Paper short abstract

Citizens that are mutilated in protests get involved in lengthy court procedures to get reparation. These procedures create an affectively charged atmosphere that negatively affects their minds and bodies, and those of their peers. Moving out, and leaving court procedures, appear as an exit.

Paper long abstract

During the last decade several citizens have been mutilated during protests in France. This is related to the use of less-lethal weapons and to a brutalization of enforcing order in this country, related to the neoliberal reduction of funding of State institutions (Jobard and Fillieule, 2020). The consequences of mutilation for the citizens that suffer them include: chronic pain, criminalization, degradation of their social relations and economic situation. Moreover, negative consequences of mutilation also extend to the minds and bodies of close family members and peers. In this context, many of these injured citizens are motivated to look for truth and justice in court. Trials against police officers are often lengthy, and police officers are usually not condemned. This presentation, based on 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork amongst mutilated citizens, their close peers, as well as lawyers, and social workers involved in their cases, seeks to describe the atmosphere of police violence mutilated citizens inhabit, which is significantly created by their entanglement with court procedures. Within this atmosphere injury is affectively transmitted towards close peers and family of mutilated citizens, showing injury is not confined to single bodies. Also, mutilated citizens are "caught" within their trials, and live in a state of waiting for the trial to take place, which creates tension and a disconnection with other aspects of their lives, impeding them from moving on. I will finish by describing how some of my interlocutors disentangled themselves from this atmosphere by moving out, and reconstructing themselves in other context.