My wife's response has been consistently 'Fucking French'. She is Flemish, so this response is expected in most cases, violent or non-violent.

As for Zizek, I wonder if he'd take the counter-intuitive tactic of point out how such riots tend to destroy the shit of one's own community -- an internal destruction in the guise of a 'fuck you' to everybody else.
Brad | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 11:05 am | #

"One is reminded of the old joke about blonde who, facing execution for crimes committed, stands before her gun-toting executioners, and screams "fire" in the hope of distracting her would-be killers. On the streets of Paris, the response of the authorities is the response of the blonde, complicit in their own ideological conflagration. After all, are not these riots the inevitable consequence of the failure of those liberals who, in the thrall of the particular Parisian gloss on cosmopolitanism, mistook an ideology for civil society? And in the fires in Paris, do we not see the immolation of a symbolic gesture that, because of the partiality of its antagonism, can only fuel its own destruction?

Not that this destruction should be condemned. Quite the contrary, for such destruction offers up the fundamental political act, an act not unlike the refuseniks in the Israeli army and the slouching sacrifice of the political agent par excellence, the sickly Gollum of Peter Jackson's lord of the rings movie. In the riots, we find the conjunction of Hegel's law of the excluded middle with Lacan's famous insight that future determines the present. Here is why Gollum remains the fundamental lens by which the imaignary of the Parisian riots is to be understood: In the absence of a genuine engagement with the capitalist Real of capitalism, the only symbolic has no choice but the production of its own flammatory other, just in order to sacrifice one's self to its crucible. And so the cycle repeats, ad nauseum, like so much tinder, like the Riley character of Aliens, who dies each time only to be reborn in her cinematic eternal return."

How's that?
Kenneth Rufo | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 11:40 am | #

Brilliant -- the only improvement I would make is to add more rhetorical questions in the second paragraph.
Adam Kotsko | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 11:56 am | #

Yes, at least one 'How?' and one 'Why?'
Brad | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 12:01 pm | #

I think a rhetorical question involving Gollum would be necessary -- you know, how he assumes that everyone of course had this ridiculous logical leap in the back of their mind the whole time.
Adam Kotsko | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 12:13 pm | #

Hence his often hilarious use of the 'of course' -- which, I must admit, I've taken up w/ alarming regularity.
Brad | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 1:43 pm | #

Kenneth--really great (I love the blond). I would begin the second paragraph, however, with

"But perhaps that's too easy. Rather than allowing ourselves to fall into the trap of focusing on the Paris is burning, we should risk focusing on the film Paris is burning, which after all its variations on the impossibility of a sexual relationship comes up against the bedrock of the Real of Capital."
Jodi | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 1:46 pm | #

Real glad you all can have some fun with this.
Adam R. | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 3:35 pm | #

(Just kidding. Which is to say that I actually am glad you all can have some fun, just in case you missed the sarcasm the first time around.)
Adam R. | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 3:36 pm | #

The Paris riots will be taken by opponents of multiculturalism as indicative of a failure of multiculturalism as official state policy (lax immigration policies, insufficient pressure on immigrant communities towards "integration", complacent toleration of genuinely inimical foreign elements within the boundaries of the nation state), and by proponents of multiculturalism as a failure of policy vis-a-vis multiculturalism (insufficient "respect" and "inclusion", a failure to recognise and accommodate the differences of other cultures, an insufficient humility on the part of the authorities - all the symptoms of the cultural chauvinism with which France is habitually reproached).

But is not the opposite true, in both cases? Do not the Paris riots underline the *success* of multiculturalism, on its own terms, both as a racist policy that was always intended to create and maintain an ethnically identified underclass, and as a leftist ideal that always aimed at the creation of impermeable zones of cultural uniqueness? The Paris riots have in fact given both the France of the left-wing and the France of the right-wing the gift they always wanted: for the right, evidence of the irredeemable wickedness and abandonment to violent impulses of the poor; for the multiculti left, the concrete realisation of their ambition to arrest the claims of the universal, epitomised in the creation of "no-go" areas from which not only the police but also the rescue services are vigorously excluded.

In this way, the rioters perform their resistance to the tacit coalition between the chauvinist right and multiculti left, by adopting a strategy we might describe as "work to rule": the literal enactment of the other's expectations, the literal fulfilment of his everywhere-implicit-yet-unavowable desire. The rioters are confronting French society with the spectacle of its own obscene enjoyment, as it is sustained by that society's own racist imagery of the irrationally self-destructive and sexually violent ghetto youth.
Dominic Fox | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 4:09 pm | #

oh my god. Dominic, that is truly amazing. (I especially like 'but is the opposite not true in both cases...) really amazing...
Jodi | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 4:51 pm | #

I think Dominic's is nearly perfect in terms of substance -- I just sense a lack of rhetorical excess, the ALL CAPS, the "IS NOT...?"s, etc.

Still, ultimately, much better than I would have done, had I actually taken up my own challenge rather than outsourcing it to commenters.
Adam Kotsko | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 5:02 pm | #

Dominic, I swear, I expect to see those exact paragraphs in In These Times within the week.
Kenneth Rufo | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 7:28 pm | #

I wouldn't be surprised if this post and comments sparked an edited collection of the same name and spirit.
Marc Lombardo | 11.07.05 - 8:10 pm | #

Thinking of the Katrina article, that was actually pretty light on the rhetorical tics -- I think I'm going to edit my opinion and agree with Kenneth on this one, especially since this is a European issue.
Adam Kotsko | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 9:47 pm | #

"At least the French have less of a problem with traffic these days".

I don't think Zizek would utter it, but perhaps I might. Of course, I just did.
Tom | Homepage | 11.07.05 - 10:37 pm | #

Now wear the T-shirt:

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/ prod...weblog.36841529

(N.B. I apologise in advance for possible misuse of the name "the weblog" in naming the CafePress "store", and will happily delete it or transfer ownership on request)
Dominic Fox | Homepage | 11.08.05 - 7:52 am | #

Aw, Dominic said what I was going to say... Which is what Zizek is going to say... Lets send him a selection!
Amish Lovelock | 11.08.05 - 8:18 am | #

WWBS?
Amish Lovelock | 11.08.05 - 8:22 am | #

I think the question now is, "What DID Zizek say". If anyone can translate Spanish there's an essay here on the French riots waiting for you. I presume it will appear in English soon enough.

http://www.clarin.com/suplemento.../u- 01088024.htm
Joseph | Homepage | 11.20.05 - 7:29 pm | #

Who could have predicted the Forrest Gump reference?
Dominic Fox | Homepage | 11.21.05 - 5:02 am | #