Night of Philosophy in New York

Thousands of people attended the Night of Philosophy event in New York, from 7 PM April 24 through 7 AM the next morning, held at the French consulate and the adjacent Ukranian Cultural Center across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hundreds of listeners crowded into lectures on a wide variety of topics, while even more people milled around and watched performances whose relation to philosophy was tenuous at best.

Considerable attention had been given in the press to the participation of Monique Canto-Sperber as one of the opening speakers, because of the “cognitive dissonance” between her chosen theme of “Freedom of Speech->http://www.nightofphilosophy.com/monique-canto-sperber/]” and her own decision in 2011, as director of the ENS, to ban two events connected with the academic boycott of Israel.[[See the “Open Letter Protesting Monique Canto-Sperber’s Appearance at ‘Night of Philosophy’” and the article “Why Is a Notorious Free-Speech Censor Being Given a Platform at a Major Academic Gathering?” by David Palumbo-Liu in The Nation, April 23, 2015.]] A number of representatives of the press attended her talk, including the journalist from France-Amérique who had published an article on the controversy and the [letter of protest.

One of the invited speakers had announced her intention to withdraw from the event but was convinced not to do so when the organizers explained that Canto-Sperber had chosen her own topic. A video of Stéphane Hessel’s speech in 2011 in front of the Panthéon was posted on the event’s Facebook page. [[The meeting with Stéphane Hessel finally took place outside the École Normale Supérieure, in front of the Pantheon, and it turned into a demonstration against the censorship at the ENS :

]] (The cancellation of Hessel’s planned speech at the ENS was the first of Canto-Sperber’s acts of censorship.)

Another invited speaker, Omri Boehm of the New School, announced on the event’s Facebook page that

“A change of topic: Instead of speaking of ‘Thinking and Obedience’, I’ll be speaking of ‘BDS, Freedom of Speech, Violence’.” Omri Boehm (11pm French Embassy Ballroom).

Before the talk began, New York activist Peter Hogness was handing out leaflets in the ballroom containing the text of the Open Letter of Protest with the list of signatories. He was ordered to stop by French consular officials, who at one point tried to take the leaflets out of his hand, and was told that if he continued, he would be forcibly removed. After he announced this to the crowd, he was allowed to continue distributing leaflets at the door to the room.

Canto-Sperber’s talk was meant to be a philosophical analysis of the balance between freedom of speech and necessary restrictions. She reminded the audience (including the celebrated philosopher and author Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor at NYU) that certain kinds of speech are restricted in many European countries. In France she mentioned the loi Gayssot against holocaust denial and

“The 2010 law which prohibits the boycott of a country as a provocation to discrimination against a nation”.[NDLR : Canto-Sperber refers to the “Circulaire Alliot-Marie” which is not a law, but a set of administrative rules imposed by the Minister of Justice Michèle Alliot-Marie in 2010. A boycott is not prohibited under French law, as long as it does not fall within the scope of the two texts of the Criminal Code that prohibit discrimination (Article 225-1) and obstructing the exercise of an economic activity (Article 225-2). The Circulaire Alliot-Marie made an amalgam between Article 24 paragraph 8 of the Act of 29 July 1881 and Article 225-2 of the Penal Code, which would, according to the Circulaire, “sanction, not interference with economic activity, but encouraging such interference, through speeches and writings”. This combination seems to be legally incorrect and contrary to the spirit of both the 1881 Act and Article 225-2 of the Penal Code. See [AURDIP’s letter to the Minister of Justice Madame Christiane Taubira.]]

She added that “all these laws will be more strongly applied in the near future, because very soon a law will be passed that will put these offenses under criminal law, and no longer under the sophisticated common process of rights of the press”. Which law? How does she know?

It was at about this time that three students ran to the front of the room and unrolled posters that together spelled out the following message:

“January 2011 M. Canto-Sperber Director of ENS forbade a debate on the Israelo-Palestinian apartheid. Freedom of speech for only some is freedom of speech for none! #hypocrite”

Here is a summary of Canto-Sperber’s explanation of her decision. Verbatim quotations are identified as such; the rest is a reconstruction.

“My decision was related only to the nature of the institution concerned, which is an institution devoted to research and argumentative debates, with for and counter arguments. This kind of debate was proposed to the organizers, and they refused it. I went to offer my help to find other places in which they could launch their campaign, making them aware that the call for boycott of a state is forbidden by law in France.”

“Even if I think that freedom of speech should be as unlimited as possible, holding in this space which is devoted to scientific research] was not appropriate.”

I caught up with the students afterwards, while they were speaking to the France-Amérique reporter. The three students came with several friends, one of whom seems to have filmed at least part of the event. Their protest was taken entirely on their own initiative; they had not heard of AURDIP and had apparently not read the articles in Mondoweiss or the Nation, nor had they seen the [Open Letter (at least not when they initially decided to come; they may have read the France-Amérique article later). The woman on the right of the photos is a normalienne, studying philosophy. She is teaching French in New York and heard about the Night of Philosophy from one of her students. When she saw that it was headlined by Canto-Sperber, she and her friends decided to stage their protest.

The rest of the evening went more or less as planned, with the crowd becoming progressively younger as the night went on. I left shortly after Omri Boehm’s talk. Boehm identified himself as an Israeli and an academic but not an Israeli academic; he talked about his activism in opposition to military service in support of the occupation, and hinted that his opposition to Israeli politics was more radical than that. He could envision a situation in which an academic boycott would be appropriate, but he denied that it can be qualified as non-violent, because it silencing Israeli academics is a form of violence. His interpretation of the academic boycott was entirely based on an article of Judith Butler — for whom he has immense respect as a philosopher — in which she argued that interaction with individual Israeli academics is perfectly consistent with BDS, provided they received no institutional Israeli support (to attend conferences or whatever). For this reason, he said, the distinction between boycotting individuals and boycotting institutions does not hold up to scrutiny.[NDLR : AURDIP does not share this interpretation of the academic boycott, cf. [PACBI Guidelines for the International Academic Boycott of Israel]]