October 17th, or the Return of Playfulness

from lundimatin #539, 26/10/2026

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“Opportunistic delinquency,” “holiday-strike,” “lack of political maturity,” “childish cosplay,” “reckless destruction,” “acts of rage” — all these hostile terms used to discredit the ongoing uprising have given rise to their political antonyms: “material reappropriation,” “demands for better study conditions,” “political awareness,” “joyful staging,” and so on. October 17th has been the occasion for a prolific and all-encompassing production of a staggering number of counter-interpretations, theoretical texts, and hypotheses about what drives the movement. Yet, a subterranean dimension to its actions, omnipresent throughout, still seems to be ignored: playfulness [le ludique]. Without returning to a thorough examination of the underlying causes of the movement, nor to a prescriptive reading of its aftermath—most often guided by the intention to “manage” the movement—we wanted here to recapture the passion at work behind the riotous gestures and the high school fervour.

“Je te tiens, tu me tiens, par la barbichette, le premier de nous deux qui rira aura une tapette!”
[“I hold you, you hold me, by the goatee, the first one to laugh will get a light slap!”)[1]

The Game Begins

Our hypothesis, which can coexist with others, posits that the “playful” comes into play as a uniquely effective concept for understanding the fundamentally joyful riotous activity around which the subjectivities of those participating in the insurrection were emotionally bound and organised.

Whether in the charivaris, carnivals, or parades of high school students dressed as comic book superheroes, the fact remains: play coupled with laughter constitutes an undeniable domain of tactics and stratagems allowing one to temporarily break free from the grip of a dominant power. But this playful aspect is neither a simple formal reversal of positions nor a powerless parody of power. It is a refutation in action of learned protest techniques and other demands. The weariness of traditional activist circles is left behind, and already a new horizon of joyful and creative acts is emerging.

The high school students’ strategic skill lies in reusing codes deemed harmless and far too childish to be repressed or even considered: superheroes, costumes, TikTok trends, and so on. Yet, each time, they repurpose these codes in a context of assault and offensives, leading to physical or non-physical confrontations with law enforcement. For example, Captain America launches an attack followed by hundreds of individuals dressed in black. These actions further expose the fundamental illegitimacy of police officers using force. And besides, what can a police officer do against a Batman who starts dancing in front of him? Get enraged, strike, or experience boredom, or endure his docility (the latter two obligations usually being reserved for high school students). How do you stop a battle of auras, the apotheosis of absurdity and humour? By no other means than as a spoilsport. One last thing: what can a police officer do when faced with a left-wing activist, some kind of proselytizer, megaphone in hand, shouting the same old slogans? Ignore them like any other piece of scenery.

Rediscovered Lucidity(ies)

One of the obvious attributes of the complicity present before and during October 17th (Gen Z, students, temporary workers, suburbanites, subordinates, Yellow Vests—in short, subjectivities in the process of proletarianisation) is their propensity for the “playful”. The innocuous act of triggering an aura battle, like smashing a shop window, even if they share no fundamental equivalence, manifests this same playful relationship to the metropolitan imposition of a commercial space. It would be wrong to oppose acts of rage and destruction to the expression of newfound joy, or in other words, acts of looting and arson to role-playing, aura battles, and dressing up as superheroes. They condense and stem from the same affects: in short, a joy in destruction or the anticipation of destroying with joy. Against the contained, regular, and monotonous movements and displacements of the urban and commercial world, always assigned to a goal, they also oppose and demonstrate the here and now possibility of free activity, of a reclaiming of space, without a stated goal or pre-established function. In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga defines play as follows:

Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. )t is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.[2]

Material appropriation through the destruction of property or self-reduction, and amusement in its various forms of staging, are found within the realm of play. Ultimately, there is nothing surprising about this return of play if we understand it and situate it within the long decline of the school system, which has relentlessly sought to ward off all possible manifestations of play and the reappropriation of daily life: distractions, amusement, subversion, and even, until recently, the use of the telephone. Playfulness must be distinguished from the petit-bourgeois conception of fighting as festive folklore, with its infamous techno dances, the vanguard of militant harmlessness.

