Desjarlais, Robert & KhalilHabrih. Traces of violence: writings on the disaster in Paris, France. xxxiv, 280 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2022. £27.00 (paper)

In this serious and creative book, two scholars of contemporary France relate their efforts to find traces of the violent attacks on Paris carried out by members of the Islamic State, or ISIS, on 13 November 2015. In the space of several hours, ISIS commandos set off explosions in the Stade de France, opened fire in a number of city bars, and attacked patrons of the Bataclan music venue. Overall, 130 people were killed and many more were seriously wounded. Coming less than a year after the attack on the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the killings stoked fears of continual threats. They also left material traces, and those became the object of this book. The two authors write in alternation, each bringing his own approach. Robert Desjarlais largely eschewed interviews in favour of making observations, overhearing remarks, reading newspaper accounts, all of which he calls a ‘critical phenomenology’ of the aftermath of violence. Khalil Habrih draws on his sociological studies of poorer neighbourhoods in Paris, and describes the particular policing strategies pursued in different parts of the city. In each chapter, the authors contribute separate, signed sections. Their approaches remain distinct, but they move towards each other: Desjarlais towards greater understanding of state violence, and Habrih towards an appreciation of the effects of policing on his own body. Habrih's work is essential to understanding the successive waves of immigration to the area called la Goutte d'Or. The first wave was of French people arriving from the provinces over the course of the nineteenth century. Then came Jewish families from Eastern Europe from the 1890s to the 1920s. After 1918, they were followed by Algerians. More recently, the neighbourhood has become a gathering point for Africans of varied origins. The area has also been the object of a bewildering array of police brigades, differing in their degree of secrecy or publicity, and in the violence of their raids and crackdowns. The authors return repeatedly to the Carillon, one of the bars attacked in 2015. They find bullet holes marking the attack, and memorials left at the site, tolerated for a time by city officials. Written on a wall is the command ‘Do not archive!’, which they see as a plea not to simply pack up and put away the inscriptions that grow organically from the fears and denunciations accompanying the terror. Do not mistake these living expressions of discontent for museum pieces! Habrih describes how bodies present a shared history of subjectivation, in Algeria and then in France. Invoking Bourdieu here on bodily hexus and lived habitus, he narrates his own experience as an Arab in appearance, taking his encounters with police and his conversations with others who are also coded as North African to be starting points for his thinking about violence. Desjarlais, by contrast, narrates his own flânerie, finding objects to be ‘spectral’ and terrorists to be creating a ‘phantom territoriality’. It seems that all is spectral. His approach, turning around impressions and associations, pays off in his imaginative riff, by way of Derrida, on the archive. He also acknowledges his ambivalence regarding the archive. Yes, remove it from its context and you thereby short-circuit its capacity to testify to violent acts carried out in this particular place, and to continue to do so as contexts and frames change. But you gain the opportunity to remind more Parisians and others of that which the authors term ‘disaster’. The two approaches continue to converge in the chapter on vigilance and states of emergency. Desjarlais effectively conjures up the atmosphere generated by enactments of vigilance by small police patrols, accentuated by the way they keep their fingers on the trigger as they walk along streets and through parks. Habrih speaks with fellow Arabs to gauge these patrols’ oppressive effects on those whose bodies trigger suspicion and who are sometimes stopped and frisked by the patrols. Their joint phenomenology of violence passes by way of the experiencing of violence or its aftermath. If Habrih investigates the ways in which state violence leaves traces – on bodies, in memories, in ways of avoiding state agents – Desjarlais looks to his own perceptions of what he calls spectres or phantasms as he walks by or sits in a café shot up in 2015. The format of point and counterpoint allows each author to pursue his own methodological pathway while finding points of contact between them. Traces of violence keeps the inquest open.