The Critical Dynamics of France's "Yellow Vest" Movement
Résumé
Yellow vests" uprising is an important moment in French political life and no doubt beyond. It has been much commented on, but the actors themselves have invented gestures that bear in themselves a critical dimension: to wear a yellow vest as symbolic manifesto of the relationships of danger, of visibility and invisibility but also of singular unity; interrupt the flow, occupy spaces, manifest without administrative authorization. They also produced objects, huts of all kinds on round-about, statements on their vests, songs that circulated in the form of clips, texts that were sometimes carefully edited. Acts of Criticism are undeniable. They were almost simultaneously associated with a critical reflexivity in which the aim was to analyze the strategy to be adopted in view of claims that have gradually become more refined and complex. One of the theoretical challenge seems to me to be to give an empirical meaning to the apocalypse in the definition of Sartre and Malraux, the emergence of the fused group, as a situation where the enunciators of a hidden text decide to devolve it to make it a weapon of public aggregation.