Are We Replaceable? Part One

Renaud Camus and the real force behind "replacism"

On the list of influential writers no one will admit to having read, Renaud Camus is surely second only to Steve Sailer. Convicted in 2010 of inciting hatred against Muslims, after referring to Muslim migrants to France as “thugs” and “colonisers”, Camus is most notorious for coining the phrase “The Great Replacement”. The term has since taken on a life of its own: frequently cited by white identitarians and mentioned in the manifesto left by Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the New Zealand gunman who shot 50 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, today the phrase “Great Replacement” is more or less synonyous with “far right conspiracy theory”.

So, especially in a week where a British man was jailed for two years for “inciting racial hatred” by producing stickers, I’m playing with fire by offering a reading of Camus. But in what follows I want to distance Camus’ ideas both from racial violence, and also from a supposed conspiracy some associate with the phrase “Great Replacement”. Camus himself rejects the notion that any such conspiracy exists, preferring instead to address an ideology he calls “remplacementisme”, translated in a recent English-language anthology of his writings as “replacism”.

In what follows, the first of a three-part series, I’ll argue with Camus that replacism is not a conspiracy. And yet, polemic aside, it addresses something real: a structural blind spot across the Western world concerning the nature and meaning of human culture, predicated on the idea that peoples have no collective attributes, only individual ones.

This predates the two World wars, but has become a crusading force in their aftermath. It is arguably the central paradigm of contemporary Western culture, and finds expression in fields as diverse as architecture, tourism, and gastronomy. And my aim in venturing beyond the cordon sanitaire to risk a discussion of Camus’ provocative body of writing, is emphatically not to express (or incite) hostility toward other peoples. It’s to explore what insights this dissenter from present orthodoxies can offer, into an ideology now so normalised as to be all but invisible.

I want to disaggregate replacism from crude and paranoid conspiracy, with a view to showing how its demographic aspect is less a cause than effect of something much more pervasive. I’ll show how Camus’ analysis misses its real driving force (spoiler: this is not migrants from the Global South into the Global North). Then in the second part, I’ll explore replacism in this broader sense.

In the third, I’ll link replacism to our prevailing managerial ideology of the body: what elsewhere I’ve termed “Meat Lego Gnosticism”. For those of you who read this newsletter for its (reactionary) feminism, this will hopefully make clear how Camus’ macropolitical critique articulates with my usual enquiries into embodiment, anti-universalist feminism, and the structural blind spots that make mothering so invisible and under-valued.

What “The Great Replacement” Is Not

Before we get to replacism, my real interest in this essay, let’s talk a bit about Camus’ radioactive way into this discussion: the so-called “Great Replacement”. In particular, what this is, and is not. Camus sees this “Replacement” as both real, and emphatically not a sinister conspiracy or form of covert racialised animus. In his view, it’s an emergent phenomenon, driven by