Violence on the Body: A Manual for French Police Escorting Illegal Immigrants

How to expel and illegal immigrant

The last dec­ade has seen Europe exper­i­ence a very import­ant wave of xeno­pho­bia that is modi­fy­ing our insti­tu­tions in their very essence. As two cur­rent examples, Hun­gary is modi­fy­ing its con­sti­tu­tion in order to declare Chris­ti­ans “nor­mal cit­izens” and Italy and France are threat­en­ing Schen­gen space to know who will have to take care of 20 000 Tunisian emigres who just fled their country.

In this con­text, the French altern­at­ive press web­site Mediapart (here is a link to the Eng­lish ver­sion) just released a manual cre­ated for the French police con­tain­ing clandes­tine escort preo­ced­ures to the bor­der. In this manual, dozens of pages describe the pro­ced­ure of stran­gu­la­tion in order to poten­tially calm who they call “the for­eigner”. That’s in fact his only crime, believ­ing that glob­al­iz­a­tion was not just for goods, but also for people. He is cat­egor­ized as abso­lute oth­er­ness, the one we are taught to fear and to expel.

The pages of descrip­tion of the stran­gu­la­tion are inter­est­ing to look at. Their cold­ness reveals the banal­ity of viol­ence, and yet two things strike me:

The first is that the pho­tos present this viol­ence as a cho­reo­graphy that appears even more ter­ri­fy­ing as it gives to it the dis­turb­ing ambi­gu­ity between an embrace and a rape.

The second is the ana­lyt­ical present­a­tion of it that reminds me of the present­a­tion of an archi­tec­tural pro­ject. Dia­grams, elev­a­tions (it shows front side and back), per­spect­ives, texts, everything is here to describe an action on the body. This is a read­ing I do, in the spec­trum of my thesis, which is that archi­tec­ture is weapon­ized; it car­ries inher­ently a tre­mend­ous power on the body and exer­cises it by its phys­ic­al­ity. This argu­ment might appear exag­ger­ated, espe­cially in this extreme case, but I include at the end some pho­to­graphs by Edmund Clark, taken in the cur­rent extreme archi­tec­tural paradigm in this mat­ter: Guantanamo camp. In both cases, viol­ence is expressed in its banal­iz­a­tion which is the abso­lute danger of our so-​called lib­eral and demo­cratic societies.

Léo­pold Lam­bert is an archi­tect and Editor of The Fun­am­bu­list http://​www​.leo​pold​lam​bert​.com/, http://​the​fun​am​bu​list​.net/

This entry was posted on 29 April 2011 at 3:30 am and is filed under Aesthetics, Radical Politics. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.