Withstanding horror
When Nourredine is stabbed to death, the town of Montrimond, close to Paris, is plunged into shock. That shockwave makes its way across the barriers between a number of different social worlds : the “boys of Montrimond”, the family, the shopkeepers, residents, and municipal officials, the police officers in charge of the investigation and the local and regional media dispatched to the scene to cover the story. Mourning is often a private matter, but death has the power to reverberate beyond the boundaries of intimacy. At the heart of the ethical problem that leaves the protagonists torn between public accusation and a desire for retaliation, the aesthetic dimension is commensurate with the rekindling of dread in forms that metamorphose the shocked crowd into a “shattered community”. By looking at the way in which reflexivity can become embodied in collective forms of vulnerability, this article shows that a state of shock is one that doesn’t lead to the ordeal of a public experience, while shattering engages an ethics of indecision favorable to launching an investigation.