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Two parallels are often evoked apropos the recent violent outbursts in France: the New Orleans looting after Katrina hurricane and May 68. In spite of significant differences, lessons can be drawn from both parallels. With regard to New Orleans, the Paris fires had a sobering effect on those European intellectuals who used New Orleans to emphasize the advantage of the European welfare state model over the US wild capitalism - now we know it can happen here also. Those who attributed the New Orleans violence to the lack of European-style solidarity are no less wrong than the US free-market liberals who now gleefully returned the blow and pointed out how the very rigidity of state interventions which limit market competition and its dynamics prevented the economic rise of the marginalized immigrants in France (in contrast to the US where many immigrant groups are among the most successful). On the other hand, what strikes the eye with regard to May 68 is the total absence of any positive utopian prospect among the protesters: if May 68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the recent revolt was just an outburst with no pretense to any kind of positive vision - if the commonplace that "we live in a post-ideological era" has any sense, it is here. Is this sad fact that the opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a meaningful utopian project, but only as a meaningless outburst, not the strongest indictment of our predicament? Where is here the celebrated freedom of choice, when the only choice is the one between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence, a violence which is almost exclusively directed against one's own - the cars burned and the schools torched were not from rich neighborhoods, but were part of the hard-won acquisitions of the very strata from which protesters originate.

The movie ends with a weird scene of family redemption: Jimmy's wife, Annabeth, draws her family tight together in order to weather the storm. In a long pathetic speech, she restores Jimmy's self-confidence by praising him as the strong and reliable head of the family, always ready to do the necessary tough things to protect the family haven. Although this symbolic reconciliation, this <i>Aufhebung</i> of the catastrophe of killing the wrong man, superficially succeeds (the last scene of the film shows Penn's family watching the Irish parade, restored as a "normal" family), it is arguably the strongest indictment of the redemptive power of family ties: the lesson of the film is not that "family ties heal all wounds," that family is a safe haven enabling us to survive the most horrendous traumas, but, quite the opposite, that family is a monstrous ideological machine making us blind for the most horrendous crimes we commit. Far from bringing any catharsis, the ending is thus an absolute anti-catharsis, leaving us, spectators, with the bitter taste that nothing was really resolved, that we are witnessing an obscene travesty of the ethical core of family. (The only similar scene that comes to mind is the finale of John Ford's <i>Fort Apache</i>, in which John Wayne praises to the gathered journalists the noble heroism of Henry Fonda, a cruel general who died in a meaningless attack on the Indians.) And, perhaps, this is all we can do today, in our dark era: to render visible the failure of all attempts at redemption, the obscene travesty of every gesture of reconciling us with the violence we are forced to commit. Perhaps, Job is the proper hero today: the one who refuses to find any deeper meaning in the suffering he encounters.

As to the "terrorist" fundamentalists' attacks, the first thing that strikes the eye<ref>1. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, <i>Avions-nous oublié le ma? Penser la politique après le 11 septembre</i>, Paris: Bayard 2002.</ref> is the inadequacy of the idea, developed most systematically by Donald Davidson, that human acts are rationally-intentional, accountable in the terms of beliefs and desires of the agent.<ref>2. Donald Davidson, <i>Essays on Actions and Events</i>, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980.</ref> This approach exemplifies the racist bias of the theories of "rationality": although their aim is to understand the Other from within, they end up attributing to the Other the most ridiculous beliefs (up to the infamous 400 virgins awaiting the believer in Paradise as the "rational" explanation of why he is ready to blow himself up), i.e., they makes the other ridiculously weird in the very effort of trying to make him "like us." Here is a passage from one of the propaganda texts distributed by North Korea during the Korean war:

What this means is that the "deconstructionist" / "risk society" commonplace according to which the contemporary individual experiences himself as thoroughly denaturalized, that he experiences even his most "natural" features (from his ethnic identity to his sexual preferences) as something chosen, historically contingent, to be learned, is profoundly deceiving: what we are effectively witnessing today is the opposite process of an unheard-of re-naturalization: all big "public issues" are (re)translated into questions about the regulation and stances towards intimate "natural"/"personal" idiosyncrasies. This is also why, at a more general level, the pseudo-naturalized ethnico-religious conflicts are the form of struggle which fits global capitalism: in our age of »post-politics,« when politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration, the only remaining legitimate source of conflicts are cultural (religious) or natural (ethnic) tensions. - And "evaluation" is precisely the regulation of social promotion that fits this massive renaturalization. So, perhaps, the time has come to reassert, as the truth of evaluation, the perverted logic to which Marx refers ironically in his description of commodity fetishism, when he quotes Dogberry's advice to Seacoal from Shakespeare's <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i> (Act 3, Scene 3) which concludes Chapter 1 of <i>Das Capital</i>: "To be a well-favored man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by nature." Today, in our times of evaluation, to be a computer expert or a successful manager is a gift of nature, while to have a beautiful lips or eyes is a fact of culture...

This same deadlock is clearly discernible also beneath the New Orleans outbursts. One of the pop heroes of the US-Iraq war, enjoying a short fame and today forgotten, was Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the unfortunate Iraqi information minister who, in his daily press conferences, heroically denied even the most evident facts and stuck to the Iraqi line - when the US tanks were only hundreds of yards from his office, he continued to claim that the US TV shots of the tanks on the Baghdad streets are just Hollywood special effects. Sometimes, however, he struck a strange truth - say, when, confronted with the claims that Americans are in control of parts of Baghdad, he snapped back: "They are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!"

