Some remarks on the Tarnac 9

I've just finished reading The Coming Insurrection - a staggering document! And what unashamed philosophical plundering. The complexities of trying to think our socio-political situation today demands such bricolage. This work is a concrete example of what I was trying to elucidate in my previous post, that attitude of finding connections everywhere, of ingenuity, of cunning, both theoretical and practical. The author(s) put together things which don't belong together, they hypothesize, until every type of knowledge becomes a savoir-faire, becomes a tool, a weapon. They have mobilized their intelligences to "gather scattered knowledge."

Turning to the case of the Tarnac 9, I feel an opportunity, a precarious one to be sure, has been missed. I came to the story via the train sabotage accusation, and the newspaper article I read left me with the vague impression of some kind of neo-luddite sect living in the woods. I also assumed that they were guilty of whatever crime it was. Only afterwards did I come across the text and the political leanings of the group. Thus I identified the saboteurs (whom I still assumed to be guilty) with the authors of the The Coming Insurrection. Something astonishing dawned on me in that moment: a group of philosophers had decided to take direct action. This was how I understood it. This is how I still choose to understand it. Yet all the discussions I've looked at (and specifically the letter written by intellectuals - including Badiou, among others - to Le Monde) focus on the police, the judicial system, political interference, in essence the response of the authorities, while defending the idea that the group are innocent. That nothing has happened.

Of course all the criticisms of the ridiculous response by the police and the political establishment are more or less correct. And it can also be said that the errancy of state power has been fixed or measured, in Badiou's terms. But why the hesitation to go further? What is the risk of affirming at least a partial identity between the saboteurs, the Tarnac 9 and the Invisible Committee (allowing that the saboteurs got help from the germans, for example)? The only danger here would be that a group of left-wing thinkers declaring the guilt of the Tarnac 9 might lead to those nine actually being found guilty. But there are far greater things at stake - there is an undecidable, I think, which can be decided: political violence can have meaning today. And this relies on the identity claim, since it is the linking of the three groups which constitutes the meaningfulness of the sabotage. To say that the Tarnac 9 are just a group of people trying to develop an alternative lifestyle, by reading, protesting, etc, is to reduce or deny what, in this case, is truly remarkable (and remarkable in a way that the 2005 upheaval in France wasn't).