°Public versus street

April 13, 2006

Speaking of the politics of publicum versus that of the streets (below and before), here’s a sign hung in the George Washington library stairwell (I think) yesterday:

As the future policy writers of America, gather with your fellow students to discuss how to avoid letting a situation develop like the one in France–where the streets circumvent sound public policy.

And, as an aside on the impolitical, those with an interest in the writings of Roberto Esposito might be pleased to know … Relatedly, on the cut of politics, the name and the border, Keith generously transcribes Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Cut Throat Sun” over at Metastable Equilibrium. La raza - the razor.

Filed under: Constitution + Escape + Nancy + Esposito
:: trackback url | permanent link |

Bookmark and Share

3 Comments »

  1. BHL has a short piece in The New Republic.

    We had a prime minister who argued that when one is young, it is better to have a job with less security than no job at all. We had youth for whom the very idea of insecurity, the idea of being fired without cause, awakened a fear that petty bureaucrats–vicious, capricious, dissolute–would control their lives. We had a president who, until yesterday, equivocated.

    And there were the protesters (some of whom were also youth) who–rather than accepting a chance to negotiate with the government, which they demanded as their right and which was offered to them; rather than doing the dance of “dialogue,” which has accompanied all our successful reforms of the last 30 years and which is the only way to reform in France–said: “No, not that. Being heard is not enough; what matters is the movement. What counted, what counts still is the sacred spirit of the group, which must not be broken at any cost and which becomes an end unto itself.”

    For the protesters, was the CPE merely a pretext, an occasion for mass revolt, a means of changing the world? This logic harkens back to the spirit of ‘68 and in that sense it offers a certain allure. But it wasn’t really the spirit of ‘68 one saw in these terribly solemn marches to reclaim the right to security, to the 35-hour work week, to a loan for an apartment–the right for the young to become as quickly as possible exactly like the old. Instead it was a kind of demagoguery that not long ago Laurent Dispot called “youthism.” The idea is that the street is as good at making law as parliament and that parliament must immediately cede to the demands of the street. The project, in the back of the protesters’ minds, is that the masses, or the street, or better yet, the masses in the street, are a legislator with all the necessary legitimacy to undo a law that parliament has made. And now those masses have done exactly that.

    He digresses through Tocqueville. Reminiscing, really… forgetting the lessons of Democracy in America and concludes with the following:

    Perhaps the lesson of the CPE affair is that–rather than wavering without rest between two extremes (one day the technocrats, the next the guillotiners)–we instead need to initiate dialogue: to use popular opinion to enlighten the legislators and the legislators to mediate the seething anger of popular opinion. And then, from this crisis, some good might come: France, embarrassed before the world, could become–who knows?–one of the rare laboratories that produces the democracy of tomorrow.

    Craig [April 13, 2006 @ 5:32 am]

  2. Thanks for the excerpts, Craig. That Bernard-Henri can be pretty funny. I don’t really get the transposition of ‘technocrats’ for ‘bosses’. But he’s spot on about the terms through which this is being played out: street versus public, calls for dialogue, mediation, accusations of Jacobinism, etc.

    Though, I’ve been taken aback by how prevalent the theme of ‘Those weak French politicians who capitulated to the mob’ has been. Maybe this is a US-specific take, and Levy was responding to/feeling embarassed by this, and maybe it obviously comes off the back of ‘Those French and their reluctance to be proper warlords’, but I was kind of surprised.

    By the by, the guillotine comment reminds me that there’s an audio recording of a talk by Rebecca Comay (also Eduardo Cadava and Jean-Michel Rabaté) on the Slought Foundation site on terror and revolution (and Hegel, Kant) which I should listen to in full.

    s0metim3s [April 13, 2006 @ 12:16 pm]

  3. off-topic perhaps, but as an addendum perhaps to the Nancy text. it being Beckett’s birthday, thought i’d mention he has a great translation of Appollinaire’s ‘Zone’.
    translates the last line - if memory serves - as
    ’sun corpseless head’.

    Amie [April 14, 2006 @ 12:54 am]

Leave a comment



PLEASE RETYPE THIS NUMBER IN THE BOX PROVIDED. ANNOYING, BUT SO IS DELETING SPAM.






Get free blog up and running in minutes with Blogsome | Theme designs available here