The first answer that came to mind had to do with historical reasons. To take Paris and France as a target is the reverse of the reactions that were heard across the globe when the attacks were made known. Let’s take President Obama’s televised speech for example. The roots of the alliance between our two Countries, that have withstood many a tangle, dates back to the Enlightenment, the encyclopedists, the French revolution and the ideals that their signifiers put into circulation. That neither France nor the USA has often been to up to the standard of these ideals, and has even trampled them, has not weakened the force of these master signifiers that spread the world over like a bolt of lighting: liberty, equality, fraternity, blue, white, red: a double ternary structure for which Lacan has shown the power of the knot. Their diffusion expanded the interpretations, almost infinitely. Therefore France because, first hit of the battering ram in the Name of the Father, a political scansion of the rising capitalist economy. To take the opposing view of all the signifiers from the Enlightenment, according to logic inaugurated by the extreme right in France, as Z. Sternell has demonstrated it.

The second answer is of a different order. Here, it is the IS’s communiqué that puts us on the track. Paris is qualified as « capital of abominations and perversion », and the youth of all nationalities at the concert at the Bataclan or at a terrace café as « idolaters in a celebration of perversity ». What is being targeted here? A mode of enjoyment, as Internet users quickly interpreted it on social media. Now it just so happens that this mode of enjoyment has become an international icon: images seen thousands of times in the movies, book titles, and photos. The beret, the baguette, the terrace cafés, the conversation, the music in the streets, the museums, the fashion, the ravaged by the ferocity of the Super ego. It hit gourmet cuisine, the social diversity, the kiss: a catalogue of the symbols of the pleasure principal. Paris is a myth of the party, of the joy of living.
Why Paris? Because it is a dream that has become universal. Paris, vedutta della Città ideal of the 21st century, a live set where youth in all its diversity breathes life into desire and into its objects in a world ravaged by the ferocity of the super ego. It hit.