CONFLICTS OF GESTURES, CONFLICTS OF IMAGES

The article presents some notes for an anthropology of the gestures of uprising [soulèvement]. It argues that, just as sounds (screams, words, slogans) always come out of the mouth of the demonstrators, images of all kinds are also brandished at the end of their arms. Based on this the article raises the question of the very notion of a desire for uprising.

longer feel subjected. At the same time, I repeat, we never finish beginning, beginning again, continuing to struggle and to fight.
Does not Samuel Beckett conclude his internal debate in The Unnamable by writing "I'll go on," just after having spoken his own splitting in the expression "I must go on, I can't go on"? Is it not clear that this also meant: "There where everybody tells me no, I will, despite everything, keep on trying, attempting, desiring, speaking, affirming, inventing, saying no to no"? 1 We have endured so much and then, one day, we tell ourselves that this can no longer continue. We have long since thrown in the towel. Again, however-as we have been able to do on occasions, as others have so often done before us-we raise up our arms above our shoulders still marked by alienation, still bent by pain, by injustice, by the depression that had reigned up until then. It is now that we pick ourselves up: we throw our arms into the air, forward. We open, we re-open, our mouth. We cry out, we sing our desire. With our friends we discuss how it is to be done. We imagine, we advance, we act, we invent. We raised ourselves up through conflicts and antagonisms, agonies and affects. Higher up, alone on the hill, a human being-sketched no doubt so that we cannot see anything more than its basic outlineraises its arms. Seen together, it is a gesture of despair before the atrocity that is unfolding below, a gesture calling for help in the direction of the eventual saviors outside of the frame and, above all, a gesture of tragic imprecation beyond-or through-every appeal to vengeance. Like the famous individual being executed in the Third of May who, he as well, raises his arms up high, it is less the isolated psychological signification of the character than it is a question of identifying the direction of the meaning given by the painter to the whole canvas: in these kinds of scenes, in fact, it is something like the potency of anonymous people who protest and rise up before armed forces of power that have come to enslave or massacre them. We find all of this, not surprisingly, in Guernica, where Picasso so forcefully throws the arms of his characters, with their eyes, with their mouths in the same movement, so that their bodies, whether they are wounded or leveled, will continue to cry out against with a sovereign energy, in the constant dialectic between pathetic forms of death endured and dynamic, vectoral signs of life rising up again.
Such is indeed the non finito of history: depression and bursts, reflux with returns of flows, borders that are suddenly crossed, losses with uprisings, all of this without letting up. In the middle of this all-both as skiffs on the waves and as the very medium of the political by which a backward movement is able to give way to a return of flows-are bodies, with their gestualities, their imaginations, their languages, their re-subjectivisations, their actions in public space. This is why the political is always "staged" in its perpetual vocation of appearing, which was picked up by Hannah Arendt in the fragments collected under the title The Promise of Politics and according to a problematic commented on afterwards by Étienne Tassin. 2 This staging thus goes beyondor perhaps indeed behind, as much as it is quotidian and includes the intimate, disseminated, polymorphous, at multiple levelsthe familiar political allegorisations, such as "the assembly of the People" or the image of the "body of Liberty" so often represented in the 19th century, notably, from David to Delacroix. The "body of Liberty" is not only a representation, it is also a gesture of antagonism, presence, or "presentation", including its moments of public appearance that we so nicely call, in French, manifestations (a word which, phenomenologically speaking, will seem rather poorly translated by the English word demonstration, which is too argumentative). 3 For in to manifest, there are first of all hands [mains], soon arms themselves and entire bodies. Manufestus, in Latin, is the individual who is "taken by the hand", meaning: "to be caught red-handed" or "caught in the act". It is the visible transgressor of the social rule, the manifestatio thus designating all that appears [s'expose], all that is Conflicts of Gestures, Conflicts of Images risked-according to the double meaning of appearing and taking a risk, indeed of the crime of transgression-in a visible way, "manifest" or transgressive, as the forceful defying of order. To manifest will thus be to have desired to proclaim one's desire and, now, to disobey in acts or, rather, in concrete gestures. It is striking that, in the social genealogy of political protests in Europe, funerals, processions, or traditional festivals have constituted an anthropological matrix for protesting assemblies or processions, as Vincent Robert has shown in his book Les Chemins de la manifestation. 4 To manifest would be thus to "get a handle on desire": to transform loss into an uprising, then reveals all of the complexity of its aspects, of its processes, of its dialectics: notably, between its setting and its explosion, as soon as to protest falls both under a democratic right written in the Constitution and an act of radical dissensus, of an unexpected struggle that the forces of the police will try, not only to repress, but even to foresee and delegitimise by all means possible.
