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(Turkish)

The Jeffrey Epstein file that exploded in 2026 pulled Jack Lang out of the comfortable fog of being “a former minister” (full text at the very bottom of this page): emails, gifts, gestures, planes, vehicles, “facilitations,” and an offshore setup; all of it spoke in the language of a “network.” The showcase of this network was the Institut du Monde Arabe; Lang was able to stand there for years as if he were the “undisputed master of his field,” until the file carried into public view the privilege habit “everyone knew.” Being forced to resign and a French financial investigation were far more than one person’s “falling in with the wrong crowd”: it was a naked stage of how social credit, relationships, and the feeling of immunity are operated. (🔗)

Lang here was not “just a name”; as a French Socialist statesman, he was one of the faces of the emblematic cultural policy of the François Mitterrand era: the Ministry of Culture, then the Ministry of Education; the claim to set up culture not as “the fortress of high art” but as a public mobilization; mass cultural moves like the Fête de la Musique. The raw material of this line was also the climate of 68: suspicion toward institutions, a liberation rhetoric that readily brings the word “repression” into play about the body and desire, a spirit of the time that joins theory and action in the same sentence. In the culture-organizing vein of Lang’s youth (theatre circles in Nancy, festival-making, the eagerness to build a “culture machine”), the shadow of 68 was already there; then that shadow turned into a signature of “progressivism” within the state’s cultural apparatus. (🔗)

Exactly into this line fit the French Pedophilic Intellectuals’ Petitions of 1977: normalizing pedophilia seemed so normal to France at the time that the signatories were full of psychiatrists. First Petition (full text at the bottom of this page), on the occasion of the Versailles/Yvelines case, framed an accusation of a non-violent “assault on decency/modesty,” dismissed as a “morality” file, in the tone of “three years in prison for caresses and kisses”; it foregrounded the consent claim and the theme of “the law’s outdatedness.” Among the signatories of this text was Lang; on the same list were Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. While signing the same petition in 1977, Lang was 37, Guattari 46, Deleuze 52 years old; “big-brothering” worked precisely here, in the wrong place and in the wrong form. (🔗)

Then Le Monde journalist Pierre Georges published a moralist defense of pedophilia after the hearing (full text at the bottom of this page): starting by saying “the detention of two adults for more than three years is unacceptable,” he set up the essence of the case by describing it as “adults who have taken over the sexual impulses of the very young for their own interests and pleasures”; yet in the same text, with formulas like “they were not forced, they were not threatened,” he also circulated—through a cool register of record—the details of accumulating pornographic photos/films and the sexual practices between children and adults. Pedophilia became speakable by being placed, on the one hand, into the cliché of an “overly harsh society,” and on the other hand, into the packaging of “morality.” In other words, in the libidinal exploitation of human beings, French psychiatry and media had nothing at all inferior to American psychiatry and media. (🔗)

Moreover, it did not end there: with a Second Petition written in a more proper tone (full text at the bottom of this page, a call for revision of the penal code under the heading of “minor–adult relationships”), another crowd lined up on the same track with the main melody of “the rapid evolution of customs,” “consent,” and “updating repressive texts.” Here, around Lang, a kind of clustering of “French theory + public respectability + expert prestige” became visible: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, André Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner, Françoise Dolto, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Patrice Chéreau, Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, Gabriel Matzneff, Pierre Guyotat, Michel Leiris, Louis Aragon, Francis Ponge, Catherine Millet. The word “freedom” here did not work to strengthen the boundary that protects the vulnerable; it worked to make room for the adult network while loosening the boundary. (🔗)

In Slavoj Žižek’s formulation, the 1972 Anti-Oedipus had corrupted the morals of Guattari and Deleuze; what was read as a “bad influence” was a slippage that, with the language of desire and flight, postponed the cut, scattered the measure, and polished the maneuver of the stronger side as if it were an aesthetic movement. As a result, they also did Lang a bad big-brothering: the signature, together with theory, produced a kind of atmosphere of immunity; that atmosphere put “consent” into circulation like a password. The harshness of this reading becomes even clearer when it combines with an objection coming from a Lacanian place: as the anti-Oedipal fire turns into the eagerness to zero out the law, it also burns the ground on which the subject and desire are constituted; what remains is not freedom, but the easy language of abuse. (🔗) (🔗)

And Jacques Lacan was the exception to this: he never, ever indulged these so-called “libertarian” stupidities. In the signer lists published by Le Monde in 1977, Lacan was not there; because the moment what is called “consent” is operated like a seal that vaporizes structural asymmetry, it enlarges not the protective function of the law, but the immunity of the adult network. In 1977, consent was a clean-copy operator that made power invisible; in 2026, the network came on stage with the same logic as a clean-copy operator that makes responsibility invisible. (🔗)

Return 1: Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

The most naked move of the 1977 petition line was this: the law is “outdated,” society has already shifted elsewhere in “everyday reality,” children have “consent,” therefore harsh penalties are scandalous; indeed, a language is found that banalizes it: years of prison “for caresses and kisses” is “too much.” (🔗) This language presents itself as a language of liberation: against repression, against moralism, against the state’s age line.

The Deleuze–Guattari toolkit recognizes this discourse very comfortably at first glance: desire-production, flows, assemblages, cuts; an anti-Oedipal break against Oedipus’s “closure”; lines, flights; on one side the promise of molecular liberation, on the other side precisely the risk of microfascism that they themselves name. Because the language of desire-production is not built only as “prohibition = repression”; at the same time it is also the language of the “management of flows.” A flow is not, by itself, a paradise; every flow has its cutter, every assemblage has its regulator, every flight has its captain. The machines lexicon that Yersiz Şeyler carries over from Anti-Oedip speaks with this knowledge: a machine-organ emits a flow, another machine cuts it; “flows and cuts” proceed together. (🔗)

The reductio starts here: the moment you translate the defense of “the child’s consent” as desire-production, the possibility is born of covering over asymmetry with aesthetics. The adult has language, continuity, status; in the child’s hand there remains only a fragmented “yes” that articulates onto the stage the adult has set. When the language of desire-production reads this “yes” as if it were the natural signature of the flow, the power relation disappears. When the discourse of the line of flight packages the stronger side’s flight as “ethical,” the line of flight turns into a micro-power technique: “I am not repressing; I am only allowing the flow.” The question of who the “one allowing” is evaporates in the brilliance of theory.

Time asymmetry finishes the job: what is presented as “experience” for the child is, most of the time, a debt sent into the future; who pays the debt becomes invisible in the “liberation” rhetoric of the moment. Moreover, when institutional and network support enters, this language becomes not only an idea but a technique of immunity: signature, fame, expertise, milieu; all of it turns “consent” from a power relation into a seal of legitimacy. The objection that Žižekian Analysis constructs from the Lacan line presses exactly here: when the cheerleading of flows comes in place of “the cut” and “the act,” desire is “captured”; when the function of the cut is eroded, the language of liberation serves a new form of domination. (🔗)

The verdict is short and bitter: the moment the language of desire-production sanctifies consent as “the freedom of the flow,” it makes the strongest side “the best flow manager”; that is, the most skillful manipulator turns into the most “liberating” figure. If the line of flight becomes an ethical badge, the one who flees in reality flees responsibility. Instead of exposing microfascism, you produce an operator set that gives microfascism style. Consent turns into a clean-copy machine that makes asymmetry invisible.

The staging is the same logic flowing at two different times in two different sentence types: in 1977, what is diminished as “caresses and kisses” demands immunity by making the punishment look “too much.” (🔗) In 2026, network language does the same job through gifts, relationships, and privileges: words like “friendship,” “bond,” and “habit” make the accounting invisible. (🔗)

Return 2: Michel Foucault

The 1977 discourse was constructing itself as if it were a truth discourse against repression: society represses sexuality, the law is outdated, if there is consent there is no crime; moreover, inside what is diminished as a “morality” file stood the fact that adults take over children’s sexuality for their own interest. Le Monde’s hearing chronicle, while accepting that the place to be “outraged” could be long detention, then has to draw a threshold: the matter is the adult’s placing of his own pleasure and interest into the child’s world. (🔗) (🔗) This chronicle exposes exactly the era’s climate of “normalization”: even though the asymmetry between child and adult is visible, it is imagined that it can be covered over by the language of consent.

