Democracy in crisis: Violence, alterity, community 9781847792983

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Democracy in crisis

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PERSPECTIVES ON DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE Series editors: SHIRIN M. RAI and WYN GRANT With the ebbing away of the ‘third wave’ of democratization, democratic practice is unfolding and consolidating in different ways. While statebased representative democracy remains central to our understanding of the concept, we are also conscious of the importance of social movements, non-governmental organizations and governance institutions. New mechanisms of accountability are being developed, together with new political vocabularies to address these elements in democratic practice. The books published in this series focus on three aspects of democratic practice: analytical and normative democratic theory, including processes by which democratic practice can be explained and achieved; new social and protest movements, especially work with a comparative and international focus; and institutionbuilding and practice, including transformations in democratic institutions in response to social and democratic forces. Their importance arises from the fact that they are concerned with key questions about how power can be more fairly distributed and how people can be empowered to have a greater influence on decisions that affect their lives. This series takes forward the intellectual project of the earlier MUP series, Perspectives on Democratization. Already published John Anderson Christianity and democratisation: from pious subjects to critical participants Susan Buckingham and Geraldine Lievesley (eds) In the hands of women: paradigms of citizenship Bart Cammaerts Internet mediated policy processes beyond the nation state Francesco Cavatorta The international dimension of the failed Algerian transition: democracy betrayed? Katherine Fierlbeck Globalizing democracy: power, legitimacy and the interpretation of democratic ideas (2nd edn) Carina Gunnarson Cultural warfare and trust: fighting the Mafia in Palermo Jennifer S. Holmes Terrorism and democratic stability revisited (2nd edn) Anca Pusca Revolution, democratic transition and disillusionment: the case of Romania Paul Routledge and Andrew Cumbers Global justice networks: geographies of transnational solidarity

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Democracy in crisis Violence, alterity, community

edited by Stella Gaon

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2009 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 7923 8 hardback First published 2009 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Contents

Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction

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Part 1 Alterity as a crisis for democracy

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1 ‘Don’t blame me!’ Seriality and the responsibility of voters Robert Bernasconi

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2 Sovereignty, property and the lifeworld: democracy’s colonization of alterity Mielle Chandler

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3 Narratives of groups that kill other groups Jacqueline Stevens

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4 Technologies of violence and vulnerability Kelly Oliver

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5 The brackets of recognition: recognition, espionage, camouflage Elizabeth Povinelli 6 Humanitarianism and the representation of alterity: the aporias and prospects of cosmopolitan visuality Fuyuki Kurasawa

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CONTENTS

Part 2 Alterity as a provocation to democracy

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7 Alterity as democracy-to-come Stella Gaon

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8 The ends of democracy: who, we? Catherine Kellogg

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9 From fear to democracy: towards a politics of com-passion Dorota Glowacka

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10 Meditations on turning towards violently dead Sharon Rosenberg

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11 Democracy, accountability and disruption Rita Kaur Dhamoon

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12 Dissensus, ethics and the politics of democracy Ewa Płonowska Ziarek

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Index

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Acknowledgements

The research presented here was first developed at an international, collaborative workshop held at Saint Mary’s University, in June 2007. Funding for this event and its dissemination from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) is gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks are extended to Saint Mary’s University for hosting the meeting on campus and for sponsoring it generously. The Office of the President of the University of King’s College is also gratefully acknowledged for having co-hosted and co-sponsored the research workshop from which this volume has emerged. The workshop organizing committee, Rita Kaur Dhamoon, Dorota Glowacka and Catherine Kellogg, worked tirelessly to ensure that crucial deadlines were met and that necessary resources were in place. Indeed, this project was initially conceived with their full collaboration, and could not have been undertaken without their essential assistance. I also extend my appreciation, as well as that of my co-contributors, to students involved in the project: Brennan MacDonald and Ley Missailidis created and maintained a website on which to disseminate information pertaining to the project, and Eluned Jones and Jeremy McMillan assisted with preliminary arrangements, attended the workshop panels and served as final ‘rapporteurs’ on its proceedings. Finally, I am especially grateful for the editorial assistance of Sean Meades, who worked painstakingly and with good humour to sort out some of the copy-related issues associated with this publication. Any errors it may still contain remain my responsibility alone.

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List of contributors

Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. From 1988 to 2009 he was the Moss Chair of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. He works on twentieth-century continental philosophy, Hegel, race theory and the history of social practices, and has published numerous scholarly works on Sartre, Levinas, Kant, Derrida and Fanon. Mielle Chandler completed her Ph.D. in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto (2008). She is interested in the relationship between property, ontology and political conflicts and processes. Her current work brings phenomenology and biology into conversation in analysing colonial history and contesting forms of neoimperialism. Rita Kaur Dhamoon is a Faculty member in the Department of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford. Her areas of interest include the meanings of culture, feminist and gender theory, critical race theory, critiques of multiculturalism, postcolonial and anti-colonial thought, disability and Deaf identity. Stella Gaon is Associate Professor of Political Science at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. She is interested primarily in questions concerning political critique, particularly with respect to the political–philosophical theme of otherness and the possibilities for emancipatory change. She draws primarily on twentieth-century, continental, social and political thought, including Frankfurt School critical theory, critical legal theory, deconstruction and psychoanalytic thought.

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CONTRIBUTORS

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Dorota Glowacka is Associate Professor in the Contemporary Studies Programme at the University of King’s College in Halifax. She is a co-editor of Between Ethics and Aesthetics (2002) and Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust (2007), and the author of journal articles and books chapters in the area of continental philosophy and Holocaust studies. She is currently working on the project ‘Jewish Memory in Today’s Poland and the Polish National Narrative’. Catherine Kellogg is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She is interested in the relationship between justice, law, critique and democracy. She draws primarily on contemporary continental philosophy, Marxist and feminist theory and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Law’s Trace: From Hegel to Derrida (2009). Fuyuki Kurasawa is Associate Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto. He works on the intercultural analysis of Western modernity, cultural materialism, and global justice and global rights, and is engaged most directly in developing a critical theory of cosmopolitanism. He is currently working on an SSHRC-funded project entitled ‘The Making of a Global Culture of Human Rights: Towards a Sociological Cosmopolitanism’. Kelly Oliver is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. She focuses on the relationship between ethics and subjectivity from both an abstract philosophical and a concrete practical perspective. Her most recent book, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media (Columbia University Press, 2007), examines notions of freedom, justice, war, legitimate force, terrorism and vulnerability in discussions of recent violence. Elizabeth Povinelli is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University in New York. Her research aims at developing a critical theory of late liberalism grounded on theories of the translation, transfiguration and the circulation of values, materialities and socialities within settler liberalisms.

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Sharon Rosenberg is Associate Professor of Social Theory and Cultural Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Her theorizing is compelled by interests in trauma, loss and memorialization, and with the modes of encounter they demand. This work is currently being supported by an SSHRC grant, for a project entitled ‘Opening the Present to the Violently Dead’. Jacqueline Stevens is Associate Professor of Law and Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She writes about how laws create hereditary membership groups that seem to be natural, including the nation, ethnicity, race and family roles. Ewa Płonowska Ziarek is the Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and the Founding Director of The Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She publishes in the areas of feminist theory, modernism, continental philosophy, ethics and political theory. She is the author of An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and Politics of Radical Democracy.

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Introduction Stella Gaon

This book interrogates a ‘crisis’ of democracy that is manifest in the increased violence provoked by radical difference (‘alterity’) in Western democratic communities and explores its significance for the thinking and the practical development of democracy today. Significantly, however, the contributors to this volume treat the question of what sustains and what undermines radical democratic practice from an unusual perspective. Rather than beginning from the standard assumption that a greater degree of inclusion of given cultural identities will enhance democracy, the contributors begin from the question of how claims to selfdetermination and identity are a problem for democracy and, indeed, how they lead to its essential undoing. For, while it is always provocative to claim that a given issue or ideal is just now reaching its most critical state, it must be said at the outset that, at a deeper or originary level, democracy has always been in crisis – indeed, that it has always been a crisis – since its ancient instantiation in Greece. In the first place, both theoretically and practically – which is to say, both as an idea and as a form of political regime – democracy is essentially impossible as a legitimate form of rule, because the very constitution of the ‘people’ that embodies sovereignty cannot itself be democratically or legitimately established (see Näsström, 2003, 2007, and Keenan, 2003: 13, 25–41). As Sophia Näsström puts it, there is a ‘gap at the heart of democracy in the sense that “the people” – in order to constitute the legitimate source of political authority – would have to be prior to itself’ (2003: 808). This problem is not, as Alan Keenan remarks,

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merely a conceptual one, nor an issue that applies only to the moment (real or hypothetical) of the community’s foundation. . . . It is relevant any time the community is divided over an issue that touches on its identity as a community – which is to say, it is relevant for any important political issue in a democracy. (2003: 37)

Because the identity of the people is ultimately indeterminable, every democratic polity is necessarily open to question, and every such regime is also simultaneously subject to the danger that, as Keenan says, ‘the drive to closure built in to the ideal of collective autonomy [may take] more forceful, even violent forms’ (2003: 13). In the second place, democracy is also always in crisis, because it is always at least potentially unjust, in the sense that antagonism against others and xenophobia are built into its very practice. This second claim can be elaborated in three steps. First, a democratic polity cannot function as such unless the demos itself is delimited as a boundaried entity. Any such process of delimitation necessarily, and not merely accidentally, constitutes its inside and its outside – that is, it constitutes both itself and its other(s) – in one and the same move, because that is the logic of identification (I am this and therefore not that). Second, genuine identification in and with a group involves an affective tie that binds; it requires, as Wendy Brown argues, drawing on Freud, ‘something of a common ego, a “common me” to a degree that no mere social contract could produce’ (2006: 308). And, insofar as no such identification can ever be guaranteed in the sense that no ego, whether mine, yours or ours, is even conceivably unshakeable, the delimited demos is always essentially vulnerable to real or perceived attacks from within and without, against its boundaries. Third, the culture of liberalism that constitutes the demos in Western countries works no differently: the West, in constituting itself, simultaneously establishes what Brown calls ‘its constitutive outside and its hostile other’, which in this case comprises groups based on ‘religious, cultural or ethnic’ identity, whereas liberalism identifies itself as somehow above the fray developmentally (Brown, 2006: 316, 299). Thus, from a liberal point of view, Brown contends, ‘we have culture, while culture has “them”’, and therefore liberalism appears as the only ‘political rationality’ that can issue in tolerance

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or that can determine what modes of culture are even tolerable to begin with (2006: 299). The outcome of this logic is that any democracy will necessarily entail an inbuilt xenophobia and, if it is a liberal democracy, it may entail a kind of colonial imaginary as well (see Brown, 2006: 302, 732–3, note 51). Either of these entailments may result in either more or less aggression towards other states, while internally every demos must also be on guard against those deemed foreign or different. Thus, democracies are again constitutively rather than merely accidentally vulnerable to the excesses of bigotry and rightwing populism, which is not to say that these excesses will necessarily occur. The fact remains, however, that they always might.1 Consider Switzerland, for example, where the foreign population stands at 1.5 million, or approximately 20 per cent, because even third-generation immigrants are not automatically granted citizenship. Immigrants, their children and even their grandchildren must wait twelve years before applying for citizenship status. In practice, candidates with any connection to the Balkans, Turkey or Africa are regularly rejected in German-speaking regions – even if they meet the language and culture tests – while those from Western Europe are regularly accepted, after they have been submitted to a public town hall meeting or, until five years ago, to a secret vote. In fact, on 1 June 2008, the option of returning to a secret ballot was rejected by 64 per cent of the Swiss population in a nationwide referendum (BBC News, 2008). The referendum was initiated by Switzerland’s right-wing Swiss People’s Party, on the grounds that the Supreme Court decision to abolish secret ballots had undermined the people’s democratic right to have the final say – at least in principle. In fact, the reality was probably that the Supreme Court decision was perceived, rightly, to have undermined the people’s democratic right to exclude potential citizens on purely discriminatory, racial grounds – a right that citizens in a democracy by definition always have. To be sure, liberal forms of democracy were instituted to combat precisely this kind of majoritarian bigotry by safeguarding individual rights against the rights of ‘the people’. But liberalism’s methodological individualism addresses the problem of right-wing populism only to introduce another

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form of injustice: the almost myopic focus on individual rights and (or as) individual property rights works (unwittingly and sometimes not) to aid and abet structural forms of inequality such as poverty or racist oppression, at the very least by occluding their operation, and sometimes even by encouraging it. To see this, we must note in the first place that liberal democracies tend to arise in the context of market economies, and economic globalization and neo-liberal hegemony have issued in an increasingly wide gap between the rich and the poor. As Carter and Stokes write, ‘while formal legal and political equality was achieved’, ‘the social and economic reality was gross inequity’ (2002: 2, 4). Individual rights offer no protection against this structural possibility. On the contrary, as Craig Browne argues, the same globalizing forces that produce a ‘contrast between the mobility of capital and the lesser mobility of people or labor’ also tend to ‘weaken class solidarity’ and promote ‘regressive nationalism and fundamentalism’, thus producing class- and ethnicity-based conflicts (Browne, 2006: 53). Second, just as economic class disparity fails to appear to the liberal democratic perspective, so too are racial difference and social inequality largely hidden from view. This argument comes across forcefully in Himani Bannerji’s analysis of the Sangh Parivar, the Indian party of the Hindu right, which has made profoundly anti-democratic use of the formality of abstract, individual rights and ‘the liberal democratic tenets of freedoms of speech, association and assembly’. These goods were mobilized in support of an ‘extreme and sustained social politics of hindutva, of exclusion and hatred against Muslims’, she shows, a politics that culminated in a slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 (see Bannerji, 2006: 372, 373). Most significantly, Bannerji demonstrates that illiberal polities based on ethnic nationalism have often arisen in modern, capitalist states; such nationalisms, she writes, ‘have combined the “unfreedom” of a class society with that of the “free market,” a neoliberal stance with an authoritarian form of governing’ (2006: 363). To combat this kind of sophisticated ideological manipulation, she contends, an appeal to abstract individual rights is clearly not enough. As she puts it,

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Those who consider cultural politics as unimportant or secondary to what they deem ‘real’ politics do not have the capacity to either understand or resist this fascist hegemony. Nor do those liberals who separate the social from the cultural or the political. Secularism can provide a common platform to unite liberal democratic and left parties and win an electoral victory over the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, as happened in 2004, but this is not enough to hold back the re-emergence of hindutvo fascism. (2006: 385; cf. Brown 2006: 313)

Taken together, these issues suggest that the perennial debate over questions of cultural ‘difference’, group rights and multicultural recognition – the debate that characterizes the state of democratic theory today – is essentially irresolvable, because these questions constitute the nature of democracy itself. The ideal of collective self-legislation, by and for the people, under conditions of freedom, equality and solidarity, is actually at odds with itself. It entails in the first place an irreconcilable need, in the name of freedom and solidarity, to question the demos while simultaneously closing its boundaries, and it entails in the second place an impossible compromise in the name of equality between the demand for inclusion, pluralism and openness to ‘others’, and the demand that a communal ‘we’ is instantiated and defended against both violent and non-violent threats. The very nature of democratic solidarity and collective identity is thus in conflict with the norms of individual autonomy, freedom and rights that democracies themselves demand. There are, in short, internal tensions inherent in the very nature of the democratic ideal – concerning its foundational legitimacy and the impossibility of its promise – that simply cannot be fully repaired by the legal, institutional or even ethical remedies that are offered by theorists working to address democracy’s manifest deficits, yet that simultaneously provoke democracy to aim for its unrealizable perfectibility nonetheless. Democracy is, in one sense at least, nothing other than the crisis that gives rise to its own critique.2

Democracy in crisis Despite this constitutive crisis of the first order, democratic polities do indeed function and even sometimes thrive,

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which is precisely why legal, institutional and ethical repairs are properly conceived and undertaken. This is true at least in the best-case scenario, which would entail a relatively homogenous populace that shares some kind of communal identity, a relatively stable and adequate economy, a relatively accountable mode of governance and a relative degree of national security. Under these optimal conditions, disputes and contestations that arise among groups within states or between one state and another can be addressed through what Chantal Mouffe might call a form of agonistic politics, which entails adversarial political relations, but not outright violence or antagonism (see Howarth, 2008: 177–8) – provided, that is to say, that institutional and procedural mechanisms to ensure justice are in place. Moreover, a certain degree of political apathy, prescribed by democratic theorists in the 1950s (in the guise of empirical realism) and institutionalized through mechanisms that effectively disenfranchised the populace, also serves to lessen both the frequency and the severity of social and political conflicts, as it did in the twenty-year period following World War II, thus giving rise to the appearance of successful democratization in various Western nations. As Jeffrey Green summarizes the point, a preference for a certain degree of political ‘apathy’ stemmed from the belief that it enabled social cohesion, whereas mass democracy ‘would lead to chaos and political disintegration’ (2004: 747; cf. Isaac, 1998: 39 and Browne, 2006: 49). Western liberal regimes that have adopted this model of representative democracy did stave off fascism and achieve stability, but, as Jeffrey Isaac argues, they also resulted in extremely poor versions of democracy. For such regimes do not ensure that ‘“the people rule” in any meaningful sense or that “the will of the people is realized”’. Rather, the people’s will is mediated by officials, divided, and only crudely and partially represented (Isaac, 1998: 30). The great virtues of this representative model of liberal democracy, of course – which is more or less taken as the very essence of democracy in the public imagination – are that it undercuts the kind of popular mobilization that leads to fascism – as notoriously occurred in Germany in the 1930s, for example – and that it achieves at least a ‘modicum’ of comfort, security and political stability (Isaac, 1998: 34).

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The great drawback of this model, on the other hand, is that it produces comfort and security at the expense of any significant form of collective self-determination or autonomy. From this point of view, one might say that a legacy of the impoverishment of democracy had already set the stage, at least fifty years ago, for the current state of affairs. In other words, it is arguably precisely because the form of democracy on offer now is so watered down and ineffectual, in terms of providing any real opportunity for civic engagement, that there has been such a dramatic decrease in voter turnout in many Western democracies since the 1980s (which now hovers in the sixtieth percentile in Britain, Canada and the United States), such a manifest loss of trust in public authority, and such a marked decline in governmental legitimacy (see, for example, Parvin and McHugh, 2005: 634–5; Elections Canada, 2006; Carter and Stokes, 2002: 3; Crozier et al., 1975). Writing on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the Trilateral Commission’s 1975 Task Force Report, ‘The Crisis of Democracy’ (Crozier et al., 1975), for example, Robert Putnam, Jean-Claude Casanova and Seizaburo Sato claimed there was no longer any ‘significant evidence’ that ‘fundamental democratic principles and institutions faced a serious threat’ in 1995. However, they quickly added, even if democracy was essentially more secure in its institutions than had been thought possible twenty years earlier, this was not to say that everything was therefore ‘well with politics and government in the trilateral world’, because there was no question that political alienation and widespread cynicism were rampant in Western democracies (Putnam et al., 1995). Such a status quo might have been deemed generally acceptable as long as the other conditions (economic, social and political) were met. However, we don’t live in the best of times, and this returns us to the way in which democracy is in crisis now, at a second level or order, as it were – that is, in an urgent and timely sense that goes beyond the ‘spectacular index of public impatience’ with democratic politics that is evidenced by declining participation in elections (Maier, 1994: 48). Indeed, the suggestion that the success of democracy might be measured solely in terms of electoral turnout may itself be a symptom of the very crisis this book attempts to illuminate and to interrogate – namely,

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that there is less and less public space in which to engage meaningfully in the world or with one another, and that there is greater and greater violence undertaken to foreclose what space there is – rather than as a causal factor that might simply be addressed through attempts to increase civic participation. Given an increasingly heterogeneous make-up of the populace in European and North American countries, due to massive changes in migration flows, the condition of unstable or radically impoverished economies in the global South and East due to privatization and global deregulation, and the growing manifestation of governmental unaccountability in the West in response to real or perceived threats to national security, I would submit, the tensions within democratic regimes that already exist at the first order – concerning the legitimacy of the people, the impossibility of collective autonomy, and the essential antagonism towards others that is built into democracy’s very character – are subject to forces that stress them beyond the repairs that customary checks can provide. Beginning with the notorious events of September 11, 2001 – barely moments after the obviously premature proclamation of the ‘end of history’ that the fall of the Berlin wall was said to have inaugurated (Fukuyama, 1992) – there has been a marked rise of violence around the world towards intolerable ‘others’ and the gradual erosion of democracy, even where its certainty has been least open to doubt. Consider, for example, the ongoing ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the ‘Bradford riots’ in July 2001 in England, which involved days of violent, racial conflict between ethnic minorities and a white majority in West Yorkshire, the inexcusable abuse of human rights exercised by the US government at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, the illegitimate American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the bombings in Madrid, Spain, in 2004, the riots in France in as many as three hundred towns in response to the deaths at the hands of the police of two African-born teenagers in Clichy-sous-Bois in late October 2005, the American Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 – which criminalizes ‘all foreign born people who live, work, and pay taxes in the United States, but from whom . . . current immigration law has denied permanent resident status’ (Chacón, 2006) – the arrest in August 2006 of twenty-four suspected ‘terrorists’

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following the bombing of three tube stations and a bus in London, England, and the violence that erupted in France again in November 2007 in the Parisian suburb of Villiersle-Bel, which is home to a large population of people of African and Arab descent, and which is plagued by high unemployment rates, poverty, racial segregation and inadequate educational opportunities for French-born children of immigrants.3 If the above examples signal the widespread, violent contestation of democratic community, moreover, they also signal a second issue, particularly since September 2001, which is the erosion of the sacrosanct individual rights that are supposed to be the hallmark of liberal democratic societies. The American ‘wars’ on drugs and on terror seem to amount to, respectively, a war on African-Americans and a war on Muslims in particular and on those of (or thought to be of) Middle Eastern or South-Asian descent more generally.4 Ironically, there is little evidence that these initiatives to combat drug use or increase ‘security’ have been particularly effective, although it is clear that they have padded prison cells and alienated racialized citizens, immigrants and visitors in Western democracies, often at the expense of legally enshrined individual rights. An especially egregious case in point is that of Maher Arar, the Syrian-born, Canadian citizen who was detained by US immigration officers in New York on his way back to Canada after visiting Tunisia in 2002. Denied access to legal council or due process, he was suspected (but not formally accused) of having connections to Al-Qaeda, and was summarily deported by the US government to Syria on the basis of incomplete or misleading information supplied by the Canadian RCMP. Arar was held and tortured for almost a year in a Syrian prison. On 18 September 2006, the Canadian ‘Arar Commission’ cleared Arar of all suspected activities and connections related to terrorism in general and to the security of Canada in particular, but the emotional and financial damage appears to be irreparable (see Arar Commission, 2006, and Maher Arar’s website).5 Another notorious case was the police shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in the Stockwell tube station in London on 22 July 2005. De Menezes was a Brazilian national suspected of having taken part in four attempted bombings that had taken

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place the previous day. Although he was unarmed, he was pursued and then shot seven times in the head – killed long before even his identity, let alone his alleged involvement, could be determined. He was later proven to have had no connection to the attempted bombings. Legislation such as the USA Patriot Act of 2001, the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 and the Australian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2005 paves the way for the quashing of individuals’ civil rights in precisely these ways. These events are by no means conclusive, but they do reveal that democratic constitutional regimes around the world are in significant trouble in ways that are increasingly urgent in their implications. They indicate a widespread and multifaceted problem liberal democratic regimes are having dealing with ‘others’ and thus with making good on their most essential aim of embodying the rule of the people as a whole and simultaneously ensuring their freedom and equality. Such examples suggest an irrefutable rise of virulent, civilizational clash, both between sovereign states and within them. Moreover, the countries that have been implicated in events of these sorts – Canada, the United States, Switzerland, Australia, France, Ireland and the United Kingdom – are among those that pride themselves particularly on the freedom they provide, the tolerance they endorse and the equality they espouse. How can we address the violence that is emerging everywhere towards weak and minority others, the internal rupture of communities and the resurgence of ethnic forms of identity in so many societies that represent themselves as democratic? How might we rectify the growing inequality before the law – or even its suspension – and the increasingly inequitable allocation of civil rights, which are reaching violent and therefore critical proportions?

Theories of democracy These questions are under serious consideration among political scientists, social theorists and political philosophers. As Carter and Stokes note in the introduction to their collected volume, Democratic Theory Today, ‘the growing assertion of religious or ethnic identity by minorities is due

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both to the increase in migration in a globalized world and to a new assertiveness among migrants’ and, consequently, there is also ‘a growing awareness of the challenges to conventional notions of citizenship in a culturally diverse society, where people may have multiple identities and allegiances and where the possibility of global citizenship is on the agenda’ (2002: 6, 3–4). On this basis, P.J. Kelly argued in 2001 that ‘multiculturalism’ is ‘a political problem for modern ethnically plural societies’, and that it has arguably ‘become the problem for political philosophers in the last decade’ (2001: 428), particularly in terms of the ‘potential crisis in [liberalism’s] universalist self-representation’, as Wendy Brown has clarified more recently (2006: 316). Indeed, Isaac remarked in 1998 that, as a result of ‘economic transformations . . . new forms of global mass media, and dramatic demographic shifts’, the most serious problem facing liberal democratic regimes now ‘is what might be called a crisis of national identity’. This crisis is one whereby the very ‘meaning of membership in a national community and of democratic citizenship in a nation state’ is called into question (Isaac, 1998: 35–6). In a review essay on ‘Recent democratic theory’ written at roughly the same time, Mary Dietz summarizes the issues facing democratic theorists as follows: the crisis of identity/difference (in national and international, as well as group and cultural terms), the creation of shared yet diverse communities, the articulation of civic moral ideals, the meaning of civil society, the challenges of multiculturalism, the problems facing participatory social movements, the procedures of deliberative democratic practices, and – above all – the phenomenon of citizenship, whether as an ‘ideal’ . . . a ‘myth’ . . . or a ‘theoretical problem’ . . . are the themes that animate much democratic political theory today. (1998, 113–14)

It is clear that questions concerning the nature of national identity, the value of democratic citizenship and the possibility of civic solidarity – questions, in short, that arise from the crisis of democracy I have identified as occurring at the second order – are now high on the political science agenda and, indeed, that they have been for quite some time. As a case in point, the thirty-fourth Annual Conference of the Atlantic Provinces Political Science Association – which

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met in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in early October 2008 – was entitled ‘Democracy’s Shifting Shorelines: Representation, Citizenship & Governance’, and shortly thereafter the fourth Global Conference on ‘Pluralism, Inclusion and Citizenship’ was held in Salzburg, Austria. Yet, if it is conceded that, in a certain sense, democracy is always in crisis to begin with – that is, that it is constitutively in critical condition, so to speak – then it is not clear that the kinds of answers to these questions such scholarship will produce – essentially, that what we need now are different or additional institutional fixes – will go very far towards addressing the root issues at stake. In other words, if a timely and urgent crisis at the second order, which is manifest now as rampant, civilizational clash and which has provoked extensive discussions and analyses of citizenship and democratic practice, is itself informed by an underlying crisis of the first order, which is to say, by the critical condition of democracy as such, then debating the relative merits of, for example, deliberative democracy versus communitarianism, or social democracy versus civic republicanism, simply will not be enough, since these approaches were only partially successful even at the best of times. In fact, one might venture that there are arguably two basic limitations to a majority of the conceptual models on offer. The first limitation concerns the evident theoretical impasse that has all but stalled innovative developments in analytical democratic thought since approximately the 1980s: the liberal–communitarian debate. Already in 1998, Mary Dietz, writing in the British journal Political Theory, expressed frustration with the then decade-old practice of reducing all theoretical questions relating to democracy to the polemical terms of the conflict between individual rights and group identity (1998: 116). Yet this polemic continues to play itself out. Just as K.A. Appiah is applauded (in 2006) for having succeeded ‘where so many other theorists and philosophers have failed: explaining the value of diversity in terms of individuality’ (Soutphommasane, 2006: 115), so Bhikhu Parekh is chastised for falling too far on the communitarian side of the line (see Kelly, 2001). In his text The Politics of Identity (2004), Mike Kenny overviews the debates about identity politics in Anglo-American political

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thought and focuses particularly, in the final two chapters, on the liberal (recognition) and communitarian (difference) discussions, as do a host of other writers working in the Anglo-American tradition, including Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, James Tully, Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, Duncan Ivison, Iris Marion Young, Amy Gutmann and Avagail Eisenberg, among others. These theorists all offer responses to the ‘question’ of social difference and the issue of national identity – with a range of proposals that include increasing the avenues available to members of various subnational communities for public, civic engagement through deliberative juries, polls, referenda and consultative bodies informed by carefully defined procedural criteria based on discourse ethics (deliberative democracy); increasing social capital through the encouragement of community associations (civic republicanism); instituting the devolution of traditional state functions onto civil society associations comprised of independent, voluntary members (associative democracy); extending democratic structures of governance and political participation from the national to the global level (cosmopolitan democracy); founding collective national identity on constitutional principles drawn from political culture rather than on ethical principles associated with cultural forms of life (constitutional patriotism); encouraging cultural memberships and collective solidarities within an overarching liberal state (communitarianism); and redistributing wealth through progressive taxation and social welfare reform (social democracy) – but fail to address the constitutive (or first-order) crisis of democracy itself. What these perspectives share, in other words – notwithstanding their many important differences and insights – is the assumption that the contemporary crisis of democracy is provoked by the antithesis between alterity and democracy, between the ‘othered’ and democracy, between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, between the non-citizen and the citizen, and so on; incommensurable ‘others’ are deemed the source of the problem. From this point of view, the kind of radical, irreducible difference that contemporary conflicts manifest is seen as a ‘crisis’ for democracy – a crisis of policy or law, for example – that can best be addressed through the greater inclusion of given cultural identities, expanded conceptions of citizenship or the broadening of civil rights.

