💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › rosales-petrossiants-manchette-nada.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:42:35. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: A Model of Behavior Like A Cop or A Female Saint
Author: Jose Rosales and Andreas Petrossiants
Date: July 23, 2020
Language: en
Topics: illegalism, anarchism, insurrectionary anarchy, bonnot gang, blanqui, ultra left, urban guerilla, 1968,
Source: https://blindfieldjournal.com/2020/07/23/a-model-of-behavior-like-a-cop-or-a-female-saint-on-jean-patrick-manchettes-nada/

Jose Rosales and Andreas Petrossiants

A Model of Behavior Like A Cop or A Female Saint

[]

Before the Red Army Faction in Germany (1970–1998), the Red Brigades in

Italy (1970–1988), and Action Directe in France (1979–1987), there was

Nada. This latter group was a significantly smaller formation relative

to the three other militant, extra-parliamentary, post-68

contemporaries; more importantly, it was work of fiction that has, at

its center, neither an historical actor nor a marginal organization of

the post-war European ultra-Left, but rather, six disaffected militants

who comprise the titular group and owe their existence to the french

crime novelist, Jean-Patrick Manchette. Manchette, similarly

disaffected, if for radically different reasons, produced an important

corpus of literature over four decades that demonstrates an engaging

attempt by an ultra-left thinker to respond to the ossification of

Europe’s institutionalized left, and its capitulation to

authoritarianism. However, reminding us of someone like Nanni

Balestrini, for one example, he did this with fiction. Not theory as

culture, but rather an appeal for a change in social relations as an

anti-fascist cultural practice in itself.

“When Manchette began to write his novels in the mid-1970s, the French

polar had become a still pool of police procedurals and tales of Pigalle

lowlife. Manchette wanted to throw in rocks, disturb the calm surface,

bring up all the muck beneath—to demonstrate that the crime novel could

be (as he said again and again) ‘the great moral literature of our

time.” [1] For these reasons, Manchette was far less interested in the

novel form in-itself—though he was an avid admirer of late 19th century

French literature, Proust especially, and sought to reconcile literary

mastery with pulp forms—but rather with its potential for constituting a

genuinly “anti-fascist” platform: at one time a staple of the genre,

only to have become atrophied in the years following the golden age of

Chandler and Hammett. Avoiding any obvious and uninteresting

interpretation regarding the roman noir as the “great moral literature

of our time”— a statement that is cited as often as it is taken out of

context—Manchette sought to bridge the politics of the “neo-detective”

as others have called it, with the literary form itself. A more direct

statement of Manchette that gets to the point: “The polar for me,

was—and still is—the novel of violent social intervention.” [2] Having

been involved in the French Left in the postwar years, veering slowly

towards the “ultra-gauche” after stints at La Voie Communiste, Manchette

would arrive at a decidedly anarchist-inspired situationism, a

singularly self-styled composite political position which inevitably

came to infuse his fiction and, ultimately, his non-fiction essays on

the genre.

Beginning in the late 60s, Manchette would embark on an eleven-book

cycle, which would have little in common except anti-statist and

anti-institutional outlooks, their fascination and erudite usage of noir

tropes either genuinely or sardonically, and characters developed

quickly and with minimal interiority. In most novels, the anti-heros and

the killers who chase after them are developed not through dialogue or

interior monologue but rapid-fire descriptions: what kind of gun, what

kind of jazz, what kind of breakfast pastry. These characters exist in a

dog-eat-dog world, one wherein all fight each other relentlessly. As

Sallis writes “For Manchette the world is a giant marketplace in which

gangs of thugs—be they leftist, reactionary, terrorist, police, or

politicians—compete relentlessly.” [3] This is not to say that Manchette

leveled the same level of scorn for police as for corrupted militants.

Imbuing all the works, Manchette paints struggle to be the

characteristic of the post-war era, when even a worker’s revolt had been

forsaken by the Communists who once fought the Nazis in the Latin

Quarter.