For Foucault, the key word here is not “consent”; it is how “consent” is produced. Power is not only a fist that forbids; it is an apparatus that works with knowledge, norm, institution, classification. That is exactly what the apparatus means: family, school, clinic, media, law; all of them working together make some sentences easier and make some sentences impossible. In such an order, “consent” cannot be an innocent inner voice; consent speaks with the language of the staged scene.

That is why the reductio is very clear: if even consent is produced within power relations, then where the densest asymmetries exist, “consent” turns into the mask put into circulation the fastest. The sentence “I am not forcing, he wants it” is power’s shortest route; because it makes coercion invisible, vaporizes responsibility, and polishes the perpetrator as if he were a “libertarian” figure. What the petition does is, while criticizing repression, to build a device that produces selective impunity in place of repression: the language of the powerful is put into circulation as if it were the child’s language; the child’s speech is substituted with the adult’s legal-intellectual sentences. Thus the “confession regime” is inverted: the child’s experience is made raw material for the adult’s “liberation” narrative; it looks as if the child is speaking, but the one speaking is in fact the prestigious language of institutions.

Time asymmetry is the second key here. The language of the child’s harm is most often constructed later; when it is closed now with “there is consent,” the way is cut off for sentences that could be constructed later. Institutional and network support is the final ring of the job: when signature, expertise, and media circulation come together, the consent discourse becomes not only an argument but a technique for producing immunity.

Verdict: the apparatus that polishes consent as “liberation” turns into power’s most direct mask. When an apparatus that produces immunity is built while targeting repression, repression does not decrease; it only becomes selective. Consent becomes the clean language of power. The criticized mechanism extracts legitimacy with the prestige given by the signature.

The staging is the similarity of the two periods’ “clean language”: in 1977, the petition polishes consent by saying the law is contradictory with a logic like “power of discernment.” (🔗) In 2026, network language produces the same cleaning through email traffic, mutual favors, and status; the relationship replaces ethical accounting. (🔗)

Return 3: Jacques Derrida

The second line of 1977 advances by appearing more “proper”: the matter is not only a case, it is a revision of the penal code; customs have changed; texts must be “rejuvenated,” age limits and distinctions are “outdated.” (🔗) By showing the boundary as arbitrary, this language targets the boundary itself. In the signer list, the name Derrida also stands inside this call for “revision.” (🔗)

Derrida’s toolkit cannot tolerate the ease with which “boundary” and “decision” are spoken here. Meaning slides with context; the word hides the load it carries; decision emerges from within an aporia: it is both necessary and yet cannot be fully grounded. In such a thought, using the word “consent” like a seal is to fall back into the metaphysics Derrida dislikes most: as if “yes” were a ready essence in itself, as if it were a closure independent of context. Whereas here the “yes” is the text the adult has set up; the child’s sentence becomes a line appended to the adult’s archive.

The reductio therefore rests on this simple fact: when one says “the boundary is arbitrary,” the boundary is in practice removed by the strongest side. Because removing the boundary under asymmetry is not distributing freedom; it is handing actual license to the stronger side. Deferring the decision is not innocent either: aporia is not saying “let’s wait”; it increases the burden of decision. Deferral leaves the vulnerable unprotected. Here the logic of “autoimmunity” works: the move that completely dissolves the protection mechanism opens the system to attack against itself; the most vulnerable feels the first absence of protection.

When institutional and network support arrives, the language of “revision” becomes not only a critique but a technique of privilege: the claim to reduce the boundary’s violence serves to dissolve the boundary entirely and produce immunity. The ethical task of deconstruction is the exact opposite: not to abolish the boundary, but to strengthen the protective function while reducing the boundary’s violence. This is not something to be done by shortcutting with “arbitrary”; responsibility begins precisely by refusing this shortcut.

Verdict: aporia is not a license to suspend responsibility; it is the weight of responsibility. Under asymmetry, deferral gives license to the stronger side. Collapsing the boundary as arbitrary is not “liberation,” but an autoimmune collapse: it leaves what must be protected unprotected first. The moment you use “consent” like a seal, you do not protect the child’s word; you append the child’s word to the adult’s writing and close it.

The staging is the kinship of the tone of “rejuvenating texts” with the tone of “institutional armor”: in 1977, the word “rejuvenation” enlarges actual license by presenting the boundary like an aesthetic reform. (🔗) In 2026, institution, reputation, and network produce the same reform atmosphere in another language: relationship and status replace accounting; ethics dissolves within “connection.” (🔗)

Return 4: Louis Althusser — The Ideological Production of Consent Built with the Equal-Subject Fable

The 1977 line uses the word “consent” like a lock and opens the door: the age limit is arbitrary, repression is repressive, the child is also a subject, so consent must be recognized. The brightest side of this lock is how it polishes the word “subject” itself; its darkest side is how it makes one forget who produces the subject with which apparatuses. The petition logic of that period even feeds the “power of discernment” argument into this lock: if a child at a certain age can be held responsible for a crime, then at the same age he should also be able to give consent in sexuality. This reasoning is clearly seen in the backbone of the 26 January 1977 open letter. (🔗)

Althusser’s toolkit here turns back on its owner. Because what you call a “subject” is not an empty core; it is a position that ideology hails and installs. Hailing (interpellation) works exactly like this: a person is hailed as “you,” and the moment he turns his head, he becomes a “subject.” Therefore the sentence “the child gave consent” is not an innocent record; it is the sentence that hails the child into a specific ideological position: the consenting-subject position. The adult’s act, thanks to this hailing, assumes the guise of an “intersubjective free contract.” The fable of “two equal sides” is required first of all to vaporize material inequality; if it does not vaporize, the fable does not hold.

The reductio starts here: the moment one says “the child is also a subject,” the conditions of the subject’s production become invisible; once they are invisible, consent becomes the cheapest commodity. Because the side that produces consent is the one that holds language, time, and institutions. Language asymmetry presents itself as “freedom of expression”: the child’s sentence is translated into the adult’s legal-intellectual sentence, and while being translated the content does not merely shift; it changes direction. Time asymmetry presents itself as “experience”: irreversible traces are squeezed into a present “yes”; the question of who will carry the cost of that “yes” in the future is removed from the ideological stage. Institutional and network asymmetry presents itself as “intellectual courage”: signature, prestige, and media circulation weave an invisible armor around the perpetrator; they produce not critique, but immunity.

At this point the verdict is unavoidable: the moment you make consent a banner in the name of ideology critique, you reproduce ideology’s crudest trick. Because ideology most needs the image of “free choice.” The more you elevate “consent,” the more you lower asymmetry; the more you lower asymmetry, the more the power difference itself begins to operate like an invisible law. This is what was done with consent in 1977; that is why consent here is not liberating, but the password of reproduction. The appearance of Althusser’s name in the May 1977 signer lists of the petition text shows how comfortably this password circulated in the intellectual milieu. (🔗)

Return 5: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir — When the Freedom Slogan Swallowed the Reciprocity Threshold

The petition language sets a stage between “repressive law” and “libertarian stance.” On the stage, the law is unjust by imposing age limits; freedom is virtuous by loosening those limits. At first glance, this stage looks like a familiar post-1968 reflex: institutions repress, bodies speak, liberation advances. The presence of the names Sartre and Beauvoir in the signer sequence of the May 1977 text shows that this reflex could be readily operated even in petition form. (🔗)

But when spoken in Sartre’s own concepts, this stage collapses immediately. For Sartre, freedom is not only “choosing”; it is taking on the responsibility of the choice. And “bad faith” enters exactly here: a person tries to flee by hiding his own responsibility behind a role, a system, a justification. The sentence “the child wanted it” is textbook bad faith in an asymmetric relation: the adult tries to rid himself of the ethical burden by outsourcing his own act to the child’s choice. The moment he speaks as “I didn’t do it, he made the choice,” he is not defending freedom; he is making freedom into a mask.

