Book launch: Habiter le point de fixation. Contre l'abandon.

Professor Anna-Louise Milne launched her recent book Habiter le point de fixation. Contre l’abandon at the Rideau rouge bookshop on Thursday 5 June 2025. Taking up the term of ‘point de fixation’ routinely used by the police to designate areas of established petty criminality, informal street markets and, in recent years, encampments of unsheltered and undocumented people, it proposes to revisit this idea of a ‘fixation’ through the experiences of attachment that characterize life in these areas of improvised resourcefulness. Moving between lived experience and contemporary theorisation of solidarity, of the urban commons, of public culture, it reveals the complexity of social interactions across radically disparate relations to life in the ‘point de fixation’. In so doing, it shows what everyday capacities for negotiation across these differences can generate.  

The book reflects work carried out in collaboration with an informal collective organised around a daily free breakfast distribution, which has also spawned a range of other activities, including writing projects, a dance network, and an annual carnival that now brings together thousands of local people from one of the densest urban areas in the Global North. Drawing on archives and direct experience from this scene, it opens up the links with the longer history of immigration and anticolonial struggle in the area, particularly in relation to the Algerian War. It also connects the work of food solidarity to feminist organising, particularly in Latin America, and pursues this connection through a grassroots publishing project, developed with the support of the local Paris lending library, the Bibliothèque Václav Havel, and its parallels with dissident cartonera publishing across South America. 

As Anna-Louise stressed by way of an introduction to the book at the launch, which gathered people familiar with this free breakfast and colleagues and readers from further afield, the challenge the book set itself was to approach the 'minor’ resourcefulness of a local solidarity movement through association with ‘major’ political and social transformations. Neither an ‘occupation’ nor a ‘movement’, the ‘point de fixation’ is a minor feature of the contemporary political landscape. What resources does it reserve, what explains its ‘stuckness’, what possibilities does it enable?  

Anna-Louise will be doing further presentations of this work in and around Paris in the autumn term, including an evening at the Institute with Dr Katie Tidmarsh, previously of the Institute team, who recently defended her PhD thesis at Paris Cité University. Katie’s work focuses on diasporic Congolese writing, including representations of Kinshasa. The evening will be an opportunity for Katie and Anna-Louise to compare thoughts about contemporary urban dwelling when all recognisable conditions of life in the city seem to be lacking. 

More information about this event will be shared shortly.