In his theory of the sublime (<i>das Erhabene</i>), Immanuel Kant interpreted our fascination by the outbursts of the power of nature as a negative proof of the superiority of spirit over nature: no matter how brutal the display of ferocious nature is, it cannot touch the moral law in ourselves. Does the catastrophy of New Orleans not provide a similar example of the sublime? No matter how brutal the vortex of the hurricane, it cannot disrupt the vortex of the capitalist dynamic...

There is, however, another aspect of the New Orleans outbursts that is no less crucial with regard to ideological mechanisms that regulate our lives. According to a well-known anthropological anecdote, the "primitives" to whom one attributed certain superstitious beliefs (that they descend from a fish or from a bird, for example), when directly asked about these beliefs, answered: "Of course not - we're not that stupid! But I was told that some of our ancestors effectively did believe that..." - in short, they transferred their belief onto another. Are we not doing the same with our children: we go through the ritual of Santa Claus, since our children (are supposed to) believe in it and we do not want to disappoint them; they pretend to believe not to disappoint us, our belief in their naivety (and to get the presents, of course), etc. Is this not also the usual excuse of the mythical crooked politician who turns honest? - "I cannot disappoint the ordinary people who believe in it (or in me)." And, furthermore, is this need to find another who "really believes," also not that which propels us in our need to stigmatize the Other as a (religious or ethnic) "fundamentalist"? In an uncanny way, some beliefs always seem to function "at a distance": in order for the belief to function, there has to be some ultimate guarantor of it, yet this guarantor is always deferred, displaced, never present in persona. The point, of course, is that this other subject who directly believes, needs not exist for the belief to be operative: it is enough precisely to presuppose his existence, i.e. to believe in it, either in the guise of the primitive other or in the guise of the impersonal "one" ("one believes...").

This brings us back to rumours and "reports" about "subjects supposed to loot and rape": New Orleans is the city within the US which is among the most heavily marked by the internal Wall that separates the afffluent from the ghettoized Blacks. And it is about those on the other side of the Wall that we fantasize: they more and more live in another world, in a blank zone that offers itself as a screen for the projection of our fears, anxieties, and secret desires. The "subject supposed to loot and rape" is on the other side of the Wall - it is about this subject that Bennett can afford to make his slip of tongue and confess in a censored mode his murderous dreams. More than anything else, rumors and fake reports from the aftermath of Katrina bear witness to the deep class division of American society.

The recent outbursts in Paris bear witness to the same Wall in Europe itself. The thing to resist, when we are faced with shocking reports and images of cars burning in Paris suburbs, is the "hermeneutic temptation": the search for some deeper meaning or message hidden in these outbursts. What is most difficult to accept is precisely their utmost meaninglessness: more than a form of protest, they are a <i>passage à l'acte</i> which bears witness not only to the impotence of the perpetrators, but, even more, to the lack of what Fredric Jameson called "cognitive mapping", to their inability to locate the experience of their situation into a meaningful Whole. The true question is thus: which are the roots of this disorientation?

The most popular TV show of the Fall of 2000 in France, with the viewer rating two times higher than that of the notorious "Big Brother" reality soaps, was <i>"C'est mon choix"</i> ("It is my choice") on <i>France 3</i>, the talk-show whose guest is each time an ordinary (or, exceptionally, well-known) person who made a peculiar choice which determined his or her entire life-style: one of them decided never to wear underwear, another tries all the time to find a more appropriate sexual partner for his father and mother - extravagance is allowed, solicited even, but with the explicit exclusion of the choices which may disturb the public (say, a person whose choice is to be and act as a racist, is a priori excluded). Can one imagine a better predicament of what the "freedom of choice" effectively amounts to in our liberal societies? We can go on making our small choices, "reinventing ourselves" thoroughly, on condition that these choices do not seriously disturb the social and ideological balance. With regard to the <i>"C'est mon choix,"</i> the truly radical thing would have been to focus precisely on the "disturbing" choices: to invite as guests people like dedicated racists, i.e. people whose choice (whose difference) DOES make a difference. This, also, is the reason why, today, "democracy" is more and more a false issue, a notion so discredited by its predominant use that, perhaps, one should take the risk of abandoning it to the enemy. Where, how, by whom are the key decisions concerning global social issues made? Are they made in the public space, through the engaged participation of the majority? If the answer is yes, it is of secondary importance if the state has a one-party system, etc. If the answer is no, it is of secondary importance if we have parliamentary democracy and freedom of individual choices.

Etienne Balibar<ref>Etienne Balibar, "La violence: idealité et cruauté," in <i>La crainte des masses</i>, Paris: Editions Galilée, 1997.</ref> proposed the notion of excessive, non-functional cruelty as a feature of contemporary life: a cruelty whose figures range from "fundamentalist" racist and/or religious slaughter to the "senseless" outbursts of violence performed by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call "Id-Evil" (referring to the Freudian Id (<i>das Es, le Ça</i>), a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reasons. All the talk about foreigners stealing work from us or about the threat they represent to our Western values should not deceive us: under closer examination, it soon becomes clear that this talk provides a rather superficial secondary rationalization. The answer we ultimately obtain from a skinhead is that it makes him feel good to beat foreigners, that their presence disturbs him. What we encounter here is indeed Id-Evil, the Evil structured and motivated by the most elementary imbalance in the relationship between the Ego and <i>jouissance</i>, by the tension between pleasure and the foreign body of <i>jouissance</i> in the very heart of it. Id-Evil thus stages the most elementary "short-circuit" in the relationship of the subject to the primordially missing object-cause of his desire: what "bothers" us in the "other" (Jew, Japanese, African, Turk) is that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object - the other either possesses the object-treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why we don't have it), or he poses a threat to our possession of the object.

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