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Such an approach, rooted as it is in the politics of identity and yet insufficiently attentive to its exclusionary logic, ultimately succeeds well only insofar as it sidesteps or defers the crisis that radical difference entails. Ironically, the continental response, which has often positioned itself on the difference side of the debate and which tends to address the reality of radical difference much more directly, may also be locked into the same dialectic – although, as Patchen Markell rightly notes, most careful continentalists do not crudely advocate radical contingency, anarchy, insubordination, contestation, rupture or some such aim simply in the place of identity, rule or stability (Markell, 2006: 2). On the contrary, because those such as Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Sheldon Wolin, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Jacques Rancière do all concede that ‘some sort of rule is unavoidable’, as Markell puts it, their theories are in fact troubled, even while they are enriched, by the paradox that ‘democracy’ means both the ideal of popular rule in which ‘the people’ (‘we’) rule over our collective destiny and, simultaneously, the ideal of popular insubordination or unruliness, in which ‘the people spontaneously shatter the bonds of established political forms’ (Markell, 2006: 2, 3). It is a paradox they have neither resolved nor fully taken on. Moreover, just as Browne suggests that Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy is a ‘countermodel’ of the deliberative model (Browne, 2006: 54), so it is not at all clear that these partially inverted models of democracy are not also responses to the same liberal– communitarian, identity–difference, conceptual binds that stymie analytical democratic thought. Markell, for example, suggests that, insofar as continental scholarship on democratic theory proceeds ‘by inverting a common objection to democracy’ – namely, that it amounts to mob rule by the incapable and the uninformed – ‘the space they have opened up is structured by a series of stark oppositions’ between the closure and the openness that democracy constitutively entails (Markell, 2006: 2). Nonetheless, much of this work does delve, as Markell says, beyond institutional issues into the ‘“elementary idea” of democracy itself, exploring problems that lurk in and behind its basic terms’, and it is specifically to this endeavour that the present volume is intended to contribute (see

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Markell, 2006: 1). Many of the arguments in the chapters that follow draw directly on resources those continentalists provide. For the second, more general, limitation attending so many conceptual models of democracy is that they tend to respond to the second-order level of crisis, without fully attending to the first. In other words, while analytical, theoretical work on representative democracy, deliberative democracy, radical pluralism, social democracy, agonism, cosmopolitan democracy, constitutional patriotism, civic republicanism, and so on, does indeed address such obvious democratic deficits as the lack of civic engagement, the impotence of electoral politics, the question of legitimate authority and the inequities attending social and cultural identity, and while continental, theoretical work on various forms of radical democracy does indeed attend to and expose the irreducible contingency, uncertainty, openness and instability at the heart of democratic power, only a handful of thinkers are trying to think about the possibility of democracy itself on the basis of, rather than despite, its inaugural crisis. To contribute to this conversation, this volume on ‘violence, alterity, community’ addresses the crisis of democracy that is in evidence at the second order of analysis, not by rehearsing, reiterating or reformulating the diversity-withinunity model of democratic reform, nor by simply developing or celebrating the openness of contestability and contingency (as misinformed versions of deconstruction tend to do), but rather by returning to the critical instability that stands at democracy’s first or foundational level – that is, at the level of its very meaning. In other words, this volume offers a departure from the identity–difference, liberal–communitarian, universalist–multiculturalist terms of the debate about the politics of identity. Rather than beginning from either side of those divides, these authors start from the insight that the crisis of democracy is its paradoxical condition of possibility rather than its problem. The term used in what follows to signal this condition is ‘alterity’. This term appears frequently in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who used it to distinguish otherness in its most radical, irreducible, ethical sense from the more quotidian, ontological understanding of what is merely other than what is. In other words, alterity for Levinas qualifies something

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far beyond what is merely different from this, from it, from me, and it therefore signifies something quite apart from the plane of being or of identity. For what is other-than (other than this, other than it, other than me) is merely a negative form of existent, merely that which is not the same as what is – merely a not-having the quality of this, of it, of me – and so what is other-than is ultimately a dimension of the same identity as its positive counterpart. ‘Otherness’ in Levinas’s sense is really uncognizable: it is what is not thematizable, not reducible to the categories of identity, being or understanding I have at my disposal. The Other is the absolute stranger, she or he whom I cannot anticipate, fathom or know, and who makes an experiential demand on me to which I must respond. Indeed, Levinas insists, to reduce the Other to what is merely different from me is to do a radical violence to what makes him or her, so singularly, him or herself. Beginning with a focus on alterity rather than identity opens the possibility of engaging in two sets of debates in an innovative and productive way – debates about the relationship between democratic community and intolerable or violently untolerated ‘others’ on the one hand, and debates about the nature of identity and the possibility of radical democratic critique, on the other. The explicit rationale of this text is to engage with the tensions underlying these debates directly, rather than to occlude them – in Part 1, through a series of questions about the relation between democracy and alterity with respect to power, with respect to the production of subjects and citizens and with respect to political intervention and resistance, and, in Part 2, through a series of questions about the nature of democracy as alterity with respect to the nature of political critique and with respect to the aporetic quality of ‘democracy’ itself, which issues in its own disruption as well as in its potential disruptiveness. Part 1 begins with Robert Bernasconi’s argument that the form of democracy for which alterity is a problem is a very impoverished one indeed, for this is a polity in which the public good has all but disappeared. Bernasconi makes this case by reviewing the debates concerning the shift from public to private ballots in the nineteenth century. He draws particular attention to the difference between what he calls

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the ‘share-holder’ model of democratic practice that is prevalent today (in which one understands oneself as like others in a series, but as a private and unrelated entity) and that now manifests so patently as wide-spread civic apathy, and a notion of responsibility towards others that is produced when one is subject to their gaze in public. In so doing, Bernasconi interrogates the kind of community that is formed on the basis of self-interest and points towards a more robust democratic practice that embraces rather than excludes alterity, whereby voters are held responsible for the effects of their choices – not only on their fellow citizens, but on other nations around the world as well. In Chapter 2, Mielle Chandler develops this theme of responsibility to others on the basis of a critique of mutual recognition. She argues that political recognition, particularly as formulated by Hegel, is premised upon predicates of ownership and objectification and thus precludes in principle the possibility of plurality that an ethic of infinite responsibility entails, and actively produces a colonial attitude toward others. Drawing on Levinas, Chandler underscores Bernasconi’s point that democracy must be rethought beyond the subject–object, identity–difference binaries that have dominated the liberaldemocratic imaginary since the nineteenth century. Clearly, the indifference, objectification and antagonism towards others that Bernasconi and Chandler diagnose in contemporary democratic regimes are very much in evidence. Treating the identity–difference problematic from another angle entirely, Jacqueline Stevens demonstrates, in Chapter 3, that group combat against other groups and, indeed, the production of others as proper objects of state violence, is not only motivated by the rhetoric of selfinterest; the state’s military recruitment discourse also appeals explicitly to its members’ desire for immortality through sacrifice. The chapter thus identifies a number of appeals and narratives, including instrumental ones, used for recruitment. It is especially important to attend, Stevens insists, to the ‘dynamics motivating violence pursued by supposedly civilized countries’. This is precisely the theme taken up by Kelly Oliver in Chapter 4, where the violence undertaken by a specific democratic nation, the United States, towards ‘detainees’ at Abu Ghraib, among others, is given critical attention. In Oliver’s analysis, treating others

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as less than human is motivated in part by a disavowal of our own capacity to wound. Indeed, she argues, the capacity to wound is the original meaning of the word ‘vulnerability’, which is only secondarily defined as the susceptibility to being wounded. Insofar as only the secondary meaning of the term vulnerability is mobilized in theoretical explorations of violence, however, the ambiguity attending human experience – particularly the ‘destructivity, vulnerability and disequilibrium which are integral to the identity of the human species’ – she argues, is overlooked. The consequence of this occlusion is a disingenuous argument for the legitimacy of violence against those deemed horrific, barbaric or uncivilized, and an equally disingenuous assumption of innocence and civility on the part of Western democracies. What is ultimately required, Oliver therefore contends, is the ability to move beyond the struggle for recognition and the violence it entails by considering the psychic forces that operate behind the scenes in conjunction with the essentially human capacity to heal. The politics of recognition that are so central to contemporary democratic thought and that are contested by both Chandler and Oliver are the subject of Elizabeth Povinelli’s analysis in Chapter 5 as well, but here recognition is examined in terms of its other modalities: ‘espionage’ and ‘camouflage’. Most interestingly, Povinelli illuminates the way in which liberal-democratic calls for recognition function to bracket alterity, that is, ‘those aspects of difference over which we cannot agree’, and thus to produce what she calls ‘an aggressive zone of abandonment’ in which harms are done to others in the name of recognition and tolerance itself. Focusing directly on what occurs within the ‘brackets of recognition’, Povinelli draws attention to the need of those deemed other – such as indigenous men and women in Australia – to use tactics of camouflage and espionage if they are to live their lives in the present. Here, it emerges clearly that ‘discourses of belonging in late liberalism’, as Povinelli puts it, produce injustice rather than justice, insofar as belonging is explicitly limited to those who are sufficiently ‘like us’. Faced with genuine alterity, Povinelli shows, recognition ‘trembles’. This point is brought home with particular force in the concluding chapter to Part 1, where Fuyuki Kurasawa offers

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a compelling critique of what Costas Douzinas has aptly termed ‘the visual politics of suffering’ (Douzinas, 2007: 17). Kurasawa focuses specifically on the way in which alterity is visually represented in Western media coverage of humanitarian disasters in the global South, namely, in terms of either pathologization or victimization. He argues that a critical theory of visual representation is urgently needed, given the enormous power of visuality today, and given that humanitarianism is a central pillar of the universality and equality that constitute the democratic ethos. How distant strangers are represented in what Kurasawa calls the ‘humanitarian scopic regime’, therefore, crucially determines the relationship between Euro-American democracies and their ‘others’, as well as the identity of those democratic communities themselves. Ultimately, Kurasawa calls for a dialogic encounter with alterity – one that simultaneously interrogates the ways in which alterity is a problem for democracy and points to a different democratic imaginary altogether. Kurasawa’s chapter makes clear that although alterity is a crisis for democracy as it is currently imagined and conceptualized – that is, in terms of the way in which the individual self-interest, mutual recognition and identificatory practices that constitute its grounds exclude, oppress and subjugate those who are not like ‘us’ – it remains that these imaginings and conceptualizations occlude the tensions that underlie democracy itself. In other words, insofar as ‘democracy’ is an inherently unstable concept and therefore a constitutively imperfectible practice, it is always essentially open to its own critique. Building on this insight, the authors grouped in Part 2 investigate the critical questions that the very alterity that is democracy serves to open up and make possible. Stella Gaon begins this investigation in Chapter 7 with a reflection on the relationship between alterity and the conception of ‘democracyto-come’ that emerges in the later writings of Jacques Derrida. She argues here that although the letter of ‘democratic’ politics signifies its meaning as rule, the spirit of democracy is its radical openness to the alterity of others, and that, in this meeting between democracy’s letter and its spirit, rests the only hope for democracy there is. Developing a similar point in Chapter 8, Catherine Kellogg interrogates the form

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of democracy itself in terms of what she calls its ‘impossible possibility’, whereby democracy can only take place insofar as it remains open to its own ‘dangerous perhaps’ – that is, to its own risk – and thus diverges from its canonical sense of friendship, equality or fraternity, even while it aims towards them. To say that the classical understandings of friendship and love that underlie the ancient conception of democracy need to be interrogated, however, is by no means to say they are not relevant at all, as the chapters by Dorota Glowacka and Sharon Rosenberg clearly illuminate. Specifically, Glowacka attends, in Chapter 9, to the apparently conflicting affects of fear and love in the face of anti-Semitism in Poland, in order to illuminate the crucial role that affect plays, both in xenophobic, ethno-nationalist attitudes, as well as in their proposed remedies. Following Chantal Mouffe, Glowacka argues that, just as democracy is founded on a constitutive political paradox concerning the irreconcilability of individual freedom and collective equality, so too is it founded on an affective paradox concerning the aporetic relationship between fear and love, which emerge as radical political sentiments when viewed in this light. In Chapter 10, Rosenberg undertakes a consideration of political affect as well, this time with respect to the response to violent deaths in and for specific communities (Montreal and Edmonton) in Canada. Rosenberg examines the forms of memorialization through which the violently dead are remembered, in order to open up the complex ways that violence, loss, identity, identification and public memorial history are caught up with each other, and how remembering can take the form of critical intervention. Specifically, in issuing a call to face the ‘almost unbearable’ violence perpetrated on the ‘other’ whose alterity we simply cannot abide, Rosenberg problematizes remembrance practices that operate through modes of identification – which often is taken as the basis of solidarity in democratic theory – and points instead at a conception of ‘democracy’ that might entail a ‘crisis of thought’, whereby it could be conceived as something ‘other than other as same, history as past, and progress as necessitating destruction’. This political call to rethink who ‘we’ are is taken up in another way by Rita Kaur Dhamoon, who examines in Chapter 11 one particular

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dimension of the production of subjects and citizens in multicultural, democratic societies. Dhamoon focuses on the ways in which everyday processes of ‘meaning-making’ produce the distinctly racialized, gendered, classed, sexualized and differently embodied subjects that ultimately constitute ‘the people’. She argues that if ‘democracy’ is conceived as an ongoing practice of making citizens, rather than as an entity, product or form of regime, it can be critically disrupted and redirected to the end of opening up the possibility for ‘new and different kinds of subjects’. In other words, here the ‘crisis of democracy’ is conceived in terms of the power that is always at work in and as democracy, and in terms of the contingency of the subjectivities that are thereby produced, rather than in terms of the need to ‘tolerate’ increasingly irreconcilable ‘others’ who signify alterity. If the power at work in democracy is accounted for and named rather than disowned, Dhamoon submits, it can be radicalized as a social praxis that intervenes in the contemporary crisis to open up subjective possibilities, rather than to close them down. Arguably, the radical democratic praxis that Dhamoon prescribes might be understood as a politics of ‘dissensus’, rather than a politics of consensus, as Ewa Płonowska Ziarek suggests in the final chapter to this book. Ziarek contends that if democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression are to be effective on the ground, what is required is an ethical-political understanding of freedom that sidesteps the seemingly intractable debate between the two positions available today: the liberal position that seeks universal, quasi-transcendental, normative criteria for the determination of political justice beyond difference, and the communitarian, multicultural or ‘difference’ position that advocates the continued contestation or negotiation of heterogeneous forces based on an ethical obligation to the other. While the liberal position in mainstream and in feminist political discourses alike tends to mobilize a conception of freedom based on autonomy, fixed or objectified identity and democratic totality, ethical discourses of obligation are insufficiently attentive to the question of political praxis, particularly with respect to injustices related to race and gender. The ‘dissensual’ politics that Ziarek proposes6 addresses both these limitations insofar as it

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develops from an ‘anarchic’, heteronomous conception of freedom based on the always-embodied, inherently contingent, asymmetrical encounters with others that constitute our identities. It is precisely the gap between ethical responsibility and political manifestations of justice, she argues, that sustains the possibility of democratic life. Together, these authors investigate two dimensions of the crisis that is/in democracy: its always ambivalent and incomplete inclusion of ‘others’, and its constitutive propensity to provoke its own critique by virtue of its non-identity with itself. These irreducible dimensions of democracy are juxtaposed, rather than opposed, to illuminate various sides of a complex, multifaceted relationship between democracy and violence, alterity and community. What emerges from these reflections is an understanding of irreducible difference as valuable insofar as it is a provocation to, and a condition for, radical democratic practice, rather than its obstacle or impediment. In thus considering the crisis of democratic politics from the side of alterity rather than from the side of identity, we hope to contribute to the possibility of a new thinking, and indeed to a revitalized practice, of ‘democracy’ in the wake of its crisis today.

Notes 1

Brown analyzes Seyla Benhabib’s position in The Claims of Culture (2002) through this lens (see Brown, 2006: 312–13).

2

Above all, a ‘crisis’ signals an unstable condition and thus a radical opportunity for judgement or critique. As Seyla Benhabib explains, ‘critique’, together with the word ‘crisis’, is etymologically connected to the Greek word ␬␳␫´␴␫␨ – ‘which means dividing, choosing, judging and deciding’. She continues, ‘krisis refers to dissent and controversy, but also to a decision that is reached and to a judgment that is passed. “Critique” is the subjective evaluation or decision concerning a conflictual and controversial process – a crisis. The connection between a process of social and natural disturbance and subjective judgment upon this process is even more striking in medical terminology, to which the terms were restricted in the Middle Ages. In this context, “crisis” designates a stage in the development of a disease that is a turning point and during which the decisive diagnosis concerning the healing or worsening of the patient is reached’ (1986: 19).

3

These occurrences are by no means limited to Western democracies, as the cases of the 2002 Hindu fundamentalists’ rampage against the Muslim minority in Gujarat, the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the Kosovo war of 1996–99 and the violence against immigrants that erupted

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in 2008 in Johannesburg bear out. My focus here, however, is on instances of crisis in democratic regimes in the West. 4

With respect to the ‘war on drugs’, African-Americans are apparently ‘nearly 12 times more likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men’ in the United States. This figure reflects an arrest rate that ‘rose at three times the rates for whites’ between 1980 and 2003, ‘despite roughly equal rates of illegal drug use’ (New York Times, 2008). With respect to the ‘war on terror’, Islamophobia seems to be encouraged and even provoked by entertainment media’s portrayal of Arabs as ‘evil characters’ on television and in films; such ‘othering’ is also manifested by social discrimination against Muslim air travellers and by ‘electronic billboards over interstate highways urging motorists to “Report Suspicious Activity” (drivers in turbans?)’ (Brzezinski, 2007: B01). See, for example, ‘Flying While Muslim: “Racial” Profiling Post9/11’ (2007).

5

The US government admitted no wrong-doing after a five-year probe into the affair; however, Arar’s case was reopened in 2008 by the US Department of Homeland Security’s head of internal investigations, Richard Skinner, when the release of previously classified material indicated that US authorities’ reasons for deporting Arar were not entirely credible. The new information, not yet publicly available, apparently casts doubt on the conclusion that US officials should be exonerated after rushing to remove Arar to Syria, notwithstanding the conclusion on the part of other US officials that he would likely be tortured there (Freeze, 2008: A1).

6

For a much fuller discussion of the relationship between the politics of dissensus and radical democratic practice, see Ziarek (2001).

References Brzezinski, Zbigniew (2007), ‘Terrorized by “War on terror”: how a threeword mantra has undermined America’. The Washington Post (March 25): B1. Bannerji, Himani (2006), ‘Making India Hindu and male: cultural nationalism and the emergence of the ethnic citizen in contemporary India’. Ethnicities, 6(3): 362–90. Benhabib, Seyla (1986), Critique, norm, and Utopia: a study of the foundations of critical theory (New York: Columbia University Press). Benhabib, Seyla (2002), The claims of culture: equality and diversity in the global era (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Brown, Wendy (2006), ‘Subjects of tolerance: why we are civilized and they are the barbarians’, in H. de Vries and L.E. Sullivan (eds), Political Theologies: Public Relations in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press). Browne, Craig (2006), ‘Democratic paradigms and the horizons of democratization’. Contretemps, 6 (January): 43–58. Carter, April and Stokes, Geoffrey (eds) (2002), Democratic theory today: challenges for the 21st century (Malden, MA: Polity Press).

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Chacón, Oscar A. (2006), ‘Latin American immigrants struggle for fair immigration reform’, Americas Program Special Report, 11 July 2006, translated by Katie Kohlstedt, available at http://americas.irc-online.org/ am/3356. Crozier, Michel, Huntington, Samuel and Watanuki, Joji (1975), ‘The crisis of democracy,’ Trilateral Commission Task Force Report #8, available at www.trilateral.org/projwork/tfrsums/tfr08.htm. Dietz, Mary (1998), ‘Merely combating the phrases of this world’. Political Theory, 26(1): 112–39. Douzinas, Costas (2007), ‘The many faces of humanitarianism’. Parrhesia, 2: 1–28. Elections Canada (2006), ‘Report of the Chief Electoral Officer of Canada on the 39th General Election of January 23, 2006’, Section 4.1.2, ‘Voter Turnout’ available at http://www.elections.ca/content.asp?section= gen&document=p4& dir=rep/re2/sta2006&lang=e&textonly=false#p4 12 (accessed 14 May 2008). Freeze, Colin (2008), ‘Porous border spurred Arar’s rendition’. Globe & Mail, 6 June 2008: A1. Fukuyama, Francis (1992), The end of history and the last man (New York: Free Press). Green, Jeffrey (2004), ‘Apathy: the democratic disease’. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 30: 5–6, 745–68. Howarth, David (2008), ‘Ethos, agonism and populism: William Connolly and the case for radical democracy’. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 10: 171–93. Isaac, Jeffrey C. (1998), Democracy in dark times (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Keenan, Alan. (2003), Democracy in question: democratic openness in a time of political closure (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Kelly, P.J. (2001), ‘ “Dangerous liaisons”: Parekh and “Oakeshottian” multiculturalism’. The Political Quarterly, 72(4) (October): 428–36. Kenny, Mike (2004), The politics of identity: liberal political theory and the dilemmas of difference (Cambridge: Polity Press). Maier, Charles S. (1994), ‘Democracy and its discontents’. Foreign Affairs, 73(4) (July/August): 48–64. Markell, Patchen (2006), ‘The rule of the people: Arendt, Archê, and democracy’. American Political Science Review, 100(1): 1–14. Näsström, Sophia (2003), ‘What globalization overshadows’. Political Theory, 31(6): 808–34. Näsström, Sophia (2007), ‘The legitimacy of the people’. Political Theory, 35(5): 624–58. New York Times (2008), ‘Racial inequality and drug arrests,’ Editorial, 10 May 2008, available at www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/opinion/10sat1. html. Parvin, Philip and McHugh, Declan (2005), ‘Defending representative democracy: parties and the future of political engagement in Britain’. Parliamentary Affairs, 58(3): 632–55. Putnam, Robert, Casanova, Jean-Claude and Sato, Seizaburo (1995), ‘Revitalizing trilateral democracies’, in Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington and

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Joji Watanuki, ‘Trilateral Commission Task Force Report #47’, available at www.trilateral.org/ProjWork/tfrsums/tfr47.htm. Soutphommasane, Tim (2006), ‘Review of Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity’. Thesis Eleven, 85 (May): 115–30. Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska (2001), An ethics of dissensus: postmodernity, feminism, and the politics of radical democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

Internet sources Arar Commission (2006), ‘Version captured September 13, 2007’, available at http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/206/301/pco-bcp/commissions/maher_ arar/07-09-13/www.ararcommission.ca/eng/index.htm. BBC News (2008), ‘Swiss reject new citizenship rule’, available at http:// news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/europe/7429728.stm. ‘Flying while Muslim: “racial” profiling post-9/11’ (2007), video available at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2952394158092697182 (accessed 15 May 2008). Maher Arar website, www.maherarar.ca (accessed 12 May 2008).

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Part 1 Alterity as a crisis for democracy

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1 ‘Don’t blame me!’ Seriality and the responsibility of voters Robert Bernasconi

Personal interest and the secret ballot Within democracies, politicians are called upon to take responsibility for their decisions, but surprisingly little is heard today about holding voters responsible for the decisions that they make when electing their representatives. The rhetoric of voters is represented by the bumper stickers that say, in effect: ‘Don’t blame me’. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Britain, the idea of the voters’ responsibility to the nation as a whole took hold for a time. The circumstances surrounding its appearance help to explain what was meant by it. The idea arose when the franchise was still severely restricted, and it spread because it provided a way to negotiate the gap between a growing belief in democracy and the fact that the majority of the nation was excluded from the electoral rolls. The resulting tension gave rise to a powerful reformist movement, but many supporters of reform, like many supporters of the status quo, claimed that, to the extent that those who had the vote understood themselves as responsible or answerable to those who did not, the latter could be said to be taken into account. However, as the suffrage was extended, the idea of the responsibility of the voter to the people as a whole largely disappeared, as if it was no longer necessary, because ‘everybody’ – with striking exceptions, like women and, in the United States, African-Americans – could vote and they could vote as they wanted. In this chapter, I review this history and, on its basis, argue for a new notion of the responsibility of the voter better suited to address the new problems facing democracies today, not

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the least of which is the fact that many of the most pressing problems – such as poverty, climate change or disarmament – are global and so far exceed the powers of even the most powerful democracies that it barely makes sense for voters in the other, less powerful, democracies to consider them under the present system. In early nineteenth-century Britain, elections could easily be bought, particularly in ‘rotten boroughs’, as constituencies with few voters were called. Two main ideas for reforming the situation were proposed. Some wanted to expand the size of the electorate so as to make the buying of elections more difficult, whereas others believed that the introduction of the secret ballot would better protect the integrity of the process. However, the secret ballot also contributed to the introduction of a new, more insidious form of corruption, insofar as it transformed the experience of voting in such a way that it helped to legitimate a distorted idea of democracy, one in which each individual seeks an advantage over his or her neighbours, without much regard for their fate or the fate of the nation as a whole, let alone the distant others, forgotten in their own countries. As I shall show, some of the early advocates of the secret ballot saw the danger even before the new system of voting was introduced, but they changed their minds too late to stop its introduction. They recognized that the secret ballot would distort the relation of the voter to other members of the electorate. If a voting system isolates the voters at the very moment when, for an instant, they exercise their main political function, it encourages them to think of themselves as separated from society, with interests unique to each of them. Voting, which had until that point been a public act, now took place in private and so was, in a fuller sense, privatized. It was not only that, because nobody had to know how one voted, one was no longer under the same burden of having to explain one’s vote. Even more important was the fact that one now voted as an isolated individual who answered not to others, but only to one’s own conscience (Bulkeley, 1839: 48). This meant that, particularly when employing the usual techniques of self-deception, it was easier than hitherto to vote simply from personal interest. As Fraser’s Magazine put it in 1831, ‘He who votes by ballot votes as an individual, he who votes before the world votes

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as a component part of a public body’ (quoted in Park, 1931: 55). The way to ‘buy’ elections under the secret ballot was not to intimidate voters, nor offer to pay them directly, but to promise to pass measures that would benefit some at the expense of others and to warn voters that their political opponents would harm their political interests. There was nothing new about partisanship and the pursuit of selfinterest; what was new was the growing belief in representative democracy. The democratic systems that evolved first in the West, and that have spread from there, have an extraordinary resilience: even when the vast majority of people are disaffected with their governments, they rarely seem to blame the system, still less look to change it. Today, such debates about democracy as we do have – about whether there should be a paper trail for machine voting, whether convicted felons should be allowed to vote, or whether limits can be placed on campaign funding – are confined to the mechanics of democracy and only occasionally touch on the question of the fundamental principles of democratic government, such as those that arise whenever a majority overrides, not just the interests of a minority, but their rights, particularly when that minority can be identified as other than the majority by virtue of race, ethnicity or religion. However, the extraordinary changes the world has undergone in the last fifty years or so, in particular the way that, as a result of both globalization and global warming, every country is impacted by other countries to an unprecedented degree, call for a complete rethinking, not only of international organizations like the United Nations, but also the way individual voters think of their own nation’s relations to all others and to other nations as such. Whereas voters in poor countries face an unprecedented lack of autonomy, because the decisive issues are not determined within the borders of their own countries but by international organizations and foreign governments, the rich democracies focus on maintaining their advantage. That is why I attempt here to develop a notion of responsibility that lives up to the political challenges of today and tomorrow. This notion of responsibility helps to legitimate the widespread experience of the citizens of the richer nations that they have a responsibility to the whole world and to future generations, just as

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some in the nineteenth century articulated a sense of the voter’s responsibility to the nation as a whole. Above all, this new notion of political responsibility is needed to correct the tendency, so widespread within traditional ethics, to limit our responsibilities and maintain the individual’s good conscience, particularly as these same techniques are now employed by transnational companies to serve their shareholders at the cost of their employees and the poor countries that host them (Bernasconi, 2005). My aim in this chapter is thus threefold. First, by examining the nineteenth-century debate that led to the introduction of the secret ballot into Britain, I will show how the invention of a certain technology of democracy – the ballot box was understood in that way – shaped and transformed the understanding of democracy by allowing private concerns to dominate over the public interest. By engaging in such a genealogy I want to highlight aspects of the contemporary democratic process that we too readily take for granted. Second, by highlighting the role that the new notion of responsibility, long before it became a recognized philosophical concept, played in political debates in Britain in the 1820s and 1830s, I want to make a contribution to the history of concepts, albeit one motivated by an interest in Sartre’s idea of hyperbolic responsibility and – although it is less clear in this chapter – Levinas’s notions of infinite responsibility. Finally, and this is the most important task, I want to ask whether the early nineteenth-century discourse on responsibility can offer any assistance for this new task in this new context. If, in this chapter, I turn back to a few select moments in the history of democracy, it is not out of an inappropriate nostalgia, but to elucidate how the current understanding of politics in general, and democracy in particular, has been shaped by institutional practices that were formed some time ago. My thesis is not that public voting should be restored. There are no doubt contexts where this would be appropriate and would have the desired effect, but one cannot simply turn the clock back. But, at a time when democracy is in crisis, with opinion polls showing that it is widely agreed that it is not working, there is every reason to think about why our democracies take the form they do. Only then are we ready to understand what improvements have to be made in each particular context.

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The collective responsibility of the electorate If one thinks of democracy as simply majoritarian rule, then there seems little need for the idea of the voters’ responsibility to the nation as a whole. Under the open ballot, the idea of voters being answerable for their votes had been associated with what was called the ‘moral’ or ‘legitimate’ influence of the major landowners, who had in an earlier time been thought to have embodied the best interests of the country at large, because the wealth of the country was concentrated in their hands (Moore, 1976: 233–4). Once the majority of the voters were to be found in the cities, the role earlier theorists had accorded to the landowners became a thing of the past, and so, for the most part, did the idea of the responsibility of the voter. In this view, the idea that voters had a certain responsibility to represent non-voters survived largely as part of the justification of the exclusion of women from the vote, long after universal suffrage had been declared. Husbands were in some sense also representing women, and John Stuart Mill argued that a man had to answer to his wife and daughters, albeit only in relation to issues ‘specially affecting women’ (Mill, 1977: 334). Of course this conception says nothing to the question of the inclusion of unmarried women and widows. But there is another account of public voting that can be given, which ties it in with a richer account of responsibility than this seems to suggest and which gives a more powerful place to alterity. The history of the term ‘responsibility’ points to a stronger tie between the ideas of responsibility and representative democracy. The English noun ‘responsibility’ and its equivalents in French (responsabilité) and in German (Verantwortlichkeit) first appeared in the late eighteenth century in the context of democratic politics and stock companies: the minister is responsible to the people as the directors of a company are responsible to the shareholders (Bernasconi, 2008). Initially, the term ‘responsibility’ was a virtual synonym for accountability in one or other of these spheres. Thus, in 1787, James Madison, arguing that elections ‘produce’ responsibility, insisted that it must be limited to objects within the power of the responsible party, in this case the elected representative (Cooke, 1961: 423–4).

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However, by 1815, Benjamin Constant, in his treatise De la responsibilité des ministres, sketched the logic of a new conception of responsibility that would eventually separate the notion of responsibility from that of accountability. A minister is held responsible to the people, not for breaking the law, which is a matter for the courts, but for the legal misuse of power. It is a feature of this misuse that it cannot be codified or specified in advance except in the vaguest possible terms (Constant, 2001: 441 and 460–1). Hegel, who read Constant, seems not to have been convinced of the need to make a clear distinction between responsibility and accountability; nevertheless, in his discussions of the Chinese mandarins who were held to answer even for events beyond their control, he employed the term ‘responsibility’ because no guilt could be attached to them (Hegel, 1996: 137). But, although philosophers were slow to see any need to introduce this new term into ethical discussions, it quickly came to play a role in public discourse (Henriot, 1977). Indeed, later in this chapter, I shall document John Stuart Mill, in 1859, using the term ‘responsibility’ to refer to a feeling that has its source in the gaze of others and that can lead one to do the right thing, whereas six years later he will say of ‘the feeling of moral responsibility’ that it is the ‘feeling of liability to punishment’, thereby identifying it with what I call ‘accountability’ (Mill, 1979: 454). Already in the 1830s, to be held responsible is to be held answerable in a very different sense from the way criminals are held accountable for breaking laws that are clearly stipulated ahead of time. Trustees, who are called upon to execute someone’s wishes, are responsible not just for following the letter of the instructions given to them, but also for following the spirit of that person’s intentions. The idea of responsibility readily suggested itself to writers on voting practices because the voters increasingly came to see themselves as exercising a trust: that is to say, the few on whom the right to vote was conferred were considered trustees for those who had no vote, both by supporters and opponents of the ballot (Mill, 1830: 8; Smith, 1839: 17). In this way, the legitimation of the system came to depend on the idea that the voter was under an obligation to vote with an eye to the general interest. That was why, when in Britain

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the call was introduced to move from open voting to a secret ballot in an attempt to eliminate or at least reduce the occasion for bribery and intimidation, there were many who balked at the idea that the privatization of electoral politics could secure the public interest. In the twentieth century, public voting survived within the trade union movement, but, when the British government moved to restrict it, the reasons for maintaining it had been largely forgotten by the general public. An examination of the history of the debate surrounding the introduction of the secret ballot in both France and Britain shows how the gaze of the Other was supposed to function to promote responsibility. That the process of voting could be a group activity in which the people come together to celebrate their unity was an idea proposed at the time of the French Revolution by Paul-Philippe Gudin. Gudin actually supported the secret ballot, which was mandated for the election of the legislative assembly in 1791, but he believed nevertheless that all the people of Paris, not just the voters, should gather in one place so that all the votes be cast at the same time and ‘under the eyes of citizens, and those of the wives and children’ (Gudin, 1791: 237). He wanted the election to be a public festival, as if he wanted to counteract the alienating experience of voting in secret. He entitled his book Supplément au contract social, and one way in which he differed from Rousseau was in his admiration of the English system of open elections. He clearly believed that popular assemblies around France would be more civilized than the drunken electoral meetings that Hogarth documented in England (see Bindman, 2001). Rousseau had virtually excluded the possibility of a thriving democracy in a populous country like France or England, but Gudin saw large assemblies in which everyone could see the others and celebrate their presence as a solution to that problem. Rousseau had advocated the public gaze as a means of keeping the representatives in check (Starobinski, 1988: 231), but more than anybody at that time he had richly exposed the dangerous ambiguity of the gaze. It was not only a safeguard, but, by creating the desire to be looked at, it could lead to vanity and envy (Rousseau, 1992: 47). The gaze of the Other can call one to one’s democratic responsibility or subvert one’s judgement.

