By The Invisible Committee
Semiotext(e), 136pp, £9.95
http://www.newstatesman.com/non-fiction/2009/10/coming-insurrection-france
Reviewed by Daniel Miller
15 October 2009
Back to Meinhof
In July this year, the Fox News presenter Glenn Beck, conceivably the
stupidest man in America, warned his three million regular viewers of
"a dangerous leftist book" that harboured the potential to launch a
violent global revolution. "I am not calling to ban this book," Beck
explained, "but you should read it to know what is coming and be
ready when it does."
The book was The Coming Insurrection, a slim political pamphlet
recently translated into English by the venerable left-wing publisher
Semiotext(e), after first achieving notoriety through a terrorism
trial in France. The details of this absurd and disturbing circus are
now widely known.
In November last year, about 150 gendarmes, equipped with dogs and
helicopters, swooped at dawn on the mountain village of Tarnac,
central France, to arrest nine members of a locally based anarchist
collective on charges of "criminal association for the purposes of
terrorist activity". The charges referred to the sabotage of some
power lines, which several days earlier had caused minor disruption
to a few hundred TGV passengers. The book, which explicitly advocates
sabotage, but not terrorism, was then paraded before the media as
prima facie evidence of guilt.
The book itself is in some ways a trial. The Coming Insurrection is
an angry, florid text, grimly intent on a project of absolute
condemnation. Its organising political vision is established in its
opening chapter, in which the spectre of an evil Empire ("the
mechanisms of power that preventively and surgically stifle any
revolutionary potential in a situation") is contraposed to a noble
"party of insurgents", dedicated to "the sketching out of a
completely other composition, an other side of reality, which from
Greece to the French banlieues is seeking its consistency".
These two sides soon simplify into their more basic components:
"them" and "us". The authors suggest that a differential of joy
divides these two camps. "We can but notice," eight members of the
"Tarnac Nine" recently wrote for Le Monde, "that there is much more
joy in our friendships and our 'company of miscreants' than in your
offices and courthouses." But the text itself lacks joie de vivre,
and comes across as dogmatic and sermonising.
The Coming Insurrection is made up of "seven circles" of analysis in
which the authors indict a series of symptoms of contemporary
decadence (excessive individualism, the cheapening of intimacy,
generalised relativism, ubiquitous advertising . . .), followed by a
final four chapters. Proposing prescriptions for how we might rid
ourselves of "the corpse of civilisation", the advice boils down to
forming more intense and adventurous friendships. But the language
throughout is dyspeptic, macho and, at several points, troubling. "In
a sense," states one passage, "the open hostility of certain gangs
only expresses, in a slightly less muffled way, the poisonous
atmosphere, the rotten spirit, the desire for a salvational
destruction by which the country is consumed." This rhetoric strikes
me as fascistic.
The Sorbonne criminologist Alain Bauer, the man who first brought the
Tarnac group to the French government's attention by circulating
copies of L'insurrection qui vient among the security forces in 2007,
has argued that groups such as the Tarnac Nine herald the rebirth of
a 1970s-style violent left. "With Action Directe and the Red
Brigades," Bauer told the Observer in January, "there was a first
intellectual phase, followed by a radicalisation and then a
transition to physical action. Books like The Coming Insurrection are
strongly reminiscent of the first phase." Bauer neglects to mention
that in cases where this transition has previously occurred - as with
the strategy of tension in Italy in the early 1970s, when elements of
the Italian state carried out terrorist attacks against its own
people in order to manipulate public opinion - it has been the forces
of government that have provoked it.
No case was brought to trial in France following the November
arrests. Instead, one of the Tarnac Nine, Julien Coupat, was held for
six months before being released without charge. Between the context
surrounding it and its own grave flaws, and a marketing campaign that
has nakedly traded on figures of dissent, subversion and glamour, The
Coming Insurrection is without a doubt the most thought-provoking
radical text to be published in the past ten years. It deserves to be
read and discussed.
--
Daniel Miller is a writer living in Berlin
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