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November 22, 2005
3 April 1955: À propos des banlieus
No more quiet days in Clichy...
'55, '68, '05,..plus ça change. But of course a repetition is not the repetition of the same: and I do not repeat because I repress. I repress because I repeat, I forget because I repeat. [Deleuze Difference & Repetition]
In May '68, from the first sparks to the local clashes, the upheaval was brutally transmitted to the whole society...Vested interests prevailed in the end, but only after a month of burnings. We're headed for explosions of this type, yet more profound. [Félix Guattari 'On Capitalism and Desire' (Desert Islands)]
When Simenon completed L'Horloger d'Everton in 1954, just as the storm was building in Algeria which was to make 'necessary' the first application of the quasi-martial état d'urgence that, with the import of colonial discontent into France's "internal souths", would later be reprised.
Simenon was far away, having forsaken France for Connecticut, where he based his novel. A father – a watchmaker – separated from his wife, and his adolescent son, a couple whose lines of communication form the psychological heart of the story. Simenon's wonderfully flat prose details how the watchmaker's steady, measured life is overthrown by his being forced by circumstances to question his knowledge of – and his relationship with – his son.
The father learns suddenly that his son has run away with a girl, and is suspected of committing a murder. The interference of the police and the media in the hunt for the boy only serves to uncover slowly in the father an obscure solidarity with the estranged boy and his lover in their flight: "they were of the same breed, all three of them. ... It seemed to him that, in the whole world, there were only two sorts of men, those who bow their heads and the others." Reunited finally, uncomfortably, with his son, who refuses to give any justification or defence in mitigation of his act, the watchmaker discovers in this solidarity another time, another mode of connection, he finds again what he had lost in the measured quietitude and satisfaction of middle-age.
It is only in Bertrand Tavernier's 1974 film adaptation L'Horloger de Saint-Paul that the secret charge buried in this psychological drama is catalysed. In the first scene in the film we see a burning car, a motif that runs through the film (and beyond). Transplanting the action back to France, to Lyons, Tavernier uses the troubled father-son relationship as a synechdoche for the apparently unbridgable gap between the generations that '68 had made all too tangible.
The boy has killed one of the private security police hired in to protect the factories from protestors. Whilst on the run, the combination of the media, unionists, and public thirst for sensation makes a political terrorist and cause celebre of the boy. On the other hand, when he is finally caught his lawyer insists that a crime of passion defence is the only way to ameliorate his lot. But the accused refuses this psychologisation just as he refuses the media's attempts to make him the representative of any assignable political movement.
Finally, the father stands by his son: they find a sort of understanding and a solidarity in this total, unassignable revolt, they reach an understanding, a common cause, against that which is simply insupportable, a sort of absolute revulsion at the world that demands to be expressed in an act, even a violent act. This understanding which was never reached after '68, and whose absence continues to haunt the country, erupting wherever socially-attenuated circumstances weaken the surface, on the peripheries. Is it sick to compare '68 to '05? An overinterpretation of a purely sociological picture?...depending on how you think it, the comparison could reveal a shocking decline from idealism, either to brutal realism (where once the youth revolted for dreams and freedom, now they demand the right to work?) or to mere confusion (nowadays, they don't even make demands, not even impossible ones....).
The Ancien Regime's refusal to give up their ideal of a social closure, their elitisms, their blocking out of the internal south....as Badiou says, 'we get the riots we deserve'; and however preferable to the Sarkozy hardline, it is no good, at this point, trying to 'understand' in sociological terms the 'agenda' (or likewise decrying the lack of agenda and impropriety of means), putting in place money and schemes which will only trickle away without changing anything. A public display of guilt and self-flagellation together with a refusal to recognize the events as political in themselves ('...but still, they must realise that this is not the done thing'). Platitudinous demands for signification: "There is a lack of political consciousness of the objectives, what Marx called the for-itself. This movement wants something, but it does not yet know what it wants." - Negri
They may not be able to formulate what they want; Maybe there is no formula. They know very well what they are against: everything, because everything is against them. Why did the watchmaker's son kill a man? "Because he was filth." It's all filth. The imperative is to act.
- Twenty years, my God!
- They made him pay for what he said.
- Yet they didnt let him speak long.
- I know.
- They shut me up too.
- They tried him as a terrorist, yet tried to supress the political aspect.
- I'd have liked to say...how you break windows when you cant breathe. We're stifling here in this rotten country where the cosy status quo must be preserved at all costs.
"A state for which what they call public order is nothing but an excuse for the protection of private wealth and for letting loose on working class or foreign children is purely and simply disgusting." [Badiou] Totally revolting; demanding a total revolt.
It's not hard to imagine a modern day update of the story: Badiou provides us with the back-story. The runaway would no doubt be 'linked' vaguely by the media to Al Qaida, etc.etc...L'Horloger de l'ENS? Once again, asking the question who finds time for the youth...
Posted by robin at November 22, 2005 10:14 PM