Beauvoir’s line strikes this mask down even more harshly. In Beauvoir, freedom is thought together with the freedom of the other; the other is not a validation screen, but a being with his own future. Under the condition of asymmetry, sanctifying “consent” increases the risk of constructing the child not as a future subject, but as an object that acquits the adult’s present desire. “Situation” (facticity) here swallows the slogan: the child is not in the same situation as the adult; dependency, admiration, fear, teachable obedience, the need for protection, the form of the capacity to speak, all of it is a “situation.” If the discourse of freedom ignores this situation, it becomes not freedom, but the aesthetics of the superior position.

Reductio blows up the petition’s claim to “libertarianism” from within: the real test of the language of freedom is the threshold of reciprocity. If there is no reciprocity, the word freedom automatically turns into a machine that translates in favor of the stronger. Power asymmetry is the ground that most easily produces the narrative of “free choice,” because the stronger side is the one that determines the conditions of choice. Language asymmetry turns “consent” into an elegant sentence; the more elegant the sentence becomes, the more the content is dirtied, because the child’s experience is packaged in the adult’s concepts. Time asymmetry glorifies the “moment”; the more the moment is glorified, the irreversibility of what comes after becomes invisible. Institutional and network asymmetry suspends ethical accounting: the intellectual signature, media circulation, the pose of “courage against repression,” produces a social credit; the more social credit grows, the smaller the accounting becomes.

The verdict, with Sartre’s hardness about responsibility and Beauvoir’s insistence on reciprocity, arrives at the same place: sanctifying “consent” as freedom in an asymmetric relationship organizes not freedom but bad faith. This exception built in the name of freedom removes the basic condition of freedom, that is, the other’s future, from the stage. Thus the word freedom turns into an ethical casing that lightens the stronger side’s act; what remains inside is the naked power difference.

Return 6: Roland Barthes — The Myth Machine of the Innocent Consent Figure

In the 1977 petition universe, certain sentence types are especially useful: instead of violence, “closeness” speaks; instead of abuse, “love”; instead of crime, “moralism”; instead of law, “arbitrary texts.” Thus the matter is pulled away from protection and power and into a debate over a linguistic “excess.” In the Le Monde archive, one can see how this tone was put into circulation in the texts published in 1977; within the same file line, consent works like a word suited to being identified with “the natural.” (🔗) (🔗)

Barthes’s concepts cut like a knife here, because Barthes’s concern is precisely how what looks “natural” carries ideology. What he calls myth is a sign order that erases historicity and renders interest innocent. Myth presents something not as “the way it ought to be,” but as “it is already like this.” The figure of “the child’s consent” is one of the most suitable raw materials for this mechanism: the power difference is converted into the image of “mutual closeness”; irreversibility is buried in the romanticization of “a moment”; the adult’s responsibility is left to the flow of “natural desires.” Thus the adult perpetrator clears himself by outsourcing his act to “nature”; nature is the biggest whitewashing machine.

Reductio works like this: if you put “consent” into circulation as if it were an innocent sign, the strongest recipient of that sign will be the stronger side; because the sign serves the work of showing the stronger side’s interest as “innocent.” Power asymmetry turns, in a Barthesian sense, into a sign economy: the stronger side selects the signs, sets the frame, distributes the narrative. Language asymmetry is the motor of myth: the word “closeness” swallows the need for protection; the word “moralism” swallows the possibility of harm; the word “liberation” swallows responsibility. Time asymmetry secures the continuity of myth: the story built now becomes a pre-text against a future objection; it closes with “it was like that then, too.” Institutional and network asymmetry is the distribution grid of myth: the signer list, prestige, cultural authority, visibility in the newspaper, make the myth present itself as if it were “evidence.” The fact that the Barthes signature appears in the signer list of the May 1977 text shows how myth could be carried in an “intellectual language.” (🔗) (🔗)

The verdict is delivered with Barthes’s cold clarity: the “innocent consent” figure is not a truth, but a production of myth. When one should be a myth-breaker, the language that naturalizes consent slides into myth authorship. The most dangerous myth is the myth that markets itself as “liberation”; because the reader buys not an ethical alarm but an aesthetic comfort. Consent here is not a criterion, but a packaging; the more stylish the packaging becomes, the more easily the power relation inside it becomes invisible.

When these returns are read together, the same knot becomes visible: when the “consent” of 1977 is used as a shortcut that can be legitimized with different theoretical toolkits, it arrives each time at the same result: asymmetry becomes invisible, responsibility changes place, the protection threshold drops, language produces immunity. (🔗)

Return 7: Jean-François Lyotard

In 1970s France, the language of “liberation” had been carried not only into the bedroom, but also into the law and the newspaper. On the one hand, there was the great rupture energy of the postwar generation that targeted family, morality, and the state in the same sentence; on the other hand, there was a crude protective logic built by penal law’s “age” lines. This tension, in some texts, foregrounded “consent” against “repression” as if it were a key that would solve all matters in a single move. The text published in January 1977, which centered the claim of a “consent-based relationship,” was constructing a sentence type that asserted that children “consented”; moreover, it packaged this in a softening tone that served to make the punishment look “excessive” (🔗). (🔗)

Lyotard’s apparatus, exactly at this point, blows up from within the discourse that uses “consent” like a seal of correctness. Language games, regimes of sentences, testimony, and the idea of “inexpressible harm” say this: if, in a conflict, being in the right is determined only by the question “who speaks more persuasively,” the loss of the side that is harmed the most is often made invisible from the outset. Because harm, especially when a child is in question, may not always find its full name at that moment; a bodily shock, shame, confusion, fear, or a state of “normalized” habit can turn into language only over time. The lag of language does not mean there is no harm; on the contrary, the language of harm has not yet been built. The sentence “there was consent” interprets this delay as if it were a lack of proof, and invalidates today the sentence the weaker side would build in the future.

At this point reductio works with Lyotard’s own rhythm: when one says “There is no victim; there is consent; the law is committing violence,” one has accepted as the measure of justice only the force of the sentences that already exist. Yet the differend is exactly this: one side’s wrong is forced to be measured with the other side’s language; and the moment it is measured, the wrong cannot even appear as wrong. If “the file is closed” before the sentence of harm is built, what is closed is not in fact the file, but the possibility of testimony. Power asymmetry appears here not as crude repression, but as superiority in sentence-making: the adult formulates “consent” by using the law, the newspaper, concepts, and milieu; the child, on the other hand, often gains only years later a distance in which he can form the sentence “what happened to me.” Language/expression asymmetry turns this delay against the child. Time asymmetry charges the cost of irreversibility to the vulnerable. Institutional and network support accelerates the circulation of the “liberation” sentence and slows the conditions of testimony.

The verdict comes from Lyotard’s sense of justice: the moment you make consent the sole criterion, you are not only denying the child’s harm; you are placing it from the outset into an “inexpressible” position. Because the sentence “he said yes then” steals the speaking right of the future sentence “I did not choose this, I did not understand, I was afraid.” Justice is not multiplying strong sentences; it is securing the weaker side’s condition of forming a sentence. When consent is made the key, the door that is locked is not the law, but testimony.

The staging establishes only a kinship of logic. In 1977, the tone “they had consent, the punishments are excessive” produced a language economy that lightened the event (🔗). (🔗) In 2026, sentences of the type “everyone knew / he doesn’t pay” build an economy that shows privilege as habit and serves to dissolve responsibility within the network; the rhythm of the institution again leaves the rhythm of testimony behind (🔗). (🔗)

Return 8: Guy Hocquenghem and René Schérer

In the 1970s, family critique was read not only as a matter of “lifestyle,” but as the basic stage of power. The child’s body, education, speech, even the image of “innocence,” were seen as a reproduction mechanism of the bourgeois order. The strength of this view was here: diagnosing the family not as a natural home, but as an apparatus that produces discipline. Its danger was here: while targeting the family, automatically zeroing out adult power outside the family. Exactly this illusion enlarges the point that the slogan “liberating the child” leaves in the dark.

