Lecturing at the Collège de France thirty years ago on the nature of the
state, Pierre Bourdieu queried Weber’s notion that functioning states
enjoy a monopoly of ‘legitimate physical violence’. Bourdieu already
preferred the expression ‘legitimate and symbolic physical violence’,
and in the lectures he commented: ‘One could even call it the “monopoly
of legitimate symbolic violence”.’
In the last few years, the French police have overstepped the mark. The
use of unreasonable force is nothing new. More worrying is the
coincidence, on more than one occasion, of physical violence with
sinister signals that make a mockery of the idea that the police are a
‘legitimate’ expression of symbolic violence on the part of the state.
If they are, then France is in trouble. Take the case of Théo Luhaka, a
22-year-old youth worker arrested in Seine-Saint-Denis in 2017 during an
altercation between a group of young men and police. After he was
detained, Luhaka was assaulted with an expandable truncheon, leaving him
with severe lesions of the anal sphincter and (it’s assumed) lifelong
incontinence. A dark thought in a policeman’s head, or an abusive remark
on the tip of his tongue, erupted in the real world. The violence of the
racial symbolism – using a crowd-control weapon to rape a black man of
Congolese origin, believed perhaps to be getting above his station (his
uncle is a cabinet minister in DRC) – compounded the awfulness of the deed.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/december/unreasonable-force
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#4086): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/4086
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78659940/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