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The problem Gudin was trying to address was the fundamental one of the conditions of possibility of a democratic society as it had already been identified by Rousseau: the problem was how, beginning from separate individuals, one could generate a sense of the people as a people, such that their decisions would be binding on all of them, even those who disapproved of the policy and had voted against it. Rousseau’s answer was that changing the organization of society was not enough: what alone could legitimate this process was a transformation of human being, and it has seemed to many that the transformation could ultimately be accomplished only by a level of violence that was unacceptable. Rousseau, in Of the Social Contract, was already clear that a majority of voters voting in terms of their particular interests would not secure the interests of all. On his analysis, the problem lay in the vast gulf separating the will of all, which might be ascertained by totalling the votes cast by individuals, and the general will, which can be ascertained not by asking each voter whether he or she is in favour of a proposal, but by asking each voter – without the benefit of political discussion, political parties or opinion polls – whether ‘the people’ are or are not in favour of the proposal. Rousseau’s explanation of the need for this shift was that to be in a minority on such a vote was not to be defeated, but simply to be mistaken (Rousseau, 1994: 201). To be sure, that assumed one already identified oneself not with one’s particular interest but with the whole. This was the problem Gudin had attempted to solve through a transformation in the technology of voting (Bernasconi, 2000). Whereas the French introduced the secret ballot in 1791, with only a few exceptions, by contrast, in Britain, voting in parliamentary elections remained public until 1872 and then became secret only after a long and often acrimonious debate in which the underlying principles of democratic theory were articulated and refined. It is that discussion which is important here. Until the secret ballot was finally introduced, individual votes were often a matter of public record. In many districts, commercial printers would publish poll books that not only recorded how the electorate had voted, but sometimes also their addresses and occupations (Vincent, 1967). In Britain, the leading advocates of the secret ballot were initially the utilitarians. To be sure, from the

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very beginning, they recognized that it depended on the prevailing circumstances which method of voting would best arrive at ‘the interests of the nations’. Even the leading advocate of the secret ballot, James Mill, was willing to acknowledge that someone, who might vote according to their sinister interest when voting in secret, might vote differently if forced to vote publicly: ‘he will be subject to all the restraint, which the eye of the community, fixed upon his virtue or knavery, is calculated to produce’ (Mill, 1826: vol. III, 452). Furthermore, he and other utilitarians tended to share with their opponents the idea that the vote was a public act to be discharged as a public trust (Mill, 1830: 8; Grote, 1974: 37). In 1837, Lord Nugent defended the proposal for a secret ballot because he feared undue influence on voters, leading him to wonder why others needed to know how someone voted (Nugent, 1837: 43). At the heart of this response was his rejection of the idea that the vote was a trust. He accepted that the voter had a moral responsibility to his conscience to cast his vote for the public good as well as his own, but he denied that the voter was under a moral responsibility to discharge a duty to the unenfranchised (Nugent, 1837: 25). Similarly, in 1839, the primacy of individual conscience was asserted by James Bulkeley when he argued that the individual voter, unlike a Member of Parliament, was not responsible to the public, but only to himself: The Voter . . . is responsible to no public tribunal in the disposal of his vote. The trust reposed in him is that he votes according to the conscientious dictates of his judgment. His conscience is the sole empire. He commits a breach of trust, incurs the forfeiture of his privilege, only as he admits another influence to sway him than its pure dictates. (Bulkeley, 1839: 48)

This is the crucial question around which the debate over the secret ballot came to settle in England: to whom is the voter answerable and how does one promote responsible voting? Some argued that the voter was answerable only to himself: the question was then whether this meant simply that one should try to isolate the individual voter from all external influence or whether some forms of outside influence might prompt the voter to vote his conscience. Other theorists took the view that responsibility meant a

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more direct form of answerability. The idea that tenant farmers were somehow answerable to the landowners was, in this view, not necessarily ‘illegitimate’, because in an appropriate context it was supposed that the farmer’s interest was tied to that of the landowner. However, there was also a view that the voter was answerable to everyone. And it is this possibility that interests me. John Stuart Mill believed that it was just as much an abuse of the vote to be guided by one’s own selfish interest in casting one’s ballot as it would be to vote against one’s interest because one had been bribed by some third party to do so: Jeremy Bentham, a supporter of the ballot, had recognized that it was subject to ‘the seductive influence of the personal interests, and affections, sympathetic and antipathetic, of each individual voter’ (Bentham, 1983: 158). John Stuart Mill had a similar suspicion of private individual interest, but presented the alternative in terms of an accountability, that is not punishability, but responsibility in the broader sense: he wrote to George Lewis, in 1859, that the ballot might give the impression that the State countenances the idea that ‘electors may vote as they please, and are not accountable for their vote as a moral act’ (Mill, 1972: 607). Indeed, in the same year, in ‘Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform’, he took up the language of responsibility: ‘when the voter’s own preferences are apt to lead him wrong, but the feeling of responsibility to others may keep him right, not secrecy, but publicity, should be the rule’ (Mill, 1977: 331). Just as representative democracy works as a system only if the representatives do not allow their private interest to determine their votes, so each member of the electorate should not follow their ‘self partialities’ when deciding for whom to vote (Mill, 1977: 332). Mill was clear that openness in voting was the best way to overcome such tendencies, not because it promoted conformism, but because it stimulated rational discussion. It is a very superficial view of the utility of public opinion, to suppose that it does good only when it succeeds in enforcing a servile conformity to itself. To be under the eyes of others – to have to defend oneself to others – is never more important than to those who act in opposition to the opinion of others, for it obliges them to have sure ground of their own. (Mill, 1977: 335)

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Publicity forces everyone ‘to determine, before he acts, what he shall say if called to account for his actions’ (Mill, 1977: 335).

Sartre and seriality In the twentieth century, nobody has explored the issues at stake in the debate between secret and open voting more radically than Jean-Paul Sartre who, in 1973, wrote a brilliant essay under the title ‘Elections: A Trap for Fools’. He characterized the voting system introduced into France in 1789, according to which the suffrage was extended only to landowners and exercised through a secret ballot, as ‘profoundly unfair . . . but not absurd’ (Sartre, 1977: 198). His argument was that, by conducting their democratic duty in isolation, these voters reflected the real separation between them, and yet the expectation could nevertheless arise that, through the secret ballot, their common interest, that is to say, their class interest, would emerge through this process. However, continued use of the secret ballot, even after universal suffrage was introduced, meant to Sartre that workers were voting ‘as landowners even though they owned nothing’ (Sartre, 1977: 199). He did not say so explicitly, but he clearly believed that the result was a process that was both unfair and absurd. For Sartre, secret voting cannot elect a legitimate government that is truly representative of the people; it can only produce the transformation of each concrete voter into an individual who has become other to him- or herself. Sartre wrote of the change each person undergoes as they approach the polling booth: To each person it says: ‘No one can see you, you have only yourself to look to; you are going to be completely isolated when you make your decision, and afterwards you can hide that decision or lie about it.’ Nothing more is needed to transform all the voters who enter that hall into potential traitors to one another. (Sartre, 1977: 200)

According to Sartre, democracy finds its legitimacy in the people acting together in concert. This makes it highly significant that, in so-called advanced democracies, mass

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action and popular assemblies are relatively rare and tend to be seen as ways of circumventing the democratic process rather than an indispensable moment of it, at least as a possibility. At one level, the contemporary crisis of democracy can be traced back to a bad ontology, whereby the individual is conceived as the prior unit from which society derives and is given as that to which all political institutions must therefore refer. But the individual so conceived is merely a fiction, an artificial construction, an abstract unit of analysis. It is only in relation to one’s family, fellow workers and class that the individual is concrete. The concrete individual cannot be understood in isolation, and so Sartre believed that the tendency to talk as if it can was evidence of a defective, or at least incomplete, way of thinking: analytic reason. Sartre believed that analytic reason had served in the seventeenth century to undermine the institutions of the Ancien Régime, but that it subsequently supported liberalism by its power to cast doubt on our ties with others, particularly our class interests, but also the bonds of race and gender (Sartre, 1963:5). The political philosophies that are constructed in terms of the abstract individual efface and distort the issue of alterity within the social body. On the basis of that insight, Sartre described how the system of elections in France at his time succeeded only in preserving each voter as a member of a series, whereas it is only when the people gather together as a group that they experience their power. To vote in secret is not to experience power, but to discover one’s impotence. Nevertheless, Sartre did not advocate public voting as a panacea, any more than I do. He was too sanguine about the prevailing social conditions and their impact on voters. Nor was he willing to place his hope in shame as a positive moral force. For Sartre, since Being and nothingness, the gaze of the Other, at least outside a possible future egalitarian society, enslaves me (Sartre, 1957: 267). Because Sartre’s critique of the secret ballot is sustained by his brilliant description of seriality in Critique of dialectical reason, I shall introduce it here to deepen my analysis. He there described how, particularly in cities, people for the most part live their lives in relative isolation, with each one’s project relating to the projects of others only

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negatively. He called this seriality, and his most famous example of it is the bus queue, where everyone in line is formally identical insofar as they each share the same aim, but have a unity that is simply negative, insofar as those ahead of them in the line can be understood as obstacles to their project of getting on the bus. Similarly, their place in life is not determined simply by who they are: each is determined ‘as Other by every Other as Other’ (Sartre, 1976: 261). Ultimately, this means that each is not only Other than the Other, but also Other than her- or himself (Sartre, 1976: 266). Sartre’s explanation of this idea is clearest when he extends the notion of a serial unity to embrace identities like that of the Jew, the colonialist or the soldier. All Jews, as members of a minority grouping, submit to a ‘perpetual being-outside-themselves-in-the-other’ that, when it is embraced with conscious lucidity, amounts to a responsibility for all other Jews which leaves them at the mercy of what those other Jews do, insofar as what one Jew does comes to be associated with all Jews (Sartre, 1976: 268). That is to say, the Jew who takes up being-Jewish interiorizes it as a responsibility in relation to everyone else who shares that identity, and this makes that person vulnerable to what those others do: ‘the Jew, far from being the type common to each separate instance, represents on the contrary the perpetual being-outside-themselves-in-the-other of the members of this practico-inert grouping’ (Sartre, 1976: 268). Similarly, a colonialist who beats his colonial servant may do so because that is what a colonialist does in such circumstances. Or, to take another example, which seems to fit Sartre’s analysis very well, when a black family in the United States buys a house in a predominately white area, white families may start to put their houses on the market, not because they have any personal objections to the presence of a black family in their neighbourhood, but because of a conviction that other white families might object, with the result that house prices would fall. They act, not as themselves, but as Other than themselves. Sartre used the terms of this analysis to describe some of the changes that already, in the late 1950s, were transforming the character of politics. For example, he contrasted the way that in radio broadcasts political messages are received

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passively, with the way one can exhibit one’s reactions at a meeting (Sartre, 1976: 270–2). Listening to a voice on the radio or television, one becomes conscious of the impotence that arises from not being in a position to respond. Furthermore, one has no way to reach the others who are also listening, except possibly by a letter to the newspaper, which is simply to answer seriality with seriality. In any event, one does not listen to this voice on the radio as oneself, but listens to it as it might be listened to by Others (Sartre, 1976: 274–5). The relevance of these analyses can readily be shown by applying them to the way that politicians in the United States tell their public what ‘the American people’ believe: they establish a false solidarity within seriality by saying: ‘The American people stand for x’; ‘the American people know y’. The conviction they are trying to convey is that to believe anything else is ‘un-American’, a label that still gets employed in spite of its notorious history. A loyal US citizen who wants to be a ‘good American’ but who does not share these beliefs is faced with a discrepancy within him- or herself. That person wants to be what he or she is not and is not what he or she wants to be. The speaker who tells them what ‘an American’ thinks manipulates the series. Sartre introduces this idea in relation to the phenomenon of hit records, whereby, once a recording hits the top ten, its sales tend to multiply: it becomes a recording I must have because the Other has it and so I listen to it ‘as an Other, adapting my reactions to those which I anticipate in Others’ (Sartre, 1976: 646). The same idea also applies to all aspects of fashion. But the impotence at the heart of Sartre’s account of seriality (Sartre, 1976: 227 and 309) is perhaps nowhere more clearly experienced today than in relation to democratic politics and the discrepancy that exists between our ideas of what democracy should be (sometimes – in spite of Derrida’s warnings against doing so – referred to as a ‘democracy to come’) and the reality in which we exist. To the extent that this rhetoric of ‘the American people’ succeeds, American citizens find themselves obliged to bring themselves into conformity with what they are supposed to be by disowning or eradicating what does not conform to this picture of who they are. This is fine so long as the picture does indeed express their true

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interests. The problem here is not that of the tyranny of the notion of authenticity, or some vague idea of being this or that (a problem that Sartre had already brilliantly expressed in Being and nothingness). The problem is both to identify what the real interests are of any group and, perhaps even more critically, to determine which is the operative group identity at any given time. But here the common mistake is to suppose that that can be determined in advance, whereas it is the historical situation itself that is the determining factor. The secret ballot is an instrument of seriality and one that seriality helped to introduce. During the debate over the introduction of the secret ballot in Britain in the nineteenth century, opponents called it un-English (Kinzer, 1978), using the term much as politicians in the United States use the term ‘un-American’. To this extent, one can readily show that even the opponents of the ballot had already succumbed to serial thinking.

Public interest and the crisis of democracy Politics is inherently a public affair. Representatives are called upon to vote publicly and to justify themselves. Why is it assumed that, in a mature society, the voters need to be protected from public scrutiny? When the electorate was small in number, as was the case in so-called rotten boroughs in England, it was perhaps possible to fix an election by buying votes. I have argued that today the more common way of buying votes is to divide the electorate into segments and offer inducements to that segment. And yet we live in a time when sacrifices need to be made, not just for the sake of the poorest in the nation, but also for the poor in other societies and indeed for future generations as well. To be sure, we can continue to look at that as simply a matter for the private conscience of each individual voter. But the individual voter feels impotent in the face of such problems as nuclear war, the radically uneven distribution of resources and the impending ecological disaster. Voting in front of others, where appropriate, that is to say, where it is not liable to introduce a source for greater distortion than voting in private already does, does not by any means exclude the

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possibility of conformism, the comfort that comes from behaving like all the rest. Indeed, in a context of fear it would take great courage to go against the crowd. Nevertheless, the courage of a few can also encourage others. It also takes courage to put the interests of distant others, particularly future generations, above the interests of oneself and one’s immediate circle. There are experts today who are ready to tell us that what is necessary for the survival of human life as we know it is for governments to take actions that are not politically viable. On the face of it, this sounds absurd, until one understands how private interests have effaced the public good. That way of putting things sets up the individual in opposition to the community, but the question then becomes whether it is not possible to attain a conception of the concrete individual as one who is implicated in all others, including future others, and this is what Sartre’s concept of hyperbolic responsibility provides: ‘man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders: he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being’ (Sartre, 1957: 553) (Bernasconi, 2006: 43–52). The governments of the most powerful Western democracies are convinced that democracy is the solution for every other country, while at the same time their citizens summon little enthusiasm for the practice of democracy at home. The latter are dissatisfied with the choices they are given and the parties that offer them those choices. The problems inherent in the democratic system of government as it tends to be conceived today are well known to everybody: lack of protections for the interests of minorities; the interpretation of the choice of one candidate over another as a mandate for a political party to promote a whole agenda; the infrequency of elections; the leeway given to representatives and the consequent possibility of corruption, especially as a result of campaign financing abuses; the discipline of the party system; the fact that votes in marginal districts have more significance than those where one party predominates; the impotence of the voter and so on. But the main crisis of democracy arises from the question of whether democratically elected governments are in a position to address the issues that face humanity today. Democratic nations are built on the model of the shareholder: one has a vested interest in the nation – there was long a question of whether,

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if one did not have property, one had such an interest and thus whether one should have a vote – but on this model the obligation of the country is to pursue only the interests of shareholders (not of workers or customers, except indirectly). I believe that, just as the conception of responsibility was originally linked to the relation of shareholders to the directors of a company, but has now grown into the more expansive conceptions of responsibility promoted by Sartre and Levinas, so democracies must look beyond their borders to their broader obligations, if they are to maintain their legitimacy. I have argued that it is through Sartre’s dialectical conception of the individual, that of the concrete individual, who in his or her concreteness is implicated in the lives of others and in no way independent from them, that we leave behind the false ontology of the abstract individual on which democratic theory has so long relied. I have also argued that the gaze of the Other, as it operates to instil into voters a sense of responsibility to all the others, is what transforms democracy from simply being another version of the rule of the powerful, here the power that a majority can exercise over a minority, that is to say, over minorities. Democratic theory must seek a way to incorporate the gaze both into its account of the conditions of its own legitimacy and into its practices. A democracy that thinks and acts in this way would be sustained by a hyperbolic notion of responsibility, whereby everyone is responsible for everything, including future generations. But that is not the only reason why I have focused on Sartre in the final pages of this chapter. Sartre had a clearer sense than most of how a distorted conception of alterity, that which belongs to seriality, underlies the crisis of democracy, just as the cultivation of the gaze of the Other, who questions me ethically and calls for my response, provides the only way out of the crisis.

References Bentham, Jeremy (1983), The Constitutional Code, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Bernasconi, Robert (2000), ‘Rousseau and the Supplement to the Social Contract’. Cardozo Law Review, 11:5–6, 1539–64.

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Bernasconi, Robert (2005), ‘Globalisierung und Hunger’ (translated by T. Bauer), in P. Delhom and A. Hirsch (eds), Im Angesicht der Andenen (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphenes): 115–29. Bernasconi, Robert (2006), How to read Sartre (London: Granta). Bernasconi, Robert (2008), ‘Before whom and for what? Accountability and the invention of ministerial, hyperbolic, and infinite responsibility’, in S. Sullivan and D. Schmidt (eds), Difficulties of Ethical Life (New York: Fordham University Press): 131–46. Bindman, David (ed.) (2001), Hogarth’s election entertainment (London: Apollo). Bulkeley, James (1839), The ballot: some questions answered (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper). Constant, Benjamin (2001), ‘De la responsabilité des ministres’. Principes de politique et autres écrits, 9(1) (Tübingen: Niemeyer): 439–96. Cooke, Jacob E. (ed.) (1961), The Federalist (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press). Grote, George (1974), Minor Works, A. Bain (ed.) (New York: Burt Franklin). Gudin, Paul-Philippe (1791), Supplement au contract social (Paris: Maraden and Perlet). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1996), Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte 1822/1823, K.H. Ilting et al. (eds) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner). Henriot, Jacques (1977), ‘Note sur la date et la sense de l’apparition du mot “responsabilité”’. Archives de Philosophie du Droit, 22: 45–62. Kinzer, Bruce L. (1978), ‘The un-Englishness of the secret ballot’. Albion, 10: 237–56. Mill, James (1826), The history of British India, 3rd edn (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy). Mill, James (1830), ‘On the ballot’. Westminster Review (July): 5–28. Mill, John Stuart (1972), ‘The later letters, vol. 2’, in F.E. Mineka and D.N. Lindey (eds), Collected Works 15 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Mill, John Stuart (1977), ‘Thoughts on parliamentary reform’, in J.M. Robson (ed.), Essays on politics and society, collected works 19 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press): 311–39. Mill, John Stuart (1979), ‘An examination of Sir William Hamilton’s philosophy’, in J.M. Robinson (ed.), Collected works 9 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Moore, David Cresap (1976), The politics of deference (Hassocks: Havester Press). Nugent, Lord (1837), On the ballot (London: James Ridgway). Park, Joseph H. (1931), ‘England’s controversy over the secret ballot’. Political Science Quarterly, 3: 51–86. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1992), ‘Discourse on the origins of inequality’ (translated by J.R. Bush et al.) in Collected writings 3 (Hanover: University Press of New England). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1994), ‘Social contract’ (translated by J.R. Bush et al.) in Collected Writings 4 (Hanover: University Press of New England). Sartre, Jean-Paul (1957), Being and nothingness (translated by H. Barnes) (London: Methuen).

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Sartre, Jean-Paul (1963), Search for a method (translated by H. Barnes) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). Sartre, Jean-Paul (1976), Critique of dialectical reason (translated by J. Rée) (London: NLB). Sartre, Jean-Paul (1977), Life situations (translated by B. Eisler) (New York: Random House). Smith, Rev. Sydney (1839), Ballot, 2nd edn (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans). Starobinski, Jean (1988), ‘The political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ (translated by Julia Conaway), in A. Ritter and J. Bondarella (eds), Rousseau’s political writings (New York: Norton): 221–32. Vincent, J.R. (1967), Pollbooks: how the Victorians voted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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2 Sovereignty, property and the lifeworld: democracy’s colonization of alterity Mielle Chandler Among the inhabitants of ‘Western’ democratic nations, democracy is generally understood as antithetical to colonialism. Indeed, democracy has come to be deified as ‘the good’, in part precisely because it is generally believed to provide the kinds of intersubjective procedures and decisionmaking processes that not only facilitate the peaceful coexistence of a plurality of individuals and nations, but also give rise to and sustain that plurality. This chapter contests this belief, suggesting, rather, that plurality is severely circumscribed by the ontological structure and the economic processes endemic to political participation. Being a state or a citizen requires being recognizable as such, which requires conforming to the dominant organizational strictures of statehood and personhood. In accordance with these organizational strictures, sovereign entities (individual bearers of rights and nation-states) approach others through one of two colonizing actions: by engulfing that which is external as property, or by recognizing that which is external as a similarly engulfing or sovereign entity. In no way do I wish to deny that the proliferation of democratic decision-making processes may indeed be the best option available for interhuman1 life in the current world order. But the necessity of, and cries for, democracy today need not, and indeed should not, impede its critical investigation. Particularly at issue here is democracy’s fundamental tenet of mutual recognition. While foundational for freedom and self-determination, mutual recognition, I argue, circumscribes plurality and difference, and obviates the possibility of yet unconceived ways of organizing intersubjective relations. Indeed, plurality and difference are

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precisely what a democracy based on mutual recognition most essentially overcomes. This chapter demonstrates that the cognitive processes of mutual recognition that Hegel so aptly describes serve to reinforce and perpetuate political structures predicated on private property, thereby radically curtailing the range of possible manifestations of alterity. The circumscription of plurality and difference stems from a cognitive approach that issues in patterns of property and exchange inextricably bound up in liberal democracy. While democracy is embraced as the ground of plurality, it ties plurality to the level of identity, thereby obscuring the ontological sameness on which such plurality is predicated. In other words, differences at the level of identity both depend on, and serve to mask, the ontological uniformity of sovereignty. The dominant conceptualization of democracy denotes, for example, specific processes of decision-making and forms of governance that must take place in order for the democratic legitimacy of a sovereign nation-state to be recognized. Although democratic processes are not confined to states, sovereignty remains the underlying ontological structure every democratic process presupposes. Further, the intersubjective constitution of sovereignty is bound up, in turn, with an economic mode of engagement in which an administrative apparatus solidifies its identity through material and territorial possession. That which is territorialized and claimed, that is, the ownable ‘matter’ of the lifeworld, is submitted, as such, to the purposes of identity. Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of western ontology illuminates some of the ways that ontology intersects with epistemology and economics in this context. First, the presumption that what is significant in interhuman relations is necessarily cognizable (and thus recognizable) serves to subordinate the transcendent dimension of humanity to the political. In effect, the proliferation of identities at the political level results in a loss of plurality at the level of ontology. Second, the idealization of sovereign self-determination functions to derogate the ‘property’ that is its condition of possibility. In other words, in order to be recognized as a subject, one must assume proprietary jurisdiction over segments of an (historically and technologically constructed) objectifiable realm (see Latour, 2004). Third, sovereign

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subjectivity is assured through a regime of mutual recognition that submits all others to one of two categories: ownable object or recognizable and recognizing subject. The mutual recognition endemic to the democratic process is thus predicated on the logic and practice of exchange. If homogenization at the level of ontology is bound up with democratic processes whereby the material conditions of existence are subordinated to sovereignty, how can plurality be fostered? This chapter contrasts the Hegelian form of reciprocal recognition to Levinas’s conceptualization of subjectivity, which issues out of an ethical sensibility in which one is called, entirely beyond the bounds of exchange, to respond to the needs of others. Levinas’s phenomenology can be understood as an ethical call for the material nurturing of plurality – not at the level of identity, but at the level of the interhuman, which is to say, beyond ontology, at the level of ethics as the transcendence of the face-to-face. For Levinas, ethical subjectivity entails a compulsion to provide the material conditions for the flourishing of others without confining them to particular identities or, indeed, to any form of reciprocity. Ethics, responsibility and transcendence, for Levinas, precede violence, identity and politics. Politics – whether it takes the form of rational public debate or the brutal violence of war – is engagement at the level of identity, the level of being that both repeats and presupposes ethics and the sociality in which the subject, to use Levinas’s phraseology, is called as responsible. Although it is the condition of the myriad ways humans might organize their political and economic structures, the radical passivity of ‘undergoing’, of being called to respond by the face of another – what Levinas terms ‘transcendence’ – is, in Levinas’s analysis, covered over and obscured by identity and politics. Within the intersubjective structure of liberal democratic ontology, giving without expectation of return renders one akin to ownable matter, and thus vulnerable to derision and objectification. This objectification of the subject who is other-oriented impedes the social proliferation of responding to others in ways that facilitate their flourishing, because it constrains response to structures of exchange. Levinas’s philosophy is valuable not only because it entails a critique of politics predicated on mutual recognition and identity, but also because it provides the conceptual

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resources for fostering the plurality that democracy promises but fails to deliver in its contemporary forms. Nonetheless, Levinas’s privileging of the interhuman leads him to commit the Hobbesian fallacy of attributing a solitary egoism to presocial human creatures. I therefore conclude the chapter with the suggestion that, by foreclosing openness to the infinity and transcendence of the non-human lifeworld – that is, by freeing the subject but not the object from the subject–object binary – Levinas stunts the ethical potential of the very subject whose responses he is concerned to elaborate, and limits the range of pluralities which that potential could facilitate. What is required, therefore, is a reconceptualization of the lifeworld as infinite in its material fecundity.

Ontology, alterity, identity Ontology, for Levinas, is the manifestation of things as things and the fusing of appearance with an essence apparent to a cognizing ego. The ontological structure of sovereignty refers, then, to the appearance of sovereignty and its fusion with sovereignty’s central feature: self-determination. Ontology, in Levinas’s account, involves a ‘thingification’ that ties the ‘thing’ to being. This nexus of identity and matter, Levinas argues, is generally taken in Western thought to encompass the totality of being, including the entirety of its meaning and significance. Levinas contends, however, that being is not all there is, and that significance therefore is not constrained to what is identifiable or cognizable. Indeed, for Levinas, significance necessarily overflows identity. The meaning of the other is always so much more than I could ever name or think. The term ‘alterity’ is, in Levinas’s writings, nuanced by this analysis. Alterity does not refer to another identity or to the other of an oppositional dialectic, but rather to what overflows identity and issues from beyond being. Levinas explains alterity as a certain mode of sociality – the face-toface moment in which one senses that the other person is sacred and unfathomable. As such, the other defies circumscription to the plane of existence, the ontological plane, upon which identities are constructed. The distinction and connection that Levinas draws between the ontological level

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and the level of identity are thus central to his analysis. We can think of sameness at the level of identity through various categories that define persons as belonging to, for example, a particular nation, sex or gender, ethnic, linguistic, religious, cultural, ideological or socioeconomic group. Sameness at the ontological level is harder to see, but it can be located in the process by which the sovereign subject takes itself as its own object; it is the process by which the sovereign subject becomes identical with itself, that is, the particular process through which one claims oneself as a selfidentical ‘one’ through self-ownership. This process, moreover, explains the unparalleled success of sovereignty as the paradigm of actuality and decided existence. Existence in Hegel’s schema is existence qua dominant manifestation. Levinas does not contest this formulation of existence; rather, he highlights what lies beneath and beyond it, the ground, if you will, on which manifestation is predicated and from which it emerges. While Levinas seeks to articulate what is beneath and beyond manifestation, Hegel, in contrast, narrates the process by which the sovereign subject comes to manifest as such. On the one hand, Hegel illustrates a monadic, internal emergence, a self-creation; on the other hand, he belies monadic self-creation insofar as he reveals that subjectivity is predicated on intersubjectivity, specifically, on the mutual recognition of property rights. In this intersubjective process, moreover, determination-as-sovereign involves a cognitive conversion of the surrounding environment into either objects to be owned or sovereign subjects to be recognized. This distinction between subject and object hinges on proprietorship. The Hegelian process of self-creation as self-ownership does not issue in subjects who gestate or nurture other entities into the world; rather, it reproduces itself through what I term ‘ontological colonization’. In being recognized, ‘the Other’ is not only constructed as, and constrained to, a particular identity or set of identities, but it is tied to a particular ontological structure. Indeed, the kind of ontological structure that is designated determines in turn the kind of recognition – as sovereign subject or ownable object – that is bestowed and, in the case of the sovereign subject, claimed. The process of self-determination thus also entails

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a process of other-determination. In the democratic ideal, all sovereign subjects, as such, are self-owning entities of equal worth. For Levinas, on the other hand, who puts forth a notion of subjectivity forged not through politics but rather through ethics, to confine another to the plane of being is to commit epistemic violence. This violence also entails negligence: a failure to be attuned to the depths of the other’s signification, a failure to listen for another’s call. To listen for another’s call, and to respond to the needs one discerns, is to become a fully mature subject, a subject as maternal (see Levinas, 1981: 61–94). It is to become the condition of possibility for the flourishing of another person. In this responsibility for others, Levinas locates the uniqueness (or what he terms ‘unicity’) of the ‘ethical subject’. The political subject, in contrast, the citizen or nation-state, is unique not in its responsibility, but rather in its identity, and differences of identity are predicated on a structure of sovereignty that follows a uniform model. Ontological colonization is thus the process through which sovereign identities are created, but this liberation qua colonization remains obscured by the glorification of sovereignty. It is a liberation in which all become masters, entities claiming self-determination through the ownership of the external conditions of their possibility.

