Kelly At Large #135 Destruction Edition
In which France burns--again.
Hello from Paris,
Friday night I was awake until three or four in the morning listening to booms in my neighborhood that were so loud they penetrated closed windows and some usually effective earplugs.
If the anti-retirement movement was a chance for the “radical” adult male children of the mostly white, often bourgeois to tear things up and burn things down, the shooting Wednesday of 17-year old, Nahel Merzouk by a cop in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris, opened the door to violence across France for an entirely different demographic.
This time it was the turn of very young (generally) males of color, to go out burning and pillaging. And by young I don’t mean university age, but between fourteen and eighteen years, with many even younger, between 12 and 13.
Probably some really were on the street to protest what the left explained were decades of racism and colonialism and police violence. According to the Guardian, “there have been 17 fatalities at traffic stops in the past 18 months, with most of the dead from minority ethnic backgrounds.” For them, the violence was an act of speech after muzzled lives. Even if it wasn’t violence that served any strategic purpose.
Rioters have mostly been burning down their own shops, their own busses, community centers, schools. Just like in 2005 when we saw similar violence in France when a police chase led to the deaths of two teenagers.
But while I believed the rhetoric then, following those events pretty carefully, this time feels different. I’d agree with Nahel’s grandmother who said that many rioters and looters weren’t on the street because of Nahel and police violence. Everybody was just capitalizing on his death for their own agendas.
There’s the extreme Left embodied by La France Insoumise which refuses to condemn the violence, and supports any excuse to undermine the state. Theoretically, it’s because after the revolution in which the state is crushed, a new, more just, more equitable society will magically arise. Though really it’s because they want power themselves.
In some neighborhoods, of course, drug dealers and other criminals no doubt used the occasion to solidify their control.
The Right, meanwhile, uses the opportunity to talk about the need for law and order, law and order, demanding firmness with the savages on the street. One extreme right “member of the faschosphere” set up a funding campaign for the family of the cop who is sitting in jail charged with voluntary manslaughter, a campaign which has already raised more than a million euros, something like four times the amount of a similar effort for the victim’s family.
(Just for the record, unlike other perpetrators of police violence, both in France and elsewhere, where the cops seem almost proud of themselves, this one seems to have been horrified by his own actions, and has asked the family to forgive him. Apologizing doesn’t bring back Nahel, but at least he’s not an indifferent monster.)
But then there are the many, many participants in the violence and looting who seem to have no social, political, or strategic reason. At all. You can see in the videos that they are revelling in violence, giddy with inspiring chaos for its own sake. Thrilled to drive a burning car into a mayor’s house when his family is inside, setting the whole thing on fire, and injuring his wife and one of his kids who barely escaped.
I don’t think this moment is particular to France. There’s a kind of generalized, bull-in-the-China-shop intent worldwide to smash everything in sight. I’ll never believe that the Black Bloc which came from all over Europe to burn things in Paris actually thought they were accomplishing anything. In Kentucky, meanwhile, when I was there, my friends told me that people now merely see stoplights as suggestions, and largely do what they like when they drive. All over the U.S., Trump is still extremely popular, along with his agenda, which is less to impose a vision of conservative politics than bulldoze almost every institution that props up the U.S. government. It’s also why, I think, Putin is mad enough to pursue a war in which he can’t dominate Ukraine but can certainly destroy it. Ditto for that tiny minority of radical gender activists intent on erasing the category of women, word by word.
What seems clear, is that the kind of person Walter Benjamin called the destructive character more and more has the upper hand:
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenate, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony.
The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.
The destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space – the place where thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without occupying it.
The destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy.
In our nihilistic age of destructive characters there is no desire for dialogue, reflection, thought, reform, negotiation, the slow process of creation. What they want to do is destroy, and be applauded for it, a high stakes performance. From Trump to the kids on the street all weekend co-ordinating with Telegram and WhatsApp and posting their accomplishments on TikTok, where they egged each other on to destroy more, destroy faster.
And while commentators blab about how the state needs to reform itself and the measures it should take (many of which I agree are certainly necessary and long overdue), I wonder what we can do control the moving spirit of the violence we’ve seen over the last several days which isn’t a thirst for justice but the joy of pure destruction.
I saw it with my own eyes Saturday afternoon when I had the idiotic idea to take a walk, and ended up in a little park near la Porte de Lilas where fireworks were going off with impressive, window-shaking booms.
The kids responsible for the ruckus were maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, laughing almost hysterically as they lit their rockets, then threw them at each other, passersby, even the trees.
While I was wondering how to safely get around them, they finally heard sirens, started laughing even harder, so hard they could barely run, “The cops are coming! The cops! Scram!”
In Other News
A Study Suggests an Increased Risk of Dementia with Hormone Replacement Therapy But…
“What does this study mean for me?”, you may be asking yourself. Nothing. This study, while interesting for researchers, should not change anything.
That’s it for this time.
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Disgruntedly yours,
xoxo K
Stay safe please.