Nada’s success lies in its having synthesized the reception of the

American crime novel in France with the prevailing critiques regarding

the ossification of the European Left after the “events of May.” And as

with every reception, the adoption of the genre inevitably implied its

modification. As Kristin Ross aptly writes, regarding the differences

between the American and French crime novel:

Of all the various kinds of literary characters, the detective is one of

the easiest to think of as little more than narrative scaffolding, a

string or device whose wanderings link the various anecdotes, local

histories, and glimpses of local color into a narrative whole. After

all, what other fictional character’s underdeveloped personality or lack

of ‘roundness’ is so regularly compensated for by an all-consuming

fetish—the love of orchids, for example, or the love of opera? […]

Philip Marlowe, it is important to remember, is a literary hero without

a background, and without any cultural or political substratum. The same

cannot be said of Victor Blainville, ex-soixante-huitard, sometime

journalist, sometime photographer, sometime investigator and Vilar’s

recurrent protagonist. [4]

Like Victor Blainville before them, the individuals who comprise the

Nada group are made up of nothing other than cultural and political

substance, a motley crew of would-be or long-ago compromised

revolutionaries: Buenaventura Diaz is an anarchist militant in his 50’s

whose anti-fascist father died defending the Barcelona Commune; André

Épaulard a former communist resistance fighter; Marcel Treuffais a young

philosophy teacher, author of the group’s manifesto, and the only member

to rescind participation from the group’s actions; Meyer, a waiter, and

D’Arcy, an alcoholic, constitute a duo that has been forgotten by

society; and Veronique Cash a militant in spirit with anti-civilization

proclivities who provides the farm in which the group uses as their

hideout. Their plan? To kidnap and ransom the U.S. ambassador to France.

Given Treiffais is said to have constructed the intellectual basis of

the group, it is telling that he is the only one to abandon the plan—yet

more indicative of Manchette’s scorn for mediatization, he would

ultimately be the one to telegraph their story to the press. As the

translator for the book described to us, this may be Manchette saying:

“this too, your position, can be recuperated.”

Far from valiant, Manchette stages the act, with his characteristic

quickness, as an adventurist ploy: something prefiguring small scale

militant extremism void of insurrectionary fervor that was

characteristic of the era after the left fragmented, and was left

looking for a spark. Manchette seems so intimate that the spark cannot

be produced, and especially not by a band so naive or corrupt as this.

This fragmentation that made the Left all the more susceptible to

cooptation by an ascendent neoliberalism; with hindsight this is clearly

what happened in Italy and France after the years of Lead and with

Mitterand, respectively. And yet, in light of all this, Manchette’s

novel was already, if only intuitively, aware of this too. To this end,

it carries a clear warning: without popular support, militancy will not

awaken the lumpenproletariat, but rather will alienate not just the

middle classes, but the worker as well. Absent this generalized

rebelliousness on the part of a general population, even the most

revolutionary of propaganda will be but one more sacrifice at the altar

of the Spectacle. Manchette’s own words here, quoted by Luc Sante in his

introduction to Nada, are succinct: “Politically, [the Nada group] are a

public hazard, a true catastrophe for the revolutionary movement. The

collapse of leftism into terrorism is the collapse of the revolution

into spectacle.” [5]

Of the wide influence that Manchette’s work had on a later generation of

French crime novelists (Dominique Manotti and Didier Daeninckx most

prominently), this last point may be the most prevalent. Though,

Manotti’s Escape (2013) seems to reply that even with popular support

the neoliberal carceral apparatus will track you down and employ every

biopolitical act in their playbook to neutralize it—she is a historian

of economics—and Daeninckx’s Murder in Memoriam (1984) adds that

historical amnesia may be enough to subdue that popular action

regarldess. Writing in Liberation on the importance and singularity of

Manchette’s work, Daeninckx remarks that Manchette “could have drafted

history theses,” but instead wrote polars “and [the latter are] a lot

more useful.”

With regards to Nada, we see the beginnings of Manchette’s recovery of

the genre, and its use for spreading the gospel of extra-parliamentary

action through cheap paperback pulp. It is a story of anarchist

illegalism and revolutionary violence, of a group of militants’

unwavering commitment to the abolition of capital at a moment when the

Left found itself divided around questions of both strategy and tactics

(most notably, for Manchette, was the French Communist Party’s [PCF]

support of France’s ongoing colonization of Algeria during the

anticolonial struggles that emerged after the Second World War), and

whose inflection points reside at the level of history. This is the

historical moment in which Nada unfolds. It is a moment defined not by

an unrealized, though wholly tenable, transformation of society via the

PCF, but by a Party that has been reduced to nothing more than “a

desperate attempt on the part of a traditional body to keep itself going

in the context of radically altered production relations.”[6] As

once-colleague Guattari with whom Manchette briefly worked with during

his stint at the Trotskyist newspaper La Voie Communiste, aptly put it:

