Building on Destruction Available to Purchase

Against some voices coming from both the political mainstream and more radical quarters, this article argues for a political reading of the English riots of 2011 and, more broadly, for the need to recognize the subjectivation that participants in such events go through on its own terms, rather than as falling short of what one counts as a “properly” political act. To do so opens the question of how the traces (affective, subjective, perceptive) left by such events can become the material for collective processes of politicization and organization, as well as of how and where such processes can be undertaken today.