Cognition and the subject/object structure As a ‘singleness which has incorporated . . . subsistent difference into itself’ through the actions of the will ‘and so as a unit exclusive of other units’ (Hegel, 1952: 208, par. 321), the nation-state is one such a sovereign entity. The task at hand is to understand the blueprint (which would be the metaphysical equivalent of a genetic code or a divine design) of this individual. In particular, how do cognition and will construct the self as a territorial hoarder? What is this thing called ‘the will’ and how has it come to shape individuality as necessarily acquisitive? Why has acquisition, seemingly for its own sake (rather than, say, only for the sake of need, or in order to care for others), become the blueprint of individuality? And why has this blueprint come to pattern the ideology according to which politics and economics are

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structured and practised? Why is it that this kind of self has become the dominant variety, the variety that has reproduced and spread the most, gained the most territory? Hegel’s rendition of the individual as an owning self-idea, a self-owning cognizer, goes some distance towards explaining, if not the genesis of this phenomenon, at least its contours and operations. Cognition is, for Hegel, the theoretical counterpart to a selfishly acquisitive will. A closer look at the self qua selfdetermining thought may help us to understand Levinas’s vehement rejection of the notion of cognitive origin and his turn to sensibility and corporeality as the site of subjectivity. The defining distinction and relation between (human) thought and will, Hegel explains, may be described as follows: In thinking an object, I make it into thought and deprive it of its sensuous aspect; I make it into something which is directly and essentially mine. Since it is in thought that I am first by myself, I do not penetrate an object until I understand it; it then ceases to stand over against me and I have taken from it the character of its own which it had in opposition to me. Just as Adam said to Eve: ‘Thou art flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone,’ so mind says: ‘This is mind of my mind and its foreign character has disappeared.’ An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think. The ego is thought and so the universal. When I say ‘I,’ I eo ipso abandon all my particular characteristics, my disposition, natural endowment, knowledge, and age. The ego is quite empty, a mere point, simple, yet active in this simplicity. The variegated canvas of the world is before me; I stand over against it; by my theoretical attitude to it I overcome its opposition to me and make its content my own. I am at home in the world when I know it, still more when I have understood it. (Hegel, 1952: 226, par. 4, add. 4)

This conjunction of thought (understood as rational and thus as universal) and will, a conjunction that allows a ‘me’ to make the world ‘mine’, is the conceptual blueprint underlying the liberal democratic ideals of the autonomous and free individual and the sovereign nation-state. This freedom is, fundamentally, a property relation. To elaborate, the liberal ideal of freedom is reflected in a Hegelian notion of the will as issuing out of a self-cognition only fulfilled in determinacy. It is in this movement – whereby self-

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determination qua self-creation and independence is claimed by positing an abstract ego taking itself as a materially determined object, a material territory with a head – that the intersubjective recognition of property becomes the condition and definition of both identity and freedom. Selfdetermination cannot be determinate without being recognized as such by another recognizable, determinate ‘existent’ (see Levinas, 1969). Political recognition thus comes at an ethical price: self-determination requires that I recognize your property, including your bodily existence and subsistence, as yours, and your sovereignty over it, and that you recognize my property as mine. Thus the cold and hunger I see on your face, too, belongs to you; it has no bearing on me. The liberal-democratic condition of agonistic accumulation in the face of suffering and need can perhaps be understood in this light. The concept of the ideal state is of such a wilful cognizer, and this indicates a complex egoism. In other words, Hegel attributes to the sovereign state the same ontological structure as the individual person, the fully actualized man, and so it is through his rendition of the ideal individual person that this complex egoism can be understood. Indeed, in his major work on ‘the science of the state’ (1952: 11), Philosophy of Right, Hegel begins with the individual as the starting point for the modern conceptualization of politics. To be sure, ‘right’ is ‘the realm of freedom made actual’ (Hegel, 1952: 20), and this realm of freedom is actualized, for Hegel, in and through the nation-state. Nonetheless, right’s ‘precise place and point of origin is the will’, and the will ‘begins in thinking, in the ego’ (1952: 20, 226; emphasis added). To be more precise, thought is ego,2 and the will is ‘a special way of thinking, thinking translating itself into existence, thinking as the urge to give itself existence’ (1952: 226). Thinking is thus the action of the impetus called ‘will’, and it is a possessive action. ‘In thinking an object . . . I make it into something which is directly and essentially mine’ (1952: 226). I thereby ‘penetrate’ it; ‘it then ceases to stand over against me and I have taken from it the character of its own which it had in opposition to me’ (1952: 226). As we saw above, Hegel illustrates this owning-thinking, the ego/object structure, by referring to the ‘original’ dyadic gender structure: ‘Just as Adam [ego as thought] said to Eve

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[object as material]: Thou art flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone’, so mind says: ‘This is mind of my mind and its foreign character has disappeared’ (1952: 226; emphasis added). The relation of subject to object, whereby the subject infuses the object with actuality, will and reason through ownership, is thus explained by Hegel in terms of property. Specifically, within the subject/object structure, objectification involves designating persons as matter, and designating matter (objects) as devoid of agency. Whereas persons cannot, qua self-defining, cognizing egos, be owned as property, material surroundings are, for Hegel, without thought or will. Thus they are without actuality, purpose or meaningful existence until they are claimed as property. As Hegel explains, All things may become man’s property, because man is free will and consequently is absolute, while what stands over against him lacks this quality. Thus everyone has the right to . . . make the thing his will, or in other words to destroy the thing and transform it into his own; for the thing, as externality, has no end in itself; it is not infinite self-relation but something external to itself. A living thing (an animal) is external to itself in this way and is so far itself a thing . . . Thus ‘to appropriate’ means at bottom only to manifest the pre-eminence of my will over the thing and to prove that it is not absolute, is not an end in itself. This is made manifest when I endow the thing with some purpose not directly its own. When the living thing becomes my property, I give to it a soul other than the one it had before, I give to it my soul. (1952: 236)

‘I give to it my soul.’ Property endows the thing with purpose. To objectify surroundings through ownership is to imbue them with mind, thereby bringing matter into intersubjective social, political and economic relations. Yet how are we to understand instances in which this objectification is applied to human beings? The eradication of Eve’s foreign character by Adam imbues Eve with Adam’s purpose and Adam’s mind, endowing Eve with Adam’s reason for existing, which is his own existence. Eve is thereby constituted as a material element that provides Adam with determinate reality. Read through a Hegelian lens, Adam’s naming – cognizing, thematizing and (pro) claiming – of the animals endows them with his mind, for his purposes. This schema

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can be applied to the history of European colonization: the claiming and naming of new territories endowed them with the mind and purpose of the colonizing nation-state, thereby constituting all that is other as material property to be possessed. Objectification is not, however, only outward-looking. Most importantly, it is an operation of the self on the self as well. ‘Man’ is free, for Hegel, when he takes himself as his own object, when ‘he takes possession of himself and becomes his own property and no one else’s’ (1952: 47, 48). In taking oneself as one’s own possession, it is not first one’s body that is established as one’s own. Rather, ‘one’s self-consciousness . . . becomes established as one’s own, as one’s object . . . and thereby capable of taking the form of a “thing”’ (1952: 47, 48). Freedom as sovereignty thus requires the objectification and enslavement of others and of oneself for its existence. This ideal of freedom as an act of self-determination through a mastery of the material world continues to be upheld in liberal democratic contexts. This ideal, moreover, has been given historical cogency. History shows that continual struggle on the part of the oppressed and the enslaved against technological, economic, political and social forces leads to liberation. Slavery has been abolished – in law if not in practice – and national liberation movements have attained the sovereignty of formerly colonized territories. Freedom, agency and self-determination, it would seem, ultimately prevail in at least a good number of instances. But this very liberation also testifies to colonial ‘successes’ at the ontological level. For, to the extent that liberation has taken place, the liberated have become replicas of the owners and colonizers, self-determining subjects within a subject/object structure. Consequently, alterity is stymied in this ‘totality’ of sovereign freedoms, this regime in which subjectivity is predicated on exchange. Paradoxically, freedom from external objectification continues to take the form of internal objectification or selfownership. This antagonistic self-ownership is maintained through retaining oneself, one’s body, mind and labour, for one’s own interests and against the interests of others. In this form of self-determination, the subject/object structure and distinction remain in place, even as the category ‘subject’

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broadens to include liberated individuals and independent nation-states or, as appears to be the case today, as it effectively shrinks, as increasing poverty and financial debt indenture individuals and nations to persons, ‘artificial’ or otherwise, who hold power through wealth. The subject/object structure thus upholds, ideologically, the domination of objectified matter by a cognizing will in the name of freedom and democratic self-determination. By laying claim to that from which one lives, the Hegelian subject is able to idealize itself as self-causing and thereby as self-determining. Yet, given an ethos in which Hegelian self-determination is the only way to ‘be’, becoming a vessel or precondition for the flourishing of another person has the consequence of relegating one to the category of ‘object’. In a world of finite resources, moreover, to hoard rather than to share with those in need effectively enslaves the poor, thereby entrenching systems in which productive labour and those who undertake it serve to secure and increase the stores of the wealthy.

Ethics and sensibility Levinas rejects the Hegelian notion that the will is the sole human motivating force and, along with it, the philosophical primacy given to a form of cognition that assimilates what it wills into itself. This rejection entails untying labour from the subject/object structure of domination, contesting the ontological privilege of ownership and cognition, and reformulating subjectivity as social responsivity. In so doing he casts the structure of cognition and ownership in another light. For Levinas, subjectivity, cognition and property attest to – even while their manifestations betray – the ethical basis of subjectivity. In particular, he argues that cognition and property are produced and made possible by sociality, by the face-to-face responsivity which precedes any recognition of the other person or the boundaries of his or her determinate existence. In contrast to Hegel’s conception, Levinasian subjectivity does not entail domination through wilful cognition; rather, wilful cognition is only a possibility to which subjectivity gives rise, one that manifests like an iron mask, freezing expression in an unmoving solidity which

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obscures the range of affective expressions, curtailing much of their possible movements. Levinas therefore emphasizes the flesh beneath the mask, the corporeal and sensible inception and elaboration of a self. Rather than on the shoring up and retaining of property, Levinas’s ethical subjectivity is predicated on dispossession. Interestingly, dispossession – giving what I have – requires a previous possession, a grasping, ingesting and even storing of consumable goods. Significantly, then, non-human matter plays as important a role in subject formation in Levinas’s ethics of other-orientation as it does in Hegel’s politics of self-determination. The distinction Levinas retains between subjectivity and alterity on the one hand, and materiality on the other, moreover, leads him to posit as foundational a prototype of the very egoism he seeks to render derivative. In other words, Levinas’s concern to constrain ethics to the interhuman responds to the alterity of the human other, which Hegel’s structure of mutual recognition obviates, but an egoist impetus and an assimilatory grasp still characterize the human subject’s approach to the non-human lifeworld, just as they do for Hegel. This point becomes clear when we recall that, for Levinas, human beings are first subject to sensation; before we can assume particular identities, we feel. Sensibility is thus the precondition of being, of manifestation, will and cognition, in the sense that it is that out of which cultural, political and philosophical potentials arise. But although rooted in sensibility, the identification of someone or something as belonging to a particular category does not take place at the level of pure sensibility. Rather, ‘the intention that animates the identification of this as this or as that is a proclamation, a promulgation, and thus a language, a stating of the said’ (Levinas, 1981: 62). Such proclamations issue out of cognition, reinforcing cognitive thematizations that, applied to the sensible, comprise the act of identification. In the intersubjective process Hegel describes, this act takes a particular form: both the self and the other self proclaim themselves minds substantivized through an antagonistic ownership of material elements. Here, mindas-owning-ego sets itself up against other cognizing egos. In Levinas’s analysis, in contrast, the agonism of egos can be understood as an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of corporeality

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and sensibility. As solidly determined, the ego safeguards itself from the vulnerabilities of the body in the elements, and, as wilful cognition, it safeguards itself from being grasped as a piece of what Levinas terms the ‘elemental’, the ‘faceless’ environment. Levinas’s sensible subject is not determined through action, that is, through any impetus driven by a cognizing will; rather, it ‘undergoes’ its sensibilities. Levinas refers to this undergoing as ‘radical passivity’. Where, for Hegel, the passivity of undergoing renders the human akin to ownable matter, Levinas is concerned to differentiate human undergoing in service of the flourishing of another from the non-human matter consumed and utilized in sustaining human life. In Levinas’s schema, the undergoing of radical passivity requires a previous singularization and an overcoming of egoism. In Hegel’s schema, on the other hand, it is from a self-preservational fear, a fear of becoming conflated with the environment (what Levinas terms the ‘elemental’) as an object to be owned or enslaved, that the self is driven to own, to master the other rather than to be subjected and acted upon. Undergoing, within Hegel’s schema, remains confined to the active subject/ passive object opposition. Yet sensibility, the subject as sensible, undergoes, for Levinas, beyond the confines of this opposition. It is not as a passive object that the self feels the pain of a wound or, in growing old, experiences vulnerability and corporeal finitude, but nor is it as an active subject. And it is neither as active subject nor as passive object that Levinas’s subject feels compelled to respond to the alterity, the signification that exceeds all that it is possible to cognize, of another person. The undergoing of responsivity outside the subject/object binary occurs, on Levinas’s account, on the ethical plane, separately from, and prior to, the ontological plane of cognition and identity. For Levinas, the myriad of interhuman structures – from the egalitarian collective and the commune to the corporation, the juridical system and the state – arise out of an ethical responsivity at the level of sensibility, one that precedes particular social, political or economic structures, and that is not rooted in cognition, thought or rationality. Ethics makes cognition, thought, rationality and thus political structure possible, but the ethical itself is felt, it is sensed, it is a pull, not a thought, decision or choice.

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Nonetheless, very different human and interhuman structures may arise out of the same types of sensibility, that is, out of very similar corporeal experiences. The social responsivity which is, ontogenetically speaking, first played out in the face-to-face responsivity of mother and infant, is reiterated quite differently in the public venues of wealthy, liberal-democratic nation-states than it is, for example, in traditional egalitarian Khoisan encampments, or in the midst of a despotic reign of terror. And interhuman responsivity does not only give rise to a plurality of interhuman structures; these structures are then overlaid back onto sensibility. Different linguistic, conceptual, political and socioeconomic structures, in other words, are both produced out of sensibility, and are also powerful productive forces that shape how persons experience what is sensed. As Levinas explains it, different interhuman structures ‘betray’ ethics (qua sensibility) differently. In the ideal liberaldemocratic context, for example, the asymmetrical responsibility of the face-to-face is betrayed as the symmetrical exchange of entities and quantities that are deemed equal in weight and value. If, however, a range of ethical betrayals is possible, how is it that the liberal-democratic model of exchange has come to dominate? Part of the answer, I think, lies in the fact that the specific manifestation of intersubjective response that currently reigns supreme in the liberal-democratic West is established and maintained through a process in which self and other continually recoagulate each other as sovereign entities. The other is thus both the same as me and not me, identical not in its identity but in its ontology. The ideal of sovereignty requires the subject to autotomize3 its own sensibility. The severing of aspects of one’s own ethical extensibility emerges as necessary within an intersubjective context in which the liberated, owning ego is afforded recognition only insofar as its mode of engagement with what is other than itself accords with the strictures of wilful cognition. Such autotomy circumscribes the radical potential of sensibility that lies, for Levinas, in possibilities of signification that subsist outside structures of thematization and that are prior to the assimilation of experience within cognitive, linguistic and political systems.

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Yet even when sensibility is reduced under the yoke of a structure that purports to manifest freedom, Levinas points out, sensibility continues to signify beyond this manifestation, beyond, indeed, any ontology (see Levinas, 1981: 64). This signification is a site of ethics, whereby the self is a self-for-another person. And it is this for-another person that disrupts Hegelian identity. A ‘malady of identity’, ethics as sensibility opens the possibility of giving outside the confines of exchange (1981: 69). It is thus precisely this possibility that liberal-democratic processes – hinging, as we have seen, on the reciprocal exchange of recognition rooted in Hegelian identity – must contain and curtail; they do so by rendering total an ontological model predicated on the subjugation of matter. Released from this structure, the sensibility of being-for-another would unravel the ontological basis of democracy, rooted as it is in private property. Sensibility so understood unleashes a subjectivity that not only can leave the confines of self-interest, but that can be ‘extirpated from its conatus’ (1981: 72), thrust out of its preoccupation with its own existence. For the subject fully attuned to its senses, self-preservation is hollowed out; Levinas describes this effect in the physical terms of ‘a vulnerability and a paining exhausting themselves like a hemorrhage’, and in the material and economic terms of the basic necessities of life such as ‘giving the very bread I eat’ (1981: 72). Given Levinas’s framework and analysis, it appears odd that he outlines an ontogenetic narrative in which the ethical element of sensibility, the giving of the very bread I eat, is preceded by egoism – enjoying that bread (see Levinas, 1969: 147–51). There are, however, some key features which differentiate Levinas’s ‘primary egoism’ from Hegel’s. The enjoyment or satisfaction of the sensible ego, as Levinas understands it, is not reducible to an act; it is not an ‘intentional relationship of cognition or possession’, but rather an absorption in which a precognitive, sensible ego assimilates what it immediately lives from into itself (1981: 73). There is no claiming of property here, no accumulation, and only those materials which are assimilable – the rays of the sun, the water which quenches thirst, etc. – become part of the ego’s material substance. In the enjoyment of this corporeal assimilation, in the satisfaction of taste, matter first materializes for the self. This is important because it

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is as material that matter can be given to other people, for their nourishment and enjoyment, and it is as a singularized entity that giving, the overcoming of self-interest, becomes a meaningful response to alterity.4 For Levinas, absorption and assimilation – not on the interhuman ontological basis of self-determination but rather on a singularized, corporeal basis of need and satisfaction – are movements of a preethical self. Absorbable and assimilable material cannot include for Levinas, as it does for Hegel, territories, households or herds of animals, and all that these can be made to produce. Rather, possession for Levinas is restricted to immediately graspable and ingestible particles of the elemental, the surroundings in which the self is bathed. If we look to Hegel’s work on the state, or observe the world around us he so aptly describes, it appears that, in the dialectical formation and perpetuation of the individual, all manner of resources, including the bodies and labour of other human beings, are assimilated into the identity of the ego. This assimilation is far more expansive and far-reaching than the bodily ingestion of the assimilated particles of the elements by the sensible ego-in-enjoyment. For Levinas, moreover, it is taste, not possession, through which the movement towards subjectivity is initiated. Taste is ‘the way a sensible subject becomes a volume . . . becomes the identification called me . . .’ (1981: 73). This enjoyment, the sensory absorption of what is external (the ‘elemental’) to me into me, is ‘the very movement of egoism’ (1981: 73). This movement singularizes sensibility; it renders the sensibility of a self as belonging to that self. This is not a singularization in a dialectical tension with an opposing other, nor is it the culmination of two opposing forces. Rather, the initial singularization takes place through exposure.5 That is to say that, for Levinas, primary egoism is ‘the condition of the one-for-the-other involved in sensibility. . .’ (1981: 74). Ethics is an other-oriented sensibility that requires a distinct ‘me’, an ego. In order for me to give the material I have grasped and stored to another person, in other words, I must first exist as a singular entity, with a self-reflexivity that distinguishes ‘me’ from both the material I would enjoy and from the other to whom I would give it. In this sense, ethics is, for Levinas, a post-egoist developmental step.

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Yet, although enjoyment belongs to the order of sensibility, its egoist moment is not, for Levinas, fully ‘sensibility’ because it does not signify; it does not have meaning. Sensibility ‘has meaning only as a “taking care of the other’s need” . . . as a giving’ (1981: 74). But giving has meaning only when extended by a self that experiences the sensible and is singularized by this experience. More precisely, sensibility has meaning only for a self for whom matter has become material and as such, a self who enjoys the material, someone for whom this gift to another person has, at least potentially, a corporeal consequence. Because giving to others may cause one to suffer deprivation, it involves rising above one’s own pre-social, egoist volitions. Understood through Levinas’s phenomenological account, ethics therefore is foremost about responding to the material needs of other people. Levinas seeks not to liberate the subject within the subject/object structure, but rather to liberate the subject from the kind of subjectivity to which it is bound. As we have seen, sovereignty is a way of being, an ontological structure predicated on reconfiguring all that is external according to its own organizational strictures. Plurality on the plane of politics thus obscures the alterity of other persons and peoples through mutual recognition, and objectifies the non-human lifeworld through the system of property relations underlying this recognition. However, while Levinas’s critique of the philosophy of the ‘West’ takes up the circumscription of the alterity and boundlessness of other human beings to sovereign identity, he fails to note sovereignty’s circumscription of the alterity of the lifeworld. In rescuing the subject from sovereignty, in effect, Levinas abandons the object to the plane of being and politics. Indeed, Levinas’ concern to distinguish the human potential to become part of the condition of the flourishing of others from the non-human lifeworld, and from the material elements that also provide the conditions of that flourishing, leads him to posit a sensorial egoism beneath his vehement rejection of Hegel’s cognitive egoism. Extending Levinas’s phenomenology of ethics outside the bounds of the interhuman, however, would eliminate the need for recourse to a foundational egoism at both the cognitive and sensorial levels and, with it, the ontological foundation of democracy. In other words, the necessity of

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positing a pre-social ego recedes if responsivity-as-ethics is found beyond the interhuman realm, as well as within it. This extension is philosophically necessary if we are to begin to conceptualize some of the myriad of interhuman possibilities that lie beyond the subject/object structure. Specifically, the philosophical task that remains is to release the object from the subject/object binary – not the objectified subject, the enslaved, but the objectified object, the material thing that gives itself, that undergoes. This task would not entail presenting an argument for bringing material objects into democracy by endowing them with votes and voices (see Latour, 2004), but rather exploring the possibility of a phenomenological approach that is radically incongruous with democracy as we know it. It would entail approaching the matter of the lifeworld as more than could ever be cognitively delineated, as not only ingestible or exchangeable, but also infinite, as elicited through responsivity, as eliciting of responsivity and as that upon which the flourishing of plurality beyond the constraints of sovereignty is predicated.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

The ‘interhuman’ is a term Levinas uses to denote all modes of contact that take place between human beings (Levinas, 1981). ‘The ego is thought and so the universal’ (Hegel, 1952: 226). From the Greek ‘autos’, self, and ‘tomos’, to cut or sever, the term ‘autotomy’ is used in the biological sciences to denote the casting off of a body part, usually as a means of escape. Many lizard species, for example, if caught by the tail, amputate it. I have discussed elsewhere the significance of the gender-laden terms of Levinas’s analysis (Chandler, 2006: 97–110). While Levinas locates the initiation of the ego in the positive exposure to enjoyment and satiation, he also draws attention to the underside of exposure: the deprivation, disease and vulnerability that humble the ego.

References Chandler, Mielle (2006), ‘Hemorrhage and filiality: towards a fecundation of the political’, in A. Horowitz and G. Horowitz (eds), Difficult justice: commentaries on Levinas and politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

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Hegel, G.W.F. (1952), Philosophy of right (translated by T.M. Knox) (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Latour, Bruno (2004), Politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy (translated by C. Porter) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Levinas, Emmanuel (1969), Totality and infinity: an essay on exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press). Levinas, Emmanuel (1981), Otherwise than being or beyond essence (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press).

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3 Narratives of groups that kill other groups Jacqueline Stevens

When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the coming war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin? Adolf Hitler (in Rauschning, 1940: 129, quoted by Fest, 1973: 680)

Introduction This chapter examines the relation between otherness and violence by inquiring into the language used to incite and defend group combat and genocide, in particular the discourse of sacrifice used to sanctify insiders and demonize outsiders. What is the meaning of narratives tying the immortality of the state to the sacrifice of, and killing by, its members? How do life’s boundaries of birth and death figure in these state narratives of killing? The chapter argues that when groups hold out the promise of immortality tied to group membership, this enables a paradigm of sacrifice that accommodates mass, systemic violence directed against groups distinguished by hereditary or religious differences. The first-person narratives referenced here are by Adolf Hitler, as well as President George Bush, his military command, soldiers and a group I call ‘warriors’. The narratives include the language justifying decisions to risk one’s own life and to kill others on behalf of specific group affiliations. This is a unique commitment, one inconsistent with the individualist competition for economic gain. Carl Schmitt, who believes the concept of ‘the political’ implies

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the imperative to die for one’s friends and kill one’s enemies, writes: Under no circumstances can anyone demand that any member of an economically determined society, whose order in the economic domain is based upon rational procedures, sacrifice his life in the interest of rational operations. To justify such a demand on the basis of economic expediency would contradict the individualistic principles of a liberal economic order . . . To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that trade and industry may flourish for the survivors or that the purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy. (Schmitt, 2007: 48)

This point, and most of Schmitt’s work, originates with G.W.F. Hegel’s critique of English social contract thought. Hegel argued that hypothetical political societies promising individual survival and property rights cannot account for states’ ability to rouse armies to kill and die (Hegel, 1967). A patriotic citizen’s decision to risk his life in war is inconsistent with the social contract theorist’s axiomatic assumptions of self-interest and especially self-preservation. This chapter reviews the means by which nation and religion create the structures appealing to their members’ desire for immortality, not economic self-interest. I then analyze texts indicating how this desire for immortality manifests, paradoxically, in discourses of sacrifice, including the expectation that members sacrifice their own lives. These appeals are complemented by appeals to more instrumental incentives to commit group violence. The comparison of narratives offered by political leaders, soldiers and warriors highlights the different emphasis each places on sacrifice versus material rewards. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Georges Bataille’s Theory of Religion (1992) and describes the appeal of sacrifice in war by reference to the concept of melancholia.

Comparing Schmitt and Hitler Schmitt was an influential conservative intellectual in the 1920s and 1930s who became a Nazi acolyte; his essays supported Adolf Hitler’s tactic and goal of war against liberal

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individualists. Schmitt insisted on the incommensurability of instrumental rationality with the imperatives of the political categories ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. Hitler, similarly, according to his biographer, said it would be a ‘“crime” to wage war for the acquisition of raw materials’ (in Fest, 1973: 607).1 For Schmitt and Hitler, economics was in the realm of the profane, and politics the realm of the sacred, of sacrifice. The striking similarities in the Weltanschauung Hitler shared with Schmitt are important because Schmitt’s work was embraced by neoconservatives, especially within the Bush administration, who admired his forthright rejection of liberal-democratic norms (Horton, 2006). Likewise, cynics on the Left have been using Schmitt to prove that Thrasymachus was right all along, i.e., that governments exist to promote their own authority and not the rule of law, much less justice (Agamben, 1998; 2005). If we understand that Schmitt’s and Hegel’s world views were of a piece with Hitler’s, then we see just how impossible it is to countenance a Schmittian politics, even for Leftist cynics and especially for liberals. The repulsion in these circles Hitler’s regime provokes today would suggest that the theory supporting it must be rejected by those on the Right and Left alike. Schmitt writes that only an ‘existential threat to one’s own way of life’ – a threat to the preservation of one’s group identity in distinction from others – can motivate combat: ‘There exists no rational purpose, no norm no matter how true, no program no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other’ (Schmitt, 2007: 49). Similarly, Hitler observed that the Nazi struggle is ‘not waged with “intellectual” weapons, but with fanaticism’ (in Fest, 1973: 241), and that the ‘prototype of a good National Socialist [is one who would] let himself be killed for his Führer at any time’ (in Fest, 1973: 241). Both of them believe that, in the realm of politics, individuals subsume their own interests, including their own lives, to the national sovereign and see war as nationalism’s telos. And both Schmitt and Hitler define war as the telos specific to politics. Schmitt writes: ‘A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated . . . would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics’

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(Schmitt, 2007: 35). According to Hitler, war is the ‘“ultimate goal of politics” [and] the “strongest and most classic manifestation” of politics’ (quoted in Fest, 1973: 609). Schmitt sketches the difference between ‘the political’ and other motivations but does not explain why some alliances require death. Why would people find unsatisfying commitments short of deadly combat? Hitler answers this question with a special clarity (see below), albeit the account holds for contemporary so-called liberal regimes as well, and echoes Hegel’s idealization of an individual’s identification with the state, such that the individual’s life is absorbed into that of the nation. One’s existential identity remains intact, in perpetuity, as long as the nation-state persists. On the occasion of an officer surrendering at Stalingrad, Hitler echoes Schmitt’s views of how an ‘existential threat to one’s way of life’ motivates self-sacrifice: Life is the nation; the individual must die. What remains alive beyond the individual is the nation . . . So many people have to die, and then one man like that comes along and at the last minute defiles the heroism of so many others. He could free himself from all misery and enter into eternity, into national immortality, and he prefers [surrender and] to go to Moscow. (Hitler, quoted in Fest, 1973: 665)

The willingness to die for a friend and kill an enemy that Schmitt says is emblematic of ‘the political’ has an origin in two kinds of groups: first, those based on metonymies of birth, i.e., political societies that use kinship rules and rules sanctioning birth in a territory for their perpetuation; and, second, religious groups, in which membership gives one access to possibilities of reincarnation or an infinite life in heaven. Membership in both groups may require, for the perpetuation of the respective groups, the literal destruction of the other and even one’s own fellow nationals or believers in war.

Additional narratives of group violence Deaths of others Schmitt’s theory and Hitler’s speeches crystallize the incitements to die and kill for a group appearing in less publicized

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appeals to, and accounts by, soldiers. Before turning to these narratives, it is important to recognize that they are largely one-sided engagements with the brutalities of systemic violence. Perhaps it is a symptom of the other’s dehumanization, but the stories committing one group to systemic violence against another group are largely silent on the deaths of the other. The recitation of risks to self and country are foregrounded, and the supposedly noxious, dangerous, threatening qualities of the other attacked, with little mention of the corollary details of mass killing. Hitler, who had vilified Jews for decades, seems to have thought it both unnecessary and prudent to avoid connecting his antiSemitism to a programme of extermination. That the Nazi policies of denationalization, deportation and mass execution might have been an open secret does not change the fact that one of Hitler’s highest officers maintained until his death that he was unaware of this (Sereny, 1996), nor that Hitler went to great lengths to hide the mass civilian graves of Jews and other ‘vermin’ from the Germans and Allied powers, including devoting scarce troops in 1944 to exhuming and burning corpses buried earlier (Fest, 1973: 697). While there is considerable circumstantial evidence that Albert Speer knew that Jews were being slaughtered, the question of his and other Germans’ knowledge of the Jewish catastrophe is just that, and not the nature of a de facto, publicly avowed certainty similar to knowledge of Germany’s levelling of English towns. This caution exemplifies concern on the part of the regime that revelation of the Jewish genocide and mass killings in the East could turn the German public against the Nazis, not to mention lead to war crimes charges. It suggests the slaughter of others, if they are civilians, is not fit for narratives available to public consumption, while accounts of killing enemy soldiers, damaging supply lines and blowing up munitions facilities are considered good propaganda. Death, their own deaths in particular, captures the attention of groups that kill, while the fact of others’ deaths is not so much rationalized or celebrated as it is treated as a strategy for gaining exclusive domination through obliteration towards the end of an eventual forgetting of the other.2 Governments of all sorts try to avoid details of the body count. Perhaps the most obvious symptom of this is

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the ease with which the US government could make it official policy not to report the number of people, including civilians, the military kills in war. This suggests that citizens in a nominal democracy would be so uninterested in this information it could be withheld easily.3 The reason for the policy presumably is fear of a backlash against high levels of civilian deaths, although the absence of any pressure for the government to change this policy also indicates a general apathy about the deaths of others. Each and every US soldier who dies in Iraq or Afghanistan has that fact and often many of the details of their demise reported in most major print and television outlets, but the number of civilians killed by the US military is close to a state secret and can be gleaned only by inference and private services, such as iraqbodycount. org. During the first Iraq war, the US would not release information on even the number of Iraqi soldiers killed, which was estimated to be close to one hundred thousand. Nonetheless, it is important to see this link between risking life and taking life. Whether as a result of self-defence, retaliation or simply conquest, those who undertake the systemic destruction of others know this will be a mutually deadly proposition, and their narratives exhorting these risks reveal this.

Producing the other To understand the fundamental dynamics of the so-called ‘state of exception’ that results in torture at Abu Ghraib and detention camps in Cuba, and that even leads to the illegal racial profiling and deportation of US-American citizens (Stevens, 2008), an excellent place to start is with the rules producing the other in the first instance. The domestic other is created by and through the idea of the political other, always on the verge of being an enemy who may invade, either directly with troops, or surreptitiously, through the immigration of aliens and intermarriage. The latter’s phenomenology of legal contingencies highlights difference’s ontological impossibility. People are well aware of how migration, borders and marriage may affect the demographics of a geographical territory and the geography of a particular demographic, resulting in new permutations of both. To take

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one obvious example, the US Northwest used to be the Mexican Northwest. The majority of the city names in many states of the western US attest to this. However, far from providing an object lesson on the impossibility of an original, pure, single hereditary origin, these examples provoke a futile but harmful shoring up of difference’s authenticity. Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction appears as well in current discussions of the state of exception during war that use Schmitt’s vocabulary to attack pseudo-liberal democracies by claiming they, too, remove government actors from the rule of law (Agamben, 1998; 2005). However, Schmitt, Agamben and those using their work fail to recognize that the rule of law creating citizens and aliens is necessary and often sufficient for most state violence, including laws creating the sorts of friend and enemy who will kill and die as such. For example, the main source of panic in the USA over immigration, and the vigour with which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is attempting to deport undocumented residents, are a direct consequence of national membership rules, not an abstract assertion of emergency powers. To return to the example of Mexico – the current source of panic about the other in the USA – until 1848 most of the western United States belonged to Mexico (Nevins, 2002). If these borders still were in place, the national language of about half the country would be Spanish, current ‘illegal aliens’ in the southern USA would be legal citizens, and the Minuteman on the contemporary southern border would be in the middle of Mexico. But as a result of the US government’s invasion of Mexico City and its threat to occupy the entire country, the Treaty of Guadalupe was signed, and the borders were moved to their current locations. This establishes the aliens and others of today’s popular imagination and produces the DHS detention centres with their dehumanizing and deadly consequences. Rather than its abstract production of rights or law, the sovereign’s myths of origins and eternity, which establish boundaries of self and other, are the key to understanding war and less violent means of including and excluding its members. There are many means by which the official categories of friend and enemy are mobilized to take a country beyond prejudice and into war. A few of these are discussed below.

