Disorder
Page 2
There was a wave. One might say a proliferation. “Stop the bullshit” was used repeatedly, everywhere. The Budget Minister died at the hand of a taxpayer in Marseille, the Minister of Agriculture was knocked out by a women who raised goats in Toulouse, a deputy of the Minister of National Education was stabbed by a math professor during a visit to a high school in Lyon, and each time, the sentence.
Was the “movement” headed toward what might be called a politicization? A fundamental debate was begun, although not always in an explicit way, that took up differently what had already been sparked by the claim that what was happening was in no way political. There were discussions, it was, so to speak, inevitable and brought about by the situation, about the nature of the political, was the sentence “Stop the bullshit” really a political sentence, at what point can a sentence be said to be political, etc? The question was asked, how much can any ordinary individual—the criminals were all just ordinary individuals—be driven by an idea, a concept, a representation, and then to what, to crime, is it really possible, it was possible since all this had taken place, but there had to be some other explanation, didn’t there?
These discussions, these debates, in no way stopped the crimes from continuing, from gathering momentum, they were the main event all summer long. In the course of one week, once in July and once in August, big heat waves, and—it was quickly explained that this was a total coincidence—numerous killings of directors of psychiatric institutions in all corners of the country. Immediately the “dangerous schizophrenic” theory surfaced, or rather it resurfaced, it was always there in reserve and used recurringly by the media after having been coined so as to promote law and order by a former President of the Republic. But it was quickly seen to be ineffective, the killers weren’t sick, residents of hospitals or clinics or asylums, no, not a single one, they were in each case psychiatric doctors or psychologists, some older and near retirement, others just recently finished with their university training. The most emblematic case, so to speak, was of an experienced psychiatrist, loved by his patients and committed supporter of institutional psychotherapy, who during the ritual walk in the hospital’s garden shattered the skull of his department head with the branch of a tree shouting “Lobotomy, lobotomy.”
There was a sort of forerunner of these crimes with psychiatric dimensions, the suicide of a police commissioner in the city of Rennes. He was a decent commissioner, mustache, talkative, everyone liked him. He put a bullet in his head. On his desk, along with the inevitable volume of Paul Claudel, there was a letter, very long and a bit wandering, in which he explained that he couldn’t stand to look at himself in the mirror any more, seeing there each time a police commissioner, his head full of horrible things, and it wasn’t really him. Of course there was talk of a split personality.
This suicide immediately inspired several doctoral theses at the universities at Rennes and in other places, “Division of the subject and maintaining order,” “Everyone hates the police, the lasting effects of a slogan,” “Virility and Femininity: Police Gender and Policing Gender,” and abroad, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, it became a point of reference. The police commissioner’s suicide inspired a renewal of criminology studies which had long been stalled in sterile oppositions between hereditary factors and environmental causes, and a law professor at the University in Aix-en-Provence who had recently lamented the lack of interest generated by these studies rejoiced at length at this, although a bit indecently for some, in an interview given to an important national paper in which he concluded cheerfully: “Every cloud has a silver lining.”
A reputed astronomer who worked at the Paris Observatory. Stars, galaxies. The speed of light. The nearby planets, the far off stars. Distances, the expanding universe. He reported petty ongoing arguments, and he was only given administrative duties, he had no more time for research. He had swung a chair over his own head before bringing it down on the director’s, and had simply said, this was seen as very poor taste, “And yet it moves.”
There were sometimes errors. In the Bordeaux region a farmer knocked down an employee of the Ministry of Culture, it was of course the Ministry of Agriculture that had been the target. Realizing his mistake he just shrugged his shoulders. A journalist (regional newspaper) enjoyed coming up with “Culture, Agriculture, One Struggle, One Fight,” he was fired the same day.
A specialized worker—the term actually designates the absence of any specialty—seated for thirty years at the same place on an assembly line in an automobile factory. Model factory, a lightweight construction right in the middle of the countryside, excellent factory dining hall, significant year-end bonuses, carpooling and buses. Contracts underway with several Asian and Latin American countries. During a visit of high-ranking Chinese officials, the worker left her place, picked up a wrench lying on the ground next to her, and used it on a young man in a three-piece suit that she had never seen and whom she took to be the CEO. In fact it was the interpreter, but she didn’t apologize and expressed no regret.
