Presence of abandoned luggage

When fear of the unpredictable transforms forgetting into threat, an entire society tips into a security fiction. In French public transport, a simple forgotten bag is enough to paralyze the system. Behind this excessive reaction, a philosophical-political shift occurs: forgetting becomes crime, fear becomes norm, and control is exercised under the guise of security. It seems useful to me to question the profound meaning of this security logic, and what it reveals about our contemporary condition.

A society stunned by noticed oblivion

For several years, a phenomenon has taken a central place in the functioning of French public transport: the quasi-automatic suspicion toward any baggage left unattended. An inert object, forgotten inadvertently, is perceived as a potential threat, justifying the stopping of trains, the closure of stations, even the complete interruption of entire sections of public service. It’s not so much forgetting that disturbs, it’s the fact that it is seen. Discreet forgetting is insignificant; noticed forgetting becomes an object of terror.

Let’s take a simple example. If a suitcase is placed in a train by a passenger who gets off before departure, it will likely go unnoticed throughout the journey. It only becomes a “problem” when it becomes visible, present, isolated. What triggers the reaction is not the reality of the threat, but the emergence of something outside the norm in the controlled space. The isolated and unidentified object, suddenly visible, creates not a real danger, but a rupture in the readability of the environment.

However, if we think logically, the truly dangerous baggage would be that which doesn’t distinguish itself, that which travels like the others and which arouses no alert. A hypothetical terrorist concerned with efficiency would seek precisely to conceal his act, not to expose it to view through a deliberately noticed oversight. In this sense, the logic governing our reactions is based less on rational risk analysis than on an imaginary of threat.

The fantasy of threat as social regulation

This gap between the reality of facts and the alert mechanism reveals a management mechanism distorted in relation to the real. In the recent history of attacks, we find no trace of a booby-trapped bag left at random in an empty train or on a station platform. The real unpredictability of danger, its sudden brutality, has never taken the form of the solitary suitcase in an empty car. The thwarted fantasy substitutes for lived experience: we don’t react to prevent what happens, but to avoid what we imagine. It’s the imaginary that feeds the Vigipirate plan, in effect in France since 1995. This protocol is constantly applied. It systematically imposes stopping, evacuation and bomb squad intervention when abandoned baggage is discovered. These prove to be almost exclusively harmless: forgotten objects, luggage, clothing. Reports from SNCF, media and authorities show that the majority of incidents (sometimes thousands per year) are linked to oversights or clumsiness, without a malicious act ever being confirmed in this context.

In this imaginary, which passes itself off as reality, forgetting a bag can no longer be thought of as an ordinary human gesture, but becomes a problematic act, almost subject to suspicion, as if any deviation from the norm must now be interpreted as potentially malevolent. We are witnessing here an anthropological mutation: forgetting, which was once a sign of our vulnerability, of our fallible humanity, becomes a possible marker of criminality. “If you forget your bag, you become the agent of chaos,” tell us the messages conveyed in transport.

Michel Foucault had described this well in his analyses of disciplinary societies: power no longer aims only to punish, but to prevent, control, regulate behaviors even before they become problematic. What we seek here is therefore not the terrorist, but the potential-form of disorder. The abandoned bag is a screen onto which is projected the panoptic will of a society that tracks the unexpected.

“The Panopticon, presented by Bentham as a reform project for prisons, hospitals, schools, workshops, represents a dreamed political figure for the exercise of power. In the panoptic scheme, discipline makes it possible to individualize, to fix each person in their place, to ensure constant surveillance, and above all, to internalize constraint. Panopticism is the general principle of a new ’political anatomy’ whose objects and targets are no longer the bodies of enemies, but the bodies of citizens. It’s no longer about striking, but observing; no longer about punishing, but controlling, surveilling, normalizing. What matters is less violence than visibility — or better: the asymmetry of visibility. Power becomes all the more effective as it is invisible, even as it makes visible all those on whom it is exercised.”

Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1975).