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Describing war: calculations of sacrifice and benefits Media coverage When the mainstream media discuss the combatants’ motives in Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq, journalists tend to focus on the emotions of the political leaders urging Muslims to join in violent struggle against non-Muslims and specifically US and Israeli presence in the Middle East. Most accounts voicing complaints about US and Israeli occupation, for instance, ignore the emotional undertones and resentments informing the US, Israeli and European commitments to fighting. This lacuna implies that Muslims fight because of emotion, whereas Europeans fight because of economic imperatives or rational Enlightenment values, including democracy. In the last few years, American social scientists have been churning out books and articles at a furious pace, trying to understand what leads to the most extreme selfsacrifice in war-torn regions of the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and to explain the suicide missions (SMs, in the parlance of these writers) that rational choice theory cannot accommodate. The introduction to a collection of essays examining suicide missions echoes Schmitt, except that, for the editor, this finding is unexpected and alarming: SMs seem to breach the dictates of instrumental rationality: agents should seek to employ means that do not involve their own death . . . Furthermore, SMs also violate the notion, popular in modern Darwinian thinking, that extreme altruism is to be expected only towards one’s kin; some suicide bombers do say that they do it to save or revenge family or friends, but most say that they do it for their group and its cause. (Gambetta, 2005: ix)

A contributor to the collection acknowledges this and then says that Middle East violence is sui generis and inexplicable (Elster, 2005). However, most suicide missions have not been in the Middle East, and the number of US volunteer soldiers who have died in Iraq since 2003 (3080) (Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, 2007) is far higher than the number of non-US combatants who completed suicide missions in this period (889).4 The willingness to die for a cause is different from a desire to die for a cause, but they lie on the same continuum,

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whereas the loss of one’s life is categorically different from a willingness to support one’s government by paying taxes or risking economic hardships. There seems to be an orientalizing desire to make the sacrificial mission of killing others symptomatic of the mysterious psyche of organized violence in the Middle East, but this characterization ignores the dynamics motivating the violence pursued by supposedly civilized countries (Mearsheimer and Walt, 2007). War had a long history before Osama bin Laden fought with mujahideen against the Soviet Union. The techniques that he and other political leaders in the Middle East use for organizing groups to use violence also have much in common with those used in Christian countries. Al-Qaeda, as well as the US Army, relies on invocations of national honour, God and sacrifice. One of the most widely cited political science articles on suicide missions asserts they are used because they work better than instrumental appeals: groups that use suicide missions find it easy to recruit and are able to leverage results in their political negotiations (Pape, 2003). In reviewing narratives of groups that kill it should be apparent that these do not follow from decisions of individuals. President Bush may be ‘the decider’ in starting a war in Iraq, but he is not the storyteller giving his protagonists their choices. He did not decide that God would choose the Israelites, that Jews would insist on themselves as a national minority in Europe, that Hitler would try to eliminate this nation, and that Israel would use the same kinship rules that Hitler used, existing from time immemorial, to try to eliminate the Muslims in Israel’s newly sovereign borders; all of this defines the ideological terrain of present wars in the Middle East, if not worldwide. Nor did Bush decide that some causes and not others lead groups to kill other groups. Bush is a protagonist, one actor in a political improvisation performed within highly structured constraints. One way to see the role of sacrifice in the US narrative is to review the appearance of the word ‘sacrifice’ in newspaper articles about the war, in contrast with other justifications. For a rough sense of the relative frequency of themes of sacrifice versus instrumental compensation appearing in President Bush’s statements about the Iraq war, I conducted searches on Lexis-Nexis for articles between 1 January 2003 and 12 June 2007 that had ‘Bush’ and ‘soldiers’ in the first

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Table 3.1 Results from Lexis-Nexis search of articles published in the USA between 1/1/03 and 6/12/07, with ‘Bush’ and ‘soldiers’ in the headline or first paragraph

Northeast Southeast Midwest Western TOTAL LA Times Washington Post New York Times

with ‘sacrifice’ in full text

with ‘benefits’ and not ‘sacrifice’ in full text

292 352 167 365 1176 6 40 55

236 223 157 270 1075 7 25 43

paragraph and ‘sacrifice’ in the full text. I compared these results, regionally and in specific newspapers, with those for ‘Bush’ and ‘soldiers’ in the first paragraph and ‘benefits’ in the full text. The results are in the table above, with the relevant passage from the first article quoted to randomly assess the articles’ contents. I conducted these searches to assess the relative importance of ideas about sacrifice and instrumental benefits in war discourse.5 I compared these word frequencies because I assumed that the relative importance of sacrifice versus instrumental gains as war incentives could be inferred by comparing the frequency of the words indicating these commitments.6 Passages using ‘sacrifice’ from the first hits for the New York Times, Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times New York Times: From President Bush’s 2007 Memorial Day speech (29 May 2007): ‘Those who serve are not fatalists or cynics,’ Mr. Bush said. ‘They know that one day this war will end, as all wars do. Our duty is to ensure that its outcome justifies the sacrifices made by those who fought and died in it’ (Bush cited in Gay, 2007: A16)

Washington Post: An officer preparing his unit to depart for Iraq (25 February 2007):

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‘It’s worthwhile if we win,’ Kauzlarich said. ‘But to sacrifice, there’s got to be a purpose. And if we don’t win, then our sacrifices are going to be in vain.’ (Finkel, 2007: A1)

Los Angeles Times: From President Bush’s 2007 Memorial Day speech (29 May 2007): They ‘are not fatalists or cynics’, he added. ‘They know that one day this war will end, as all wars do. Our duty is to ensure that its outcome justifies the sacrifices made by those who fought and died in it.’ (Bush cited in Drogin, 2007: A8)

Passages with ‘benefits’ from the first hits in the New York Times, Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times New York Times: From article on contractors’ high death toll (18 May 2007): Many contractors in the battle zone say they lack the basic security measures afforded uniformed troops and receive benefits that not only differ from those provided to troops, but also vary by employer. (Broder and Risen, 2007: A1)

Washington Post: From article on creation of War ‘Czar’ (17 May 2007): As operations director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lute was a leading skeptic of the troop increase during the review that led to Bush’s new strategy in January, according to some sources close to the process, but he reflected a consensus among senior officers that it would produce a temporary benefit, at best. (Baker and Wright, 2007: A13)

Los Angeles Times: (9 March, 2007): Clinton, a New York Democrat who is running for president . . . She called for a new GI bill of rights modeled on the broad array of benefits offered to World War II veterans. (Newsday, 2007: A27)

Analysis of Lexis-Nexis search results These results indicate that the United States media are 10 per cent more likely to reference themes of sacrifice than

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economic benefits in their articles on war. The randomly selected samples above suggest that these are not pseudoresults but indications of meaningful differences. For instance, President Bush’s speech on Memorial Day emphasizes the importance of sacrifice, while Senator Hillary Clinton pushes for an increase in soldier benefits and does not emphasize a desire for sacrifice. The relative parity of the themes suggests that benefits are a key concern, perhaps because the volunteer army must rely on instrumental benefits for recruitment, discussed below. The frequent appearance of ‘sacrifice’ in war articles contrasts sharply with the relative absence of this theme in other discussions of US commitments. For instance, a search for ‘economy’ rather than ‘soldiers’ in the title or first paragraph, using the same range of dates, yielded 948 results for ‘sacrifice’ and over 6000 for ‘benefit’.7 This disparity is consistent with the insights of everyone from Hitler to Schmitt to Bush: the president exhorts his soldiers, and an officer his troops, by a vision of worthwhile sacrifice. They know that, in a situation in which a soldier is asked to choose between his money and his life, this is not a time to push only the rewards of instrumental benefits. This is the narrative that political leaders use to overcome the impasse of a Hobbesian-minded actor fearful, above all, of a violent death.

Army recruitment narratives Political leaders may be rallying the troops with images of honour and sacrifice, but their lackeys in the military– industrial complex trying to put warm bodies in the trenches have other tools at their disposal as well, especially instrumental incentives (Olson, 1971). President Bush might not want to taint his cause by association with the incentive of cold cash, but that’s exactly what the US Army is using for its recruitment campaign. When operationalized by advertising in magazines and television, the symbolic incentives are not those of tradition and patriotism, but NASCAR races in which the uniforms and car are used for ‘US Army’ product placement (US Army, 2007). Three images rotating in the centre of the ‘Go Army’ recruitment web page inform viewers about an exciting

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‘NEW OFFER’ that will give them $50 000 in extra benefits for signing up for two years (US Army, 2007). As one returning soldier says, ‘The military is selling a lot of educational programs and giving a lot of bonuses away. So you’ve got more kids coming in now for the college money, but they don’t know that you’re going to do a tour in Afghanistan or Iraq’ (Rieckhoff, 2007: 74). In another advertisement, the emphasis on instrumental incentives is further illustrated: it lists benefits from money to health care and even vacation as reasons for joining. One box states ‘Earn Extra Cash for Retirement’ and describes different tax advantages of military service. An additional recruitment image shows the US Army campaign to reach out to traditionally pro-military, southern white men through $16 million annual sponsorship of a NASCAR team (Bernstein, 2005: D1).

Soldier narratives In addition to narratives from leaders pursuing warm bodies to fight their wars, there are narratives of the soldiers themselves. The etymology of soldiers is given under the heading of ‘solid’. From the Latin soldus, ‘contr. of the coin solidus, becomes OF sold (var. soud), payment, esp. a soldier’s pay, whence OF-MF soldier, adopted by EE . . .’ (Partridge, 1958). This suggests that soldiers are hired guns. In distinction from the meaning of soldiers suggested by the etymology, however, modern soldiers’ discourse of service appears to echo that of their political and military rulers. Perhaps the most extreme example of soldiers’ willingness to obey orders and kill themselves during their missions is the Japanese kamikaze pilots who, en masse – and hence in distinction from ad hoc acts of battlefield bravery – agreed to a mission that was not just risky but suicidal. Their reasons are similar to those of leaders and soldiers in more mundane contexts. One who committed to go said: To bring the nation to victory was our thought, and what was that nation? The land of my parents, younger brothers, and sister. Can we bear seeing our country being invaded by outside enemies? That was what was on my mind. (in Hill, 2005: 25)

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Another stressed he was dying for his country but not the specific government: ‘I would set out this minute on a suicide mission to defend my family and country but I do not want to die for a man that calls himself Emperor’ (in Hill, 2005: 25). Some armies have members who volunteer, and others are conscripted. It may appear worthwhile, therefore, to distinguish the narratives that induce volunteers to join groups that kill from those that conscript their members by violence or the threat of violence. A reasonable hypothesis might be that honour and benefits would play a larger role in the former justifications of service, and the simple desire to survive would explain the military service of those who serve in conscripted units. However, the narratives bolstering support for volunteer armies and conscription armies alike seem similar. One possible explanation is that those countries with mandatory national service have the highest levels of nationalist sentiments predisposing military service, and those that have volunteer armies have the lowest. Universal manhood conscription creates intergenerational cohorts who experience their citizenship through the imagined collective experience of military service, one that would cultivate feelings of national attachment passed on to children. Conscripted soldiers thus might be more prepared than their counterparts in countries with a volunteer army to pursue military service for reasons of solidarity and honour, and not for individual benefits.8 In addition to the narratives of honour, benefits and peaceful altruism explaining why soldiers go to war, there remains a final, very important one: brute force. If Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein had not shot officers who deviated from orders or soldiers who deserted, it is not clear their militaries would have continued to fight in Russia and southern Iraq, respectively, in the face of such overwhelming losses and certain ultimate defeat. Günter Grass writes that the ‘first bodies’ he saw after he joined the SS were hanging from trees in German villages: Soldiers young and old in Wehrmacht uniforms. Hanging from trees still bare along the road, in marketplaces. With cardboard signs on their chests branding them as cowards and subversive elements. A boy my age – his hair, like mine, parted on the left – dangling next to a middle-aged officer of indeterminate rank,

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or, rather, stripped of his rank by a court-martial. A procession of corpses that we ride past with our deafening tank-track rattle. (2007: 75)

Just as it is loyalty to comrades and not country that motivates most heroism in the trenches (the hands-on fighting and not the more abstract agreement to kill discussed above), some commit themselves to violence because they feel they simply lack a choice in the matter. Nevertheless, even when death threats are a chief technique for recruitment, narratives of sacrifice remain important for building an esprit de corps. At the very least, these are important for the elite’s coherence, necessary for the unity and determination to threaten others. Adolf Eichmann’s work may have been undertaken for reasons that were banal (Arendt, 1994), but this does not explain why he was motivated to exterminate Jews rather than to improve intercontinental train service for a pluralist and tolerant Europe. Only nationalism can explain that. Warrior narratives Having considered the symbolic narratives of political leaders and soldiers, it is time to move to a new narrative terrain, that of warriors. Soldiers and warriors exist on a continuum of violence that begins with the wounds from family hierarchy (Stevens, 2005) and culminates in the annihilation of civilians through mass extermination – by guns, fire bombs or a radioactive cloud – all facilitated by dynamics of otherness. The warrior narrative’s embrace of a violent death distinguishes it from the soldier’s mere acceptance of this as a possibility. Soldiers accept their own death and that of others as the price of obtaining a better future for their country or, as the US Army imagines, to obtain health benefits. Warriors, in contrast, are protagonists in a narrative where death is not feared but, paradoxically, exalted and even desired. It is a happy sacrifice in both senses of the word, that is, both pleasurable and ‘happy’ in the Austinean sense of the felicitous use of ‘sacrifice’, where to give to the gods correctly means doing so fully and with joy (Austin, 1962), not, as soldiers do, with fear and perhaps regret. Al-Qaeda exalts self-denial, and its leadership practises and promises frugality, not vacation benefits (Bergen, 2001: 79).

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The distinction between the soldier and warrior is not based on whether the combat units they serve support state or non-state groups. There may be members of the US Army who are moved by warrior narratives, just as there may be members of Al-Qaeda trying to keep their heads down while earning money for their families. As opposed to soldiers, warriors fully embrace their causes and the wars pursuant to them. Warriors offer specific, principled reasons for their decisions to fight, not vague notions of duty, much less a desire for college tuition. For example, a warrior named Doha from Qatar explains to an interviewer that he is risking his life in the Caucasus to establish an Islamic caliphate: I think of democracy as the last attempt by man to create an alternative law to God’s law, the last one. An attempt that will end tragically for mankind. I think Churchill said something like this: ‘Democracy is the worst possible system, but man hasn’t invented a better one.’ So maybe we shouldn’t invent anything but just return to the law given by God. (in Mamon and Pilis, 2005)

The distaste for democracy as a failed European system is also clear among those joining Al-Qaeda from both Egypt and Pakistan, countries where democracy is largely associated with corruption (Bergen, 2001: 156, 204). A Palestinian art history student planning a suicide attack in Israel explains: At the moment of executing my mission, it will not be purely to kill Israelis. The killing is not my ultimate goal . . . My act will carry a message beyond to those responsible and the world at large that the ugliest thing for a human being is to be forced to live without freedom. (in Argo, 2003:10, quoting Hala Jabor, in Bloom, 2005: 90)

Self-sacrifice is for making an honourable statement. Patrick Henry said ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ For this art student, his own death is not an alternative to liberty but its means. The student’s martyrdom is of a piece with ending Palestinian oppression by Israelis as well as liberating his own soul in heaven. Such an instrumentalization of death (its use for public relations) paradoxically diminishes death’s importance, not only in the Kantian sense that generalizing a socially corrosive practice diminishes its effectiveness.9 In addition,

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seeking martyrdom may thwart salvation. Vasantha, whom the interviewer refers to as a boy, says of his commitment to the Tamil cause: ‘This is the most supreme sacrifice I can make. The only way we can get our Elam [homeland] is through arms. That is the only way anybody will listen to us. Even if we die’ (in Joshi, 2000, cited in Bloom, 2005: 63). A Tamil leader, Prabhakaran, said in a 1993 Black Tiger Day speech of his fighters: They have deep human characteristics of perceiving the advancement of the interest of the people through their own annihilation . . . Death has surrendered to them. They keep eagerly waiting for the day they would die. They just don’t bother about death . . . No force on earth today can suppress the fierce uprising of Tamils who seek freedom. (in De Mel, 2003, quoting Narayan Swami, 2003: 250, in Bloom, 2005: 64)

As much as principle plays a role in the thinking on suicide missions, the thoughts in some cases may be literally immature – 60 per cent of the Tamil Tigers wounded since 1995 have been under eighteen (Bloom, 2005: 65). Their youth does not diminish the importance of such narratives, but highlights their significance in a calculus for those who lack adult competencies. On account of this need to maintain a space for sacrifice, for the giving away of something useful, there are rules for distinguishing an egotistical suicide from a putatively selfless martyrdom. To be martyred is not technically possible out of a desire for heavenly salvation, as it smacks of instrumentality and not spiritual devotion. Jon Elster writes: Although Sunni theologians ‘perpetuated the veneration [of] the early martyrs of Islam . . . they nonetheless rigorously opposed the cultivation of a contemporary cult of martyrdom in their respective societies by emphasizing the illegality of suicide and equating the seeking of a martyr’s death with this’. (Elster, 2005: 242, citing Larson, 1995: 571)

Either death is a valued end, in which case potential Christian martyrs need to worry about prohibitions against simony, and Muslims about Islamic edicts against glorifying death, or death is not so valuable, and hence a warrior’s sacrifice to achieve martyrdom is not possible as such. This latter view is the one held by Georges Bataille. The warrior is happy to die only because he does not understand

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his actions, a stupidity that devalues his risks. Bataille believes the warrior’s ‘strength is in part a strength to lie. War represents a bold advance, but it is the crudest kind of advance: one needs as much naïvety – or stupidity – as strength to be indifferent to that which one overvalues and to take pride in having deemed oneself of no value’ (Bataille, 1992: 58). If death is normalized by warrior culture, then it is profane, and sacrifice mundane. For Bataille, the warrior is another variant of the soldier, and the narrative of sacrifice an aporetic ruse. The warrior culture makes human death in fighting seem similar to that of animals, i.e. cyclical, natural, practical. Such deaths are banal and cannot be offered to gods any more than one might offer them breakfast or one’s yawn. Bataille writes, ‘The warrior’s nobility is like a prostitute’s smile, the truth of which is self-interest’ (Bataille, 1992: 59). Bataille’s analogy here is a little strange, because of the obvious lack of similarity between the nobility afforded the warrior and the abjection of the prostitute. The warrior’s nobility is not an individual’s demeanour but a social script that interpellates sacrificial decisions as noble. A prostitute’s smile, also scripted, is parasitic on an original of romantic intimacy; the commercial aspects of the affair make the smile false. The warrior’s nobility is itself the supposedly authentic moment, its lie betrayed by the impossible script itself. A better analogy would be between the warrior’s nobility and the smile of the married wife, as both are metonymically connected and similar in their use of nationhood for their supposedly redeeming sacrifice. The warrior and the wife affect love in and for the relationship requiring their subordination and abjection in the name of sacrifice and honour not afforded to the prostitute. In his theory of religion, Bataille foregrounds the importance of sacrifice. According to Bataille, death without a religious significance is part of, and indistinguishable from, animal life: ‘Because death has no meaning, because there is no difference between it and life, and there is no fear of it or defence against it, it invades everything without giving rise to any resistance’ (Bataille, 1992: 40). In other words, although religion may lead to the sporadic deaths associated with sacrifice, a world without religion would mean death would be a merely mundane event, like falling asleep, and

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not worth the effort of its avoidance. This is another axiomatic insistence about the world and human nature that philosophers are so fond of making, and as usual it is impossible to judge based on the evidence on offer whether this is true. Hobbes makes the opposite claim: religion immunizes people from their otherwise natural and healthy fear of death (Hobbes, 1996).

A melancholic planet The account of soldiers’ motives for risking death by killing others seems to contrast with the paradoxical desires of warriors. But there are some crucial family resemblances between them, in contrast with the narratives of other highrisk behaviours. Individuals risk their lives in, for instance, rock climbing, heroin abuse or criminal activities. But their deaths have different connotations than those of soldiers. When the hearty rock climber plunges to her death after losing her grip, her funeral will not celebrate her ‘sacrifice’, a tribute that will be paid to the warrior and soldier alike. This is because those who die for actions pursuant to the life of their nation or religion, regardless of their motives, are the chief protagonists in the melancholic narrative of the nation. The laws and citizenry that produce families and nations all partake of and produce a fetishistic melancholy (Goodrich, 1995), one that either as a habit or through a macabre decision creates the other that is instrumental to the anxious pretence of an immortal self. The narrative requires the destruction of others within and outside the particular political society. To view the narratives of groups that kill in this light is to question the framework established through interrogations of the ‘state of exception’, ‘bare life’ and ‘the camp’ that has been stressed by Giorgio Agamben (1998; 2005) and those using his work to attempt a transition from Foucauldianism to political analysis. The modern state is of a piece with more ancient societies that used the same narratives. The tragedy of the twentieth century is not that political life suddenly becomes inseparable from bare life, that it creates bare life, but (only?) that the technologies of

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regulating the longstanding ties of nation have been bureaucratized and made seemingly more efficient. The introduction of birth certificates and other devices of bureaucratic states did not inaugurate the ability to create and track national populations, but rather continued nationalism’s longstanding practices (Stevens, 1999). In the past, the substantive idea of a distinctly Athenian, Roman, French or English subject or citizen, for instance, was inherently compromised by the form of its realization in possibly fictitious stories about paternity, the ability of people to move throughout empires and even between them with little regulation, and the absence of centralized records.10 Today’s form of record-keeping, tied to the citizen’s body (by fingerprints or eye scans), suggests a determinacy of nationality that is claimed to be novel and more accurate than earlier techniques, a self-serving proclamation of efficiency every regime in each epoch advances on its behalf. Older forms of biopolitics, since antiquity, also have included the census, birth and marriage records, and laws and officers controlling movement and nationality. These earlier and contemporary forms of biopolitics, pursuant to the melancholic desire to avoid death, are the source of war and, in turn, the state of exception and related sacrifices of and to the rule of law. Notes 1 The parallels between Schmitt’s rationalization of ‘the political’ and Hitler’s discourse are too frequent and direct to be coincidental. 2 It is true that some Arabs in the wake of the World Trade Center’s collapse appeared to have been celebrating victims’ deaths, but even this appears more of a celebration of their foe’s vividly symbolized waning power than a glee at the sight of dead American civilians. For a meditation on the psychoanalytic aspect of a nation’s forgetting of the other, see Behdad (2005). 3 ‘Our efforts focus on destroying the enemy’s capabilities, so we never target civilians and have no reason to try to count such unintended deaths’, Pentagon spokesperson, quoted by Price (2003). 4 Based on data posted on Wikipedia (Suicide Bombings, 2007). 5 A scan of the headlines appearing from these searches suggests that many of those articles discussing ‘benefits’ are assailing the Bush administration for its failure to provide them. In other words, the articles with ‘Bush’ ‘soldiers’ in the first paragraph and ‘benefits’ in the full text are not about President Bush encouraging soldiers to serve because of the personal benefits they will receive, but narratives of soldier sacrifice,

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either praised and appreciated or assailed for the absence of respect and compensation. The Lexis-Nexis newspaper database includes over one hundred newspapers and journals. The Lexis-Nexis database does not show exact numbers over 3000. To the ‘benefit’ search I screened as well for ‘jobs’ and ‘not jobs’. As both of these had over 3000 results, I could infer that the total number for ‘benefits’ would be over 6000. Günter Grass’s (2007) account of his own service in the SS is consistent with this. Widespread lying reduces people’s credibility and makes it more difficult for lies to work in the future. Likewise, widespread suicide bombings desensitize populations to their horrors. The Nazi state’s reliance on legal categories for its eugenics programme was not unique. Indeed, the US government had endorsed similar goals during this same period, invoking the spectre of a weakened race as justification for miscegenation laws. For similar eugenics programmes relying on family law during this period in Europe see Quine (1996).

References Agamben, Giorgio (1998), Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life (translated by D. Heller-Roazen) (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Agamben, Giorgio (2005), State of exception (translated by K. Attell) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). Arendt, Hannah (1994), Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil (New York: Penguin). Argo, Nichole (2003), ‘The banality of evil: understanding today’s human bombs’. Policy Paper, Preventive Defense Project, Stanford University, unpublished manuscript. Austin, John L. (1962), How to do things with words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Baker, Peter and Wright, Robin (2007), ‘To “War Czar”, solution to Iraq conflict won’t be purely military’. The Washington Post (17 May): A13. Bataille, Georges (1992), Theory of religion (New York: Zone Books). Behdad, Ali (2005), A forgetful nation: on immigration and cultural identity in America (Durham: Duke University Press). Bergen, Peter (2001), Holy war: inside the secret world of Osama bin Laden Inc. (New York: Free Press). Bernstein, Viv (2005), ‘In bid for recruits, military has allies in NASCAR and fans’. New York Times (2 July): D1. Bloom, Mia (2005), Dying to kill: the allure of suicide terror (New York: Columbia University Press). Broder, John and Risen, James (2007), ‘Death toll for contractors reaches new high in Iraq’. New York Times (18 May): A1. De Mel, Neloufer (2003). The body politics, (re)presenting the female suicide bomber in Sri Lanka, available online at www.aucegypt.edu/igws/ deMel.pdf (accessed 20 November 2003).

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Drogin, Bob (2007), ‘Bush honors the fallen at Arlington’. Los Angeles Times (29 May): A8. Elster, Jon (2005), ‘Motivations and beliefs in suicide missions’, in D. Gambetta (ed.), Making sense of suicide missions (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Fest, Joachim (1973), Hitler (translated by R. and C. Winston) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Finkel, David (2007), ‘11 days till Baghdad; crucial to the President’s new strategy for Iraq, a commander and his soldiers head into war’. The Washington Post (25 February): A1. Gambetta, Diego (ed.) (2005), Making sense of suicide missions (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Gay, Sheryl (2007), ‘Bush focuses on soldiers’ families in Memorial Day speech’. New York Times (29 May): A16. Goodrich, Peter (1995), Oedipus Lex: psychoanalysis, history and law (Berkeley: University of California). Grass, Günter (2007), ‘How I spent the war’. New Yorker (4 June): 75. Hegel, G.W.F. (1967), Philosophy of right (translated by T.M. Knox) (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Hill, Peter (2005), ‘Kamikaze: 1943–45’, in D. Gambetta (ed.), Making sense of suicide missions (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hobbes, Thomas (1996), Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Horton, Scott (2006), ‘The return of Carl Schmitt’ (15 June), available at http://ludd.net/retort/msg00685.html. Joshi, Charu Lata (2000), ‘Sri Lanka suicide bombers’. Far Eastern Economic Review (26 November 2003) available at www.feer.com/_0006_01/ p64currents.html (accessed 15 June 2007). Mamon, Marcin and Pilis, Mariusz (directors) (2005), The smell of paradise (Amago Productions). Mearsheimer, John and Walt, Steven (2007), The Israel lobby (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux). Nevins, Joseph (2002), Operation Gatekeeper: the rise of the ‘illegal alien’ and the making of the U.S.-Mexico boundary (New York: Routledge). Newsday (2007), ‘Clinton jabs at Bush and proposes a GI bill’ (9 March 2007): A27. Olson, Mancur (1971), Logic of collective action: public good and the theory of groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Pape, Robert (2003), ‘The strategic logic of suicide terrorism’. American Political Science Review, 97 (New York: Cambridge University Press): 343–61. Partridge, Eric (1958), Origins: a short etymological dictionary of modern English (New York: MacMillan). Quine, Maria (1996), Population politics in twentieth-century Europe: fascist dictatorships and liberal democracies (New York: Routledge). Rauschning, Hermann (1940). Gespräche mit Hitler (New York, Zurich: Europa Verlag). Rieckhoff, Paul (2007), ‘Volunteers’. GOOD (July/Aug).

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Schmitt, Carl (2007), The concept of the political (translated by George Schwab) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Sereny, Gitta (1996), Albert Speer: his battle with truth (New York: Vintage). Stevens, Jacqueline (1999), Reproducing the state (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Stevens, Jacqueline (2005), ‘Pregnancy envy and the politics of compensatory masculinities’. Gender and Politics, (1): 265–96. Stevens, Jacqueline (2008), ‘Thin ICE’. The Nation (June 23, 2008).

Internet sources Iraq Body Count, www.iraqbodycount.org/. Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (2007), http://icasualties.org (accessed 15 June 2007). Suicide bombings in Iraq since 2003 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Suicide_bombings_in_Iraq_since_2003#2007/ (accessed 15 June 2007). US Army (2007), Go Army, www.goarmy.com/ (accessed 15 June 2007).

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4 Technologies of violence and vulnerability Kelly Oliver

Given that immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11 one of the most frequently used words was ‘vulnerable’, it is important to reflect on the meaning and effects of vulnerability in relation to violence, particularly since the word most closely following on its heels was ‘war’. Recently, philosophers have embraced vulnerability as constitutive of our humanity. For example, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva suggest that we need to accept, rather than deny, our own vulnerability, because disavowing vulnerability undermines democratic solidarity and leads to war. Certainly, fantasies that we are invincible and not vulnerable can lead to war. However, the notion of vulnerability already includes violence: ‘vulnerable’ means both wounding and wounded, and this means that avowing vulnerability would also undermine democracy and lead to war. Here, I explore that ambiguity in order to interrogate the putative difference between legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence, and between presumptions of innocence and culpability in relation to war. Moreover, I argue that the ambiguous position of the body in relation to technology within the Western imaginary makes it appear as both vulnerable and threatening. Traditionally, bodies have been excluded from what is considered properly political. I argue that this is why, when they literally explode back onto the scene of the political in the case of suicide bombers, they are so horrifying. In an important sense, our ambivalence about the body and bodies comes to bear on how we conceive of both violence and vulnerability, and suggests that an alternative to the politics of recognition is sorely needed.

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From vulnerability to violence Journalist Tom Engelhardt researched the newspaper coverage immediately following the attacks on the Twin Towers. He concludes, ‘one of the most common words over those days in the [New York] Times and elsewhere was “vulnerable”’; the word that surfaced fastest on its heels was ‘war’ (2006: 17). The lightning move from vulnerability to war suggests that feelings of vulnerability can trigger fear, hatred and violence. Psychologically, it is true that violence towards others is often a defence against one’s own sense of insecurity. Although it is undeniable that human beings are capable of violence, even ‘unthinkable’ violence, is it what makes us human? Or, on the contrary, is it the ability to forgive and to move beyond violence that makes us human? Is violence or forgiveness more uniquely human? (See Oliver, 2004.) Certainly, denying vulnerability and holding onto the illusion of invincibility and absolute security can lead to violent acts of war. We have seen how this happens when strength in the face of crisis is reduced to military might. Hatred and the urge for revenge can be seen as a manifestation of fear, fear of our own vulnerability. Victimization of others literally puts our own vulnerability onto others. We become the bully instead of the playground idiot. It is not surprising, then, that privates in the military, themselves subjected to hazing and humiliation as part of basic training, would act out these same rituals of humiliation and subordination on others in order to establish their own authority. But just because we can or do wound others when we are wounded, does not mean that we have to do so. While the denial of vulnerability may help explain human violence, this does not mean that being wounded or wounding is constitutive of humanity or definitive of being human. Indeed, in order to move beyond war and violence, it is necessary to be able to imagine humanity defined, not in terms of its power to wound, but in terms of its power to heal. Adopting the former rather than the latter definition, Judith Butler argues in Precarious Life (2004) that we have a primary vulnerability that comes with being human; more specifically, it comes with being born as an infant completely beholden to others for survival. She claims that this primary

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vulnerability, associated with infants, is constitutive of humanity (2004: esp. xiv, 31). While it may be that recognizing our shared vulnerability will make us more accepting of each other, it is politically important to analyse critically the rhetoric of vulnerability immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Moreover, philosophically, it is crucial to question the notion that vulnerability is constitutive of humanity, because the very notion of vulnerability is inherently linked to violence. Specifically, the word ‘vulnerable’ comes from the Latin word vulnerabilis, which means wounding. The first definition of vulnerable in the Oxford English Dictionary is, ‘having power to wound; wounding’; the second is, ‘that may be wounded; susceptible of receiving wounds or physical injury’. ‘Vulnerability’ means both the power to wound or wounding, and the capacity to receive wounds or be wounded. Thus Butler’s understanding of what is constitutively ‘human’ deserves a second look. Julia Kristeva also invokes vulnerability in her latest work, La haine et le pardon (2005). There, she associates the uncanny effect of others with vulnerability. She raises the question of ‘how to inscribe in the conception of the human itself – and, consequently in philosophy and political practice – the constitutive part played by destructivity, vulnerability, disequilibrium which are integral to the identity of the human species and the singularity of the speaking subject’ (2005: 115). She claims that, along with liberty, equality and fraternity, vulnerability is a fourth term that we inherit from Enlightenment humanism (Kristeva, 2005: 115). Speaking of the handicapped, and extending her analysis to racism, classism and religious persecution, she suggests the narcissistic wound that constitutes humanity is a scar that sutures being and meaning. It is our ambiguous position in-between nature and culture, animal and human, being and meaning, that makes us vulnerable, and also free. Precisely that which makes us human and opens up a world of meaning, in other words, also makes us vulnerable. As Kristeva describes it, however, this vulnerability is not primarily the result of being infants whose bodies can be wounded by others, or having bodies that can be wounded (à la Butler), but rather the result of occupying a place between being and meaning, between bodies and words. On

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Kristeva’s account, the gap between bodies and words, the ways in which words are never quite adequate to capture bodily experience, is figured as a wound. And it is this wound that is the seat of our vulnerability. We are wounding and wounded because we occupy the space between bodies and meanings. She suggests that the uncanny encounter with another puts us face to face with our own vulnerability ‘with and for others’. And, it is the fear and denial of our own vulnerability that causes us to hate and exploit the vulnerability of others. She asks, then, how can we acknowledge that to be human is to be vulnerable? In other words, how can we accept our own vulnerability without violently projecting it onto others whom we oppress and torture or, alternatively, ‘civilize’ and ‘protect’?