Disorder, disorder, disorder.
The country couldn’t go on this way.
In the end the guillotine was reinstated.
After it was reinstated, the first crime was the act of the President of the Republic who in a fit of omnipotence and prey to an “irresistible impulse” strangled his bodyguard.
Immunity was revoked.
The 21st of January was chosen as the date for the execution.
After the execution, order was immediately restored.
In fact the guillotine was abolished.
Afterword
by Jennifer Pap
Disorder imagines violence in surprising places and in surprisingly funny forms. A long succession of workers simply turn the tools of their trade against the people who hold power over their (work) lives. These violent acts are met, on the public scene, with quite frenzied attempts at explanation. This story’s ironies, exaggerations, and humor free us up to get a better look at our reality and the language that is often mobilized to manipulate, hide, or distort it. Kaplan is in favor of giving a push to our accepted notions to tip them over and start fresh. She has written of her affection for other examples of the world turned upside-down: Galileo asserting, despite Church condemnation, that the earth moves around the sun (“and yet it moves”), Charlie Chaplin’s plane flying upside down in a scene from The Great Dictator, Jarry, Buñuel, Beckett...1 In this book too, assumptions wobble.
As important as the events in Disorder are the words and expressions that keep surfacing to explain away the ... killings. Rationalizations that avoid the obvious reasons for the crimes keep coming: the press calls them “19th century crimes”—denying their logic in the present. “Class” is a cumbersome word and won’t serve as an explanation. Really these killings are not “political” but just a case of negativity (mauvais esprit). Those who have achieved something know that, in order to do better, “you just have to...” (il n’y a qu’à...). Kaplan is attentive to such clichés, and to other language that closes off possibilities of real understanding. She introduces a powerful sentence of resistance in the course of this story, when first a machinist, then other workers who kill their bosses say “Stop the bullshit” (Ça suffit la connerie). Troublingly honest, it strikes the narrator and public opinion so much that it is referred to as “the sentence.” Has the bullshit stopped at the end of this parodic text? Can we stop it?
Disorder was (indirectly) inspired by the yellow vests (gilets jaunes), whose demonstrations and blockades sprang up in protest of President Emmanuel Macron’s policies in November 2018. Police response at protests was violent and overly weaponized (tear gas, grenades, rubber bullets). Many demonstrators suffered head injuries and even the loss of an eye—but Macron stated that this was not “police repression.”2 Kaplan felt an urgency to write Disorder in the face of this kind of language that hides the political content of reality.
Pour moi, ce qui a été le moteur de l’écriture, c’était le sentiment que l’on parlait partout de violence, et que la première des violences, à savoir, la violence policière, on en parlait beaucoup moins. La question que je me suis posée était : « d’où vient cette violence ? ».3
For me, the catalyst for writing was the feeling that violence was spoken of everywhere, and that the foremost violence, namely police violence, was spoken of much less. The question I asked myself was “where does this violence come from”?
One character who briefly appears in Disorder may have asked himself the same question: an affable police commissioner kills himself, having been horrified by what he sees in the mirror. But his suicide is dismissed by some as mental illness (split personality), then picked up eagerly as a subject of academic study that seems to be going nowhere. There is no social recognition that he may have seen something real and important in the mirror. At the time of publication of this translation, this passage has a special urgency, as the murder of George Floyd has spurred protests and demands for awareness and curbing of police violence in the US and many other countries around the world.
Disorder does not replay or allude to the actions of the yellow vests, nor mention the violent police response to them. The setting certainly appears contemporary, but the play of dates gives the story a wider relevance to many situations past, present, and no doubt future. “That spring” is the open-ended marker of the first sentence. To be sure, in the next sentence, the idea that you just have to “cross the street” to get a job refers to words spoken by current French President Macron.4 Another scandal of his presidency winks at us at the end of the book when the (hilariously unlikely) killing of a bodyguard is mentioned: some will recognize an (upside-down) reference to the “Benalla Affair,” when Macron’s bodyguard, wearing a police helmet and armband, thus illegally impersonating a police officer, attacked a demonstrator in the 2018 May Day celebrations in Paris. Disorder also takes aim at President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2008 program to impose security measures in psychiatric hospitals when it mentions a “dangerous schizophrenic” theory that is dredged up to explain the series of crimes.5 The reduction of services in France (post offices and train stations are mentioned in Disorder) is a problem that predates Macron as well. Finally, there is a leap backward when January 21 is mentioned as a very important date in the last pages: this is the date of the death by guillotine of Louis XVI. So we are even invited to consider the French Revolution along with our contemporary moment. How do they relate?