“Under these [historical] circumstances, the French Communist Party is

peculiarly badly placed to combat the myths of the consumer society, for

it has no sort of alternative to offer. By comparison, the leftist

groupuscules undoubtedly represent an attempt to keep alive the basic

themes of an independent, working-class revolutionary policy.” [7] And

as if to anticipate, not only the novel’s conclusion but Manchette’s own

assessment of the groupuscule [8] as a political form of organization,

Guattari concludes: “Unfortunately, all we see of them is their

failure.” [9]

And yet, Nada’s is a storied history as well. For in the course of the

novel’s unfolding, one cannot help but recall previous moments of

France’s history, when various extra-parliamentary groups were formed

with the intention of sustaining, or reviving, the revolutionary fervor

that was felt during their respective cycles of struggle. Thus, it is no

coincidence that the way in which Manchette narrates the Nada group’s

kidnapping of the US diplomat bears striking similarities to the actions

of the Bonnot Gang—one of the most well known French anarchist groups

and were active between 1911–1912. Manchette even goes so far as to dub

the group’s hideout “the tragic farmhouse,” which was the “epithet used

by the newspapers in 1912 to refer to the death scene of Jules Bonnot.”

[10] And before the Bonnot Gang there was, of course, Blanqui.

While it may strike some as odd to view a group such as the Bonnot Gang

and an individual such as Blanqui as having a shared orientation toward

capital and the state, both advocated for an extra-legal form of

organization; whether in the attempt at building a clandestine vanguard

(Blanqui) or through various interventions in everyday life that

directly seize the means for reproducing the organization and its goals

(Bonnot). Moreover, and of equal importance regarding Manchette’s

relation to the history of radical politics in France, both the Bonnot

Gang and Blanqui share a similar fate in terms of their reception within

the dominant currents of Leftist politics: a reception that presents

both as exemplary figures of what becomes of an allegedly unprincipled

and excessively voluntarist form of organizing revolutionary struggle.

Once more, this type of historical reception is carried forward by

Manchette and is brought to bear on the members of the Nada group.

However, rather than any moral posturing and subsequent denunciation,

when reflecting on figures and organizations of the past—Lenin’s

celebratory dance in the snow to celebrate the Bolsheviks having been in

power for one day longer than the Communards of Paris, for

example—Manchette makes use of the novel-form in order to delineate the

fate that is most likely to befall those who give primacy to direct

actions against the State and an escalation of tactics, absent a

situation defined by an wide enthusiasm for struggle and, by

consequence, an expanded notion of what people view as acceptable and

unacceptable with respect to certain strategies and tactics. For it is

precisely in light of these debates, that we find the young, defacto

“theorist” of the group, Treuffais, accusing his older and more seasoned

comrade, Buenaventura, of engaging in Leftist terrorism: “You’re falling

under the spell of terrorism, and that’s really stupid. Terrorism is

only justified when revolutionaries have no other means of expressing

themselves and when the masses support them.” [11] By adapting the

hard-boiled caper format “to the single most newsworthy

leftist-terrorist scenario of the 1970s: the symbolic abduction,”[12]

Manchette achieved a novel fusion of pre-existing literary form with,

what was then, presently existing extra-literary content. In short, pulp

across spheres of literary production.

1

Not one to keep his readers waiting, the kidnapping of the US ambassador

to France takes place in the first third of the novel. After some minor

planning, and minimal scoping out, and some punches exchanged among

them, the Nada group descends upon a brothel frequented by the

ambassador. The kidnapping, however, is not without loose ends. Not only

does the Nada group end up exchanging fire with the Parisian police upon

exiting the brothel but, much to his horror, D’Arcy ends up killing one

of the officers. (“‘I killed him,’ D’Arcy repeated calmly. ‘I want to

drink myself to oblivion’”[13]). As it turns out, the entire kidnapping

was filmed from the apartment building directly across the street as

part of a surveillance operation that sought to create dossiers on

“important clients” who frequented the brothel. Further complicating

matters is the fact that the group’s action was filmed by a member of

the Renseignements Généraux or RG (which refers to the Direction

Centrale des Renseignements Généraux or DCRG): the intelligence branch

of the French Police that answered directly to the Minister of the

Interior and, in 2008, would eventually be folded into the Direction de

la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which now oversees and operates as

a domestic surveillance agency.[14] And despite the RG’s shared role

with the police as incarnations of the repressive arm of the State, the

RG are unwilling to simply hand over the footage to the Paris police,

since every exchange has its price. Again, Manchette is at his best when

he shows that everyone is at war with everyone else—class collaborators

pitted against each other. Thus, the State will enter into negotiations

with itself.

