Poetic Sabotage and the Control Society

1 Parallels can be drawn between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” and the artistic practice of a number of contemporary French writers, whose works do not only represent the voicing of their political contentions, but also act as verbal objects designed to undermine the mainstream idea of what literature is and should be. In so doing, they aim to disrupt the political status quo, throwing “clogs in the machine” to bring about a form of literary sabotage1. Christophe Hanna, Nathalie Quintane, and Jean-Marie Gleize are three authors who share a number of theoretical ideas and political references and have been expressing their opposition to the system in this way. All are interested in the figure of Émile Pouget, the late 19th and early 20th centuries anarchosyndicalist whose publications, including Le sabotage, Les lois scélérates de 1893-1894 and L’action directe, are fundamental to the anarchist movement in France. Hanna entitled his first theoretical monograph about the political potential of contemporary poetry, Poésie action directe, after Pouget’s pamphlet2, and Gleize reproduced a version of L’action directe in his poetic review Nioques, a few years later3. Quintane offers a short introduction to Pouget in her 2010 book on the Tarnac affair – in 2008, a group of young anticapitalists living in the village of Tarnac were accused of terrorist activities and jailed, based for the most part on the publication of an anonymous anarchist text attributed to them4. Gleize also wrote a book on Tarnac5, an event which represents one of the more prominent and symbolic cases of the French state’s recent assaults against freedom of speech, in particular that of the radical left. While this common attraction for the ideas of the historical figure of Pouget may seem anachronistic, it is relevant to the political situation in France today. As one of Quintane’s later works attests, the general atmosphere is one of unrest and rebellion. In May 2018, fifty years after the Paris riots of 1968, she published a hefty book entitled Un oeil en moins, about the demonstrations of Spring 2016 against the “loi travail” (where a number of demonstrators lost an eye to rubber bullets), the Nuit Debout movement, the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, and the treatment of migrants in the Calais “jungle”. She refers to the 400-page publication as a “pavé”6, which can be understood in two senses of a thick book and of a cobblestone to be used as a weapon against police violence (as in May 1968).