To Hell With It: Yannick Haenel’s Les Renards pâles
Half novel half manifesto, Haenel’s novel guides us towards a politics of refusal.
I discovered Yannick Haenel’s Les Renards pâles after a colleague delivered a wonderful talk about it at an academic conference. He made it seem exciting, like a pamphlet by a revolutionary. After purchasing a copy and reading the first few pages for myself, my initial impressions seemed a little misguided. Not much happens for a while. The protagonist-narrator, an ordinary Frenchman about whom we never know much, decides to live off the grid, renounce to the logic of compulsory labor and of ownership, and accept his impeding homelessness. The almost idyllic portrayal of homelessness made me feel uneasy at first— he talks about sleeping under the Parisian skies as if it were a dream, when in reality the city is notorious for its hostility towards the homeless: as preparation for the 2024 Olympics, there were rumors that the city planned to forcibly remove homeless people from the capital to improve its aesthetics for its millions of visitors. I do not know if these rumors have turned out to be true, but I know for sure that Haenel’s book was, in those first few pages, heading towards dangerous territory with the aesthetization of precarity. Then things changed.
The protagonist-narrator has a political awakening after hearing about a Malian immigrant whose sleeping body was accidentally crushed by a garbage truck. The garbage disposal workers had failed to check if anybody was inside the dumpster, leading to this tragic outcome. The ease with which everybody moves on after this atrocity bothers the narrator, who starts noticing that under the current system, some lives matter less than others. Racial capitalism dictates that people from the former French colonies in the Global South are at best cheap labor and at worst disposable. How can one comply with such a system? The narrator decides to distance himself even more from the system by burning his identity papers, choosing to just be without any regard for the state. This is a move inspired by Dogon cosmology, which in the narrative acts as the foil for the Western rationalism that has led to our pitiful unjust present condition.
Haenel’s narrative arrives at its climax during a strange passage when there is some sort of orgy where all boundaries of gender, sex, race, age, and ability seem to fade. Individuals merge into one mass of pleasure. Though one is not sure if this scene is meant to be literal or metaphorical, its advocacy for community remains powerful. ‘Love thy neighbor’ is taken to its logical conclusion, undoing the hierarchies that prevent us from achieving equality.
As a philosophical document, Les Renards pâles is fascinating. It toys with anarchy, with critiques of racial capitalism, with queer theory, with the possibility of dismantling the notion of compulsory labor. As a manifesto, however, its vision remains utopian, an intellectual exercise rather than a true manual for revolutionary action. Refusing to comply may be the right thing to do, but getting to a position that lets you see abject poverty in this way is easier than done. For the educated French protagonist the refusal might be rebellion. For the Malian and African immigrants in the streets of Paris that influenced this tale, this is simply life. Though Haenel is certainly not blind to the racial disparities at play here, it is still worth thinking whether the protagonist could have used his white privilege and his skills to help others in a better way rather than simply attempting to fall into the margins like his new friends. Sometimes watching things burn achieves little other than temporary catharsis; one leaves this book not with a sense of hope or energized to change things, but rather with the impression that there is a way out. We just need to dare to do things differently. Will we?
