l'enfer, c'est les autres

If the "resistance" bona fides of Sartre's Occupation-era work has been called into question (I am often prone to paraphrase the historian Julian Jackson and argue that if you have to parse out the meaning and intent and even then it is still available only to a discreet few then I wonder what is meant by "resistance" or member thereof - in more cynical moments I fall to the postion of Merleau-Ponty and say that all resisters were killed) there remains no doubt about the cultural legacy of said work. Particularly the premier piece of insouciant, though incessant, dread - or at least the life-looping, shoulder-shrugging, make of it what you will static maze - No Exit. The "aura" of this work (to steal from Walter Benjamin) - if not simply France's 20thC Voltaire, as de Gaulle was wont to call the wobbly walleyed philosopher - and the more than faint residual draw that existentialism generally has left in the land of the champions of ennui, still marks much of the most frequently (and vociferously) lauded cultural products. Despite its relative age (being just over a decade old), I admit that I think most here of Kassovitz's 1995 "La Haine." True, the frowsy interior of a Second Empire parlor has been replaced by the more expansive (but equally entrapping) confines of the banlieue and the conversation has changed from discussions of the inappropriateness of a man presenting himself to a woman in his shirt-sleeves to any manner of dress in a space of decidedly fractured social scapes, but the general dynamic of three characters interacting in a setting besotted by a very Sartrean utterance "tu n'es rien d'autre que ta vie" (you are nothing else but your life) remains tightly to type.

Of course it's hardly a secret that the banlieues have (overtly?) re-entered the French political and social scene in the last couple of years; and given Sarkozy's use of the inflammatory "racaille" during the 2005 riots they were an important part of the presidential election this spring. Even with all this being said, I was still caught by how perfectly and peculiarly "French" the recent attempt to manage urban deliquency in the port city of Le Havre was. Anyone familiar with Luc Besson's 2006 parkour vehicle knows that the entry-ways of the modernist blocks of apartments that make up the banieues are frequent hang-out spots for local toughs with little other place to go. According to Jean-Pierre Noit, Director General of the Public Housing Authority, this has become a serious issue in the port city's housing projects. "Entry-halls should be places of conviviality," he insisted, "but the reality is that they become the focus for social tensions, and many tenants find them unbearable." To that end, a daringly existential experiment has been undertaken that once again reduces the outlines of the social experiment called life to the confines of a single space - this time not a drawing room but a "faux hall" intended to create the illusion of a foyer to an apartment building - complete with door and windows, interphone, entry code-pad, mail/letter boxes, fake elevator door, and a stairway to the roof of what is actually a former 12 meter long shipping container - some 30 meters away from an apartment block of 400 "real" apartments. The results, and discussion, of the experiment have been mixed. Nathalie Nail, of the PFC, has called it a "total failure" and another example of how the youth of France are "made fun of" rather than listened to. One of the local youths has insisted that no one ever goes to it while another, Kevin, testily called it a joke; "They're trying to pack us in like sardines in tins."

Given the awkward way in which the French are only beginning to address the role and place of immigrants in the country - beyond futbol of course - there is something about this that does stike uneasily. Though is it much different than a midnight basketball league, just with a little more ennui? Whatever else might be the case according to Noit, given Le Havre's place as a port city, it would take no more time to bring in the crane and remove the box than it did to place it in the first place - and as an experiment in social organization, "the object was to empty the halls of the buildings to make life more pleasant for the tenants, for the moment it has worked." And if there is something that might mark the experiment at least a temporary success, lending it some of its own gritty authenticity - the faux hall was recently vandalized.