In the January 1977 text, the claim that children “consented” stands not only as a legal argument, but like a shortcut application of norm critique: the line “society represses; prohibition is violence; if there is consent there is no crime,” while targeting family morality, melts the material asymmetry in the adult–child relationship into discourse. The norm critique of Hocquenghem and Schérer, when it exposes “prohibition” but suspends the question of what prohibition protects, bites its own tail: every move that lowers the protection threshold can, while weakening the family, strengthen adult access. If the text replaces the child’s need for protection with “liberation,” it is not the child that is liberated, but the adult’s room for maneuver. (🔗)

Reductio works here in four layers. Power asymmetry is clear: the role of “courage against norms” turns into a prestige instrument in the adult’s hand; the child shifts to the side that pays the cost of this prestige. Language/expression asymmetry works more insidiously: a big term like “politics of childhood” reduces the child’s concrete need for protection to a sign; the child’s singular experience is translated into the movement’s general narrative. Time asymmetry is the heaviest bill of the slogan: what is said as “we liberated today” can become, years later, a loss that can be understood only then; irreversibility becomes invisible inside the slogan. Institutional and network support, with the shared language of the “intellectual milieu,” produces immunity: critique builds a ring that exempts itself from critique; the sentence “we are against repression” turns into the sentence “no harm comes from us.”

The verdict is this: family critique does not guarantee the absence of power outside the family. The sentence “liberating the child,” if it cannot establish a protection threshold for the child, produces not freedom but access. Norm critique, especially in the adult–child asymmetry, has to accept that toppling the norm is not enough; a new guardianship can be silently installed. If hatred of “prohibition” throws “protection” into the same basket, what is demolished is not morality, but the boundary; when the boundary collapses, the first winner is always the stronger side.

The staging is again a kinship of logic. In 1977, the sentence “they consented, the punishments are too heavy” used social norm critique to make a concrete asymmetry invisible (🔗). (🔗) In 2026, the network built around “gifts, privileges, institutional positions” produces the same invisibilization by another route: the tone “that’s how things work” turns the ethical boundary into a habit (🔗). (🔗)

Return 9: Françoise Dolto

From the outside, the Dolto line carries the promise of “taking the child seriously”: the child is not an object, but a speaking subject; the adult’s task is not to silence the child, but to make the child’s word possible. The appeal of this promise is understandable, because for a long time the child was managed as if he were a being whose right to speak had been taken away in the name of adults’ “goodness.” Yet exactly at this point begins the reductio that will be returned to Dolto: recognizing the child as subject and using the child’s declaration of consent as a shield for the adult’s act are not the same thing; indeed, in most cases they are two moves that sabotage each other.

In May 1977, in the call for “revision” of the relevant articles of the penal code, Dolto’s name appears in the signer list; the text establishes a language similar to “the age limit is arbitrary” and uses the emphasis on consent like a key (🔗). (🔗) Documents in Dolto’s own archive offer a trace that confirms her involvement, at that time, in petitions and debates along this line; one sees that the debate is built on the axis of “revision” and “repression” (🔗).

When thought through Dolto’s theoretical tools, the defense of “the child’s consent” works in the opposite direction of its own claim. The idea of transference makes the adult’s position structurally superior: the child turns toward the adult not only to give information, but also to find meaning; this orientation makes the adult’s word and gesture heavier. This heaviness automatically makes the sentence “the child wanted it” suspect, because the child often learns what he “wants” from the adult; more precisely, the child’s desire can take shape according to the adult’s position. Here language/expression asymmetry is decisive: the child’s “yes” gains meaning within the context the adult establishes; and the establisher of the context is most often the adult. Time asymmetry enlarges the effect of this context even more: the child can rename what happened only years later, in other relationships, with other words. When that naming is delayed, the sentence “there was consent” turns into a retroactive lock; the lock is placed in front of the word the child will build later. Institutional and network support operates through clinical language: if the difference between “critique of repression” and “setting a boundary” is erased, the adult’s violation can enter the packaging of a “liberating experience”; clinical words produce legitimacy instead of protection.

The verdict emerges from within Dolto’s own promise: if the child is a speaking subject, the adult’s task is not to translate the child’s word into his own act, but to protect the conditions of the child’s word. The moment you turn “consent” into a slogan, you do not make the child a subject; you reduce the child to a sentence that acquits the adult’s act. Building a consent defense without accepting the structural inequality of transference is not recognizing the child’s subject; it is taking the child’s subject hostage. When the protection threshold drops, the word subject becomes decoration; what operates behind the decoration is the adult’s position.

The staging is again a kinship of logic. In 1977, the tone “the age limit is arbitrary, if there is consent there is no crime” tended to reduce the protection line into the single color of “repression” (🔗). (🔗) In 2026, institutional position and network habits reproduce with another face the tendency to bend the ethical boundary as “normal”: special privileges are presented as “the nature of the job”; responsibility disperses and disappears within relationships (🔗). (🔗)

When the word “consent” is put into circulation fast enough to make asymmetry invisible, it does not produce freedom; it produces immunity. If the time of the weaker side to form a sentence and the power of the stronger side to form a sentence are not equal, consent turns not into a key that opens truth, but into a bolt that locks testimony. A contemporary reading line on how this transformation can work like an “operator word” discusses how concepts can produce a circulation that postpones responsibility by canceling the binding cut (🔗). (🔗)

Return 10: Bernard Kouchner, André Glucksmann, Jack Lang — Rights Language, the Promise of Protection, and the “Humanitarian” Shortcut

In 1970s France, the word “liberation” was not only a feeling; it was a key used against the discipline that institutions such as law, family, school, clinic, and media built around sexuality. This key sometimes opened a real lock: it made the unspeakable speak, eased shame, narrowed the field of arbitrary punishment. But the same key, especially in relationships containing asymmetry, could also silently close another lock: the lock of the boundaries that protect the vulnerable. In 1977, the petitions and texts circulating on the Le Monde line positioned themselves as a call for “humaneness” and “equity” against “the law’s blindness”; yet at the same time they opened a rhetorical field suited to turning the word consent into a clean-copy operator. Context knots: the Le Monde archive narrative (🔗) and the 1977 petition/return reading (🔗). (🔗)

The concept set of this return can be built from the shared core of the three names’ public image: victim, protection, rights language, public interest, emergency, good faith, critique of disproportionate punishment, prestige producing trust, and the invisible shield effect of networks. When this vocabulary works in the vulnerable’s favor under normal conditions, it means “obligation”: prioritizing not the stronger side’s freedom, but the weaker side’s safety. Exactly here reductio begins; because once “rights language” is reduced to “expanding the space of freedom,” it skips the most basic question about asymmetry: two bodies and two lives entering the same field of action do not carry the same risk burden.

On the plane of power asymmetry, “humanitarian” rhetoric most easily turns into this sentence: I did not force, he wanted it. This is not a crude confession, but a polished form of whitewashing; because the word “humanitarian” brightens the perpetrator’s intent and darkens the act’s consequences. A defense that centers the child’s consent begins to turn rights language into a showcase that serves the stronger side’s presenting himself as “merciful” and “progressive”; the more the showcase light increases, the less visible the inequality inside becomes.

On the plane of language and expression asymmetry, rights discourse is especially dangerous; because it works in favor of the side that speaks best. The child’s experience is subjected to “translation” into the adult’s legal-intellectual sentences. That translation often does not strengthen the child’s sentence; it produces a justification for the adult’s act. Thus the word right ceases to be an instrument that grows the vulnerable’s language and becomes the authority to speak on behalf of the vulnerable. Once authority is established, consent is no longer a relational fact, but a single word behaving like a signature; that single word closes, in an instant, effects that can spread across the long time of a life.

On the plane of time asymmetry, the “good faith” narrative pushes the cost into the future. Consent here is treated like a momentary photograph; yet the vulnerable’s life is not a photograph. A meaning-making that may arise later, regret, alienation from self, or simply the question “how did I accept this at that age,” is declared outside the court from the outset by the sentence “there was consent at that moment.” Squeezing what time enlarges into the “moment” is not freedom, but the mortgaging of the future.

