destroying paris text by MEHDI BELHAJ KACEM Why is Paris no longer the capital — not intellectually, not artistically, not politically, nothing? Paris has been unlivable to me, I’d say, since the beginning. Since the beginning of my life as an adult and a writer. I tried to resist, to hold out against obvious facts, to believe that there was something worth saving in this city. Like many before me (for example, Elein Fleiss, the cofounder of Purple, who went to live in the countryside), I realized that it was wasted effort. There is nothing left to extract from Paris. “I shall thus limit myself to a few words to announce that, whatever others may say about it, Paris no longer exists,” said Guy Debord, the unacknowledged but obvious heir to the spirit of Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire. Guy Debord also used to say that the death of Paris dates…