Vivre Sans: Deserting Capitalism, Governance, and Identity in Les Renards pâles by Yannick Haenel

There is an emerging trend of twenty-first-century French novels that depict precarity as a means of deserting neoliberal capitalism entirely and creating autonomous forms of community. Of these texts, Les Renards pâles (2013) by Yannick Haenel is notable for its intersectional examination of poverty, colonialism, and identity. The novel’s narrator joins the Renards pâles, a revolutionary, anti-identarian groupuscule whose members, regardless of their ethnic or cultural background, identify as Black, African, and Dogon. From this universalized minority position, they connect their struggle with the repressed history of French colonialism, sparking a reparatory revolution intended to destroy both French society and all forms of identity. I elucidate the novel’s anarchist politics, placing them under the rubric of destituent power. I demonstrate how its radical politics involve taking up universalism as a means to completely abolish all identarian categories. I argue, however, that the novel lacks a sustained attention to the specificities of the various minority social positions with which it tarries. Focusing specifically on its claim to Blackness as a means to a revolutionary end, I assert that Les Renards pâles’ anti-identarian proposition risks reproducing the schemas it seeks to desert.