city of the same text by JOHN JEFFERSON SELVE Paris has always been a hard, clannish city, socially codified in the extreme. That’s also what makes it paradoxically appealing, even fascinating, beyond its visible beauty, beyond its rigidity. Paris doesn’t mingle. Paris doesn’t renew itself. Paris is the city of the same. Each district conforms to a historical stereotype: each artistic or social class, each age bracket, has its own city districts, its own restaurants, its own dinner parties. Paris is the city par excellence of permanent cliques, aloof and wary of any hint of Otherness. We don’t even realize anymore how many boundaries these Parisian micro-worlds have created. This is true for all groups: the art world, the world of literature, of cinema, etc. And at the core, each of these little worlds divides infinitely into even smaller families, microscopic worlds that look down on each other, criticize each…