Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France

3. Figures of Multiplicity: Can France Reinvent Its Identity?

chapter three FiguresofMultiplicity:CanFranceReinventItsIdentity? Achille Mbembe Translated by Jane Marie Todd T he root cause of the crisis in the banlieues is the way France has historically tried to dodge the question of race even while engaging in multiple practices of “racialization” at every level of daily life. This crisis exposes the impasse that has resulted from the country’s refusal to undertake its own decolonization. If France still wants to exert minimal influence on the contemporary imagination, it must quickly come to realize the urgency of the situation. Never in any country has civil peace and public order, let alone the social contract,been established through political repression alone.This is particularly the case for postcolonial societies, a category to which almost all European democracies once possessing a colonial empire belong. The banlieues of France will prove no exception to that rule, despite the police questioning and mass arrests, the assembly-line trials and convictions, and, lurking in the background, the exhumation of colonialism and slavery. These old cadavers, as we have been told repeatedly in the last ten years, were never properly laid to rest: the past refuses to pass away. It is now clear that the major victim of recent events is French democracy, its credibility and respectability in the world. If France still wants to exert minimal influence on the contemporary imagination , it must quickly come to realize the urgency of the situation. That TSHIMANGA_pages.indd 55 8/10/09 10:47:27 AM  / Achille Mbembe urgency lies not in the resurrection of old colonial laws that date from the Algerian War and that have granted extraordinary powers to the state—in metropolitan France itself and in the twenty-first century— but in the slow patient work by which the country will forge a new identity for itself in the era of globalization. We must hope that once a semblance of order has been restored, France will quickly display the courage needed to treat the structural causes of a problem that, far from being accidental, exposes the impasse that has resulted from the country’s refusal to undertake its own decolonization. It has not been repeated often enough that the root cause of the crisis is the way France has historically tried to dodge the race question even while engaging in multiple practices of“racialization”at every level of daily life. What is new is that “aliens” are no longer the sole targets of these practices, which are increasingly applied to the most vulnerable French citizens and to those most marked and stigmatized by their ethnicity. Through the recent riots, then, France is paying the price for the double exaction it has never ceased to demand of these sectors of the population : that of “class” and that of “race.” Beneath the real social problems raised by life in the banlieues, the race question constitutes the substratum of the “insurrection of the invisible” we have just witnessed. As we see clearly in the extraordinary measures currently being imposed in certain of these areas, “race” also lies at the foundation of the mechanisms aimed at repressing that“revolt of the sans-parts,” whom we have, in a brilliant display of unanimity, rapidly criminalized.1 No longer content to show itself only underground , in the unconscious, the Beast has suddenly leapt out into the open, corrupting along the way rights, law, and justice, and creating a situation that will long leave indelible scars on the skin and face of the nation itself. Self-Inflicted Disaster The reason that the self-inflicted disaster has been so spectacular, and in many respects so comic,is that France,after so many years of arrogance and bad faith, has finally fallen into the trap of its own hypocrisy. Having tried to deny responsibility for its history, and therefore at a loss TSHIMANGA_pages.indd 56 8/10/09 10:47:27 AM Figures of Multiplicity /  as to how to heal its wounds—though in large part it had the means at hand—it now finds that the past has suddenly caught up with it. At the intellectual level, the tragedy (or should we say the farce?) is particularly serious because France has long refused to equip itself with the conceptual tools that would allow it to analyze properly what is happening. How are we to explain, for example, the hostility and contempt of right-minded elites in regard to “postcolonial studies” or...