On the plane of institutional and network support, reductio takes its most naked form: prestige turns the “humanitarian” language into a protective shield. Signature sometimes functions not as “defending the vulnerable” but as “producing immunity”; because signature points, in the public eye, not to the perpetrator’s but to the signers’ “good faith.” The collectivization of good faith is the dispersal of responsibility. At this point, a form becomes visible similar to the network logic in Le Monde’s 2026 Jack Lang file: in an environment where everyone knows, no one demands an account, and gifts and privileges are normalized as “habit,” the visible politeness closes the account inside (🔗). (🔗)

The verdict is this: when rights language is used not to soften asymmetry but to make asymmetry invisible, it works against rights. When the protection threshold is lowered in the name of “humaneness,” what appears is not liberation, but an access privilege granted to the stronger side. If the image of “mercy” does not increase the vulnerable’s safety, it is not mercy but a showcase. The more the showcase grows, the word consent becomes the shortest tunnel that allows the stronger side to escape responsibility.

Staging: in 1977, a petition and the public language accompanying it could, with a softening tone like “caresses et des baisers,” shrink the weight of the act and produce a frame in which the punishment looked “excessive” (🔗). (🔗) In 2026, the network’s turning privilege into habit with the tone “no one paid, everyone knew” creates the same kind of clean-copy climate; it is not causality, but a kinship of logic (🔗). (🔗)

Return 11: Gabriel Matzneff — The Aestheticization of Confession, the Conversion of Transgression into Capital

In the 1977 context, the defense of “the child’s consent” was sometimes carried not by direct philosophical abstraction, but also by a literary stance. Here the concept set works less like theoretical schemas and more like a regime of writing: confession, the pull of scandal, the aesthetics of transgression, privilege producing an artistic mask, public shock as an attention economy, the narrator acquitting himself with honesty, the victim’s voice becoming an extra in the text. The lock of this set is “confession”; because confession, at first glance, resembles responsibility. Yet confession does not have to be responsibility; it can also be performance. Context knot: the 1970s text line and the return of the petition (🔗). (🔗)

Reductio is built through this simple slide: the sentence “I am not hiding it” replacing the sentence “I am not harming.” Confession here produces not illumination but fog; because the reader relates not to the fact but to the narrator. When the narrator positions himself as “honest,” an automatic credit is opened in the reader. The cost of this credit is most often written to the side that is not visible in the text, that is, the vulnerable.

On the plane of power asymmetry, the aesthetics of transgression produces the most predictable result: the one who breaks the boundary looks “free” to the extent that he makes someone else pay the cost. Here consent is not proof of liberation, but a stage prop that polishes the author’s image of freedom. The adult’s desire is presented as “brave” and “taboo-breaking”; the child’s life turns into the décor of that bravery. In asymmetry, the word “courage” behaves like paint that whitewashes the power difference.

On the plane of language and expression asymmetry, confession sharpens even further: the text works in favor of the one who speaks best. The child’s sentence is not as long, complex, receivable, stylish as the adult’s sentence; that is already why the text does not quote the child, it represents the child. Representation here is not protection; representation is appropriation. Consent becomes the certificate of legitimacy of this appropriation: “Look, he wanted it too.” But this sentence is not a sentence built in the child’s world; it is a sentence translated into the adult’s public language.

On the plane of time asymmetry, transgressive literature enlarges the moment and shrinks what comes after. The glitter of scandal makes the burden of the future invisible. The story of “a moment” swallows the effect of years. Yet for the vulnerable, the matter is most often not “that moment,” but “after that moment”; for this reason, using consent like a momentary approval makes the possibility of harm that passes through time unspeakable.

On the plane of institutional and network support, aesthetics is tied to a circulation network: publishing, media, salons, prestige, and the feeling of “artist immunity.” Here “confession” becomes even more functional; because scandal turns into sales and talk. Thus transgression becomes a kind of capital. The most basic feature of transgression that turns into capital is this: the risk is loaded not onto the capital owner, but onto the vulnerable; the capital owner carries only the story, he does not have to carry the body.

The verdict is this: if confession is not taking responsibility on, it is only a more refined form of the perpetrator’s self-acquittal. If transgression is not protecting the vulnerable, it is not freedom but privilege. The aesthetics of scandal, the moment it cancels the obligation of protection, forces the reader to notice that what he is buying as “courage” is in fact an “image of impunity”; if it does not make him notice, then it is already performing not an aesthetic duty but a shield duty.

Staging: in 1977, the “plaidoyer” and petition language were suited to carrying a judicial context into an aesthetic field by pulling it into a story frame of the type “can love be a crime” (🔗). (🔗) In 2026, the network of the sentence “everyone knew” can carry the fact out of the ethical field and into the field of “habitual privilege”; in both cases, what is common is the invisibilization of responsibility (🔗). (🔗)

Return 12: Jacques Lacan — The Logic of the Exception and the Structural Fragility of Consent

The fact that the name Jacques Lacan does not appear in the name lists circulating around the 1977 petitions is not, by itself, an explanation of “why”; but at least, as a “record of absence,” it brings to mind the possibility of a stance distant from the consent discourse of that period. This record can be seen in compilatory listings (🔗). (🔗) The return here, without leaning on a biographical reading of intention, builds step by step how the Lacanian toolkit would blow up the consent defense from within; because this toolkit is suspicious from the outset of using the word “consent” like a seamless seal.

The concept set is this: the distinction between desire and demand, the symbolic function of the Law, the splitness of the subject, the transference relation, the jouissance knot, the illusion of the “knowing subject,” the object-cause logic, and the idea of the cut. This set captures the consent claim by translating it into this plain petition assumption: “If there is a declaration of consent, there is no crime; the law is a repressive obstacle.” The core of this assumption reduces consent to a sentence: “Yes.” The Lacanian reading hits the brakes exactly here; because before whose “yes” it belongs to, it asks how the scene that makes the “yes” possible is established.

On the plane of power asymmetry, the transference relation is decisive: the relationship between child and adult is not a free exchange purely between two individuals; the positions are not equal, one takes place in the other’s world with knots of authority, knowledge, approval, fear, admiration, or dependency. In this case, the adult’s staging of “consent” is highly suited to converting the child’s demand into proof of the adult’s desire. The sentence “he wanted it” is, most often, not the product of the child’s demand, but the product of a scene established for the adult’s desire. Under asymmetry, the power to establish the scene becomes the hidden hand that determines the content of consent.

On the plane of language and expression asymmetry, the illusion of the “knowing subject” enters: the declaration of consent is handled as if the subject fully knows himself. Yet the idea of the split subject emphasizes that the distance between what one says and what one wants is structural; when a child is in question, this distance does not shrink, it grows. Consent here is not “truth,” but a fragile knot established within a symbolic order. Taking the knot as a “seal” is to ignore how the knot was tied.

On the plane of time asymmetry, the jouissance knot matters: some experiences do not fit into the “moment”; they leave a trace, return, then become meaningful. When the sentence “he said yes at that moment” closes off the meaning that will be established later, it in fact draws a barrier against the subject’s future possibility of speaking. For this reason, the temporal problem of the consent defense is not only “regret”; it is the right of the subject to be able later to turn his own experience into a sentence. When this right is canceled by the authority of the “moment,” what is produced is not liberation but silencing.

On the plane of institutional and network support, the symbolic function of the Law becomes visible again. When critique of the law is built as “let the law be removed,” the protective function weakens against desire masks. Under conditions of asymmetry, saying “no law” often means “the power difference will not be spoken.” For this reason, Lacanian logic does not sanctify the law; but it centers the risk that zeroing out the law leaves the most vulnerable unprotected. Here the idea of the cut becomes decisive: placing a stop in front of the flow of desire is not repression, but a safety condition that makes asymmetry visible. This line is also discussed, in Turkish knottings, through the tension of “cut/act” (🔗).

At this point, the warning about how concepts put into circulation like “operators” can produce a short circuit when they combine with the word consent can be clearly seen in a current polemical language as well: if concepts are not producing an increase in responsibility, they easily turn into badges; and the badge-like concept provides an aesthetic mask for the strongest position (🔗). (🔗) This warning supports the essence of the Lacanian return: consent is the word most suited to hiding behind a badge; because while giving the image of “freedom,” it can make asymmetry invisible in a single move.

