The Right to Annoy God, Richard Malka

“It is up to us, and us alone, to reflect, analyze, and take risks to remain free. Free to commit ourselves and to be what we want. It is up to us, and no one else, to find the words, to utter them, to write them with strength, to drown out the sound of knives at our throats.
It is up to us to laugh, to draw, to love, to enjoy our freedoms, to live with our heads held high, in the face of fanatics who would impose on us their world of neuroses and frustration—in co-production with academics gorged on Anglo-Saxon communitarianism and intellectuals who are the heirs of those who supported some of the worst dictators of the 20th century, from Stalin to Pol Pot.”

Thus pleaded Richard Malka, lawyer for Charlie Hebdo, during the trial of the January 2015 attacks. An intellectual trial, a historic trial, during which the author powerfully traces the underground and ideological path of evil. Every word carries weight. Every word strikes. Or brings gentleness, evoking the names of the disappeared, of friends, their pens, their brushes, their ironic and tender distance.
Much more than a plea, it is a eulogy to a free, joyful, and enlightened life.