In exchange for the footage, the “Grabeliau faction” of the RG “demand

the removal of the sanctions, the rehiring of fired officials, and…those

expelled from the SAC [Service d’Action Civique].”[15] That is, in

exchange for the video recording the Minister must re-employ and

ultimately pardon the Service d’Action Civique (SAC)—that historical

militia who unconditionally supported de Gaulle’s push for continuous

occupation and colonization of North Africa and that engaged in

paramilitary tactics, such as kidnapping and torturing students and

demonstrators during May ‘68 while establishing far-right youth

organizations to counter left wing youth groups; and who, in 1981,

carried out the massacre of a police inspector and his family under

suspicion of corruption and for maintaining strong ties with the Left.

With these scenes of intra-bureaucratic dissensus, Manchette

demonstrates the extent to which the State is always-already primed for

absolving itself of the violence it inevitably wishes to employ. What is

more, it is via this process that the figure of the “left-wing

terrorist” emerges and serves as the new grounds for the self-absolution

of the State. But what is Statist self-absolution if nothing other than

psychic disavowal raised to the level of the juridical? A disavowal,

which announces that “it is because I am no longer responsible for past

violence that I am justified, and therefore free, to engage in the

violence of the present?” And just like that, “a thousand leftists [are]

questioned in Paris.”[16]

Back with our protagonists, their next move is a “wait and see” style

retreat to Veronique Cash’s farmhouse just outside of the city after

distributing their manifesto to various media outlets throughout the

Paris metro area. From the safety of the countryside, the group gets

wind that the media has began reporting on the manifesto: Le Monde,

France-Soir, Libération, to the newspapers of the French Communist

Party, The Communist League, and the Parti Socialiste Unifié (Unified

Socialist Party, PSU), as well as a communiqué from the New Red Army,

all weigh in on the group’s kidnapping. With each new editorial, review,

and communiqué, however, a consensus takes shape denouncing the group’s

actions: the Communist Party “condemns what it calls provocation,” the

Parti Socialiste Unifié accuses of the Nada group of putting the

revolutionary front at risk, France-Soir’s editorial accuses the

“terrorists of the Nada group” for “aping the Tupamaros [17] in

demanding the publication of their manifesto,” while Libération

publishes the New Red Army’s communiqué dismissing the Nada group as

“petty-bourgeois nihilists…who are objectively complicit with the power

structure.”[18] Complicit though they may be, it is not the same

complicity maintained by propaganda outlets of the reformist and

bourgeois parties (Le Monde, France-Soir, Libération) and left-wing

orientalists fetishistically wanting their own ‘Cultural Revolution’

(New Red Army).

Meanwhile, from the privacy of his Paris apartment, our young philosophy

teacher and author of Nada’s manifesto, reads the following analysis

from Le Monde:

The style is disgusting…and the childishness of certain statements of an

archaic and unalloyed anarchist might raise a smile in other

circumstances. In the present situation, however, they inspire disquiet,

a deep anxiety in the face of the nihilism embraced, seemingly with

delight, by this Nada group, which chose such an apt name for itself but

which, in its texts as in its actions, express itself in an utterly

unjustifiable way. [19]

Thus, Treuffais, without having aided in the kidnapping, still finds

himself being held to account. From the vantage point of Le Monde and

its editors, not only was the kidnapping a counterrevolutionary measure,

the idea and its subsequent justification via the manifesto format, was

already an embrace of the nihilism at the heart of the group’s

“unalloyed anarchism.” Scenes such as these lead readers to feel that

the group and their plans are the mere playthings of a fate they have

yet to grasp; an intuition that is confirmed soon after the critiques of

the groups activities went to print. Not only does the Minister of the

Interior agree to pardon Grabeliau and his followers from the Service

d’Action Civique (thereby allowing for the French police to track down

the group to Cash’s farmhouse by means of the newly released video

footage), the group, caught off guard, find themselves surrounded by

police on all sides. The police, for their part, waste no time and lay

siege to their farmhouse and all but one of the group (Buenaventura)

makes it out alive, having found himself on a supply run.