One of the pleasures of translating this book was in getting so close to the voice of the narrator. I imagine him (or her) in a hurry and a little flushed, because he packs so many thoughts into one sentence, only pausing the space of a comma before adding a detail or moving between contradictory views. French probably accommodates such prolific commas, and long sentences in general, better than English does, and at first I wondered if I should take the strain off the English translation by using semicolons, for instance, to add some calming points of reference. I quickly decided against this, because the rapidly paced accumulation of clichés, contradictions, and ironies are crucial to Disorder. It’s a sampling of public discourse foundering in explanation and denial.
The narrator doesn’t really take sides as he reports this public discourse. He pauses to remark on those disappearing post offices and train stations, something a leftist would notice, but he also reports, without much comment, the thoughts of those who think that words like “domination, subordination” have become “outdated and cumbersome.” He doesn’t feel the need to repress things, just says it all, as Kaplan said in discussion with me. Within the space of one period and quite a few commas, there are the facts (the acts!), the theories about the acts, the failure or the popularity of such analyses, the entangled rationalizations, and the tangible objects of a number of different workplaces: a jackhammer, an apron, a truck, cosmetics, the omelet still in the pan. This narrator gives us all of that, as well as a deadpan humor: he reports killings in the style of a promotional brochure for typical regional products of France (“A manager of a dairy in the Auvergne was drowned in milk, another in cream in Brittany”) and slips in “What was to be done” as the business leaders’ worried question, as if Lenin had never produced a similar phrase. Perhaps he appears at his most agitated in this nine-comma, two-dash sentence, as he reports a series of questions that might begin to admit to the political reality of class, only to deny it again:
The question was asked, how much can any ordinary individual—the criminals were all just ordinary individuals—be driven by an idea, a concept, a representation, and then to what, to crime, is it really possible, it was possible since all this had taken place, but there had to be some other explanation, didn’t there?
Disorder invites us to stop ... and keep the questions open.
Endnotes
1Leslie Kaplan, “Renversement” in Louise, elle est folle (Paris: P.0.L., 2011).
2See Pauline Bock, “Emmanuel Macron’s Year of Cracking Heads,” Foreign Policy, Nov. 29, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/29/emmanuel-macrons-france-yellow-jackets-police-europe-year-of
-cracking-heads/.
3Leslie Kaplan, “Nous sommes des êtres parlants, ce qui fait de nous des êtres politiques.” Interview with Marie Richeux, Par les temps qui courent, May 14, 2019, www.franceculture.fr/emissions/par-les-temps-qui-courent/leslie-kaplan. [Translations in this Afterword are mine.]
4In September 2018, Macron told an unemployed man that he could “cross the street and find him a job.” It’s worth watching the video of this encounter. See http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/le-scan
/2018/09/16/25001-20180916ARTFIG00043-macron-a-un-jeune
-chomeur-je-traverse-la-rue-je-vous-trouve-du-travail.php.
5See Kaplan’s “La folie concerne tout le monde,” written in support of professionals in the psychotherapy fields who formed “39 contre la nuit sécuritaire” to protest Sarkozy’s actions: http://lesliekaplan.net/folie-langage-et-societe/article/la-folie-concerne-tout-le-monde.
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Copyright
Disorder: A Political Fable
© Leslie Kaplan, 2020
Translation and afterword © Jennifer Pap, 2020
This edition © 2020 AK Press (Chico, Edinburgh)
ISBN: 978-1-84935-393-9
E-ISBN: 978-1-84935-394-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933424
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Cover design and illustrations by T.L. Simons ~ tlsimons.com
Printed in the USA on acid-free, recycled paper
Originally published as Désordre by P.O.L. Editeur (Paris) in 2019