The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

In the City and Out

Others 91 IntheCityandOut The notion of civility, like its near synonym urbanity, implies that a certain level of sophistication is to be found in cities. (A French equivalent of “civil” and “urbane” would be policé, a word with similar implications, this time from a Greek rather than Latin root.) If cities are defined partly by diversity and circulation, life together may be attained there thanks only to the careful management of differences and more or less tacit rules of etiquette. The alleged incivility of young French people“of immigrant origin” (issus de l’immigration says the capacious phrase of choice) may then be understood as a breach of etiquette that threatens the very possibility of vivre-­ensemble. Men’s “aggressions” and women’s religiosity become signs that they do not belong in the city but outside it, in the banlieues with which they remain almost automatically associated in the minds of many. But because civility is the mark of civilization, the refusal or inability to master etiquette doesn’t entail only exteriority but also inferiority. The odious theory of the so-­ called clash of civilizations doesn’t position the West and Islam side by side and equal. The incongruity of visible Muslims in a Western city signals at best their lack of sophistication and at worst their barbarity, that is, their outsider status as uncivilized foreigners. Islamic terrorism , in that sense, would thus constitute the ultimate act of incivility. It makes an awful mess in the city. ...