The book you hold in your hands has become the principal piece of evidence in an anti-terrorism case in France directed against nine individuals who were arrested on November 11, , mostly in the village of Tarnac. What follows is the text of the book preceded by the first statement of the Invisible Committee since the arrests. Everyone agrees. There is a certain pleasure in calculating the risks. Already, we are presented with a detailed menu of preventive measures for securing the territory.
We can discern more clearly every day, beneath the reassuring drone, the noise of preparations for open war. The newspapers conscientiously draw up the list of causes for the sudden disquiet.
There is the financial crisis, of course, with its booming unemployment, its share of hopelessness and of social plans, its Kerviel and Madoff scandals. There is the failure of the educational system, its dwindling production of workers and citizens, even with the children of the middle class as its raw material. There is the existence of a youth to which no political representation corresponds, a youth good for nothing but destroying the free bicycles that society so conscientiously put at their disposal.
None of these worrisome subjects should appear insurmountable in an era whose predominant mode of government is precisely the management of crises. Unless we consider that what power is confronting is neither just another crisis, nor a series of more or less chronic problems, of more or less anticipated disturbances, but a singular peril: that a form of conflict, and positions, have emerged that are explicitly not manageable.
Those who everywhere make up this peril have to ask themselves more than the trifling questions about causes, or the probabilities of inevitable movements and confrontations. They need to ask how, for instance, does the Greek chaos resonate in the French situation? An uprising here cannot be the simple transposition of what happened over there. Global civil war still has its local specificities.