Security or exercise of power over bodies and minds?

The security argument, although apparently based on common sense, proves to be a convenient pretext for rationalizing fear and extending the field of control. For after all, if we base ourselves on statistics, cases of attacks via forgotten baggage are non-existent or so rare that they in no way justify the intensity deployed at each alert. It is therefore elsewhere that the true logic lies: in the need to organize a disenchanted social space, where everything is known, controlled, predictable.

We have entered fully into what Giorgio Agamben might call a “society of permanent control,” in which every shadow zone must be eliminated, every fluctuation filled in. In this world, any autonomy of the real is suspect. Even forgetting, which could still carry poetry, encounter, interstice, must be eliminated. Poetic surprise becomes dangerous because it troubles secured routines. It’s not so much the bomb we dread as the emergence of an unmarked real.

“The sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order. [...] Our conception of democracy and the rule of law does not at all suppress the paradox of sovereignty, but on the contrary pushes it to the extreme. [...] Sovereign is he who decides on the exceptional situation: the exceptional situation is characterized as exceptional precisely because it escapes the sphere of law; but he who takes things in hand in such a situation, he who is designated to govern at the moment when government leaves the sphere of law, that one precisely is the sovereign. [...] The sovereign is both in the law and outside the law: he produces both the exception and the norm, he makes of the exception, of the state of emergency or exception, the new norm, he includes within the juridical order what it has pushed outside, he is the system that interiorizes what exceeds it...”

Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben (1995)

The political management of the Covid period, so harshly criticized by Giorgio Agamben, who was one of the few intellectuals to take the risk of engaging in this direction, provided an even more total experience: every anomaly had to be contained, every surprise neutralized, every freedom temporarily suspended, criminalizing humanity in its essence, filial bonds, and even funeral rituals, foundational to our spirituality, forbidden for a time. The abnormal, and during this period even the normal, was no longer tolerable. Thus, current society operates a reversal: it’s no longer for the norm to adapt to life, it’s for life to calibrate itself to the norm. Forgetting becomes fault. The unexpected becomes threat. Difference becomes guilt.

When forgetting becomes crime: toward a normative fiction of daily life

The most worrying thing about this drift is that it always presents itself under the appearance of common sense for collective security, while it is itself that creates the danger. Who would refuse to protect themselves? Who would want to risk the lives of others for a simple oversight? But it’s precisely this naturalization of the absurd that constitutes the trap. Because in reality, nothing assures us that a forgotten bag is a danger. It’s even the opposite that experience tells us: never has an attack functioned in this manner, and yet, the mechanism reproduces itself, generalizes, imposes itself, and daring to criticize it as I do here could even be considered as reprehensible criminal thinking.

One could, conversely, imagine a society founded on trust rather than suspicion. Faced with a forgotten bag, we could simply take it, bring it to lost and found, try to find its owner, which would create connections from this oversight, chance encounters and perhaps essential ones, in any case fraternal ones. This would be incomparably more human than treating it as a threat and triggering a collective alarm. But our era seems to prefer security fiction to collective intelligence. The real is suspect, the citizen is potentially guilty, deviance becomes unbearable.

The implicit message of this fiction is the following: “Be permanently conforming.”, “Don’t escape the norm.”, “Any anomaly will make you suspect.” It’s no longer only a security threat, it’s an anthropological threat. One can no longer be distracted, dreamy, inattentive, which made the beauty and complexity of the human. Non-control becomes moral fault.

For a reconquest of the right to the unexpected

It seems urgent to me to reexamine the logic underlying these security procedures. Not to deny the possibility of risk, but to rediscover a just measure between vigilance and organized panic. It’s not fear that must be cultivated, it’s critical spirit. And as long as we accept without resistance this fiction of threat, as long as we renounce our spaces of the unexpected, our moments of forgetting, we will legitimize an invisible but omnipresent power in our gestures, our choices, our silences. Because behind the suspect baggage, it’s not a bomb that’s detected: it’s our freedom that’s measured.