Legitimate and illegitimate violence To answer this question, it is important to begin by noting that the rhetorical use of the term tends not only to occlude its ambiguous meaning, but in fact to oppose vulnerability directly against the possibility of violent threat. It is telling, for example, that along with the rhetoric of vulnerability, immediately following 9/11, news media conjured images of nuclear explosions. The clouds of smoke billowing from the Twin Towers recalled our detonation of nuclear bombs and rekindled fear of our own power and technologies. On the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, President Bush said that the war on terror is the ‘calling of our generation’, nothing less than ‘a struggle for civilization’ against ‘radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons’.1 And in a speech before the United Nations, criticizing Iran, Bush linked liberty to not pursuing nuclear weapons and terrorism to pursuing them, suggesting that only countries that fall in line behind the United States’ nuclear weapons can be free. Bush said, ‘The greatest obstacle to this future is that your rulers have chosen to deny you liberty and to use your nation’s resources to fund terrorism, and fuel extremism, and pursue nuclear weapons.’2 The easy slippage between liberty, terrorism and nuclear weapons is telling in a speech delivered by the ‘leader of the free world’ and the only superpower to have used nuclear weapons in

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war. As President Bush’s memorial speech five years after 9/11 suggests, we are afraid of imaginary dictators armed with nuclear weapons pointing right at the United States. The immensity of the threat in Bush’s rhetoric – the war for civilization and life as we know it – is overdetermined by the return of the repressed fear of our own nuclear power. September 11 reminded us of the possibility of nuclear devastation made possible by technologies, not only developed in the United States, but deployed by that country as well. At issue in the current ‘war against terror’, then, is the question of who is allowed to possess high-tech weaponry, or weapons of mass destruction, and who is not. The war in Iraq ostensibly began because US intelligence (mistakenly) reported that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Never mind that the United States and most other technologically developed countries have weapons of mass destruction. Never mind that the United States is the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war, which had a hugely horrific and deadly impact on Japanese populations. Increasingly the rhetoric surrounding US warfare and imperialist ventures centres on preventing rogue nations from developing nuclear weapons.3 The circular reasoning goes something like this: the US are on the side of right and goodness, so we should have nuclear weapons, while they are on the side of wrong and evil, so they should not have nuclear weapons. Of course, since the US does have nuclear weapons, it is in a position to define right and wrong, good and evil, in self-serving terms that legitimate its own use of violence while condemning violence when used by others. The discussion over the possession of nuclear weapons perfectly exemplifies the way in which vulnerability is opposed to threat, and its ambiguous meaning is denied. Nuclear capacity is seen as legitimate for some countries but not for others, while the possession of nuclear weapons is never legitimate for individuals, only for nation-states. In an important sense, the United States is going to war over the development and distribution of high-tech weaponry. Indeed, one significant fact among others that distinguishes ‘terrorism’ from ‘war’ or ‘legitimate force’ is the use of advanced technologies of war. As Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero argues, ‘the political lexicon of the West, by distinguishing between war and terrorism, assumes that only

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the violent (high-tech) performances of the Western Empire deserve the name of war. You can have a war on terrorism, as we are told, but not a war of terrorists’ (2006). War is seen as legitimate violence, while terrorism is seen as illegitimate, and one reason for this, as Cavarero maintains, is that Americans idealize violence in relation to the advanced technologies that make it possible to kill without being killed – the so-called surgical air-strike, for example, that connotes the precision of a surgeon removing a cancerous tumour. High-tech weaponry displaces bodies in combat in modern warfare. We imagine war like a video-game, where our troops handle remote controls that ‘take-out’ the enemy, seemingly without the blood and guts of older forms of war. Of course, this is an illusion created by technologies of war that remote-kill and by a visual culture in which fantasies of war in the movies are as close to bloody bodies as most of us (in post-industrial developed countries) ever get. The media coverage of the first Gulf War, fed to the television networks by the military, seemed to substantiate our sense of virtual, bloodless, disembodied warfare. War with real bodies fighting and killing each other seems like a thing of the past; it seems like a barbaric way to wage war. Deadly force is imagined as high-tech, precision violence that can be commanded with the push of a button. Deadly force that results from bodies rather than technology is not only illegitimate but also horrifying – we ask, for example, ‘what kind of psychopaths would use their own bodies to blow up other people?’. We are especially appalled by suicide bombers who seem to value killing over their own lives. Indeed, our quest to protect life at all costs (some lives, anyway) is part of what makes suicide bombers so horrifying within the Western imaginary. Suicide bombers make explicit the connection between the body and politics that has been denied within Western politics. They insist that the body is political and reinsert it into the realm of politics in a brutally violent way. They obviously value something other than mere survival or bare life, because they are willing to kill themselves for their cause. (In his study of suicide bombers, Christoph Reuter (2004) discovers that they are not crazed fanatics but well-educated young adults seeking to exact revenge on a more powerful enemy by using

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their lives as weapons.) But this violent return of bodies to politics is all the more shocking because of Western assumptions about the opposition between natural bodies and cultural politics. These bodies bring ambiguity back into politics. Thus, even while we honour our own dead as heroes sacrificed for the sake of higher values, we cannot imagine those other killers as sacrificing themselves for higher values; their bodies don’t count as bodies that can be sacrificed. Rather, their bodies are seen as weapons, treacherous, illegitimate, cruel weapons that fall outside of the political sphere and into the realm of the monstrous and unnatural. How can a few guys with box-cutters cause so much destruction? If box-cutters can be weapons of mass destruction, what about nail clippers, tennis shoes, Gatorade bottles or baby formula . . . or maybe even the babies themselves? If the body can be a weapon, then we are surrounded by weapons; we cannot tell the difference between weapons and the things or people in our midst every day. Suddenly, everything and everyone become threatening. The idea that the body can be a weapon or that something as low-tech as a box-cutter can take down an airplane not only boggles the mind but also seems wrong – the use of everyday objects in this way is just plain evil . . . too sinister for words. This attitude suggests that good people use high-tech bombs to blow up people, preferably other soldiers who are manning military targets. It also suggests that we feel somehow threatened by bodies themselves; that bodies used as weapons are especially uncanny because they conjure a deeper ambivalence we feel about our own bodies as well as the bodies of others. Insofar as all bodies are mortal, they are in a sense ticking time bombs waiting to kill us. Insofar as, within the history of Western thought, bodies are figured as finite, inconsistent, even irrational, they have been conceived of as opposed to civilization and culture. Part of the subtext of the exclusion of the body from politics is its unpredictability, that it could ‘go off’ at any minute. This is one reason why suicide bombers, or ‘body-bombers’ as Cavarero calls them, are particularly uncanny. With body-bombers, the body literally explodes back into the realm of politics. In contrast to the illegitimacy associated with suicide bombings, however, the treatment (no matter how extreme)

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of designated ‘terrorists’ is deemed fully appropriate. For in recent rhetoric, more than identifying a particular form of political violence, the label ‘terrorist’ connotes horrific violence beyond the pale of human society, compassion, ethics or politics.4 To call an act, a person or an organization ‘terrorist’ is to expel them from the realm of the political into the realm of the pathological. There is ‘normal’, ‘civilized’ violence and then there is ‘abnormal’, ‘sick’ and ‘barbaric’ violence. But, as social scientist Ghassan Hage emphasizes, ‘we need to question the way we are invited to uncritically think of a particular form of violence as “the worst possible kind of violence” merely by classifying it as “terrorist”’ (Hage, 2003: 70–1). The ways in which the classification ‘terrorist’ is used normalize some forms of violence and pathologize others. Specifically, the logic of exception seems to be the fundamental logic of the war against terror. For example, the abuse at Abu Ghraib or at Guantánamo Bay was said to be the result of exceptional individuals, the few bad apples. The prisoners held in Iraq and Cuba are not even called prisoners; rather they are called ‘detainees’, because, as we are told, these are exceptional times that require exceptional measures for these few exceptionally bad, even monstrous, individuals. President Bush and Vice President Cheney argued that ‘the terrorism threat requires that the president have wide power to decide who could be held and how they should be treated’; and former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had his aides shred documents from officials who ‘called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention centre at Guantánamo Bay Cuba’ (see Golden, 2006: A1). They insist that the president must have discretionary powers to make decisions about terrorists outside national or international law. Terrorism is described as outside the realm of politics, as evil, and therefore our normal (good) means of war-making do not apply because terrorism is an exception. This is why the administration maintained that the Geneva Convention was outdated and did not apply to terrorism (former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called the Geneva Convention ‘quaint’). The very space of the military base in Cuba is exceptional: the US military runs a prison from the shores of one of its supposed enemies.5 We

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use exceptional spaces to hold exceptionally evil enemies (we do not even call them criminals, since that would imply that they are within the law), so that we can exercise exceptional methods of interrogation and torture because we live in exceptional times. Thus, ‘terrorism’ becomes an inflammatory term that not only describes a particular form of violence, but also legitimates other forms of violence, namely the high-tech warfare of Western militaries and the use of exceptional methods of interrogation that flaunt international law. Hage maintains that ‘the struggle between states and opposing groups [is]: first, over the distribution of means of violence and second, and more importantly, over the classification of the forms of violence in the world, particularly over what constitutes legitimate violence’ (2003: 71–2). The fight operates on the material level of the distribution of wealth, in particular regarding high-tech weaponry, and on the symbolic level in terms of who has the authority to define legitimate force. Legitimate means legal; recently we have seen how the world superpower redefines what constitutes legitimate force by redefining torture and international law. If it is simply a matter of the more powerful defining the terms of engagement, then it is merely a case of ‘might makes right’, and our righteous, virtuous stand is nothing more than posturing on the part of the powerful. Ghassan Hage points out that what we call ‘terrorist groups’ never call themselves terrorists; rather they call themselves revolutionaries, rebels, martyrs, nationalists or freedom fighters, etc. He also notes that terrorism is a ‘violence of last resort’ that in many cases stems from the will to resist colonial domination or foreign occupation in spite of a lack of resources or high-tech weaponry. As a Palestinian living in Australia said, ‘Let the Americans give us the monopoly over nuclear power in the region and the strongest army there is, and we are happy to do “incursions” and hunt down wanted Israeli terrorists by demolishing their houses and “accidentally” killing civilians. Who would want to be a suicide bomber if such a luxurious mode of fighting is available to us?’ (quoted in Hage, 2003: 73). Part of the struggle, then, is precisely over who will and will not have access to ‘luxurious’, high-tech weaponry. Those that do have access, the wealthy nations, have not only the military might

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to physically force their case but also the symbolic capital to define the terms of the struggle on an ideological level. They are in the position of power in terms of both the weapons of war and the rhetoric of war. They control and distribute both the armaments of war and the ideology of war, using high-tech weaponry and high-tech media. This is to say, they not only have the power to execute deadly force but also to justify it with the rhetoric of saving civilization against barbarians, good versus evil, humane versus monstrous, and legitimate versus illegitimate violence. Technology both produces and reproduces the material and intellectual terrain of the contemporary landscape. On the one hand, technology provides the instruments or vehicles through which we experience our world – almost all facets of our everyday lives are mediated by technology, from electric toothbrushes, breast-milk pumps and hair club for men, to televisions, aeroplanes and computers. On the other hand, the technological form of mediation gives rise to a way of looking at the world, a world-view associated with instrumental reason; everything in our world, including our own bodies, other people and other creatures, becomes nothing more than the raw material with which to make high-tech instruments. They are no longer seen as ends in themselves, but rather as valuable only insofar as they serve to advance our technologies. Technology becomes a value in itself. Applying this line of thinking to contemporary warfare, Cavarero argues that technology aims at replacing, covering and neutralizing the traditional role of the fighting bodies; bare bodies, as she calls them, are excluded from what is considered legitimate warfare, while legitimate forms are defined by their use of high-tech weaponry (Cavarero, 2006). Bare bodies are excluded from the realm of the properly political and therefore from the realm of legitimate war, which is seen as an outgrowth of the political. Or, to put it simply, bodies are imagined as part of nature and therefore never completely assimilated into culture, while politics is imagined as the most organized form of culture that removes us from the realm of nature altogether. Yet, what is most remarkable about these bare bodies is that they are not bare; they are not natural; they are not innocent. Rather, they are armed and dangerous. In this regard, they are more than the

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return of the repressed natural body within Western politics. What is more dangerous than a natural body is a body that won’t stay put, a body that moves between nature and culture, a body that becomes a political statement. Indeed, suicide bombers unsettle Western politics by manifesting the way in which the body is always political; there is no bare body, no natural body. The greatest threat, then, is the ambiguity of the body as existing between nature and culture, between the physical and the technological. In her analysis of the role of the body in metaphors of politics – e.g. the body politic – Cavarero shows how real flesh and blood bodies have been associated with women and excluded from the realm of the properly political, while properly political bodies are seen as male bodies abstracted from everyday existence. Western politics’ valuation of abstract or virtual bodies over the messiness of real ones is part and parcel of the Western investment in advanced technologies. Our psychic and material financial investment in technology, in this case high-tech weapons with which to defend our body politic, both produces and reproduces the exclusion of real bodies from the realm of politics. This is one of the reasons the body appears as a threat to politics. What is disloyal and treacherous about these bodies-becomeweapons, however, is not merely the fact that they are bare and non-technological – the exploding belt may be low-tech, but it is still technology. Rather, alongside the threat of physical violence comes the threat of the explosion of ambiguity onto the scene of meaning. The centrality of visual media to both the culture and effectiveness of suicide bombers indicates that these violent acts are intended for mass distribution via communication and information technologies. The video recordings that suicide bombers make beforehand are circulated both to honour the ‘martyr’ and to recruit more ‘martyrs’. And the terror of these attacks, which actually do not kill as many people as hightech weaponry, is spread through media reports, especially television and the Internet. Al-Qaeda is notorious for delivering video recordings of its leaders condemning the United States and calling for Jihad. And Jihadists are increasingly using the Internet to recruit; they turn American technology against itself (Fattah, 2006: A6). So, while these ‘body bombers’, these young women and mothers who kill,

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menace high-tech Western culture with the return of the repressed body to politics, they also rely on Western technology to deliver their message. Their homicidal acts become terrorism in part because they aim them at the realm of information exchange – the symbolic realm – as well as at material bodies. The body returns as political, and its ambiguous status between nature and culture – between lifegiving mother and death-dealing bomber, between being and meaning – makes these acts not just violent but also abject. Julia Kristeva’s description of the abject is apt here. She maintains that the abject is not just what is disgusting or dirty but rather what calls into question the boundaries of the clean and proper. The abject is in-between, the double, that which cannot be neatly contained.6 It is ‘a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you . . .’ (Kristeva, 1982: 4). Certainly this description fits the perky girls engaged in abuse at Abu Ghraib and the pony-tailed girl suicide bombers blowing up themselves and others; their smiles dissemble; they are not what they seem. While Cavarero diagnoses the idealization of a virtual, technological (male) body over and against a real, natural (female) body, she does not discuss the role of technology in creating this prejudice. The issue of the relation between technology and bodies is complex. Technology is often seen as one means to control and even discipline unruly or diseased bodies; for example, we develop ultra high-tech modes of surgery to treat diseases and illness. But technologies with which we cure bodies are condensed with those with which we destroy bodies, as the use of the metaphors of surgery for military strikes suggests. Technology is also used to monitor and manage criminals and even terrorists. The use of surveillance technology is widespread – from the cash-machine on the corner to the prison. As our world becomes more technological, we become more dependent on, and invested in, technology. Not only is our material world affected; our mental landscape changes as well. And this change in our ideas is more difficult to diagnose. We come to prefer technological or virtual bodies to real ones, to the point that we feel betrayed or threatened by flesh and blood. At the same time, we feel alienated from our bodies

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in this technologically mediated world, and we crave more intense bodily sensations, which leads some people to sadomasochistic violence towards themselves or others. We become more limited in the ways we can imagine ourselves as human beings living together. We adopt a technological approach to life that is imagined at odds with what we still maintain as natural bodies excluded from the realm of politics. In this way, bodies and politics are seen as opposed. The consequences of this idea – or perhaps we should call it an assumption – are grave in terms of actual life-and-death struggles. For we feel threatened when the ambiguity of the relationship between bodies and politics is made manifest.

Innocence and vulnerability The threat posed by ambiguity brings us back to the discussion of vulnerability. One of the most outrageous aspects of terrorist violence is that it is directed toward innocent civilians.7 Civilians are innocent because they are not armed warriors; they presumably cannot fight back, which is also what makes them vulnerable. The assumption is that civilians will be protected by the government and by the military. But perhaps we should examine the division of labour implied in the notion of military personnel whose job it is to protect, and the comfortable lives of civilians who, for their part, benefit from military operations and occupations undertaken elsewhere, especially in the case of military superpowers that exercise force throughout the world in order to maintain their economic superiority and ‘way of life’. In a thought-provoking statement, Ghassan Hage challenges the distinction between soldiers and innocent civilians as it functions in violence between Israel and Palestine: The PSBs (Palestinian Suicide Bombers) disrupt the ability of the colonizers to consolidate a ‘normal peaceful life’ inside the colonial settler state of Israel. As such they do not respect the Israeli colonizer’s division of labor between the military who engage in protecting and facilitating the process of colonization and the civilian population who can peacefully enjoy the fruits of this process. (Hage, 2003: 68–9)

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The innocence of civilians can be associated with their vulnerability only insofar as the division of labour and the larger socio-political context in which it operates are overlooked. Moreover, from this perspective, children are especially innocent and vulnerable; it is heart-wrenching when children are the innocent victims of war or terrorism. Immediately after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, many news reports kept returning to the fact that children died in a day-care centre in the towers. Even if children are, or will be, the beneficiaries of imperialist violence and exploitation, they, more than others, have not (yet) chosen this way of life. But their innocence, it seems, is associated with their vulnerability even more than with their lack of choice. They are dependent upon others for their care and well-being and they are also vulnerable to others. And this innocence associated with childhood is not only valorized within American culture, but is seemingly definitive of it. Americans pride ourselves on our innocence, and we continue to feel menaced by corrupt forces that threaten it: Vietnam, 9/11, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo. We talk about the loss of American innocence in relation to these events, even while we continue to insist on it. Paradoxically, this loss of innocence is thought to make us vulnerable. Think of rhetoric such as ‘After 9/11, America will never be the same. America is now vulnerable’. In sum, paradoxically, we are vulnerable both because we are innocent and because we have lost our innocence after the 9/11 attacks. The ambiguities inherent in our concept of vulnerability, not the least of which is the association with both wounding and being wounded, signal ambiguities in our conception of the body itself, particularly in relation to technology. The body is imagined as natural and therefore both innocent and outside culture. Thus, when the body explodes back onto the scene of politics, for example with suicide bombers using their bodies as weapons, the horror it evokes is linked to its ambiguity. In other words, bodies, especially human bodies, occupy ambiguous spaces between nature and culture, between the physical and the political. As Julia Kristeva argues, it is this ambiguity, this position in-between, which makes us vulnerable. And as such, it is this ambiguity that we must acknowledge in order to

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acknowledge the role of vulnerability in human life. So, it is not just our embodiment that makes us vulnerable (or violent) but our status as beings on the cusp of being and meaning. For Kristeva, to recognize this is to recognize our humanity. But, what does it mean to recognize vulnerability in humanity, especially if we see the first as constitutive of the second? Judith Butler concludes her reflections on violence in Precarious Life by insisting that ‘the task at hand is to establish modes of public seeing and hearing that might well respond to the cry of the human within the sphere of appearance, a sphere in which the trace of the cry has become hyperbolically inflated to rationalize a gluttonous nationalism, or fully obliterated, where both alternatives turn out to be the same’ (Butler, 2004: 107). Butler suggests that we see and hear ‘the cry of the human’ but, at the same time, we do not see and hear it because, as she maintains, we do not recognize it as human. Hage also asks ‘what kind of social conditions must avail and what kind of history must a people have internalized to make them lose this capacity of seeing the other in his or her humanness?’ (2003: 85). Hage too suggests that we do not see, because we do not recognize, the humanity of the other. What would it mean to see or hear the humanity or humanness within the images presented to us in the media? In the case of the photographs from Abu Ghraib or testimony of army insiders from Guantánamo, is it that we do not see or hear the victims – and the perpetrators – as human? Is it, as both Butler and Hage argue, that we do not recognize their humanity? Or is there, rather, something more at stake than recognition in explaining and overcoming violence? Is there something in these images, in these events, in our response to them – our responsibility for them – that takes us beyond recognition? We might formulate the question this way: what is the relationship between the recognition of another’s vulnerability or humanity and the response to it? Are these one and the same? Or, on the contrary, is it rather that we do indeed recognize the other’s vulnerability and humanity and that is precisely why we engage in insistent disavowals of our own violence as well as hyperbolic justifications for it?

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Conclusion: beyond recognition Both Butler and Hage, along with many other contemporary theorists, explain violence in terms of a struggle for recognition, a struggle to be recognized as part of humanity. More than this, they both suggest that reciprocal or mutual recognition is a necessary ideal for overcoming violence. Butler articulates this struggle in terms of the constitutive power of norms and describes recognition itself as a performance that enacts and confers, in this case, humanity (2004: 43–4). Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, Hage describes the struggle for recognition in terms of the distribution of the meaningfulness of life (2003: 78–9). He maintains that ‘society is characterized by a deep inequality in the distribution of meaningfulness’, which he associates with ‘the losers in the symbolic struggle for recognition’ to humanity. Yet, in spite of their gloomy portrayals of the dreadful consequences of losing the struggle for recognition, both Butler and Hage continue to embrace the Hegelian ideal of reciprocal or mutual recognition. In spite of the fact that they catalogue in gory detail many of the casualties in this struggle, they continue to have faith in the ideal. Elsewhere, I have argued that, by doing so, they continue to promote an ideal that is not only unattainable but also politically suspect, because the struggle or need for recognition is a by-product of colonial violence in the first place (Oliver, 2001). Why do we continue to hold onto the ideal of mutual recognition in the name of democratic solidarity, even while we reject so many other nineteenth century ideals as part of the colonial enterprise? More to the point here, why do we continue to imagine humanity as a struggle, a fight, a war? How can we get beyond violence, if the best hope we have for overcoming it is violence itself, the so-called struggle for recognition? When we look at the photographs from Abu Ghraib and hear about the abuses at Guantánamo, we may work to justify them, explain them away or redefine torture; we may see them as ‘just having fun’ or necessary or ‘legitimate force’. At the same time, however, we do recognize our own culpability, but we disavow this recognition; simultaneously, we know it is wrong but continue to insist on our innocence. The question, then, is not one of recognition – if only we

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recognized (in either Hage’s epistemological sense or Butler’s political sense) these other people as humans or as vulnerable bodies, then we would treat them differently.8 We can recognize them as humans in both an epistemological and a political sense and still torture them and kill them. The question is how and why we deny what we recognize in order to justify torture and killing. The question is not just how and why we justify violence, but, moreover, how and why we seem to enjoy it! This question, of the meaning of violence in our cultural imaginary, demands that we pay attention to unconscious desires and fears. Given the violence of humans against humans, it is not enough to recognize humanity if what that means is to fight the ‘good fight’ or keep up the struggle for recognition. If winning the war over recognition is the only way to end violence, then violence becomes the only means to peace. We are all too familiar with the deadly logic of ‘peace-keeping forces’ waging war. With recognition, the best we can hope for is that we will recognize there is something in our relationships with others that is always beyond the struggle, violence and war, something that requires recognizing the limits of recognition itself. Continually reassessing the limits of our own recognition compels us to continue to examine and question our own desires and fears in relation to others. It is precisely when we think that we understand others that we have stopped having a relationship with them and have started having a relationship only with our fantasies of them. This is not only true for relations with so-called ‘enemies’, but also with friends and loved ones. The question, then, is not how to win the struggle for recognition or how to recognize the humanity or vulnerability of others. Rather, the question is what it means that we imagine human relations as a struggle in the first place. What does it mean that vulnerability denotes both wounding and being wounded? What are the implications for ethics and politics of seeing and describing human relations as fundamentally and inherently violent? While the struggle for recognition might help to explain war and violence, when it is taken as the norm for human relationships it also normalizes war and violence. War and violence exist, and human beings are capable of inflicting and suffering astounding violence, but it is not this violence or vulner-

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ability that is definitive of humanity. Rather, it is the ability to move beyond violence and heal wounds that makes us human. We can commit violent acts, and we can wound and be wounded, but we can also interpret our violent impulses to prevent ourselves from acting on them, to prevent the repetition of the cycle of violence, to heal ourselves and others (a healing that is never complete, but always only provisional and part of an infinite process). Our first reaction when wounded might be to seek revenge. But the time of critical reflection and interpretation of our own stake in violence can be just enough time to stop that deadly reflex. To rethink politics as beyond recognition, we must consider the psychic forces that operate behind the scene. As Hage argues, with the move from a welfare state to a penal state, we no longer value social explanations – and I would add psychological explanations – for understanding violence (2003: 86). For, if we did insist on explanations that include the historical context and the social, political, economic and psychological stakes, then we could no longer easily justify detaining people indefinitely or punishing, torturing or killing them. It is much easier to figure them as evil monsters or animals and dispose of them, than to analyse our own political and psychological investment in their disappearance or their exploitation or suffering. Reacting or acting-out without considering these complexities may seem easier, but in this case our obsession with speed and efficiency leads to death. Rather than trying to deny the complexities of life by seeing in black and white, good and evil, us and them, we must explore, not only the ways in which our lives depend on those ambiguities, but also the ways in which, without those ambiguities, life is empty and ultimately meaningless. Without examining our own ambivalence towards violence, freedom, justice and democracy become nothing but clichés, or worse, the justification for torture, killing, and war.

Notes 1

President George W. Bush’s speech on September 11, 2006 in Shanksville, PA. As reported in The Tennessean, ‘Bush vows to fight “to the end”: War on terrorism is the calling of our generation . . .’ (Hunt, 2006).

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2 3 4 5

6

7

8

Reported in The New York Times, Wednesday, 20 September 2006. (Rutenberg and Cooper, 2006). For a ‘deconstruction’ of the notion of rogue states in relation to Western notions of sovereignty, see Derrida (2005). For recent discussion of how to define terrorism, see Coady and O’Keefe (2003). For an insightful application of Agamben’s (1998) logic of exception to the Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay prisons, see Gregory (2006). Compare Judith Butler’s use of Agamben’s theory of exception and bare life in Precarious life (2004). Kristeva describes the abject: ‘it is thus no lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (1982: 232). Notably, most discussions of ‘just war’ theory that focus on the issue of civilian deaths neither question the use of the word ‘innocent’ in this context, nor reflect on the relationship between soldiers and civilians as a division of labour. For a historical account of changing conceptions of civilians in relation to war, see Hartigan (1982). Certainly it is not a matter of epistemological or cognitive recognition, but rather of political recognition. We do not respect their humanity even while we recognize them as humans. But even on the political level, we do recognize them as our enemies. We call them ‘dogs’ or ‘beasts’ in order to justify mistreating them (as if being an animal was justification enough for mistreatment); the US occupation of Iraq has seen many dogs, both metaphorical and literal. The ‘Us versus Them’ mentality that divides the world into kinds of people (friends and enemies, humans and dogs) both produces and justifies killing some but not others. It is not that others are not recognized as human, but rather that they are recognized as enemies, all too human enemies. Indeed, the very definition of identity as a struggle for recognition is part of the ‘Us versus Them’ logic that views all human relationships as fights to the death in which there are necessarily winners and losers. Even if violence and hatred can be partially explained in terms of recognition, as I argue elsewhere (2007), overcoming violence and hatred requires going beyond recognition and toward witnessing ethics.

References Agamben, Giorgio (1998), Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life. (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Butler, Judith (2004), Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence (New York: Verso). Cavarero, Adriana (2006), ‘Violent bodies’, unpublished manuscript. Coady, Tony and O’Keefe, Michael (eds) (2003), Terrorism and justice (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press). Derrida, Jacques (2005), Rogues. Two essays on reason (translated by P.-A. Brault and M. Naas) (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Engelhardt, Tom (2006), ‘9/11 in a movie-made world’. The Nation (September 25): 15–21.

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Fattah, Hassan (2006), ‘Growing unarmed battalion in Qaeda army is using Internet to get the message out’. The New York Times (30 September): A6. Golden, Tim (2006), ‘Memo on detainees fueled deep rift in administration’. New York Times (1 October): A1. Gregory, Derek (2006), ‘Vanishing points: law, violence and exception in the global war prison’ in G. and A. Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: fear, terror and political violence (New York: Routledge). Hage, Ghassan (2003), ‘“Comes a time we are all enthusiasm”: understanding Palestinian suicide bombers in times of exighophobia’. Public Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press), 15 (1): 65–98. Hartigan, Richard (1982), The forgotten victim: a history of the civilian (Chicago: Precedent Publishing). Hunt, Terence (2006), ‘Bush vows to fight “to the end”’. The Tennessean (12 September): 1. Kristeva, Julia (1982), Powers of horror: an essay on abjection (translated by L. Roudiez) (New York: Columbia University Press). Kristeva, Julia (2005), La haine et le pardon (Fayard: Paris). Oliver, Kelly (2001), Witnessing: beyond recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Oliver, Kelly (2004), The colonization of psychic space: toward a psychoanalytic social theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota). Oliver, Kelly (2007), Women as weapons of war (New York: Columbia University Press). Reuter, Christopher (2004), My life as a weapon: a modern history of suicide bombing (translated by H. Ragg-Kirkby) (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Rutenberg, Jim and Cooper, Helene (2006), ‘Presidents spar over Iran’s aims and U.S. power’. The New York Times (20 September): A1.