As for the Spanish anarchist, it would take the utter failure of the

kidnapping, the murder of fellow comrades, and a protracted evasion of

the law while attempting to make it back to Paris, for him to eventually

realize the truth of Treuffais’ reservations; that the condemnation of

terrorism “is not a condemnation of insurrection but a call to

insurrection,” with the necessity of wide support. [20] Or as he puts it

in a recording made to be broadcast over radio and TV alike:

‘I made a mistake…Leftist terrorism and State terrorism, even if their

motivations cannot be compared, are the two jaws of […] the same mug’s

game,’ he concluded, and went on right away: ‘The regime defends itself,

naturally, against terrorism. But the system does not defend itself

against it. It encourages it and publicizes it. The desperado is a

commodity, an exchange value, a model of behavior like a cop or a female

saint. The State’s dream is a horrific, triumphant finale to an

absolutely general civil war to the death between cohorts of cops and

mercenaries on the one hand and nihilist armed groups on the other. This

vision is the trap laid for rebels, and I fell into it. And I won’t be

the last. And that pisses me off in the worst way.’ [21]

It is here, perhaps more than anywhere else in the novel, that we find

Manchette at his most Situationist. The trap laid for all would be

rebels, we are told, resides in the illusion that national, or even

international, media attention can be immediately and directly used for

the purposes of social transformation in the absence of the popular

support that is realized during periods of struggles. As Buenaventura

points out, while political parties may defend against the variants of

ultra-Left praxis, it remains the case that the market and its media

outlets seemingly encourage and happily publicize it. And if so, it is

precisely because the circulation of the image of the revolutionary is

nothing more than another commodity readied for mass consumption. That

is, the ‘left-wing terrorist’ is never simply “a collection of images;

it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” [22]

Nada, however, does not end with this critique of the figure of the

urban guerrilla but with Treuffais, dialing the number of an

international press agency, saying, “Listen, man, and take careful

notes…I am going to tell you the short but complete history of the Nada

group.” [23] We do not know if he includes Buenaventura’s recordings in

this “short but complete” history of the group. And in some sense,

neither of these are of great importance. What is of import in this

final scene is the manner in which it acts as a critical rejoinder to

Buenaventura’s discovery of the commodity that lies at the heart of the

desperado. The fact that the urban guerrilla’s commodification and

circulation as that spectacular image, which would shape the

relationship between the Nada group, the broader Left, and the masses

(and would eventually come to shape the Left’s relationship to itself

and the broader public in the decades following 1968) does not culminate

in Treuffais’ resignation but in his reassertion of the revolutionary

principles around which the group came together within the realm of the

media. Nada ends by acknowledging that it’s finally become clear that

the media is but one more site of contestation in the long game of

revolution, and counter-revolution.

Manchette, however, is not interested in a programmatism of literature.

If it was the case that in the classic mystery novel (which Manchette

nominated as the “great moral literature” of the 1920s–1940s) “crime

disturbs the order of the law, which it is crucial must be restored by

the discovery of the guilty party and his elimination from the social

field,” in the world of the roman noir, “the order of the law is not

good; it is transitory and in contradiction with itself.” [24] Unlike

works of moral literature that presuppose an essentially just world, the

roman noir adheres to Benjamin’s dictum that every document of history

is a document of barbarism. Thus, the roman noir can no longer be seen

as the complimentary opposite of the mystery novel, such that the

preservation of justice can be had by correcting unjust laws. The law

that grounds the roman noir is identical to the law(s) that determines

the world as a concatenation of freely competing interests between

various social groups, without recourse to social or historical

restitution: for every social group, an Angel of History.

2

Manchette would retain a life-long commitment to what one could call a

“methodological indistinction between the literary and the political,” a

penchant for viewing literary crimes as political crimes, and vice

versa. And so much so that as late as his 1994 essay, “The Roman Noir

and Class Struggle,” we read Manchette continuing to criticize the laws

of that govern capitalist reality (which are viewed as the same laws

that govern the roman noir):

Against such repression anarchists sometimes toss bombs, and the agents

provocateurs toss others, which only worsens the situation and worses

the pursuit of “criminal syndicalism.” Other militants, doubtless the

best of them, attempt to unify the laboring class in the Industrial

Workers of the World (IWW). The IWW, very much of a minority, but active

throughout the country, has as its slogan One Big Union, and unites

workers without distinction as to craft (or ethnicity), leads several

large-scale victorious strikes before and during World War I, and

suffers many defeats as well. Its program is anarcho-syndicalist and the

organization thus refuses any participation in the electoral political

game. After the war it is progressively crushed, principally by judicial

means […] Its defeat left in tact a tradition of direct action that

still flourishes today, where dynamite and rifles periodically resurface

in mining and other conflicts. But this defeat showed how impossible it

was for the proletarian strata to unify. Which leads us back to the

roman noir… [25]

