Free Expression and the Tyranny of Speech

PHOTO DAVID BOILY, ARCHIVES LA PRESSE

« Mes chéris, je devrai vous le dire un jour, le monde est incommensurablement gris », écrit Pascale Fournier.

La Presse, June 26th 2021

The author addresses her three sons.

The city is exploding. Everyone is trying to claim it, to rebuild it, to raise it up with words, with certainties, with rights, with linguistic division. The songs are so proud, so full of pride, that they no longer even hear the Other's refrain. The surrounding din clumsily conceals how impossible the encounter has become.

On one side, the champions of free speech, the kind that searches and searches again, through the beauty and the wounds of history, for the philosophical path that aspires to embody critical thought. To dream of a better world, they would tell us, and moreover to contribute to it, we cannot withhold from knowledge the raw words that have roused crowds, the bludgeon-words that have crushed and that remain, always, available in the repertoire of hatred.

They are there. They exist. They sleep at times. They wake again. They are not done haunting us. To utter them in order to denounce them would open up reflection, help us grasp their semiotics, situate the marker of meaning between dominant and dominated. In Frantz Fanon's language, can the colonized turn the colonizer's weapons around by reclaiming his words, by breathing another identity into them, by charting a destiny through the very prism meant to enslave?

What power remains with individuals, even within unequal relationships, even within the cruelty of oppression, to mark their own destiny with meaning, with breath, with emancipation?

Does speech carry meaning even before it is uttered, produced and circulated? Or is it rather a bare mode of expression that, the moment we assign it a meaning, changes colour like a chameleon catching us off guard? These would be the questions, sovereign and fiercely free, that allow us to understand, to name, to think. The university city unfolds here in the strength of its versatility, in the breadth of its horizon. It cannot be constrained in advance, for its exploratory path is the very condition of its possibility.

Structural injustices

On the other side, the champions of identity politics, the kind that describes and denounces the structural injustices that made possible the horrific deaths of George Floyd and Joyce Echaquan at the hands of institutions representing the State. The police. Hospitals. And today the universities. So many institutions that claim to be neutral, driven by a mission, theoretically at the service of the citizen regardless of the colour of their skin, but which are in reality carried only by the individuals who represent them.

Systemic racism toward Black and Indigenous people. The inaccessibility of services for people with disabilities. Sexism and transphobia. The exclusion of the poor. Discrimination against francophones. So many social ills that strip speech of its freedom, that drain legitimacy from those who speak, that distribute the weight of the word unjustly.

Can the vocabulary of oppression be taught by someone whose own group legitimized that oppression, or does she thereby contribute, perhaps without even knowing it, to reproducing unequal relations of power?

Can a white professor teach negritude? Reconciliation? Decolonization? Is knowledge, in its condition, its teaching and its reach, separable from the person conveying it, or is it rather her intrinsic and inevitable extension? The university city unfolds here as the shadow of the power relations that make its existence possible. It must give the floor to those who have never truly been able to speak.

Charles, Pierre and Henry, you are still small, to my great joy. You do not yet apprehend the world through the infinite complexity it carries within it. You look at it as though it were a novel, where characters are defined by their grace or their wickedness, their kindness or their pettiness. I watch you in the morning and I picture the invisible: those years ahead that will be the real trials, when categories blur, when subjectivity grafts itself onto objectivity, when intention colours the act.

My darlings, I will have to tell you one day: the world is immeasurably grey. Human beings always seek refuge in those childhood certainties that reassure and protect you; they return to them periodically to be soothed, to play at winners and losers. But reality, and the cargo of suffering it permits and legitimizes, lies somewhere between free speech and the tyranny of speech. To pretend otherwise would be to lie to you and to betray you.

At the heart of the storm, at the very moment when the city no longer brings together but divides, when the university city questions the legitimacy of its own mission, I want to reassure you: it is possible to be inclusive, courageous, humble and free. To encourage critical thought while denouncing the structures of injustice. To transcend categories, out of a concern for inclusion, while reflecting on how they are reproduced. To allow the human being to embody what is dearest, most precious and most noble in them: the capacity to think relationally.