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5 The brackets of recognition: recognition, espionage, camouflage Elizabeth A. Povinelli

In Time and the other, Johannes Fabian characterized the relation between anthropology and its object as a ‘political cosmology’, at the centre of which lay a constitutive contradiction. On the one hand, ‘anthropology has its empirical foundation in ethnographic research, inquiries which even hard-nosed practitioners carry out as communicative interactions’, and, on the other hand, ‘when these same ethnographers represent their knowledge in teaching and writing they do this in terms of a discourse that consistently places those who are talked about in a time other than that of the one who talks’ (Fabian, 2006: 143). Demonstrating how the event of narration was (mis)aligned to the narrated event that provided its foundation allowed Fabian to align the writing practices of modern anthropology to the historical desires of a ‘modern Hegelianism’, in which the function of the nonWestern other is to make sense of Western unfolding (Fabian, 2006: 140). We should be wary, however, of wallowing too long in this self-lacerating version of anthropological exceptionalism. After all, narrative manoeuvres of time and the other, embedded in the political cosmology of anthropology, are also found in the practical governance of late liberalism. Late liberalism, like anthropology, depends on narrative constructions of time and the other, or what should be more precisely called tense and the other. It is this broader system of liberal tense and governance that I address in this chapter. More specifically, I explore late liberal figurations of the tense of the other in order to open a discussion about liberal recognition in its other modalities, namely espionage and camouflage, about the liberal modes of social belonging in

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which recognition, espionage and camouflage manoeuvre and make sense, and about the manoeuvres of social worlds that are addressed by, exist in, or are a result of, these tactics of recognition and social belonging. The narrative configurations of the tense of the other that interest me are indicated by such statements as ‘We need to be able to live with our impasses’ and ‘We need to start with what we can agree about’, but they are far broader and more encompassing than any specific statement. In particular, I am concerned with the statements, and their discursive backdrops, that urge us to suspend or bracket social differences that cannot enter into the communicative rationality of the liberal public sphere. It is in the tense of the other in this broader sense that I am interested: how those who live within these brackets and deferrals are placed in an antechamber of time – a knot of past perfect and future perfective. To understand what is at stake we need to remember that the call for people to begin with the agreeable and become comfortable with impasses does not mean that those people who are disagreeable and the supposed source of the impasse disappear until they are called back onto the stage of recognition. People may be bracketed by liberal procedures treating radical alterity, but the brackets do not vaporize those within them. And so scholars should be interested in the social dynamics that occur when these brackets are installed and that take place at their thresholds. After all, large groups of people may be, as Dipesh Chakrabarty put it in another context, consigned to the ‘imaginary waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 8). But they are living within these waiting rooms. The social referent of the disagreeable and impractical remains in durative time, although it effectively disappears from public discussion, public sentiment and public ethics. But it would be a mistake to think that the people within these bracketed zones are sitting quietly, or clamouring outside the gates of the Emerald City waiting for the wizard to appear, or hanging out with the doorkeeper of law, waiting for permission to enter (Kafka, 1999). Not only are people not waiting in their waiting rooms, but, when we open the brackets of recognition or stand at their threshold and examine the clamorous, sprawling social worlds living within, against or on top of them, we find that ‘recognition’ might not be the most useful way of

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conceptualizing the dynamics at play. Indeed, when we look into these waiting rooms, it is not recognition we see but recognition in another state, or another state of recognition – recognition in its mode as an aggressive abandonment. And it is in regard to this aggressive mode of abandonment that this chapter considers late liberal modes of recognition in two other modalities, namely espionage and camouflage. By ‘espionage’, I mean actual practices of spying and being spied on, as well as assumptions that someone is trying to penetrate a socially sealed space. There is no a priori reason that espionage must be experienced or understood as a dystopic condition, although in the politics of liberal democracies it usually is. By ‘camouflage’, I mean the art of hiding within a given environment via embodied disguise. In this chapter, I examine these bracketed zones of late liberal recognition as an aggressive zone of abandonment within which various experiments of the self and society are fostered and demanded. I begin by briefly discussing some of the ways scholars have thought about the causes and justifications of the appearance of these brackets of recognition, and how the narrative manoeuvres of tense and sense within them are anchored in, produced and made sensible by two normative forms of social belonging. I then turn to two examples to elaborate the modalities of recognition that emerge at these moments. I end with a discussion of social being within these brackets of late liberalism, including the ways in which it disturbs an anthropological address. Before beginning this discussion, let me say a few words about some of the terms I employ, beginning with the broad, periodizing phrase, ‘late liberalism’. By this term I simply mean to refer to the present moment, when the hegemony of the US and Western Europe is no longer secure or selfevident. Of particular interest in this regard are those social manoeuvres that challenge or conserve liberal forms, identities and affects, especially those that arose during anticolonial struggles, continued through the post-colonial and settler-colonial politics of recognition, and are now being unsettled by the perceived loss of American and European social and market hegemony. I am not, however, asserting that the US or Europe was in fact hegemonic prior to this moment. Rather, I am interested in this period as a retroactive experience of a now lost status. Second, the economies

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of abandonment that are of interest are organized around two liberal norms of social belonging – what I have elsewhere called the discourses and practices of the autological subject and genealogical society (Povinelli, 2006). I say more about these two normative modes of social belonging within late liberalism below. As will become apparent, however, how I think about late liberalism and the economies of abandonment that rely on these liberal norms of social belonging has an immediate effect on how I think about the trial relationship among recognition, espionage and camouflage.

The trembling of recognition Let me begin with what I think we can all agree with: the certainty of recognition in liberal democracies trembles when faced with an unrepentant moral alterity of the sort witnessed in some post-colonial, theological, queer and indigenous struggles. However, sometimes recognition trembles at seemingly slighter things, like the treatment of animals or plants as above or equal to human life (see Singer 1995; Jamieson 1999). What trembles does not concern merely the particular behaviour at hand, but whether recognition is itself the right framework though which to view such encounters. Consider, for instance, an editorial in the UK Sunday Times, 16 September 2007, in which Nick Clegg, the Home Affairs Secretary of the Liberal Democratic Party, presented his party’s official stance on the appropriateness of recognition in moments of serious social retraction: Our aim must be to refute the medievalism of Al-Qaeda’s perverted world view, while ensuring that members of our mainstream Muslim communities feel that our liberal values of tolerance and diversity are their values too. We must combine critical engagement with the many grievances held among mainstream Muslims, without necessarily accepting them, drawing a clear red line beyond which liberal respect for other views does not extend. (Clegg, 2007)

Like Kantian reason, recognition has its proper limits, but it continually seeks to overstep those limits and, as a result, must be carefully disciplined.

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For some time, scholars of recognition have been interested in two aspects of these clear red lines and the brackets of recognition they create and around which people cluster: their cause and their justice and justification. Thus, on the one hand, we have asked what causes the trembling of recognition – the liquefactions of the self and the social in relation to an Other – so that we can better understand, shape and direct the resultant transformations of law, economy and politics that it provokes. Broadly speaking, two competing causes of this trembling have been discussed. One group, exemplified by Samuel Huntington’s Clash of civilizations (1998), argues that a trembling of recognition results when the semantically ordered, practically based, moral foundations of distinct civilizations collide. Though hardly aligned with, and strikingly more complex than Huntington’s political project, some philosophers of language have likewise presented the problem of recognition in terms of incommensurate semantic fields; they ask how and why radically incompatible ethical and epistemological horizons are aligned or not, how people interpret and decide between them, and how they characterize these interpretations and the practical worlds that result within or alongside them. A second group argues that recognition trembles in the face of internally incommensurate liberal, social, political and economic logics, practices and affects. From this point of view, the problem is that a dissonance internal to liberal societies themselves is projected outward as a problem between liberal, illiberal or non-liberal societies. One such internal dissonance, for instance, is the incommensurability and undecidability of truth as it stretches across deliberative sense and moral sense. Specifically, when ‘moral sense’ is cited in the liberal public sphere, the meaning of ‘sense’ tends to gravitate towards the faculties and fields of sensation, often organically grounded. This sensate ground is the field of the final intelligibility of moral sense. The infamous statement of US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart that, in relation to what he took to be the fact that hard-core pornography was impossible to define, he could know it when he saw it, should be rephrased as ‘I feel it when I feel it’. This visceral truth as a domain of intelligibility and judgement is, of course, the effect of a long history of the body’s constitution and its ability to signal truth (Foucault,

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1986; Nietzsche, 1989) – a history that created moral sense’s constitutive other: deliberative sense. When ‘deliberative sense’ is cited in the liberal public sphere, in other words, the meaning of ‘sense’ gravitates to semantic or pragmatic signification, directly in contrast to the sensible ground of ‘moral sense’. As I have argued elsewhere, the incommensurability of moral and deliberative sense is itself the stipulative effect of a long history of separations and regimentations of human meaning, action, sensation and linguistic reflexivity (Povinelli, 2002). Over time, this procedure of communicative reason came to be considered a critical domain of truth production. Thus, both ‘senses’ of sense, sensate and cognitive, moral and deliberative, can be grounds for the generation of truth in liberal democracies, and each can be used to assess the legitimacy of the other. But, because they have different grounds, there is an internal indeterminacy with respect to which of these forms of truth-knowledge is relevant at what moment. In short, this historically constituted difference opens a zone of undecidability within liberal truth, even as it orders that truth, and it is this undecidability or dissonance internal to liberal societies themselves that is posited as the second cause of the trembling of recognition. It is really not necessary to choose between these two broad and competing causes. The trembling of recognition is no doubt produced by any of a number of factors internal and external to liberalism – it has plural conditions as well as plural states. It can be caused by various social orders confronting each other, especially when a given or emergent mode of social life challenges one or the other side of liberal deliberative and moral sense, or both sides at the same time. It can also be caused by struggles within any given liberal order, especially when moral sense and deliberative sense are meta-thematized as religious sense and rational sense. And it can be located within any given social order or within any given social subject. So a subject might find herself trembling, liquefying, because, for example, she might think she should love across radical difference but in fact is physically and affectively repulsed by some aspect of a concrete other and because she cannot be sure if her repulsion has a theological or (merely) cultural origin.

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In addition to the question of the causes of the trembling of recognition, scholars have also been interested in the problem of justice and justification when red lines of intolerance and incarceration, and various states of killing and letting die attached to these lines, are drawn. After all, when recognition encounters, or manufactures, an unrepentant moral alterity, the state of recognition publicly denounces the red-lined public, enacts repressive laws to eliminate it, and hunts down its recalcitrant members. In other words, the productive forces of state discipline are supplemented by repressive forces, governmental interests in life give way to spectacular acts of killing. Political theorists and political philosophers have attempted to discover some overarching principles on which to ground justice and justification in these moments of overt oppression. We might even say that the dominant strain of theoretical thought has focused on social justice in the moments that states decide an Other cannot be accepted as a member of the national or international community. Clegg’s public announcement that refutation rather than recognition is the proper stance for treating ‘medieval Islam’ is an obvious example. But there is another moment within public and state reason at which a judgement concerning the tolerability of alterity has yet to be made, or is made with qualifications, such that the Other is placed within a social bracket that is itself a narrative configuration of time, or such that one group is placed under the sign of refusal, while others are placed within a zone that is not yet prohibited or allowed. These deferred and partial judgements are not issued in the present perfect but as a catachresis of the past perfect, in which the undecidable practice will have been apprehensible, and the future perfective, in which the undecidable practice will have been resolved. At the intersection of these two tenses, the harms done within these brackets narratively disappear, and social worlds are abandoned. We might understand these economies of abandonment with their narrative configurations of tense as organized around two normative modes of social belonging in late liberalism – the autological subject and the genealogical society. The first mode, glossed by the phrase ‘the autological subject’, stages the human as an individuated subject

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struggling to author his or her own life and destiny against and within broader human social and historical determinations. In the second mode of social belonging, glossed by the phrase ‘the genealogical society’, some sort of human supraindividual force is hysterically imagined as constraining that individual struggle (for a fuller discussion, see Povinelli, 2006). There are several points it is important to underscore with respect to the relationship between the autological subject and the genealogical society and between both of them and late liberalism. The first and primary point has to do with how, within a liberal imaginary, the two modes emerge and function as a constitutive contradiction. To be sure, there are multiple non-liberal, even ir-liberal, modes of freedom in history and in the present, as well as multiple non-liberal, even ir-liberal, modes of genealogy. But, within liberalism, these two forms of social belonging are figured as in a dialectical relation; thus, from the perspective of liberal address, all the other modes of freedom and dependency are required to accord to this dialectic, even though, in fact, these discourses of autology and genealogy are premised upon a dead division that does not unfold into higher orders of social belonging. This leads to my second point, that this liberal division of social belonging does not reflect the nature of social life inside or outside liberal orders. Thus, rather than analysing modes of social belonging as social truths or actual facts of liberal or non-liberal socialities, we need to understand them as a mode of disciplining and fixing socialities. Now, no self-respecting critic writing in the long shadow of Foucault could possibly mistake this division within social belonging – social belonging as legible only within this division – as accounting for either social belonging per se or the history of its emergence. But, what interests me about this discursive separation between the autological subject and genealogical society in particular is that it connected two kinds of fitful developments that marked the long durée from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, and that were consolidated from the eighteenth to the nineteenth; namely, the fitful expansion of democracy across Europe, and the fitful expansion of European conquest across the globe. In both, the division of Europe’s past and present from its

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future, as well as the status of the Other, were considered in terms of the destiny of the autological subject in relation to the genealogical society. The internal difference of Europe in relation to itself, and the external difference of Europe in relation to its colonies, emerged in the topology of a Möbius strip. The third point that should be underlined with respect to the autological subject and the genealogical society is that, once they emerge, they remain ‘at hand’ even when they are demonstrably false and falsifiable. We repeat them regardless of the fact that we know they do not refer, or we know that, in repeating them, we participate in the constant retroactive regulation of belonging as a potential field at play into belonging as a deviation from these two poles. The sources of this normative grip, and its spectral quality, are not the result of either the autological subject’s internal coherence or stability, or its internal incoherence or instability. The normative grip of the autological subject results, rather, in the first place, from the performative projection of its own negation – that is, the genealogical society is an equally spectral condition of individual constraint and determination – and from the zone of indecipherability and undecidability that opens on account of them. And the source of its normative grip lies also, in the second place, in the demand that actual people and populations must give an account of themselves from the perspective of one or the other of these poles, even though these poles create zones of undecidability. Let me give two concrete examples of the dynamic relationship between the economies of abandonment within the brackets of recognition and discourses of social belonging in late liberalism.

Social belonging and abandonment in late liberalism On 21 June 2007, the then prime minister of Australia, John Howard, declared a ‘national emergency in relation to the abuse of children in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory’. Howard’s declaration came on the heels of the ‘Little children are sacred’ (LCAS) report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the protection of Aboriginal children from sexual abuse (Northern Territory Board of

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Inquiry, 2007). In the name of this national emergency, Howard’s government assumed broad and unprecedented powers over indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory, including indigenous welfare, education, land tenure and health. As a carrot, Howard promised millions of dollars for indigenous health, education and employment training. As a stick, the federal government sent, under the cover of military police, medical personnel to conduct compulsory sexual health exams for all children under the age of sixteen. ‘Business managers’ with powers to control and direct all indigenous programmes and their assets, including the monitoring of all community communication and video equipment, were also sent to take control of all Commonwealth programmes in indigenous town camps and rural communities. One of their first actions was to shift indigenous workers from the Community Development Employment Programme (CDEP) to welfare. A shift from work to welfare was necessary because the federal government wished to control the wealth and spending of indigenous people in remote communities and town camps.1 Once all indigenous people were placed on welfare, payments were tied to school attendance and other behavioural indices; furthermore, 50 per cent of payments were given in the form of debit cards that restricted purchasing choices of indigenous men and women to selected stores’ selected items, and prohibited them from purchasing alcohol and pornography. Because many of the provisions of the proposed emergency legislation were racially discriminatory, the federal government added an amendment that suspended the application of the Racial Discrimination Act to the legislation. Although Howard pegged his declaration of emergency to the release of the LCAS report, he did not restrict himself to its recommendations (Northern Territory Board of Inquiry, 2007). Instead he endorsed Minister for Indigenous Affairs Mal Brough’s longstanding call for a move beyond the politics of recognition and reconciliation with indigenous people to an enterprise approach to indigenous affairs. Indigenous people needed to stop worrying about their culture, move out of rural regions and accept whatever jobs they could get in the cities. By September, the Howard government, which controlled the federal parliament, had passed the Northern Territory National Emergency Response

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Act, 2007. The Act gave the federal government sweeping powers over indigenous land tenure, welfare, alcohol consumption and education (see Beacroft and Poole, 2008). Dumbfounded by the legislation, one of the authors of the ‘Children are sacred’ report, Patricia Anderson, said there was no relation between the report and the emergency powers claimed by the government. To date, it is unclear how much of, or on what, the $587 million actually allocated for the first twelve months of the intervention has been spent. Preliminary analysis suggests, however, that a large percentage has been allocated to the employment of non-indigenous bureaucrats, bureaucratic agencies, police and researchers. What is also unclear is whether the ban on the purchase of alcohol and pornography has any actual social purchase. It is quite simple to get around the restrictive nature of the debit card, for instance. But rather than detailing the neo-liberal logic of this intervention and local tactics of resistance, I want to focus on the discourses of social belonging that made the emergency intervention sensible and on what, by making it sensible, allowed the Howard government, and the subsequent Rudd government, to create a narrative form that placed indigenous lives at the chiasma of the past perfect and future perfective of liberal justice, conjuring away the durative present of social harm. To do so, it is useful to begin with the LCAS report itself (Northern Territory Board of Inquiry, 2007). The LCAS begins by dramatically noting ‘a breakdown of Aboriginal culture’ caused by a number of underlying conditions of indigenous life. ‘Excessive consumption of alcohol is variously described as the cause or result of poverty, unemployment, lack of education, boredom and overcrowded and inadequate housing. The use of other drugs and petrol sniffing can be added to these. Together, they lead to excessive violence. In the worst case scenario it leads to sexual abuse of children’ (Northern Territory Board of Inquiry, 2007: 12). The LCAS was careful to dispel five myths about indigenous sexual abuse (Aboriginal men are the only offenders; Aboriginal law is the reason for high levels of sexual abuse; Aboriginal law is used as an excuse to justify abuse; Aboriginal culture is the reason for under-reporting; and Aboriginal men do not have an important role to play in preventing child sexual abuse).

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Nonetheless, it was in terms of such myths about the cause of Aboriginal sexual abuse that federal government spokespersons and the national media made sense of the abuse. When the report circulated in the national press, the point that received most attention was not the supposed breakdown of Aboriginal culture but the abuse of children by their family based on traditional marriage laws. Conservative commentators rushed to claim their pyrrhic victory, indicting supporters of multiculturalism for their naïve understanding of Aboriginal customs, even as they loudly proclaimed the collapse of an Aboriginal social order. National media promoted the pro-market and promodernization visions of particular indigenous men and women who had close ties to the Howard government, who castigated progressive white Australians for wishing to lock indigenous people into a national museum. What indigenous people wanted, according to these indigenous men and women and their non-indigenous allies, was to be free enterprise subjects. This would mean some hardship during the transition. The Howard government acknowledged this – that life in the present would be worse for many indigenous men and women. Most Aboriginal men and women living in the rural north have lived through several such moments of transition. They are used to hearing that the harms in their present lives should be bracketed to create a past perfect and future perfective. If we are interested in how the narrative manoeuvres of tense and sense within the brackets of liberal recognition are anchored in, produced and made sensible by two normative forms of social belonging, then two aspects of the intervention are quite interesting. First, as this example makes clear, the dynamics of recognition operate within the metadynamics of the autological subject and genealogical society and can move between them quite easily. Governments and publics can rapidly relay between calls for recognition of social difference and calls to refuse not merely social difference but the relevance of recognition to the task at hand. Second, as this example also makes clear, when recognition is refused, life within its brackets must make use of tactics of espionage and camouflage. To live with less now in order to have a better life then dulls the critical social senses that the present cannot be lived in the future. To live

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this future in the present demands that indigenous men and women learn how to manoeuvre illegally. They must hide out within this environment, appearing to be in a time they are not even in, and they must be on heightened alert, because much of the money sequestered to help them has gone into new surveillance regimes. A second example of the dynamics of recognition, espionage and camouflage concerns a recent US Supreme Court case, Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal (UDV). In a narrow sense, the oral arguments of Gonzales v. UDV, which were heard on 1 November 2005, concerned whether the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals (Boulder, Colorado) was right to issue a preliminary injunction that exempted the UDV from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). This exemption allowed the UDV to import, distribute and use a Schedule 1 controlled substance – ayahuasca tea, which contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT) – for religious purposes. (Schedule 1 drugs are drugs with a high abuse risk. These drugs have no safe, accepted medical use in the United States. Some examples are heroin, marijuana, LSD, PCP and crack cocaine.) Central questions in the dispute concerned the competing, controlling powers of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), the American Indian Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1994 (AIRFRA) (originally passed in 1978, then amended in 1994) and the CSA, and how each of these Acts related to the 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances (UNCPS), of which the US is a signatory. This issue of controlling powers was especially pertinent since Congress passed the RFRA and the AIRFRA in order to counter Justice Scalia’s argument, in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), that a person could not excuse a criminal practice on the basis of religion. At stake in Employment Division v. Smith was whether two Native American members of the Native American Church could be denied unemployment benefits on the basis of having tested positive for the Schedule 1 drug peyote, which they had ingested during a Native American Church ceremony. In his majority opinion, Scalia wrote that the Supreme Court would no longer hold the government to the standard of compelling state interest if a law only accidentally affected a religious practice. The threat of anarchy, Scalia argued,

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must at times expose democracy to the prejudice of the majority, and this prejudice had a political not juridical address. ‘The Court today suggests that the disfavoring of minority religions is an “unavoidable consequence” under our system of government and that accommodation of such religions must be left to the political process’ (Employment Division v. Smith, 1990). Interestingly, a ruling that had little to nothing to say about the genealogical society became fundamentally entangled in liberal imaginaries of genealogical society once it entered the political process and its regulatory apparatus. Smith was primarily interested in whether ‘neutral, general law’ touched the free expression jurisprudence; whether the distinction between belief and action matters in this case; and whether these issues affected questions of compelling state interest test. But in the amended AIRFRA, the controlling imaginary of the genealogical society predominated. ‘Indian’, ‘Indian Tribe’ and ‘Indian Religion’ were defined according to the descent of blood, kinship and culture as certified by federal status.2 After Congress took up this political challenge, amending the AIRFRA, the Boulder Court of Appeals used these amendments to justify an exemption to the CSA for the UDV. It reasoned that the AIRFRA was amended, after all, to secure the rights of Native American members of the Native American Church to use the Schedule 1 drug peyote in their religious rites.3 And it further ruled that they could not discriminate between members of the Native American Church and members of the UDV. The Attorney General’s office disagreed. On the one hand, they argued that the US government had a special relation to Native Americans that was non-transferable to other minority religions. Native Americans were an exception within the chattering crowds of religious minorities for two reasons: because they were, as Will Kymlicka puts it, a national minority with unique, if qualified, claims of sovereignty within the United States, and because of the genealogical principles that underlay their status as a group vis-à-vis the state and their beliefs as tied to that group (Kymlicka, 2001). Now it is important to note that the Native American Church does not abide by the genealogical imaginary of the federal government. The AIRFRA might specify that only Native Americans are

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except from the Schedule 1 prohibition of the ingestion of peyote, and the DEA might be slowly changing its regulatory practices to conform to this restricted social referent, but the Native American Church itself is open to all, irrespective of their racial or ethnic profile. On the other hand, the Attorney General’s office argued that the securing of health, borders and international relations was a greater duty than the protection of minority religious freedoms. They cited the 1971 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances. But the spectre of 9/11 lurked. This second argument was made in the shadow of the Hamdan case. To allow the importation of this illegal drug was to open the door to drug diversion and, from there, down the slippery slope to terrorism. Gonzales v. UDV is particularly useful for understanding how recognition is always qualified, explicitly or implicitly, in such a way that it depends on its other modalities of espionage and camouflage to carry out its business, narratively figures the tense of the other as a chiasma of the past perfect and future perfective, and relies on two normative poles of social belonging in late liberalism and the zones of indistinction and undecidability they create. As with the first example, this case illuminates the dynamic relationship between the economies of abandonment and discourses of social belonging in late liberalism. Once again we see the assessment of difference against the poles of autonomy and genealogy although, unlike indigenous Australians, the UDV presents the court with a zone of indistinction between, and constituted by, these two poles of social belonging. Is the UDV genealogical in the same sense as Native America – or in an analogous way? Although claiming roots in pre-Christian Inca Peru, the group now describes itself as a Christian proselytizing religion. And it is exactly this proselytizing dimension that the Attorney General’s office points to as reason for refusing the Schedule 1 exception – the group is neither authentically genealogical in its social formation nor fully autological in its corporealinflected religious bearing. The Attorney General’s office argued that to exempt ayahuasca from the regulation of the CSA and UNCPS would be not merely to interfere with the government’s role in protecting the health of its citizens, but to jeopardize the security of its external and internal

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borders. The traffic in ayahuasca and the potential for diversion and criminality necessitated the uniform application of the CSA and UNCPS. The defence admitted that, because the UDV is not ‘a closed group that has gone through screening’ but a religious sect, it believes that it is ‘important to invite everyone to the table’. But it countered that, although diversion might be a problem in the abstract, in the concrete, there is not evidence that such a diversion would happen. They bolstered their claim by citing studies that showed that, since the legalization of peyote use in the Native American Church, there had been no evidence of expanded membership or criminal diversion. While Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion rejected both of the arguments of the Attorney General’s office, it did not ignore the difficulty of ‘balancing’ issues of state security and religious rights, which was a pressing responsibility of the state. But in cases such as the UDV, which fall between the poles of social belonging and across the divisions of nation-states, a practical solution could be found. The size of the group, the Christian nature of the ‘sect’ and the ‘circumscribed, sacramental use of hoasca’ are all cited by Roberts as reasons for allowing the exemption. Absent the disciplinary mechanism of the genealogical society, the government must simply monitor the size of the group and its use of ayahuasca. If either of these grew quickly, then the government could reasonably conclude that diversion was a problem and prosecute. It is exactly here that liberal recognition once again reveals itself in its other modalities – espionage and camouflage – setting the conditions for manoeuvres of social life that exist in, or as a result of, these other modalities. After all, camouflage and espionage are internal to Robert’s law of recognition. They are the conditions in which his recognition makes sense, becomes practical and can be disciplined. Like the Kantian gesture we saw in the home affairs secretary of the Liberal Democratic Party, so here with Roberts, recognition is seen as having its proper limits. And because a good liberal will always seek to test and overstep those limits, some form of discipline needs to be set within the very dynamics of recognition. This discipline is supplied by the brackets of recognition. What happens, then, to social life within these brackets?

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Living in abandonment To understand these dynamics, we need to unwind decisions like Gonzales v. UDV and the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act into and out of the social worlds they seek to recognize, capture and captivate. First, every state or legal decision, such as the National Emergency Response Act and UDV, must be situated in the incommensurate social fields in which they circulate. In this case, we would look at the broad matrix of regulatory, statutory and constitutional law that defines racial, cultural and religious identity and identification at any given minute. For instance, at the moment that the Supreme Court upheld the Circuit Court of Appeals’ exemption, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was removing all references to the ‘Native American Church’ in its regulatory guidelines and replacing it with reference to members of federally recognized tribes. This change aligns the enforcement regulations of the DEA with the actual language of the AIRFRA, which does not recognize members of the Native American Church, but recognizes Native Americans. So we have a decision that exempts members of the UDV on the basis of an analogy with members of the NAC, even as the DEA is refusing to recognize the equality of rights among all members of the NAC. In the case of indigenous Australia, rural and urban residential practices and identities have become an alibi for customary and assimilated identifications. The application of many provisions of the Emergency Response Act splits even biological families down the middle, depending on where members are living. These divisions internal to liberal governance provide the conditions for those who live within the brackets of recognition to manoeuvre. Again, the UDV and National Emergency Response Act present useful examples. Numerous minoritized religious and social groups carefully tracked the legal debate and emerged with differing opinions about its outcome and rationale; especially interesting here are those groups which fall in a zone of indistinction between the autological subject and genealogical society. Some of these groups have a more substantial relationship to the thematized imaginaries of indigeneity and nativeness that informed much of the discussion in the Roberts Court, while

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others have only the most attenuated relationship. Some rely on other Schedule 1 drugs, others on non-Schedule drugs, sex and other corporeal regimes. Some groups are fairly homogenous in their social constitution. Most are not. And many of these groups are heterogeneous not merely in terms of identity but in terms of practice – their spiritual practice has a procedural script only at the second order, a script that there should be no script. But even these groups grapple with how to follow this second-order script in the wake of the new, identity-based, consumptive regulations. People in these groups must spy on those who join them, assuming that they are being spied on. They must camouflage themselves in the cloak of identity when transporting drugs. There is also another social space created, but not addressed, by these dynamics of recognition – another kind of aggressive abandonment. In July 2007, I was living in a small, remote aboriginal community called Bulgul on the coast of Anson Bay, Northern Territory, with a group of aboriginal men, women and children. Most of them were living in tents. These people had been driven out of their homes in another indigenous community called Belyuen, located about three hundred kilometres from Bulgul. Wielding axes, chainsaws, pickets and rocks, other members of the community chased them into the scrub on 15 March 2007. Then they ransacked their houses and stole their goods. Initially, no one was charged. The police investigation seemed minimal at best. Without any prospect of housing in Darwin, and not wishing to live as part of the urban poor, these exiled people had been waiting for promised housing at Bulgul where they could live on land that belonged to their pre-colonial ancestors. Under Australian property law, this land is currently defined as ‘aboriginal freehold’.4 Months later, they were still living in tents, hauling water and firewood, while, just kilometres away, non-aboriginal people lived in houses on aboriginal freehold. These indigenous men and women have job skills in education, construction and power and water management. In short, they were the kind of indigenous person that the government, given the appalling statistics on Aboriginal health, employment and education, would be interested in supporting. But the federal and Territory government continued to pressure the people living at Bulgul to return to Belyuen. The rainy season began

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in November, the monsoons in December. Members of the federal and Territory government who wanted these families to go back to Belyuen counted on the weather to push them there. They refused to go, moving between suburban slums and the bush. In other words, these men and women live within the chiasmatic structures of tense and the liberal discourses of social belonging that make this chiasma compelling, by insisting they remain as a durative present. To use the insightful language of Amanda Macdonald, they do not so much resist as insist that they remain, a perfect indicative, a constant refusal of the tense of liberalism (Macdonald, 2008). When we view recognition from the perspective of its multiple modalities – espionage and camouflage – and the discourse of social belonging on which they rely – autology and genealogy – we can better appreciate the clamorous, sprawling social worlds living within, against and on top of these brackets, and the multiple, uncoordinated strategies that those living there deploy to maintain their lives. These sprawling social worlds are particularly interesting because they up-end the comfortable view of recognition as an encounter entre nous. When we remember that, in actual social space and time, there is someone beyond this dialogical encounter (at least one who has been bracketed and who has begun building her dwelling within it, and maybe others who heard about her building and visit it), then we are already within the displacements of espionage and camouflage internal to recognition. In these displaced zones of recognition people sometimes put their energies into the re-elaboration of the self rather than the identification of the self for certain others. In these social fields, the point may well be to reshape habitudes ahead of recognition, to test something out rather than translate it, not to produce meanings that can be translated, or embodiments that can be recognized. This is especially true when we are discussing subaltern publics that violate both moral and deliberative sense. By the time normative law and publics deliberate, commensurate and decide their horizons of moral sense, the bodies before them have changed, as have (hopefully) the conditions of embodied reason itself.

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But we need to be clear about the conditions of life within populations that must engage recognition where it trembles and gives way to espionage and camouflage, if we are not to be left thinking that these counter-worlds are picturesque scenes of glorious resistance, or that they can even be glorified as wells of creative discovery, as Habermas suggests in places (1998: 207–8). Exhaustion rules the roost. This is only to be expected when such significant forces are lined up against a target – when they must bear the tension of inhabiting the tense of the other. Hegel might be right that, in the end, it is the position of the slave that moves history. But most slaves die. They are worn to death. They have no energy left to make a revolution. And so their tactics of world-making within the waiting rooms of history often never appear. We must also be clear about the conditions of power within populations that are placed within these aggressive zones of abandonment. I am hardly the first to note this caution. For example, Foucault was interested in why, given the emergent forms of life that proliferate in the contemporary world, which are caused as much by these zones of abandonment as by any encouragement of market or state to be otherwise, so few forms persist and become dominant. One answer, as I have noted, is the exhaustion of life in abandonment. But another is the awkward translations and transfigurations of sense and meaning, of corporeality and carnality, which occur when these emergent or persistent forms of life circulate, or are prohibited from circulating, across various communicative media. Tactics of worldmaking swarm around all of us. We are all in the waiting rooms of history. But these tactics cannot appear to all of us. Some wear sheep’s clothing. Some names are changed, not to protect the innocent, but to protect from the necessity of innocence.

Postscript Is Roberts’s practical reason the result of a new dynamic of recognition that predates or post-dates the 9/11 attacks? Many people have argued, in contexts more broad than this

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little decision, that the emergence of tactics such as camouflage and espionage post-dates the attacks – and, indeed, that continuing to discuss the politics of recognition now demonstrates a naïve failure to understand the fundamental transformation the democratic state has undergone. For them, the recognition of cultural difference has been absorbed by state security. Monitoring UDV is now discursively and functionally integrated into the same bureaucratic order that monitors the rest of the US through warrantless wiretaps and the walling off of borders. And these have been absorbed into the new global market. Bruce Mehlman, the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy, United States Department of Commerce, delivered a terrifically interesting talk on 14 February 2002 at a Biometrics Consortium Conference, in which he articulated global terrorism, national security and economic dominance through the concept of espionage (Mehlman, 2003).5 According to Mehlman, biometrics would allow Americans to defend themselves in all these domains from the perimeter-busting practices of others, even as it would provide a means of uncloaking those camouflaged within our perimeters. The problematic at play is not tolerance and worth but (bio) informatics and population management: how to make the camouflaged stand out, to be perceived surreptitiously, to be tracked, in order to manage the threat. And, if we turn the angle of this gaze, if we are looking from the perspective of the camouflaged, the problem is not the agony of worth but the agony of action: getting in without being seen and clandestinely navigating internal and external perimeters in order to change the existing order. Where these practices of governmentality and sovereignty are brought together, the one subsumes the other. But I think these dynamics – to penetrate, to transform, to undermine and pilfer – pre-existed the new security state. They are perhaps intensified within the state, perhaps recognition is turned and transfigured by the intensification, but espionage and camouflage are not new states of recognition. Recognition always acts as espionage and camouflage when we view it from the point of view of those waiting rooms of history, wherein social life continues, inside and outside the regimes of recognition.

