At present there is no conscious debate concerning mankind's finality. Mankind's goal, necessarily, is to come to an end. This is why the absence of any debate goes against this goal.

The debate about the end of humanity is the very content of history. As well, this debate alone is the criterion for what is historic and what is not. Today's lack of a debate is not only fortuitous, for human society is organized in the absence of debate, including the filling in of this real lack with the appearance of a debate. This is why those who fight this organization fight this absence. Today, this combat has been driven outside of consciousness. So completely has alienation invaded consciousness that consciousness appears to be a moment of alienation.

But while this phenomenon of history's absence becomes general in history, it cannot suppress history. On the contrary it is the debate about humanity which supersedes this phenomenon. This debate about humanity finds itself outside of consciousness, and against alienation. Alienation no doubt has invaded all mediation and all organization, but it cannot capture immediacy and spontaneity. Here is where the real debate about humanity, the world and their finality has found refuge and is concentrated. It is a practical debate where words once again become onomatopoeia and ideas become punches. But this rough, raw, savage negativity remains the only one present.

The riot is the only practical and public moment in which alienation is criticized as the organization of society, which blocks any debate about mankind's finality. Once it is organized, a riot is no longer a riot. It is the strength and weakness of that which constitutes the only tribune for those who want to master humanity: this tribune is just a surge of life without consciousness. The riot is at present the only one of thought's activities which moves faster than alienation.

Riots are easy to recuperate, discredit or crush; except when and where they take place. In time's depths where we now find ourselves, each riot is like the awkward, angry scraping of a flint, but what results transforms coldness and obscurity into their opposite. Always too quickly swamped or stamped out, riots nonetheless are the living refusal of submission and alienation, a crowbar that opens horizons. And their limits are such that it is tempting to call them limitless. For limits like these the key of consciousness has become rusty.

Roman plebeians' riots, peasant uprisings, or nineteenth century working class riots are very different from modern ones, contrary to what is generally assumed. It is their content which is different: a Roman senator, a feudal lord or even a nineteenth century wheeler-dealer prince could not have imagined what today reveals-that the richness of humanity has taken refuge in these poor revolts of the poor. The conditions which give rise to them are also different: they always menace the State in a world entirely divided into States; they are always urban in an entirely urbanized world. They are a battle for thought in a world in which thought has freed itself from human grasp; when there are leaders, leaders are outflanked, where there are commodities, commodity value is destroyed. Their actors are different from the past: they are anonymous. Contrary to what is generally assumed, there are no longer any manipulated riots. Potential manipulators have relinquished mastery over the world, and in leading them astray, they have lost mastery of the crowds. Whatever the number of participants, a modern riot is out of measure. Semi-literate, poor and unsatisfied, riot's enemies resemble potential rioters more than potential recuperators. But the reverse is also true: modern rioters are bursting with ideology, fear and satisfaction. And their separations, that this unique modern festival threatens to supersede, constitute their first police, as well as an end of any form of police. Last of all, more than the fear they provoke it is the immensity of the shame of what they reveal which, unlike in the past, makes it impossible to attribute them to any party. This cover of silence discredits them as well.

A riot is something very short in time, it usually lasts a few hours, rarely a few days. A riot is very localized in space, it always takes place in a city, often in just one neighborhood and often in a marginalized neighborhood. Today, rioters active in the world are only a tiny minority of the world. Separated from each other, even the account and motivations of their emotion have been relinquished to those who took no part in it, unless in combating them. Today it is hardly unheard of for rioters to put more faith in what they see on the news than in what their memory recalls. Almost always defeated in the streets (to the extent that many believe that the very fact of fighting is a victory, which at times contributes to their defeat), they are also defeated with respect to theorizing their beginning of a debate, thus abetting the liquidation of this debate.

Professional rioters, which are at times evoked during these liquidation campaigns, exist: but they are uniformed or plainclothes policemen and informers. No one else is paid to be present. Rioters are amateurs: no hierarchy, no specialists. And if you run into the same rioters in different riots, that means they are real amateurs.

The rioter risks his life. Anyone judging the riot without having participated in it only runs the risk of shame. At today's going rate for shame there is no comparison between rioter and non-rioter when they express themselves. Courage and fear, which in the riot reach paroxysms that cinema and literature still attribute to wars between States, are always abstract outside the riot, allowing those absent–the observer, the enemy–to minimize and hush it up. But when courage and fear are liberated limitlessly, other violent emotions are freed as well. And to know which ones, when it is a question of riots and not of wars between states, it is necessary to have finished reading, and get on with it. There lies the beginning of the debate about the end of the debate.

The Bibliothèque des Emeutes will commit no other incitement to riot. In effect, since the riot is spontaneous, we find inciting it contradictory. Consciousness cannot incite unconsciousness. You don't go to a riot, you are in a riot. Today's practice of emotion, that is, taking the draining of emotions as the only limit, is either falsified as a spectacle or has fallen into modus operandi-less immediacy. The riot and the emotion of life are no longer premeditated, and this is wherein lies their poetry. On the other hand, inciting to riot is against the law in most States of the world. That constitutes one of their lesser contradictions: today they are a principal and perpetual incitement to riot, the truth-suffocater that makes it explode.

In itself, riot is just an intense moment that is both weightless and profound. Its inherent goal is to spread. When a riot spreads from a neighborhood to a city, and from a city to every city in a State, from one day to the next and then to an entire week, from scorn to respect, and from ignorance to universal consciousness, this is what is known as an insurrection. An insurrection which overflows State borders, which takes the totality as its goal and reveals the ground of the human dispute, is a revolution. There is no known example of a revolution which did not start with a riot.