Given that Manchette was not only familiar with roman noir authors in

the American tradition — he was a “passionate admirer of Dashiell Hammet

and the bare-bones approach of the American hard-boiled school” [26] —

but understood that the genre itself emerged during the rise and fall of

class struggle across the United States, it would be post-war France in

general, and post-68 France in particular, that came to serve as the

French analogue to the American tradition of crime fiction.

Thus, just as the roman noir is born amidst the robust tradition of

anarchist practice despite the waning of organized labor, Nada takes

place at a moment when the insurrectionary fervor of 1968 is in decline

and a critical skepticism towards the revolutionary possibilities

harbored within the traditional institutions of the Left (the union, the

PCF and the party-form in general, etc.) is reaching its peak. In this

sense, the Nada group is founded upon the anarcho-syndicalist

tradition’s rejection of electoral politics, believing that, if the

Party-form is ineluctably corrupted by its participation in the affairs

of the State, then the only way forward is through direct and militant

intervention into the matters of everyday life; a disjunct between

political organization and an inherited tradition of tactics that proved

to be for both questions concerning the revolution and those concerning

literature. What is more, it was this disjunct between specific literary

and political forms and the set of inherited practices out of which it

emerges, that allowed an adaptation of the roman noir to function as a

critique of the genre, as well.

Among the various limitations of the genre, the clearest, if not most

urgent, for Manchette, was the roman noir’s apparent allergy to all of

those acts of barbarism committed by self-described leftists, no matter

what shade of red and/or black:

…the roman noir was still in its golden age during the great criminal

period of the Comintern (end of the ‘30’s beginning of the ‘40’s).

Without counting the Russian purges, nor the liquidations carried out

during the tumult of the wars (Spanish Civil War and the World War), the

classic roman noir literally had before its eyes a multitude of

kidnappings and assassinations we dare say every bit as novelistic as

the acts of the Nazis. And it doesn’t bother with them. While its virtue

lies in its criticizing the criminal organization of the world it

forgets to criticize the principle politico-criminal form of this

organization: the incongruous alliance of the democratic left with the

GPU in order to constitute the camp of the “Good” in a world officially

organized in two camps. [27]

The problem that plagued the roman noir’s relationship to authoritarian

violence, says Manchette, involves a chain of reasoning that holds the

implicit belief that revolutionary forces and an institution such as the

GPU (Soviet Intelligence Service and Secret Police) not only share a set

of temporary interests but share the same horizon that would guide their

material praxis. Thus, when Manchette criticizes this idea of “a world

divided into two camps” and whose problematic structure is supposedly

resolved by the formation of the “forces of the ‘Good’” against those of

capital’s functionaries, he is asserting nothing other than the

incommensurability between literary genre and political organization;

that is, between the roman noir and stalinism. For it is in his 1946

Moscow address that Stalin reconstructs the events leading up to and

immediately after the second world war in such a way that not only is

war the inevitable product of capital, but so too are its results (“as a

result of this [war], the capitalist world is split into two hostile

camps, and war breaks out between them” [28]).

Thus, the roman noir’s reluctance to include within itself the various

moments of counterrevolution enacted by self-described communists

forecloses the possibility of breaking with the false dichotomy between

the capitalism of the West and the state-capitalism of the Soviet Union;

of reaffirming the anti-fascist principles of the genre as a whole

without restricting itself to questions of party allegiance. Such would

be Manchette’s own assessment regarding the crime novel after 1968:

“Most of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have either been

taken over or have run out of steam. The crime novel has followed suit.

