Social Hotspots and Sacred Places of Post-Migrant Society: An Encounter With Spaces for “Democratic” Transformation Based on Anne Weber’s Wanderings Through the banlieues of Paris

Anne Weber’s reportage novel Bannmeilen highlights many current conflicts: social inequality and marginalization, the unresolved colonial history, the failed integration policy, traces of the Shoah and environmental destruction. Together with her friend Thierry, a documentary filmmaker from the banlieues , Anne immerses herself in the suburbs of Paris. This article reads her writing as a form of action research, that not simply seeks to understand but also to intervene, and as a modality of practicing place. Similar to Michel de Certeau—who regards walking as a form of subversive performative appropriation of space—Anne and Thierry open up with their walks a view to a different “post-migrant” Europe. They encounter refugee camps, which reveal not only the fragility but also the dark side and inherent violence of Western democracies. They find social housing, which have been transit camps for Jewish people; they encounter a café as a micro-democratic meeting place and they explore churches and cemeteries as spaces of remembrance and of resonance. Thus, on one hand, the banlieues appear as “zones of exception” in Giorgio Agamben’s sense, where people are reduced to bare life, and state repression intensifies along racial and social lines; on the other hand, however, places are emerging where life is asserting itself in resistance, alternatives are becoming visible and situations of repression are being transcended. Bannmeilen itself can be read as an artistic and spiritual intervention in the political sphere that opens up small spaces for encounters for “democratic” transformation.