Badiou's L'Organisation Politique on French Riots. posted by Richard Seymour

It is above all against the ideology of security [sécuritaire] and against the incessant police harassment that these kids are rising up, against the cops in the estates who everywhere and at all times exert their control, with insults and intimidations, even of kids of 13 or 14. These days an estate is a squad of listless and malevolent cops, an unhinged command centre [commissariat], all too happy to throw themselves on a few kids playing football, on small gathering of youths, who Sarkozy, their great chief, has personally authorised them to treat as "scum" [racaille]. This after all the parties have spent months and months campaigning against young girls who wear the headscarf [foulard]...

The Minister of the Interior wishes to teach judges and justice itself a lesson, and the police find themselves invested with full powers: in schools, on the streets, in the family. The police become the guarantor not simply of public order but of "the Republican order", that is to say of society and "citizenship". In a strict sense France is occupied by its police, to which the Government accords everyday (the Perben laws (1), curfews) more areas of competence and power.



It is against workers without papers [sans papiers] that this politics was road-tested and put in place: laws of exception, campaigns concerning irregular immigration and the association with delinquency and terrorism, the incessant practice of stop and search, of arrests and expulsions. Doesn't L’Organisation politique say that we must stand beside workers without papers, to demand their regularisation on the basis of work, to demand respect for their belonging to France, and that this battle is not marginal (as too many people believe), but decisive? Who does not see today that, even when it is a matter of the French-born youth of the estates, Sarkozy raises the question of foreigners [des étrangers] as a central question, to the point of declaring outside of any legality, that he will demand the expulsion even of regularised [régulière] foreigners caught up in the youth riots? He does this to mobilise the country against the youth, to declare that it too is "not from here".



The politics of police and security is consensual, it is shared by all the parties. Consider the paralysis of the Socialists [PS] and the Communists [PC] in the face of Sarkozy and Villepin and the most extreme measures such as the curfews. Why do they not try to organise a great demonstration to protest against what has happened? Because they share the same vision, save for a few nuances (the police, but a "neighbourhood" [de proximité] police). What the youth riots show is that this politics is not consensual at the level of people [les gens]. It is a politics against people and the youth say so by doing what they do, with their own means, which are not political means but an uprising [soulèvement] of the youth.