The verdict is this: consent is not a seal, but a fragile knot established within the splitness of the subject, the direction of transference, the returns of time, and the Law’s symbolic protective function. Under asymmetry, the sentence “there is consent” most often does not produce a boundary that secures the child’s speaking; on the contrary, it converts the child’s possibility of speaking into the adult’s certificate of legitimacy. Critique of the law, when it does not turn toward making protection more visible and more functional against desire masks rather than removing protection, produces an exception. The moment the exception leaves unprotected the subject to whom it promises freedom, it produces not freedom but immunity.

Staging: in 1977, with the tone of “the law’s excessiveness,” consent could be used like a key that quickly closed the file; the risk here was producing “conditions of acquittal for the adult” in place of “conditions of speaking for the vulnerable” (🔗). (🔗) In 2026, networks vaporizing responsibility with the sentence “everyone knew” repeats the same short circuit on another plane: when a word or a network begins to substitute for responsibility, the ethical field closes (🔗). (🔗)

First Pedophilic Intellectuals’ Petition:

About a Case (🔗)
26 January 1977, Le Monde

We have received the following communiqué:

” On 27, 28 and 29 January, before the Yvelines assize court, Bernard Dejager, Jean-Claude Gallien and Jean Burckhardt will appear for an indecent assault without violence on minors under fifteen, who, arrested in the autumn of 1973, have already remained for more than three years in pre-trial detention. Only Bernard Dejager has recently benefited from the principle of the liberty of the accused.

“Such a long preventive detention to investigate a simple “morals” case, in which the children were not victims of the slightest violence, but, on the contrary, specified to the investigating judges that they were consenting (although the justice system currently denies them any right to consent), such a long preventive detention already seems to us scandalous.

” Today, they risk being sentenced to a severe term of criminal imprisonment either for having had sexual relations with these minors, boys and girls, or for having facilitated and photographed their sexual games.

” We consider that there is a manifest disproportion, on the one hand, between the characterization as a “crime” that justifies such severity, and the nature of the alleged acts; on the other hand, between the outdated character of the law and the everyday reality of a society that tends to recognize in children and adolescents the existence of a sexual life (if a girl of thirteen has a right to the pill, what is it for?).

” French law contradicts itself when it recognizes a capacity for discernment in a minor of thirteen or fourteen whom it can judge and convict, while it refuses him that capacity when it is a matter of his affective and sexual life.

” Three years in prison for caresses and kisses, that is enough. We would not understand it if, on 29 January, Dejager, Gallien and Burckhardt do not regain their freedom. “

Signatories of the First Pedophilic Intellectuals’ Petition:

Louis Aragon, Francis Ponge, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Belladona, Dr. Michel Bon (social psychologist), Bertrand Boulin, Jean-Louis Bory, Francois Chatelet, Patrice Chereau, Jean-Pierre Colin, Copi, Michel Cressole, Gilles and Fanny Deleuze, Bernard Dort, Frangoise d’Eaubonne, Dr. Maurice Eme (psychiatrist), Jean-Pierre Faye, Dr. Pierrette Garrou (psychiatrist), Philippe Gavi, Dr. Pierre-Edmond Gay (psychoanalyst), Dr. Claire Gellman (psychologist), Dr. Robert Gellman (psychiatrist), André Glucksmann, Félix Guattari, Daniel Guérin, Pierre Guyotat, Pierre Hahn, Jean-Luc Hennig, Christian Hennion, Jacques Henric, Guy Hocquenghem, Dr. Bernard Kouchner, Francoise Laborie, Madeleine Laik, Jack Lang, Georges Lapassade, Raymond Lepoutre, Michel Leyris, Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Dionys Mascolo, Gabriel Matzneff, Catherine Millet, Vincent Monteil, Dr. Bernard Muldworf (psychiatrist), Negrepont, Marc Pierret, Anne Querrien, Griselidis Real, Francois Régnault, Claude and Olivier Revault d’Allonnes, Christiane Rochefort, Gilles Sandier, Pierre Samuel, Jean-Paul Sartre, René Schérer, Philippe Sollers, Gérard Soulier, Victoria Thérame, Marie Thonon, Catherine Valabrèégue, Dr. Gérard Vallès (psychiatrist), Hélène Vedrine, Jean-Marie Vincent, Jean-Michel Wilhelm, Danielle Sallenave, Alain Cuny.

Child, Love, Adult (🔗)
Pierre Georges (journalist)
29 January 1977, Le Monde

Three men, a doctor, a pharmaceutical representative, an employee of the R.A.T.P., appeared, Thursday 27 January, in Versailles, before the Yvelines assize court. Reason: indecent assaults without violence on minors under fifteen. This affair has been mentioned twice in Le Monde. A first time, under the signature of Mr. Gabriel Matzneff, in a point of view, a plea for pedophilia under the shocking title “Is love a crime?” (Le Monde of 7-8 November 1976). A second time in the form of a communiqué-petition signed by some sixty personalities indignant at the fate reserved for the three accused kept in pre-trial detention for three years “for caresses and kisses” (Le Monde of 27 January).

Having neither the conviction of the one, nor the authority of the others, we attended the first hearing of this trial in Versailles, for which the presiding judge, Mr. Ramin, despite the delicate character of the debates, judged it necessary not to pronounce a closed session. So much the better: this will have allowed others than only the jurors to form an opinion on the nature of the acts alleged against the three accused and to know what exactly the words “caresses and kisses” or this notion of love covered.

Well then, let us say it: it is inadmissible that two men, two adults, are kept in pre-trial detention for more than three years, the third having been released on bail only for a few months, before being tried. Whatever the nature of the acts alleged against them. There indignation will stop.

This trial is not that of a society that would refuse to take into account the sexuality of adolescents, even preadolescents, of an ultra-repressive society, faced with the sexuality of the youngest. It is simply that of three men who have taken over for their own benefit, and for their pleasure, the sexual drives of very young boys and girls.

This trial is that of three adults who taught love to six young people aged twelve to fifteen: love with a capital L, “naturist photos and films with erotic conclusions,” that is to say pornographic, caresses, that is to say reciprocal masturbation, kisses, that is to say reciprocal fellatio, orgies, that is to say a thirteen-year-old girl and two boys including her brother of the same age, naked in the same bed for practical exercises, going as far as sodomy.

These young people loved this scenario imagined by their elders. These young people were neither constrained nor threatened. They had with two of the adults only limited sexual relations, fellatio and caresses, and consenting. The adults too loved it, to the point of constituting a collection of photos and films because, says one, “what interested me was seeing the sexuality of children.” But it is natural not to like this form of love and this interest.

Second Pedophilic Intellectuals’ Petition:

A Call for the Revision of the Penal Code Concerning Minor–Adult Relationships (🔗)
23 May 1977, Le Monde

Eighty personalities have just signed an appeal to the commission for revision of the penal code requesting modification of the texts governing relations between adults and minors. These relations are currently subject to restrictions: abduction of a minor – the offense of which can be constituted by the mere housing of a minor for one night, – prohibition of sexual relations with children under fifteen, prohibition of homosexual relations when they involve minors aged fifteen to eighteen.

The signatories insist on the necessity of updating texts that do not take account of the rapid evolution of customs. They ask that the penal dispositif be lightened, that such cases, today within the jurisdiction of the assize court, be judged by a correctional court.

The penal code of 1810 provided for no repression for sexual acts not accompanied by violence. It was the law of 28 April 1832 that created the offense of indecent assault committed without violence on the person of a child under eleven. This minority was raised twice: to thirteen in 1863 and to fifteen in 1945. The authors of the text point out that the “criminal qualification” today leads to aberrant consequences. Indeed, the legislator makes himself an accomplice to the incriminated act since, on the other hand, he authorizes the sale of contraceptives to girls under fifteen.

Rejuvenate the texts.

As for the offense of homosexuality, it appears in the arsenal of French laws only with the Vichy law of 6 August 1942 targeting “anyone who will have (…) committed one or more impudent or unnatural acts with a minor of his sex.”

“This is a societal problem,” affirm the authors of this open letter who pose the question: – At what age can children or adolescents be considered capable of freely giving their consent to a sexual relationship? “

The terms of the 1942 law – “impudent and unnatural” – appear today outdated. For thirty-five years the vocabulary, even legal vocabulary, has undergone many shifts of meaning and notions have evolved. If it wishes, the commission for revision of the penal code should therefore without great difficulty rejuvenate and update texts which, according to the signatories of this letter, no longer today justify anything but hassles and purely police controls.

