Paris, 2017: While the new president is being elected, the state of emergency lingers. It sneaks through the capital, on the lookout for old and new monuments to make its own. As the city struggles to regain its innocence, it gently slips its way into everyday life and seeps into the constitution
«The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of exception” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which reflects this. (…) But the astonishment that what we are experiencing is “still possible” in the twentieth century is not a philosophical reaction. It is not the beginning of recognition, unless by recognition we mean that the conception of history on which it rests is unsustainable.»
Walter Benjamin, «On the concept of history», 1940