It is now no more than a minor cultural commodity perfectly integrated

into the order of things and governed by authors who share none of my

concerns.” [29] It is, therefore, all the more fitting that Manchette

open’s Nada, not with the voice of any one of the groups members, but

with a police officer’s hand written letter, expressing his sense of

vindication in light of the murders of all but two of the Nada group:

Turning the other cheek is all very well, but what do you do, I ask you,

when you are dealing with people who want to destroy everything? Father

Castagnac pretty much agrees with me…His opinion is that if policemen

are not ready for anything, like I am, there would be no reason for

certain individuals not to do anything they want…Seriously, my sweet

Mom, would you want a country with no police? [30]

And just to guarantee that the poor, old, mother of this nameless pig

understands the struggles that come with his position within the State

apparatus, he concludes: “Would you want our property, which we worked

so hard for, overrun by levelers and collectivists in an orgy of

destruction?…Anyway, yesterday, all I did was do my job.” [31]

Given everything we’ve seen — the groups error regarding their level of

militancy in relation to popular support, the narrative arc of Nada’s

coming into being only to pass into a relative nothingness, and all of

the criticism levelled by various groups across the red-black spectrum

at the group’s overall mode of presentation — we are still inclined to

reply in the affirmative. We want nothing more than the abolition of the

police, though not simply within a single nation-state, but in every

nation-state, such that eliminating one aspect of the repressive arm of

the State primes us to abolish the State as well. What is more, the

horror expressed towards the idea of doing away with private property is

nothing but the illusory threat proper to the most uninteresting of

bourgeois imaginaries, for it cannot even bind itself to the material

conditions of the present, where private property has already been

abolished “for nine-tenths of the population,” and whose existence is

due solely “to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.”

[32] So all the worse for the cops… who are right in sensing our

collective desire for their abolition.

3

Today’s pig is tomorrow’s bacon. [33]

Today, as the question of abolition is in urgent need of being

reconciled with the question of tactics, Macnhette’s diagnosis and

critique of the organized left may serve as a crucial reminder for

prioritizing the cultivation of popular support and extra-legal

formations for the goals of decolonization, revolution, and

emancipation. If in the late 60s, Manchette’s scorn was reserved for the

capitulation of historically anti-capitalist parties and structures to

the totalitarianism that it had once opposed and to global, capitalist,

colonial war that it had once stood in opposition to, the organized

(decidedly less so) contingents of what remains of the left today can be

similarly criticized. Today, however, a more trenchant and necessary

diagnosis would read the development of non-profit structures and other

complicit forms of institutionalizing struggle that have served to reify

capitalism’s structures of austerity and philanthropy/charity even as

they often aim to genuinely help those cast aside by late capital’s

forms of value production and alienation.

Returning to Manchette today is not to encourage nostalgia for formerly

powerful state communist parties nor to lionize the ultra-left of the

post-68 years, but rather for two main reasons: to look to his forms of

self-critique as instructive, and secondly to acknowledge that

literature, even the bourgeois novel form can be detourned for the

purposes of liberation. If collective emancipation and widespread

abolition is to occur, we must not only reserve critique for right wing

hegemons, but also for the “allies” in elected posts that do more to

enshrine capitalist production than undo it. The Green New Deal, for one

example, may in fact be one terrain of struggle where popular formations

and Indigenous communities can bargain for further recognition, where

the goal of full employment can be problematized and made moot (as some,

like Alyssa Batistoni have argued), but for that to be the case, we must

be mindful to actualize these forms of self-critique.

Almost 50 years since its publication, Nada continues to remind us of

the questions we are continuously obliged to answer. What is to be done

once the insurrection has come and gone? How to go on making revolution

under the reign of a fragmentation so generalized that it has become

indistinguishable from everyday life? Absent the lived promise that one

experiences when politics spills out into the streets; failed by the

weapons and institutions inherited from the history of the workers

movement and Party’s that remain communist only in name; it is no

surprise that the end of the 60’s saw the emergence of localized

groupuscules tempted into taking desperate actions. And yet, as

Manchette is careful to demonstrate, what is desperate about the Nada

group is not their affirmation of revolutionary violence, since any

effective action taken against capital and its nation-states would

necessarily do violence to the existing state of affairs (condemning

terrorism “is not a condemnation of insurrection but a call to

insurrection” [34]). On the contrary, desperate was their attempted

substitution of mediatized attacks against Spectacular society in place

of actually existing popular support. That is to say, it is only when

there exists a real and solidaritous relation between

extra-parliamentary struggle and mass politics that localized actions

can become a modality through which collective struggles are realized.

Of what use is kidnapping the U.S. Ambassador to France when the Left is

in a moment of retreat, and is therefore capable of little else? Hence,

the figure of the desperado. Stripped of all social utility, militant

praxis becomes nothing more than “an exchange value, a model of behavior

like a cop or a female saint.”

