French "Situationist" Nihilism Promoted To Poison U.S. Mass Strike

On June 15, 2009, the New York Times politely helped promote the English translation of The Coming Insurrection, written in 2007 by an anonymous French group calling themselves "The Invisible Committee," but generally considered as written by Julien Coupat, a young follower of the Italian "philosopher" Giorgio Agamben in Paris. This must be seen as an operation to insert a terroristic element into the current mass strike phenomenon in the United States, in order to create "strategy of tension" provocations, including to cover for assassinations. Some Italian media reported that the book has given birth to circles of sympathizers on U.S. campuses.

Last November, Coupat, his girlfriend, and six others were arrested when French police raided Coupat's headquarters, a farm in Tarnac, central France, and accused them of "associating with a terrorist enterprise" that sabotaged high-speed TGV rail lines on Nov. 8.

The Coupat group, which became known as the "Tarnac 9," is now presented as something of a cause célèbre among leftists and civil libertarians, and the book itself developed a small but devoted following. Dozens of anonymous translators have posted the text on websites. And Semiotexte, a Los Angeles publisher founded 35 years ago, specializing in works by French theorists like Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, published an English edition with a print run of 3,000 in August 2009. Semiotexte recently started publishing politically and culturally oriented pamphlets and a biannual magazine called Animal Shelter edited by Hedi El Kholti. The next issue includes Gary Indiana and Penny Arcade, among others, on subjects including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italian Red Brigades star Toni Negri. In the U.S., the MIT Press has been the distributor of new titles published by Semiotexte since 2000, and now of The Coming Insurrection.

Semiotexte presents the book as follows: "The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation[?] in France and Europe. Written in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as 'the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.' The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to 'spread anarchy and live communism.'

"Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the 'war on terror.'"

The presentation says that the book is "hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point." The 1977 movement was the attempt to expand the terrorist Red Brigades phenomenon into a mass armed insurrection. Its leader was Toni Negri, a professor at the Padua University, who was then arrested and sentenced. Negri acquired immunity through election to Parliament, thanks to the Radical Party, and then escaped to France, where he was protected by the Mitterrand regime.

Last July, only days after the New York Times review, Glenn Beck, on Fox News TV, displayed the book and said that extremism and violence were not promoted by him or others on the far right, but they were by the far left. However, he said: "I am not calling for a ban on this book. It's important that you read this book. ... And let me tell you something: Don't dismiss these people. Don't dismiss them."