Charlie Hebdo

By Mike Watson / 03 February 2015 Alain Badiou analyses the events of the Charlie Hebdo attack in their global and national contexts, making the case for the incompatibility of the red flag of communism with the Tricolore of French national identity. 1. Background: the world situation Today the figure of global capitalism has taken over the entire world. The world is subject to the ruling international oligarchy and enslaved to the abstraction of money – the only recognised universal.

Drawings of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, proclaiming, “I have changed,” published in Charlie Hebdo, May 2, 2007 Tim Parks The New York Review of Books What does satire do? What should we expect of it? Recent events in Paris inevitably prompt these questions. In particular, is the kind of satire that Charlie Hebdo has made its trademark—explicit, sometimes obscene images of religious figures (God the father, Son, and Holy Spirit sodomizing each other; Muhammad with a yellow star in his ass)—essentially different from mainstream satire?