Vacillation of responsability, bouffée délirante and impaired/abolized discernment: the the Halimi Affaire in France

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the legal case of the murder of Sarah Halimi, occurred in France in 2017, and ended in
2021 with the Court of Cassation’s ruling, which recognized the criminal irresponsibility of her murderer, Kobili Traoré. We We hypothesize that the use of the concept of vacillation of responsibility, elaborated by Jacques Lacan in 1950, could have allowed a different reading of the Affaire Halimi. We intend to demonstrate that, from a clinical standpoint, the dichotomy of responsibility/irresponsibility does not take into account the individual’s relationship to the act committed. In other words, the distinction between moral responsibility and criminal responsibility allows us to question the nonsense of the criminal act and questions the individual in his relation to the other, inscribing him in a story, thus showing us the blind spot of this affair. We also hypothesize that the concept of responsibility
vacillation allows for a better contextualization, to interrogate the concepts of impairment/abolition of discernment and the psychiatric concept of bouffée délirante, as concluded by the experts. Moreover, in support of our hypothesis, the concept of bouffée délirante, which all the expert opinions concluded, could have resulted in a different reading of Traoré’s passage to the act. We compared the bouffée délirante with the brief psychotic episode and demonstrated that the two concepts, now used as synonyms, are not equivalent. Finally, by rereading the Affaire Halimi from this
interpretation, we have examined several issues highlighted by the Affaire Halimi, in particular what we believe to be the catalyzing element of Traoré’s persecutory delirium: hatred towards the Jew as an embodiment of Evil. We argue that antisemitism is the form through which the death drive inscribes itself in the subjective logic of the homicidal act. We argue that Traoré’s antisemitism is not irrelevant to the analysis of the passage to the act, as established in law, but on the contrary is the cause that makes it clinically intelligible. Lastly, we aim to demonstrate how the issue of cannabis consumption, which has been extensively discussed in legislative contexts, is secondary: based on the data available to us, we can assert that the intensification of Traoré’s intake of psychotropic substances likely responds to a need for selfcare, yet the causes of this have not been investigated to clearly establish Traoré’s
relationship to cannabis consumption.