Signatories of the Second Pedophilic Intellectuals’ Petition:

Louis Althusser, general secretary of the École Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm; Dennis Altman, author; Jean-Paul Aron, professor at the École pratique des Hautes Études; Claude Bardos, professor at Paris-Nord University; Roland Barthes, professor at the Collège de France; André Baudry, director of “Arcadie”; Simone de Beauvoir, Author; Dr. Frits Bernard, psychosexologist, Rotterdam; Pasteur G. Berner, President of the Paris-Nord Consistory; Jean-Claude Besret, prior of the Boquen Abbey; Dr. Boegner, psychiatrist serving at the Centre Hospitalier Spécialisé of Fleury-les-Aubrais; Michel Bon, social psychologist; Jean-Louis Bory, author; Bertrand Boulin, educator; Christian Bourgois, editor; Christine Buci-Glucksmann, lecturer; Dr. Cabrol, psychiatrist; Dr. Challou, psychiatrist at the Centre Hospitalier Spécialisé of Fleury-les-Aubrais; François Chatelet, professor at Paris VIII University; Patrice Chéreau, director; Jean-Pierre Colin, professor at Reims University; comics artist, author; Alain Cuny, actor; Fanny Deleuze; Gilles Deleuze, professor at Paris University VII; Jacques Derrida, professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue Ulm; Dominique Desanti, author; Jean-Toussaint Desanti, professor at Paris I University; Françoise Dolto, neuropsychiatrist, psychoanalyst; Bernard Dort, professor at Paris III University; Françoise d’Eaubonne, Author; Doctor Maurice Eme, psychiatrist, head of department at the Beaumontsur-Oise Hospital; Michel Foucault, professor at the Collège de France; Dr. Pierrette Garreau, pediatrician; Philippe Gavi, journalist; Dr. R. Gentis, psychiatrist; André Glucksmann, scientific research attached to the National Centre; Renaud Goyon, visual artist; Felix Guattari, psychoanalyst; Daniel Guérin, author; Pierre Hahn, journalist; Jean-Luc Hennig, journalist; Christian Hennion, journalist; Guy Hocquenghem, professor at Paris VIII University; Roland Jaccard, psychoanalyst; Pierre Klossowski, author; Anne Laborit, director; Madeleine Laik, psychologist; Georges Lapassade, professor at Paris VIII University; Lecourt, assistant at Amiens University; Jacques Lefort, researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Michel Leiris, director of the Musée de l’Homme; Michel Lobrot, university professor at Paris VIII University; Jean-Frangois Lyotard, professor at Paris VIII University; Michel Mardore, filmmaker; Dionys Mascolo, author; Gabriel Matzneff, Author; Doctor Michel Meignant, psychiatrist, sexologist; Gérard Molina, Lecturer; Doctor Vincent Monteil, professor at Paris University VII, Resistance Medal; Doctor Bernard Muldworf, psychiatrist, hospital doctor; Nicole Nicolas; Dr. Jean Nicolas, Gynecologist-Obstetrician; Marc Pierret, author; Jacques Rancière, university professor at Paris VIII; Claude Revault d’ Allonnes, professor of social psychology at Paris VII University; Olivier Revault d’Allonnes, Professor at Paris I University; Jean Ristat, author; Christiane Rochefort, Author; Alain Robbe-Grillet, author; Gilles Sandier, theatre critic; Jean-Paul Sartre, author; Renée Saurel, theatre critic; Rene Scherer, professor at Paris VIII University; Doctor Séguier, psychiatrist at the Centre Hospitalier Spécialisé of Fleuryles-Aubrais; Doctor Pierre Simon, gynecologist and obstetrician; Philippe Sollers, author; Victoria Thérame, author; Docteur Torrubia, psychiatrist at the Centre Hospitalier Spécialisé of Fleury-les-Aubrais; Hélène Védrine, professor at Paris I University.

How the Epstein scandal brought down Jack Lang: ‘Everyone knew he never paid for anything’
10 February 2026, Le Monde

The emblematic minister of President François Mitterrand’s era was forced to withdraw from the presidency of the Arab World Institute in Paris. Former allies and rivals began to talk about a man who used his influence and his network to sustain a lavish lifestyle.

On Tuesday, February 3, Jack Lang was still very much the master of his domain. He welcomed Le Monde, seated on the couch in his glass-walled office on the eighth floor of the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA, Arab World Institute), the Paris institution he had been leading for more than 13 years.

The former culture minister under President François Mitterrand jumped in surprise when asked whether he planned to resign. “What have I done that is reprehensible? What legal action has been taken against me? This is absurd,” he said. The day before, Mediapart had revealed the “financial ties” between the Langs — he and his daughter Caroline — and the American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a businessman known for his sprawling network, who died in detention in August 2019.

In the mountain of emails released on January 30 by the US Justice Department, the relationship between the Lang family and Epstein appeared to be woven with gifts and favors exchanged over seven years, up until the sexual predator’s arrest in 2019. Ironically, Lang himself did not use email: His entourage would print them out for him so he could annotate them. “He does not have a computer; he has never written a single email himself,” his team at the IMA confirmed. Lang traveled all over the world, but also did not speak English very well.

It was therefore his daughter Caroline, who worked for 30 years at the American company Warner Bros Television, who handled most of the communication between the two men. She shared ownership of the offshore company Prytanee LCC, founded with Epstein in 2016, and which was at the heart of the scandal that would bring Lang down.

Improbable trio

The emails reveal that Epstein came up with the idea, which he presented to Jack Lang in November 2015, before summarizing it to Caroline Lang: Why not create a fund, to which he would contribute $20 million, so that Jack Lang could buy artworks, resell them later and then split the profits 50-50 between Epstein and the Lang family? “No risk for your side. It will be fun!” “Wahou!!!” replied Caroline Lang. Yet, she had previously expressed concern to Epstein about his conviction for child sex offenses, which Paris Match and other media outlets had reported on 11 months earlier, following a new complaint and accusations of rape against Prince Andrew. Epstein played it down as “Bad press only.”

The unlikely trio formed about a year before President François Hollande appointed Jack Lang to head the IMA in January 2013. The Langs met filmmaker Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, who is also his adopted stepdaughter, at a dinner hosted by the Bourbon-Two Sicilies royal family in Paris. Caroline Lang and Previn became friends.

When Allen and Previn came to Paris, the Langs took them to the best exhibitions. One day, the couple asked to bring along a friend: Epstein. The financier often spent time in Paris, where he owned an 800-square-meter apartment on Avenue Foch, in the 16^th^ arrondissement; during a dinner in 2012, he grew closer to the Langs. The connection was made.

The beginning of this friendship coincided with the end of the long political career of Lang, an icon of the cultural world since the 1980s. It was also a time of mourning for the family, which lost a daughter, the actress Valérie Lang, who died suddenly of cancer in 2013. Epstein, this new friend, appeared to be a generous benefactor from the United States.

Dynamic director of the IMA

What happened when Lang no longer had access to a chauffeur-driven car, an old privilege that was eliminated at the IMA? Epstein lent him his. What about when he wanted to travel to Marrakech, Morocco? Epstein lent him his private jet. And when the former elected official feared his name would gradually fade from public view? Epstein spent $30,000 on a film paying tribute to his daughter, $50,000 on a film about the glory days of the Lang years, and considered paying $100,000 for a book on education.

The energetic head of the IMA was also constantly striving to raise funds, to dynamize an institute he wanted to be buzzing and turn it into a golden showcase for cultural diplomacy between France and the Arab world. Yet he did not, for six years, think to ask his philanthropist friend for money to support the IMA, where he often arranged to meet him.

“I should have… Why didn’t I do it? Because I’m an asshole,” replied Lang, brashly, on February 3. Was it perhaps because he knew Epstein was not someone to be seen with? He insisted that he knew nothing about Epstein’s 2008 conviction for procuring a minor for prostitution, or the prison sentence served in Florida, despite the widespread media coverage of the victims’ accusations, some of whom were only 14 years old at the time of the rapes.

