“… we will have to pay a stiff price for the western withdrawal of identity, the fear of proximity, european-communitarianism and the opinions rented out to the newspapers and the TV screens. We’re going to experience a kind of poverty that will remind us of our worst memories, a poverty not tied to the economic crisis but much more devastating: a poverty of possibilities, which is already gnawing away the edges of politics.
What is happening in the streets affects what is happening inside us. Since our apartments became refuges where we couldn’t dare to host those who have been neglected by police memory, the mask of apparent innocence has been taken of of our private property, which has at last shown itself as an act of war. (…) Since a few years they ask us several times a day to be scared and sometimes to feel terrorized, and now they dare talk to us about security. But security was never a matter of militias. Real security has to do with the possibility to be protected when one is in need; it’s the potential friendship hidden in all human beings. And since that has been destroyed, everything is haunted by risk. Foreigners are everywhere, it’s true, but we ourselves are foreigners in the streets and subway corridors, patrolled by men in uniforms.”
(Claire Fontaine, Foreigners Everywhere, 2005)
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