In front of high schools and elsewhere, these acts serve to expose adult seriousness and its posturing of exemplary behavior, the last vestiges of a still-latent complicity with repressive educational institutions (how many outraged and revealing reactions were provoked by the burning of the Nelson Mandela Secondary School in Nantes?). Suspending boredom, escaping the rigid, academic environment, learning skills independent of their commercial and professional applications, refusing to succumb to resignation and inaction in the face of catastrophe—these are the areas in which play offers an option.

But why claim that this playful quality can shed light on last Saturday’s astonishing and powerful offensive? Does not a better analysis require discerning, within the material circumstances, what underlay the movement? Surely.

Often, the desire to explain the causes of an insurrectionary process contains a prescriptive intent. The aim is to better understand it and make its continuation even more efficient. The effort is commendable. But it often amounts to saying what happened in order to better explain what should happen next. As Walter Benjamin pointed out in his time: “The destructive character has no interest in being understood.”[3] The efforts made in this direction seem superficial to it. Being understood is a bourgeois affair. The destroyer, for its part, does not care. It does not want disciples. It prefers to be alone, for it is the only way for it to bear witness to the solitude of what is destroyed. The incomprehension provoked by looting must sometimes be accompanied by a refusal of any time-consuming explanation, any attempt to make oneself respectable. Nevertheless, considering this activity as minimally “playful,” that breaking a shop window, breaking into stores, sometimes stealing merchandise blindly and as quickly as possible, saying that it is an act of play, is often clearer than any imaginable justification. Learning from the effectiveness of October 17th must therefore be done without trying to deduce, fix, or project desirable forms of future insurrection. Otherwise, the risk is that the event will be reincorporated into a militant body of manners, gestures, and knowledge that is profoundly antithetical and impotent.

Against Vigilance

The audacious act of October 17th stemmed in part from a combination of playful exuberance and a rejection of the usual anxieties about “consequences”. Indeed, the high school students’ offensive also lay in its ability to bypass the vigilance reflexes of informed, autonomous activists. The acts were regularly carried out openly, broadcast live, and sometimes the rioters even posed proudly with their “trophies.”

Some comrades noticed this and appreciated it, while others, more numerous, and based on the series of convictions, deplored it. We are not advocating blindly attacking shop windows without considering the extent of the surveillance and resources mobilised afterward; or, more simply and foolishly, encouraging everyone to rush headlong into the fray. But within this playful unleashing of looting, there is a kind of impulsive, reckless impulse that comes first, an unconsciousness that ultimately reflects what this struggle represents: an existential stake, a life force expressed in a “whatever-it-takes-it” and a “regardless-of-the-repercussions” attitude. Far from establishing a politics of rioting or providing a perfect tool for understanding, this “recklessness” allows us to shift our traditional conceptions of commitment, so often linked to the fear of repression. Rather than conceiving of the struggle as a rational calculation of contingencies and risks (“how to risk less and do more?”), the riotous act refuses to be confined to this accounting logic. We must act here and now, rediscover a kairos compatible with collective desire, before even considering anticipating the worst and, consequently, relegating revolutionary action to a fictitious future detached from our time. Because what the spread of anti-repression practices as a whole carries with it, however welcome they may always be, is a desire for post-insurrection stabilisation, a yearning to present a serene and comprehensible model of revolt. Yet, by its very nature, the continuation of revolt is a leap into the utter unknown, a novelty with which we must strive to come to terms.

Moreover, while prisons and endless trials may frighten us, the existence that awaits us is remarkably similar. In these circumstances, rediscovering playfulness can also mean, like Ritchy Thibault and his irreverent public hearings, refusing to bow to the legal charade and its deceptive games.

Maintaining this playful irresponsibility short-circuits the deterrent power of the pervasive security rhetoric, characterised by a continuous dissemination of new measures, tools, and sophisticated repressive forces: the use of AI, DNA guns, liquids that permanently soak into clothing, the deployment of the RAID, the GIGN, the Army… There is no need to elaborate on the arsenal at the state’s disposal for counter-insurgency. High school students and Gen Z, the new professional conspirators in chief, are showing us the way to neutralise them; to ward off risk, to embrace irresponsibility.

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[1] A traditional French children’s nursery rhyme and staring game known as “Le jeu de la barbichette” (Wikipedia).

[2] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture [1938], Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949, p. 13.

[3] Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character”, originally published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, November 20th 1931 (The Anarchist Library).