At the time, Lang was making a final attempt to relaunch his political career, running for a seat representing the Vosges in the parliamentary elections of June 2012. Despite a Socialist wave sweeping the country, the former media heavyweight of the Mitterrand years failed to get elected. Who now remembers that from 2002 to 2012, he served as MP for Pas-de-Calais? The founder of France’s Fête de la Musique celebration had been parachuted into these former working-class strongholds, at the risk of creating a disconnect that worried local party members.

One day during the 2002 campaign, Lang left without paying his team’s bill. An employee of the local departmental council ended up stuck with the tab. Longtime elected officials had to put the star politician back in line: “These are your campaign expenses. You take money out of your own pocket to pay for drinks for the kids running around for you…” On another occasion, when Socialist activists urged him to hold regular office hours in his constituency, Lang shot back: “I’m not a social worker!”

‘Production machine’

“He was the lord,” recalled former minister and Socialist senator Brigitte Bourguignon, who was elected in Pas-de-Calais in 2012. “He never had his feet on the ground. He would leave without looking to see who was paying, as if he didn’t know that things in life have to be paid for. He always took advantage of his networks — many people were like rabbits caught in the headlights. He was an extraordinary character, and sometimes outside the usual rules. Gradually, the image faded. It was all make-believe.” Lang believed in his lucky star and his tremendous popularity. “Wherever I go, I’ll be elected,” he told Socialist activists in Pas-de-Calais when he was not nominated again. Not this time.

At the IMA, his personal playground, Lang was a hyperactive, creative and all-powerful president. This intense energy went back years and wore out his collaborators. Bernard Latarjet, his former special adviser at the Ministry of Culture and National Education, recalled, “He worked tremendously hard, he would overwhelm us, suffocate us with demands, instructions and requests. No Sundays, no evenings, not even vacations. You can’t grasp the sheer amount of work. And he had a pathological, almost unhealthy, memory for the tiniest detail. Lang was a production machine.”

A former chief of staff at the Elysée Palace from that period said Lang wielded relentless pressure like no other to secure appointments, decisions or honors. “He never stopped being a minister. Every day, he would call me, send letters, emails, texts… I had a special Lang folder,” recalled former culture minister Rima Abdul Malak. When the 2022 Press Club, Humor and Politics Award, was given to Abdul Malak, Lang changed his plane ticket to return from Saudi Arabia.

“He never misses an opportunity to put himself in the spotlight — an honor, a medal, he is the guardian of his legacy and his recognition every second of his life… Everyone knew he never paid for anything in Cannes,” said Abdul Malak. “He believes he should be invited everywhere, and always in luxurious conditions. This aspect of his personality echoes the criticisms of the champagne-socialist left, the lure of money, the circles of luxury and power. But he is also capable of joining the floats at the Techno Parade and dropping by small underground workshops to support artists.”

Feeling of impunity

Ambivalent, a man of institutions and ideas, a former professor specializing in the law of piracy and not particularly attached to protocol, Lang still enjoys the aura of his record as an emblematic minister, benefiting from President Mitterrand’s 1981 promise to double the culture budget. He cultivated that aura and his connections all over the world, even at the risk — as his critics claim — of sliding toward a sense of omnipotence and impunity. “He has a naïveté and a mindset that are no longer relevant,” said a person within his entourage at the IMA.

Since his connections with Epstein came to light, the pedestal has begun to crack. Alongside the investigation launched by France’s National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) for aggravated tax fraud laundering, memories of past transgressions have resurfaced chaotically, fueled by social media set ablaze by the publication of thousands of emails. Lang and his wife, Monique, have been placed under police protection.

More discreetly, former allies and political opponents have begun to talk about unpaid bills and a lavish lifestyle. Some said Parisian restaurants dreaded seeing the Lang couple walk in. At Chez Edgard, a major haunt of the political and media elite in the 1990s, the owner confided to a former minister from Lionel Jospin’s government: “The Langs at my place, never again, they owe me 10 years’ worth of lunches.”

At the Cannes Film Festival, the luxury hotels on the Croisette decided to push back. Figures from the world of culture and cinema were invited by the festival for two nights, breakfast included. But, according to organizers at the time, the Lang couple’s bills reached several thousand euros — three or four times the allotted amount — sometimes for an extended stay, sometimes for meals with guests. No hotel would accept hosting him anymore. In fact, Lang was no longer invited after 2020, as Pierre Lescure, the former president of the festival, revealed on the social media platform X, mentioning “significant unpaid bills in the hotels on the Croisette.”

The IMA: A full-time job

A “way of life,” a “well-known habit,” is how most political and cultural leaders who knew Lang and his wife described it. For a long time, she was the driving force behind the scenes and his secret public relations asset. “Lang’s attitude toward money was abnormal — not all politicians do that,” insisted another former Socialist culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti.

In principle, the heads of boards of directors serve unpaid. Lang, however, turned the IMA presidency into a full-time job. He had the board of directors approve a monthly salary of €10,000 for himself at the time, more than a government minister earned. The detail shocked members of Hollande’s government, especially as the president had cut ministerial pay by 30% and ministers were required to return any gift valued at over €150.

“At the IMA, I had eliminated all the perks. I had neither a salary nor a driver, and my meal expenses were very limited,” recalled Renaud Muselier, who led the IMA from 2011 to 2013. “These practices did not fit with my ethics. The way Lang and his family operated was not appropriate for a position heading a public institution, where it is France that pays.”

Luxury suits

Lang imposed a “preferential rate” on the Lebanese caterer Noura, an IMA partner, for his guests and himself. However, the restaurant formally requested that the institute pay an outstanding bill of €41,000, as revealed in 2015 by the newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné. The courts recognized mutual debts between the restaurant, which was in receivership, and the Institute.

Lang also received luxury suits, such as those from the Italian brand Smalto, the couturier who dressed King Hassan II of Morocco (1929-1999), according to Le Canard Enchaîné and L’Obs. An investigation into possible embezzlement was opened and then ultimately dropped in 2023. Other designers, such as Yves Saint Laurent and the Japanese designer Issey Miyake, also gifted him suits. “The numbers are all over the place,” argued Laurent Merlet, Lang’s lawyer. “Since 1990, when I began defending his reputation and image in matters of defamation and privacy, I have never dealt with a trial over unpaid restaurant bills trying to portray him as ill-mannered.” Contacted about these matters, Lang declined to comment.

Lang was no stranger to media storms and knows how to stand his ground. Past statements, however, cast a shadow over his image as a trailblazer and progressive figure. When, on May 16, 2011, then IMF chief and French presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested at the Sofitel in New York for the rape of Nafissatou Diallo, a housemaid, Lang downplayed the event in an interview on the evening news, saying: “No one died.”

In January 2018, when Allen was again accused by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow of sexually assaulting her when she was 7 years old, Lang criticized what he called “Woody bashing” and a “plot within a family” without “any evidence” on the popular program Quotidien. “Sometimes you have to be politically incorrect and go against the grain,” Lang asserted, adding that the New York prosecutor had found the case to be unfounded in 1993, which was not in fact true. His daughter informed Epstein by email of this public support for their mutual friend Allen.

After Gérard Depardieu was charged with rape and sexual assault, accused by around 20 women, Lang remained friends with the French actor. And although he was criticized for publicly supporting Roman Polanski, who was arrested in Switzerland in 2009 at the request of the US for the sexual assault of a minor in 1977, Lang now insists that he would do it again.

After Mediapart’s revelations, the financial prosecutors’ opening of an investigation into Jack and Caroline Lang on Friday, February 6, hastened the octogenarian’s decision to resign, under pressure from the Elysée. Three days earlier, he had said of his daughter’s resignation from the National Union of Producers, “It’s very sad for her; she is responsible for this whole issue with the funds,” referring to the offshore company. “I never received a single cent,” Caroline repeated.

Lang’s term was renewed in 2023 when he was 83, breaking with the norms at the top of comparable institutions — leaders of public bodies are usually subject to age and term limits — and disregarding President Emmanuel Macron’s promise to reserve the position for former foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. Lang had warned: He would stay.