Les voies tordues de l'mancipation

Abstract

It seems that everything there was to say about the riots which erupted in the French suburbs at the end of 2005 has already been said, even before those who were actually involved had time to make it part of their own experience and even before there was any clear expression of the slightest solidarity with those young people jailed in defiance of the most elementary rights to a legal defence, as provided by the law. Whether they go for explanations of the conflict based on communitarianism or economic determinism, the experts' consensus appears to take for granted that there is no question of emancipation having a role to play here. Yet this absence is now at the heart of our inability to understand the transformations which our world is undergoing. It is through this absence that the powerlessness of a whole generation is revealed. Thus, a new interpretation of these riots is appropriate, within a broader framework that restores the notion of emancipation as one of the decisive elements not because of any need to bring it back, however artificially this is contrived, in order somehow to confer a respectable analysis on these riots, but because the absence of this notion is incompatible with a concrete understanding of the events and their significance. The refusal to grant even the slightest role to the notion of emancipation testifies once again to the exclusion of the undeserving poor. There is of course nothing new in this, except that the intellectual consensus that surrounds it today risks setting up new divisions, which may serve to sanction new forms of violence on the part of the State.