[1] James Sallis, introduction to Jean Patrick-Manchette, The Mad and

the Bad, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1972; New York: New York Review

Books, 2014); available online as: James Sallis, “Manchette: Into the

Muck,” The New York Review of Books,

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/06/18/manchette-into-muck/. Accessed

on 7/6/2020.

[2] Jean Patrick-Manchette, quoted in Annissa Belhadjin, “From Politics

to the Roman Noir,” South Central Review 27, no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer,

2010), 62.

[3] Sallis, introduction to The Mad and the Bad.

[4] Kristin Ross, “Parisian Noirs,” New Literary History 41, no. 1

(Winter, 2010), 96–9.

[5] Jean-Patrick Manchette, quoted in Luc Sante, introduction to

Jean-Patrick Manchette, Nada (New York: New York Review Books, 2019).

[6] Félix Guattari, ‘Causality, Subjectivity and History,’

Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews, 1955-1971, tr.

Ames Hodges (Semiotext(e): Los Angeles, 2015), 235–280, 265.

[7] Ibid, emphasis ours.

[8] Derived from the French word for group (groupe-) and combined with

the suffix –cule, meaning small or minor, groupuscule refers to an

informal and decentralized form of political organization. While the

term can be used to classify either right-wing or left-wing political

organizations, during the 60’s it was typically used by French leftists

to refer to extra-parliamentary groups (e.g. Gauche prolétarienne) that

sought to rehabilitate class struggle in the face of the PCF’s strategy

of establishing the collaboration, as opposed to the antagonism, between

classes.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Luc Sante, Introduction, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Nada,trans. Donald

Nicholson-Smith (NYRB: New York, 2019),vii–xii, xi.

[11] Manchette, Nada, 92, emphasis ours.

[12] Sante, “Introduction,” Nada, viii.

[13] Manchette, Nada, 67.

[14] A Note On Historical Uncanniness: The year that the Renseignements

Généraux (RG), who filmed the abduction, was integrated into the

Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), was the same year that

gendarmes (one of France’s national police forces) would descend on the

small village of Tarnac in order to arrest the group that has now come

to be known simply as the “Tarnac 9.” In response to their arrest, it

would be the then Minister of the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie, who

labeled the group as an “anarcho-autonomist cell.”

[15] Ibid, 76. The “Grabeliau faction” in question takes its name from

its then purged national secretary, Joseph Grabeliau, who, Manchette

explains, “set up his own networks within various security and police

organizations, networks that he financed in several ways.” Ibid, 88.

[16] Ibid, 82.

[17] The ‘Tupamaros’ refers to the Tupamaros National Liberation

Movement (Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-Tupamaros, MLN-T); an

Uruguayan left-wing urban guerrilla group active from 1967 till 1972.

One of its most notable former members, José Mujica, would later go on

to serve as the President of Uruguay (2010-2015).

[18] Ibid, 83.

[19] Ibid, 90.

[20] Ibid, 161.

[21] Ibid, 160, emphasis mine.

[22] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith

(Zone: New York, 1995), p. 12.

[23] Ibid, 179.

[24] Jean-Patrick Manchette, ‘Five Remarks on How I Earn My Living,’

(1976) https://www.marxists.org/archive/manchette/1976/earn-living.htm.

Accessed on 4/20/2020.

[25] Jean-Patrick Manchette, ‘The Roman Noir and Class Struggle’ (1994),

https://www.marxists.org/archive/manchette/1994/roman-noir.htm. Accessed

on 6/21/2020. Emphasis ours.

[26] Doug Headline, Introduction, Ivory Pearl, trans. Donald

Nicholson-Smith (NYRB: New York, 2018), viii.

[27] Jean-Patrick Manchette, “The Roman Noir and Terrorism” (1982),

https://www.marxists.org/archive/manchette/1982/terrorism.htm. Accessed

on 6/21/2020. Emphasis mine.

[28] Joseph Stalin, Speech Delivered by J. V. Stalin At A Meeting of

Voters of the Stalin Electoral District, Moscow, February 9, 1946, 22.

[29] Ivory Pearl, viii.

[30] Nada, 5-6, emphasis mine.

[31] Ibid, emphasis mine.

[32] Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

(1848),

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf.

Accessed on 6/18/2020.

[33] Jean-Patrick Manchette, Nada, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (NYRB:

New York, 2019), 169.

[34] Nada, 161.