Rage

Jasmine Cooper, Lili Owen Rowlands
and Katie Pleming (eds)

Rage

Affect and Resistance in French and
Francophone Culture and Thought, 1968–2020

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cooper, Jasmine, 1989– editor. | Rowlands, Lili Owen, 1992– editor. | Pleming, Katie, 1992– editor.

Title: Rage : affect and resistance in French and Francophone culture and thought, 1968-2020 / Jasmine Cooper, Lili Owen Rowlands, Katie Pleming.

Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, 2024. |

Series: Modern French identities, 1422-9005 ; volume no. 150 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024010095 (print) | LCCN 2024010096 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800798397 (paperback) | ISBN 9781800798403 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800798410 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: French literature—20th century—History and criticism. | French literature—21st century—History and criticism. | Politics in literature. | Anger in literature. | Motion pictures—France—History. | Politics in motion pictures. | Anger in motion pictures. | Anger—Political aspects—France. | Activism—France. | Traoré, Assa, 1985—Interviews. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Film criticism. | Essays. | Interviews.

Classification: LCC PQ317.P64 R34 2024 (print) | LCC PQ317.P64 (ebook)

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024010095

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024010096

Permission from Assa Traoré and Éditions du Seuil for the reproduction of an excerpt from Lettre à Adama by Assa Traoré and Elsa Vigoureux (© Éditions du Seuil, 2017).

Cover image © Makoto C. Okubo, ‘Manifestation Gilets jaunes – Acte IV – Paris’ (2018). Reproduced with permission.

Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG

ISSN 1422-9005

ISBN 978-1-80079-839-7 (print)

ISBN 978-1-80079-840-3 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-80079-841-0 (ePub)

DOI 10.3726/b19667

© 2024 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, Oxford, United Kingdom

info@peterlang.com – www.peterlang.com

Jasmine Cooper, Lili Owen Rowlands and Katie Pleming have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the editors

Jasmine Cooper is the Fairlie-Hutchinson Research Fellow in French at Girton College, Cambridge.

Lili Owen Rowlands is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in French at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Katie Pleming is an Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

About the book

This volume explores the political life of rage as it has been experienced and mobilized in the Francosphere since 1968. If mai is remembered as a failure to convert insurrectionary feeling into lasting political change, the vast number of activist groups who have alchemized their anger into resistance over the past fifty years are a testament to the continued, necessary role of rage in political life.

This volume traces the various morphologies of anger across Frenchlanguage literature, thought, cinema and activism. From Black feminisms to punk, flamboyance to suicide, cacophonous sound to riotous song, the contributions probe the aesthetics and politics of rage. This collection also examines the uneven legitimization of political anger – how rage is allowed to be expressed, by whom and in which contexts. Rage is often dismissed as inimical to proper academic inquiry: what unites the contributions in this publication is a commitment to thinking with feeling.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the French Department of the University of Cambridge, Newnham College, Cambridge and Royal Holloway, University of London for their generous financial support, which has enabled the publication of this volume. We also thank Assa Traoré and Éditions du Seuil for kindly allowing us to reproduce an excerpt from Lettre à Adama by Assa Traoré and Elsa Vigoureux (© Éditions du Seuil, 2017). Finally, many thanks to Laurel Plapp and the team at Peter Lang for their support and guidance throughout the publication process.

Jasmine Cooper, Lili Owen Rowlands & Katie Pleming

Introduction

This is a book about the political life of rage, about how anger has come to be felt and mobilized in France since 1968. If mai has been overwhelmingly remembered as an eruption of insurrectionary feeling, the decades that followed are more often figured as the dissolution of affect, what Perry Anderson, writing in 2004, called ‘the long post-partum depression of a stillborn revolution’.¹ And yet where anxieties about French decline and degeneration have long percolated – creating what Jacques Rancière considers to be a fatalist consensus for neoliberal expansion and ‘l’absolutisation du pouvoir capitaliste’ – rage has also returned to France, shattering the atomized resignation on which the powerful depend.²

Over the past decade, in response to the misery and immiseration brought about by economic liberalization and growing authoritarianism, a vast number of new activist assemblages have alchemized their anger into resistance. In 2012, the first of many zones à défendre (or ZADs) came together in Notre-Dame-des-Landes to fend off plans to build a new mega-airport. Writing about the affective undertow of these occupations and their ambition to overthrow the mode of capitalism that occasions ecological exploitation, La Mauvaise Troupe put it thus: ‘The communities that have been constituted in these places are built of blood and mud, anger and joy.’³ In March 2016, another outpouring of indignation streamed through public squares in response to François Hollande’s proposed labour reforms. For weeks the Nuit debout protesters gathered by night as their demands thickened into a full-blown rebellion against the anti-austerity policies of their so-called socialist government.

Though the nuitards eventually lost momentum, the atmosphere of righteous anger at the state was only momentarily repressed, returning in 2018 in the form of the Gilet jaunes revolt. Beginning as a series of weekly occupations of roundabouts and toll booths across France in opposition to a new fuel tax, the movement quickly morphed into a far broader uprising against the generalized morosité and précarité felt across different social strata from small towns and the rural periphery, including farmers, pensioners, the petite bourgeoisie and the unemployed. The Gilets jaunes urged that only the total reorganization of French representative democracy would quell their anger.⁴ As one group of lycéens in Toulouse phrased it: ‘Mai 68. Ils commémorent. On recommence.’⁵

Noting how ‘people’s moods and gestures appear so out of scale’ in the post-millennial moment, the affect theorist Lauren Berlant conceives of much activism – the popularity of terms like ‘microaggression’ and the proliferation of hashtags – as an attempt to find ‘new ways to care about, redress, and refuse the reproduction of the ordinary of violence’ as it is baked into the social infrastructure.⁶ In contemporary France, this is particularly true among those racialized as ‘other’, whose existence has long been contoured by urban segregation and a state racism so acute that it has born fire and flames.⁷ In July 2016, following the death of Adama Traoré, a young Black man who died in police custody, demonstrations were held in Paris and its northern suburbs. Calls for ‘Justice pour Adama’ spilled onto the streets, only to be joined in 2017 by calls for ‘Justice pour Théo’, a young Black man who was beaten and raped with a baton by police.