The Pyres of Autumn2006

This feels very relevant. It is both immigrants and natives who are disaffiliated and dettached from cultural belonging. Both turn their disaffiliation into defiance and go onto the offensive. The native offense is of course late 2010s and 2020s style groyperism. Or whatever adjacent fascistic disorder. The immigrant offense is precisely the setting of the essay, the 2006 youth protests in France.

B claims the superiority of Western culture is sustained only by the desire of the rest of the world to join it, and that it is a the fantasy that raising the rest of the world to Western living standards will settle matters. It is impossible to do so, the mechanisms at play only reinforce Westernism. How can you integrate when you are in the process of disintegration?

B rejects the notion that these riots are a symptom of failed integration, or any other economic malaise: it is symbolic, the destruction of the commodity, which is the representation of modularity in consumer society is then, repudiation of the social order. How can the West stop terrorism, mass immigration, and all these issues that trouble the minds of MAGA voters, when the threats are endogenous to the system rather that exterior imposition? This is an internal contradiction that characterizes hegemony.