These plays of forces thus indeed are manifested by themselves: they appear directly in the streets, in public squares, and, in this respect, cannot be understood without an observation-indeed an anthropology, one that is tactile, sonorous, or visual of sensible space on the whole. An antagonistic process, on the one handwhen to appear is to come into contact, that is to say, to fight-a process of effusive participations or fraternisations on the other; spaces of calling with spaces of refusal; the will to be understood with the sentiment of not being that; "law enforcement agencies" with, opposite them, a "law enforcement" that aims not only at the repression of "misbehavior", but again the stifling of the phenomenon itself according to protocols that are nothing other than, for the most part, attacks on fundamental public liberties.
What becomes clear then, is that protest invests sensible space, notably visually, on the basis of a vigorous refusal of political representation: it makes a political expression appear-the qualifier "direct" would perhaps not be exact since it is always mediatised by its choice of path, slogans, iconography, more or less obligatory comportments-which fundamentally contest the previously acquired forms of political representation, whether they be parliamentary, or even unionised.
So this is why protestors so often invent original gestualities, songs, Conflicts of Gestures, Conflicts of Images or images: arts for doing and making all their own. Arms are raised up, but not only in order to vote as in a classical parliamentary assembly. Mouths are opened and languages come undone, but not only in order to announce a political opinion stricto sensu. We walk, we dance, we run, we gesture, and we throw out all kinds of things.
We get closer, we disperse. We sing and we provoke. We leave a place for the return of a carnivalesque dimension-that is today a festivity that claims to turn the social world upside down-as Kuba Majmurek, Kuba Mikurda and Janek Sowa were able to show in the context of Solidarność 11 or Rocío Martínez in the context of the Chiapas in Mexico. 12 Bodies are in movement in conflicts, antagonisms, agonies and affects. Now any protesting body could be seen as a "body of Liberty"-and we should recall that Delacroix had taken the dynamic from the antique figures of nymphs that we call marching "Victories". Would not every protesting body be like the prow of a heavy boat that advances behind it? This prow, moreover, itself possesses its own prows: a front that "makes a stand" and eyes that "burn with desire" for example. But there is also the mouth that is, in general, "the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of thus, on that day, to strike. She is giving an account of, just as Willy Ronis had himself witnessed, the actions led by the CGTU, of which she was a militant, in "solidarity with the people of Spain." Her name was Rose Zehner. At the end of the strike, she was fired, dismissed, and did not receive public recognition until much later, when the photograph-which was too under-exposed to be published in the communist magazine Regards that it was taken for-was eventually published, in 1980. It is as if in every case the extended arm accompanies the speech of uprising: it prolongs it and diffuses it towards other when it is a question of, as it is here, rallying a group around a particular political cause. The extended arm, moreover, concentrates many operations: it opens the space to somewhere else, it is the body exclaiming itself, and consequently, contributes to resubjectivising all of those who have reasons to "complain" into a group who, collectively, will go "make a complaint" in public space. In this sense, the gesture of Rose Zehner-and of pasionarias more Conflicts of Gestures, Conflicts of Images the support of desire." 19 Now this "minimal structure" is already complex, and to be sure, dialectical: it "is itself complex in so far as it is in a third relationship with fantasy that the subject constitutes itself as desire." 20 It is thus that which makes it such that "the subject is given insofar as it fails" in its relation to the object, to the real. 21 Such would then be a complimentary way of understanding the feminist gesture: a given form, affirmed, addressed, but also a "form of rupture"-intrinsic to desire-, as Lacan developed it then saying that this relation helps us to understand, fundamentally, that "every subject is not one." This is what the feminists, in their own way, claimed in public. "Punch-gesture", then: a gesture, both cut and conjoined, separated and united. Gesture of division-sharing Non-violent methods are even more inventive and varied since it is a question of taking up arms, of making gestures, of making signs or making images out of the most minimal things. There is, of course, the banner that is in front of the protestors and, in some sense, speaks for them. Philippe Artières dedicated a useful study to this, all the while reducing it to the single dimension of "exposed writing". 23  Whence the proliferation of visual marks and "protest colors": the "orange revolution" in Ukraine or the Black Bloc, for example.

Conflicts of Gestures, Conflicts of Images
Whence the quasi-industry of militant t-shirts and pins. But the most moving, no doubt, are the larger images that the protestors brandish, images representing even those whose disappearance we have come to mourn and for which we demand justice: this was the case of the funeral processions in Paris for the victims of It is both significant and banal to claim that, in the image of the protest in London, a video camera is directed-it too held out at the end of the arms-towards the point of contact between the police and the Book Bloc militant. Everywhere in the world, today, we protest with cellphones, used as cameras or photographic devices, brandished in real space and immediately linked into cyberspace. It is a matter of images being used well beyond their simple informative and representative function: they can also function, psychically and socially, as operators of resubjectivisation. Today, in the insurgent forests in Chiapas, the "participation of women in the autonomous Government," as it is explained in an entire part of the Manual de la Escuelita Zapatista (where it is written lxs Zapatistas in order to not separate the masculine from the feminine), is accompanied by work directly on the image. 25 As Guiomar Rovira was able to recount in