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Notes 1 2

Under pressure from human rights activists, the federal government made the programme voluntary. ‘(1) The term “Indian” means a member of an Indian tribe; (2) the term “Indian tribe” means any tribe, band, nation, pueblo, or other organized group of Indians, including any Alaska Native village (as defined in, or established pursuant to, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (43 U.S.C. 1601 et seq)), which is recognized as eligible for the special programs and services provided by the United States to Indians because of the status as Indians; (3) the term “Indian religion” means any religion – (A) which is practiced by Indians, and (B) the origin and interpretation of which is from within a traditional Indian culture or community’ Public Law 103–344 [H.R. 4230]; 6 October 1994.

3

The justices in UDV ask whether non-native Americans can also use the drug. The answer is yes. This is not very clear, given the language of the RFRA and DEA regulatory guidelines.

4

In a revealing web-based dictionary of terminology pertaining to land administration, the Northern Territory government describes Aboriginal freehold as ‘a type of freehold tenure applying to land granted under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (NT) 1976. Though simply recorded in the Land Titles Register as “Freehold”, land held under Aboriginal freehold title cannot be dealt with as normal freehold as the title vests in the community rather than in individuals’ (Northern Territory Government, 2008). Mehlman’s speech has subsequently been removed from the Internet.

5

References Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (43 USC 1601 et seq.). Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) (1976) (Cth). Beacroft, Laura and Poole, Melanie (2008), ‘Overview of Northern Territory emergency response’, available at www.anu.edu.au/caepr/Publications/ topical/Beacroft_NTER.pdf. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000), ‘Universalism and belonging in the logic of capitalism’. Public Culture, 12(3): 653–78. Employment Division v Smith 494 US 872 (1990). Fabian, Johannes (2006), ‘The Other revisited’. Anthropological Theory, 6(2): 139–52. Foucault, Michel (1986), The care of the self. The history of sexuality, vol. 3 (translated by R. Hurley) (New York: Vintage Books). Habermas, Jürgen (1998), ‘Deliberative politics: a procedural concept of democracy’, in Between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy (translated by W. Rehg) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 287–328. Huntington, Samuel (1998), The clash of civilizations and the remaking of the world order (New York: Simon And Schuster). Jamieson, Dale (1999), Singer and his critics (Oxford and Malden, MA: Willey-Blackwell).

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Kafka, Franz (1999), The Trial (New York: Schocken). Kymlicka, Will (2001), Politics in the vernacular: nationalism, multiculturalism and citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Macdonald, Amanda (2008), ‘If everyone could just settle down: representational insistence in lieu of resistance in the pre-post-colony of New Caledonia’, presented at the Symposium on Conditions of Settler Colonialism (26 April), University of Chicago, Chicago. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1989). Beyond good and evil (New York: Vintage Books). Northern Territory Board of Inquiry (2007). ‘Little children are sacred’. Report into the protection of Aboriginal children from sexual abuse. Department of the Chief Minister, Office of Indigenous Policy, Darwin, Northern Territory, available at www.inquirysaac.nt.gov.au. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. (2002), ‘Introduction: critical common sense’, in The cunning of recognition: indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism (Durham: Duke University Press). Povinelli, Elizabeth (2006), The empire of love: toward a theory of intimacy, genealogy and carnality (Durham: Duke University Press). Singer, Peter (1995), Rethinking life and death: the collapse of our traditional ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Internet sources Clegg, Nick (2007), ‘Defeating terror the British way’, Sunday Times (16 September), available at www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/ columnists/guest_contributors/article2461326.ece. Mehlman, Bruce (2003), ‘Putting biometrics to work for America’, originally at www.technology.gov/Speeches/BPM_020214_Biometrics.html (accessed 4 June 2003). Northern Territory Government (2008). ‘Land lingo: a quick guide to terminology used in the business of land administration and land information’, available at www.nt.gov.au/lands/lingo.shtml (last updated 29 July 2008).

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6 Humanitarianism and the representation of alterity: the aporias and prospects of cosmopolitan visuality Fuyuki Kurasawa Introduction To state things in a slightly hyperbolic vein, I want to begin by setting out what is arguably one of the major tasks of intellectual labour in our globalized age: pondering the implications, for the liberal-democratic imaginary, of the visual character of Euro-American modes of engagement with non-Western forms of socio-cultural alterity. To speak in such dramatic terms is to recognize that, beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, what has been witnessed is a gradual, yet undeniable – and likely irreversible – transition from textuality to visuality as the dominant Western regime of description and analysis of societies in the global South. Indeed, for most citizens of the North Atlantic region, still and moving images have become the principal means through which to encounter peoples living outside the borders of the liberal-democratic West, citizens whose alleged safety and order are constructed in opposition to visually mediated scenes of a supposedly permanent state of chaos and crisis in geographically distant, non-democratic zones. Of course, this is not to make a glibly commonplace claim about the sudden ‘rise of visuality’ or the arrival of a ‘visual turn’, presentist assertions that conveniently neglect to consider the fact that Euro-American traditions of thought have always contained prominent ocular-centric elements,1 let alone that visual symbolism and iconography represent indispensable features of all societies and in all historical periods (Jay, 1993; Mondzain, 2005). Rather, I am contending

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that, for the last few decades, the visual representation and mediation of distant events and persons have had an unprecedented constitutive power for the way that liberal democracy engages with alterity, to the extent that we should speak of visuality’s construction of the social and political terrain in tandem with the socio-political construction of visuality (Mitchell, 2005). Today, then, the constitutive power of visuality stems from the very social existence of an event – shared belief in it as real – being contingent upon its visual depiction. Conversely, in a culture where ‘the proof is in the picture’, it becomes increasingly difficult for moments and situations to register in public spheres and thus to be recognized as having ‘actually’ taken place, without their being visually represented.2 How many instances of mass suffering in the global South remain unknown, and thus effectively cannot be considered to socially exist, because they have never appeared in Western newspapers, television news reports or on the internet? Moreover, given images’ viral-like acceleration and global reach due to digital technologies of distribution, their political impact on vast segments of public opinion around the world is potentially explosive. No institution understands this better than the US government, whose inauguration of new tactics of control of media coverage over the course of the first Gulf War reached unprecedented heights of manipulation and censorship during the Iraq War. For the most part, social and political theory has hitherto done little to accomplish the task set out above, as many of its analytical frameworks remain beholden to linguistic, discursive and textual paradigms and metaphors (whether one thinks of structuralist linguistics, post-structuralist literary theory or Habermasian discourse ethics, among others). Clearly, theories of the visual ought not dispense with these perspectives, for visuality is discursively mediated; in fact, rather than that which narrowly concerns images or sight per se, visuality should be understood as a socio-political phenomenon created through the complex relations of production and reception between, and mutual constitution of, images, words, texts, sight and speech. Nevertheless, the visual has a specificity that is irreducible to its discursive or textual components, an ambiguity or

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surplus of meaning that potentially contests and subverts the closing off of interpretation or the narrative framing that socio-political institutions attempt to impart to images. In recent years, the most potent instance of this is supplied by the infamous 2003 photographs of systematic Iraqi prisoner abuse and torture in the Abu Ghraib prison, which caused a worldwide furore (notably in Arab and Muslim public opinion) and exposed US claims to be promoting democracy, freedom and human rights in post-war Iraq as an elaborate charade. In other words, while images never speak for themselves, they also offer resistance to having others speak for them. Lest such an argument be conflated with a sort of visual essentialism, I should insist on the fact that images’ capacity to lie beyond complete interpretive capture is not an intrinsic property that they possess, but rather a latent capacity that needs to be mobilized by actors in the field of socio-political struggle if it is to have any effectivity; that the possibility for the meaning of visual material to exceed capitalist or governmental logics is conditional upon audiences being both willing and able to engage in alternative interpretive work. It is thus vital to elaborate a critical theory of visuality, one that concerns itself with how non-Western others are represented through visual media, and how progressive forces can intervene in image politics to contribute to emancipatory projects that are not limited to the logic of liberal democracy.3 Nowhere is a critical theory of visuality more important than when considering humanitarianism, which has become one of the principal manifestations of the liberal-democratic project in the post-Cold War world. The humanitarian ethos is itself a modality of cosmopolitanism, since its principle of assisting all human beings in need or distress (i.e. coming to the aid of anyone, anywhere) supports the notion that, as citizens of the world, their suffering is abhorrent. This ethos is premised upon an expansion of the ethical imagination and a consequent sense of responsibility towards others beyond conventional constructions of moral communities (kin and friendship networks, nation-states, etc.) to distant strangers, in order to encompass the whole of humankind. Furthermore, humanitarianism’s roots are to be found in humanist norms of universal moral equality, which are

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consonant with modern democracy, in that the recognition of the equal moral standing of a collectivity’s members is a prerequisite for their right to, and aptitude for, political selfdetermination.4 International law and the discourse of universal human rights, which assert that every human being is entitled to the protection and realization of the same civilpolitical and socio-economic rights, represent a formalization and institutionalization of these norms, as well as the moral underpinnings of humanitarianism writ large. On the global stage, humanitarianism and visual representation are indivisible. Indeed, as humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) understand all too well, media coverage of famine, genocides and the like is indispensable to cultivate awareness of, and concern about, such events among governments, multilateral international organizations and segments of national and global civil societies. Such media images constitute humanitarian crises, not only by portraying certain events and actors, but more revealingly, by contributing to the construction and framing of the socio-cultural conventions that make situations recognizable as instances of distant suffering in nondemocratic settings.5 In particular, visual material of this ilk tends to reproduce the established scripts and roles of Western aid workers, acting as proxies for concerned EuroAmerican liberal-democratic subjects, coming to the rescue of non-Western victims of naturalized or metaphysical circumstances – narratives and subject-positions that are key to the liberal-democratic imaginary. Accordingly, we can speak of a humanitarian scopic regime, a set of visual patterns and a mode of representing distant suffering that structure Western perceptions of the global South and its inhabitants, as well as the range and kind of the EuroAmerican world’s moral concern. Thus, this chapter explores how cosmopolitan visuality – that is to say, the socio-cultural processes of visual representation of distant strangers – posits alterity as both a fundamental problem and a challenge for democracy. To begin, I want to establish the representational and institutional conditions within which a humanitarian scopic regime operates. The second section explores the aporetic nature of this regime’s engagement with otherness, the dynamics through which it cannot but simultaneously negate and

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produce alterity in a manner that problematizes the democratic imaginary. On the one hand, the humanitarian scopic regime reduces non-Western subjects placed in situations of acute distress to figures of the same (as potential liberaldemocratic subjects whose rights are being violated); without this equation of ‘them’ with ‘us’, Western ‘benevolence’, in the form of humanitarian aid, would not be readily forthcoming. On the other hand, this same humanitarian system of visual representation portrays persons living in the global South as figures of otherness, whose essentialized inferiority vis-à-vis Euro-American citizens makes them appear to be incapable of participating in the project of liberal democracy. In the final part of the chapter, I make a case for a critical practice of visual engagement that seeks to de-reify the image and thereby to represent an alternative to this aporetic logic. Articulating the principle of recognition of global cultural pluralism with that of universal moral equality, such a practice entails cultivating the capacity of North Atlantic audiences to engage with images of distant suffering as means of creating a dialogical, public ethic of encounter with alterity. As such, the latter can become a provocation to liberal democracy, one that interrogates its limits and exclusions while positing the outlines of a different democratic imaginary.

Contextualizing representation Before plunging into the thick of the argument, we need to briefly ponder a fundamental query: should humanitarian crises be visually depicted in the first place? The normative and political question of representation in toto should be considered carefully, for claims that the image can lie (by manipulating reality or obscuring it), or that it cannot and ought not to represent limit-experiences (because it does violence to or trivializes their ruptural quality), must be taken seriously. At the same time, the distortion of the real and the ineffable quality of catastrophes can be confronted and worked through with forms of cosmopolitan representational practice that critically engage with the image. Surely, then, the issue is not whether visual representations of instances of distant suffering should exist or not – as

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though an anti-representational strategy would be free of pitfalls – but how they can be created and what are their effects. Hence, the visual depiction of humanitarian crises can perform a function of bearing witness that is essential to the cosmopolitan project.6 By documenting innumerable events and situations in the global South that would otherwise remain unknown beyond their immediate locations, images of such crises can make the rest of the world aware of their occurrence and, by combating state or corporate efforts to deny their existence, ensure that visual evidence exists. Furthermore, if it cannot fully restitute or recreate occurrences of mass suffering, visual representation can assist in narrowing the situational and socio-cultural gaps between eyewitnesses and audiences – and thereby contribute to the labour of interpretation of what appears incomprehensible because of its intensity and scale – by phenomenologically detailing the circumstances and experiences of living through situational and structural violence. Against the rampant sense of indifference towards, and denial of, humanitarian disasters within Western societies, visual material can puncture moral numbness by exposing the graphic nature of these disasters and the suffering of victims (Cohen, 2001). This may in turn enable the cultivation of empathy among sectors of the Euro-American public and the mobilization of civil societies to urge responses on the part of governments and multilateral organizations (as has been the case with the Save Darfur coalition in the US in response to the Darfur genocide in Sudan). Opposing the tendency to rapidly forget instances of distant suffering in the global South, the recording, preservation and broadcasting of visual material can act as catalysts for the recovery or the stoking of collective memory; for many of us in this visually saturated age, remembrance of a catastrophic event is primarily triggered by iconic still or moving images of it. And, importantly, the visual portrayal of humanitarian crises can have a salutary preventive purpose as well. In particular, by making visible the structural consequences and human costs of situational and structural violence, it may nourish a public resolve to struggle to transform the underlying causes of mass suffering. I would hasten to underscore that the effectivity of testimonial visuality, as outlined here, is highly contingent

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upon a host of institutional factors and relations of power, and is thus without guarantees. Nevertheless, the simple fact that there are different dimensions of visually bearing witness to distant suffering warrants incorporating representation into practices of critical cosmopolitanism with an emancipatory intent. Consequently, what is required is clear-sightedness about the contested terrain upon which these practices operate. On the one hand, whether it is a function of global surveillance or spectacle, the geographical comprehensiveness of media coverage (which can now become truly planetary, at least in theory) and the instantaneous speed of transmission of images across the world – a form of what Marx foresaw as the annihilation of space by time (Harvey, 1989) – have the potential to generate unprecedented visual capture and public exposure of humanitarian crises. On the other hand, given the North–South structural divide and distributive disparities in the current world order, Euro-American media and humanitarian NGOs can easily fall into the traps of cultural imperialism. Because they enjoy a virtual monopoly over what is communicated to mass audiences in the West about the global South, these organizations have tended to be highly selective in what they cover. Generally speaking, coverage is concentrated in regions where Western states have major geopolitical and economic interests, or longstanding historical ties (notably of a colonial nature).7 Moreover, the kinds of ‘quick fire’ visual depiction of humanitarian crises in the global South selected to circulate in Euro-American public spheres often unwittingly replicate or draw upon imperialist constructs, for they are expected to attract ratings and be intelligible to the average viewer without any prior knowledge of a situation of mass suffering or its structural causes.

Humanitarianism and its visual aporias Because cosmopolitan visuality operates on the field of tensions described above, humanitarian scopic regimes are constituted through the aforementioned foundational aporia, an irresolvable paradox that exists at the heart of the liberal-democratic imaginary’s representational facet: it simultaneously seeks to transcend the alterity of distant

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strangers by portraying them as identical to citizens of North Atlantic societies (and thus, as potential liberal-democratic subjects), and to reinscribe alterity by representing these strangers through tropes of stigmatized and essentialized difference (and, therefore, as incapable of becoming participants in the liberal-democratic project). The constitutive quality of the visual aporia must be foregrounded, since a strong version of the claim advanced here is that liberal democracy’s humanitarian dimensions cannot exist outside it. At one level, humanitarianism negates, or aims to transcend, otherness by reducing it to a figure of the same. In a certain cosmopolitan logic, such sameness vis-à-vis the Euro-American world is a prerequisite for recognizing the moral equality of non-Western peoples and thereby finding abhorrent the structural and situational violence to which they are subjected. Wherever they live, persons and groups are transformed into figures that are identical to ‘us’, liberaldemocratic subjects whose rights are being violated. Hence, to pierce through the veil of indifference towards distant suffering, strangers in the global South are ‘humanized’ through the taming of their socio-cultural differences, which makes them appear familiar to Western audiences, while the unfathomable extremism of their circumstances is normalized. The first visual process through which this takes place can be termed a reification of the image, whereby the image is abstracted from the specific social relations that underpin and generate whatever humanitarian crisis is being portrayed. In order to cultivate a sense of identification on the part of the viewer, bare life becomes the lowest common denominator to which subjects are reduced; they are represented as bearers of our shared ‘animal substance’, who, like all human beings, have the capacity to feel pain and suffer (Agamben, 1998; Badiou, 2003). The generic quality of a reified image signifies that it is thin or flat, to the extent that visual material about a given humanitarian disaster tends to strip victims and survivors of any experiential depth, personal referents or cultural markers.8 These subjects become surfaces, emblems of vulnerable ‘Third World’ bodies without lifeworlds or embeddedness in time and place. Reification also narrows the image, dispensing with whatever

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contextual breadth it may have by producing representations of limit-experiences that cannot encompass their structural causes. The socio-political and economic dynamics responsible for particular instances of distant suffering are consequently obscured, their specificity dissolving in the ebb and flow of human misery believed to routinely afflict the global South. Following Debord, we can identify the second visual process through which the humanitarian scopic regime negates alterity as one of spectacularization (Debord, 1992). Overwhelmingly, the media and NGOs produce images of humanitarian disasters that remove the represented situation from the realm of the uncanny or the unimaginable, converting it into a spectacle that follows conventional narrative forms and visual tropes in order that it may be effortlessly grasped by Euro-American publics. The humanitarian spectacle’s capacity to trigger empathy among such publics depends upon its formulaic structure, its drawing upon widely recognized representational typifications and habitual roles (e.g. the easily identified innocent victim and the evil perpetrator). Yet the humanitarian spectacle can also dissolve otherness by becoming fodder for a pornography of suffering, consumed for the entertainment or titillation of materially privileged and physically safe audiences who vicariously experience situational and structural violence. Further, spectacularization aestheticizes distant suffering by presenting it as a thing of beauty and its victims as icons of human dignity trapped in a hostile landscape; formal criteria (composition, lighting, balance, editing, etc.) drive representational practices in order to seduce Western viewers into engaging with visual material, while the abject and extreme that comprise humanitarian crises become mere background elements.9 Conversely, these same viewers can experience ‘compassion fatigue’, an ethical numbing or indifference in the face of the banality of, or overexposure to, the humanitarian spectacle. The saturation of televised newscasts, newspaper pages and cyberspace with scenes from overseas crises may well make large segments of audiences in the North Atlantic region blasé or unresponsive, as these scenes blend into a uniform stream of wretchedness that is eventually ‘tuned out’ because it is normalized.

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At the same time, the aporetic character of the humanitarian imaginary stems from the fact that its attempts to transcend socio-cultural alterity also reinscribe the latter into cosmopolitan visuality. In other words, the very visual processes designed to make vulnerable subjects in the global South appear to be like ‘us’ resignify them as radically different and inferior. First, by severing such subjects from their lifeworlds and socio-cultural contexts, reified images of humanitarian crises support a representational logic of victimization that generates stigmatizing modes of otherness. Indeed, these images strip persons of agency and – by contrast to the assumed ‘humanness’ of Euro-American actors – render them into victims or subhuman beings who are prey to metaphysical circumstances or natural forces beyond their control. Cumulatively, Western photographs of famine convey the impression that severe material deprivation is a ‘misfortune’ inflicted on African and Asian populations inhabiting ‘harsh’ natural surroundings, the outcome of an overpowering destiny to which they are condemned. Unlike liberal-democratic subjects who are believed to be historical agents who perpetually resist or enact ways of being in the world, victimized populations are rarely portrayed as socio-political actors with the capacity to modify the structures and institutions that determine their conditions of existence, let alone with an ability to satisfy their basic needs. As passive, helpless beings, they need to be rescued through Western benevolence. Additionally, reification dehumanizes non-Western persons by objectifying them, that is to say, by portraying them as objects of a humanitarian gaze that amplifies the gulf between their abject condition and what Euro-American audiences consider to be ‘normal’ human existence. Consequently – often dispensing with conventional considerations of the principles of consent and privacy through which representational practices operationalize the notion of human dignity – media outlets and NGOs have little compunction about exposing moments of intense vulnerability and grief as widely circulated and viewed material, with victims becoming instruments used to publicize a cause or campaign (to raise funds, inform the outside world, etc.).10 For its part, the aforementioned reduction of victims in the global South to their animal state serves not only to stimulate empathetic

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identification, but, equally, to trigger a sense of pity, guilt or horror grounded in a sense of moral superiority and material privilege. As much as anything else, it is the stigmatized alterity of the black African child that makes the Hollywood star holding her weep, the image juxtaposing extreme deprivation and lavishness while underscoring the incomprehensible character of an existence devoted to basic survival. Similarly, the second visual process aimed at negating alterity, spectacularization, cannot but reintroduce the otherness of represented subjects, for the form of the spectacle is one that collectively pathologizes inhabitants of the global South. Indeed, the range of visual representation of these inhabitants in Euro-American public spheres consists largely of their being subjected to mass disasters, which are easily converted into mediatized spectacles. In the Western world-view, sub-Saharan Africa is now largely equated with famine, genocide, civil war and pandemics – an entire continent written off as humanity’s perennial ‘basket case’, in large part owing to the images of it that are made available to those living elsewhere on the planet. Yet, to function properly, this visually based pathologization relies on a central contradiction. On the one hand, NGOs and the media aim to depict a particular humanitarian crisis as unprecedented or extraordinary in its scale and intensity, in order to grab the attention of North Atlantic audiences, whose thresholds of ‘compassion fatigue’ are being reached ever more rapidly; to care about the catastrophe being represented, audiences must be shocked or shamed into believing it is out of the ordinary. On the other hand, the humanitarian scopic regime frequently naturalizes the causes of such a crisis by falling back on visual patterns and conventions that draw upon ethno-racial essentialism. Directed thus, visuality contributes to marking African societies as fundamentally different from their North American and European counterparts because of their intrinsically violent, tribal character or, yet again, because of an ‘oversexualized’ or ‘undisciplined’ culture. Naturalization takes a metaphysical form when images repeatedly present humanitarian crises as recurring ‘plagues’ or ‘acts of fate’ that befall non-Western peoples, who are periodically victimized by a harsh climate or regular eruptions of cycles of violence (Rosler, 1989).

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De-reifying the image As a constitutive visual aporia, the simultaneous negation and production of alterity cannot be overcome within the bounds of the humanitarian scopic regime. And since an antirepresentational strategy is of dubious worth with regard to distant suffering, I am contending that we need to put forth alternative modalities of socio-political engagement with images – interpretive practices that embody critical cosmopolitanism’s concern with articulating the recognition of global cultural pluralism with an affirmation of the universal moral equality of human beings. Accordingly, alterity can be transformed from a threat that requires management by the liberal-democratic imaginary (by being assimilated into the latter or viewed as incommensurable with it) to a perpetual form of questioning of its bounds. To assist me in this reconstructive task, I draw upon the 2005 World Press Photo of the Year, a widely circulated image of a woman’s face (Fatou Ousseini), whose mouth is covered by a child’s skeletal hand (Alassa Galisou, her one-yearold son).11 The photograph was taken on 1 August 2005 by Finnbar O’Reilly, a Canadian photojournalist, at an emergency feeding centre in Tahoua, north-western Niger, in the midst of a famine that was barely noted in the EuroAmerican media and that elicited a feeble response on the part of Western governments and public opinion, despite affecting between 2.5 and 3.6 million people that year (that is to say, nearly a quarter of the country’s population). How are we to engage with this image and similar ones in a way that averts the pitfalls described in the previous section? In the first instance, I would argue, a critical mode of visuality must de-reify the image by initiating a practice of phenomenological intensification of it. This can occur when certain modes of visual representation of humanitarian crises appeal to the moral imagination by temporarily displacing our lifeworlds and compelling us to enter those of suffering subjects, through meticulous reconstructions of their experiences, so that we too can glimpse – if only fleetingly and partially – what it was like to be then and there. Put differently, phenomenologically intensifying the image combats its flattening effect by asking audiences to immerse themselves into a humanitarian crisis’s subjective

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dimensions, to try to understand how it is experienced on the ground by those being visually portrayed. Surely, the greatest monument to this sort of approach is Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985), about which Simone de Beauvoir declared that ‘[f]or the first time, we lived [the Holocaust] in our heads, our hearts, our flesh. It becomes ours’ (de Beauvoir, 1985: 9). Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that, regardless of how detailed they may be, these visual restitutions of disasters should be taken as circumscribed and imperfect, for they cannot fully capture or recreate the scale and intensity of suffering created by structural and situational violence. Neither images nor words can adequately convey mass catastrophe, insofar as the ineffable quality of limit-experiences entails that some of their elements always already remain beyond representation; totality cannot be portrayed or made visible. Moreover, insofar as visual material is temporally restricted to the moments it records, it excludes vast swaths of subjects’ lives prior to, during and in the aftermath of a humanitarian crisis. For example, the photograph of Ousseini and Galisou does not allow us to know anything about their existences outside the instant captured on camera, nor to discover what happened to them after the image was taken (did they survive and, if so, how are they now?). If it is to be experientially thick, therefore, a process of phenomenological intensification of the image must pursue the labour of transposition, whereby Western viewers attempt to put themselves in the place of the portrayed subjects in the global South. Struggling against typical reactions of denial or apathy that would leave intact the experiential gap between these two parties, carrier-groups representing vulnerable populations (such as social movements and NGOs) can pursue campaigns publicizing humanitarian crises within Euro-American civil societies. Beyond providing information, such campaigns aim to constitute empathetic audiences among ordinary citizens, audiences that are interpellated by visual representations of distant suffering and are therefore willing to engage in the interpretive work of immersion into the lives of portrayed subjects and in reflection on the conditions of acute deprivation and injustice that enframe these lives. As Eduardo Galeano wrote of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs,

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‘These faces that scream without opening their mouths are “other” faces no longer. No longer, for they have ceased being conveniently strange and distant, innocuous excuses for charity that eases guilty consciences’ (Galeano, 1990: 12). Yet these same empathetic audiences need to acknowledge that their engagement with the image, even at its most dedicated, can never enable them to become perfectly transposable with survivors and victims of humanitarian crises, nor completely able to erase these persons’ otherness. At its best, the visual mediation I advocate enables no more than a partial bridging of the experiential breach between secondary witnesses in the North Atlantic region and represented persons in the global South, never a total abolishing of this alterity. Phenomenologically and visually cultivated empathy ought not slip into vicarious or guiltridden tourism of mass suffering, whereby one believes in one’s capacity to understand immediately what such an experience is like, or worse, into a facile appropriation of the experience that renders suffering subjects voiceless or invisible. On the contrary, we must acknowledge the fact that most of us cannot grasp the mental, physical and emotional anguish that surrounds Ousseini’s experience of seeing her child become acutely malnourished. Phenomenological intensification cannot serve as a pretext to support the symbolic violence of an assumed sameness, a denial or suspension of the inequalities that organize visuality in the name of identifying with the other. Rather, what progressive Euro-American actors can cultivate is a critical mode of visual engagement, grounded on a dialogical ethic that decentres the self in order to observe, listen to, and learn from others with humility and attentiveness. Such an ethic, when geared towards emancipatory ends, compels us to recognize relations of power, as well as socio-economic and cultural asymmetries between represented and viewing parties, in a manner that links the normative validity of empathetic responses to the foregrounding of structural hierarchies. When relating these insights to the photograph mentioned earlier, we would be remiss not to draw upon Levinas’ notion of the face of the Other, the encounter with whom summons our infinite, perpetual and asymmetrical responsibility to respond to the latter’s unspoken appeal, and evokes an ethics

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that precedes ontology; in other words, responsibility displaces ontology as the foundation of subjectivity. However, instead of favouring spatial proximity and face-to-face engagement over distance and representation – as Levinas compellingly does in his defence of the face’s irreducibility to the image (Crignon, 2004; Levinas, 1971: 79–80, 331–2; 1978: 129–55; 1995) – I want to defend the potential of a mediated ethics of responsibility towards distant strangers. For, if it is to exist in our globalized epoch, a critical cosmopolitanism cannot but employ visual mediation as the principal means through which ethical and political responses to humanitarian crises can be mobilized. Extending Levinas’s argument in a literalist direction, a phenomenological intensification of the image can urge us to confront the face of Ousseini and, accordingly, to expose the failure or refusal of Western states and civil societies to heed its appeal by being properly informed about the situation in Niger and concerned enough to act to assist vulnerable populations. In addition to phenomenological intensification, another process through which the image can be de-reified consists of a structuralist expansion of it. Here, critical visuality seeks to go beyond the representation of a catastrophic event or situation to investigate the systemic sources and relations of domination underlying it. In other words, a de-reification of the image requires that those who view it analyse the local, national and global institutions that create and sustain severe inequalities and injustices, which in turn generate the humanitarian crises depicted through visual material. Foremost among these systemic causes is neo-liberal capitalism, which, in the global South, has taken the form of structural adjustment programmes. Based on the dogma of a market fundamentalism that imposes domestic policies of privatization, free trade and export-oriented restructuring, such programmes have been widely condemned for worsening already highly polarized national income distributions in South America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as for resulting in chronic and grinding poverty for the majority of the populations of these regions.12 Expanding the frame or structure of images thus means considering how the logic of Realpolitik comes into play in sustaining whatever disaster is visually represented. For what

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often underlies them is the reality that powerful nation-states and global capital support repressive regimes or regional conflicts because of geopolitical or economic interests (e.g., the US propping up Pakistan owing to the latter’s strategic role in the ‘war on terror’, and China doing the same for Sudan in order to secure access to its oil reserves), or, conversely, the fact that these same nation-states and global capital almost always act as mere bystanders when mass suffering unfolds, if no such national interests are perceived to be at stake (Niger is a case in point). Last, but not least, a critical practice of visuality should consider the extent to which civilizational chauvinism and racism remain significant structural factors in explaining why preventable humanitarian crises continue to reoccur, for human lives in the global South are still considered to be worth considerably less than those in the North. While images of crimes against humanity in Kosovo eventually shamed NATO into military intervention, however flawed and self-serving this may have been, scenes of the Rwandan and Darfur genocides did little to move Western political leaders and public opinion, which attributed these events to ancestral ‘tribalism’. Returning to the photograph that interests us, a practice of critical visuality can point out, first of all, that the production and circulation of such an image were exceptions to the general rule of public invisibility in the West of the Niger famine. Indeed, the latter barely registered a presence on the Euro-American media landscape between 2004 and 2005; visual evidence of it was rarely broadcast or published, and public awareness of it was virtually non-existent within Western civil societies. Published material about this crisis – including that surrounding the World Press Photo exhibit, which likely did more than any other event to publicize the situation in Niger – tends to limit understanding of it by severing the capture of specific moments of suffering and vulnerable persons from its systemic causes and by naturalizing it. Overwhelmingly, the visual record of, and accompanying text about, the famine emphasized the dual impact of a drought and locust invasion in Niger in 2004, thereby suggesting that the severe food shortages in that country were merely a prolongation of the normal course of affairs on an African continent cursed by Biblical plagues. To counter this sort of depoliticizing mode of representation,

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a structuralist interpretation searches beyond the visual frame to expose the role of neo-liberalism in the crisis, particularly the fact that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has imposed structural adjustment programmes (more recently, under the guise of its so-called ‘poverty reduction and growth facility’ arrangements) and economic deregulation onto Niger for over a decade.13 The consequent, internationally mandated, export-oriented growth strategy prioritized sales of staple grain crops to richer neighbouring countries (notably Nigeria and Ghana) over domestic supply, which led to substantial increases in prices for these staples in Niger (Vasager, 2005).14 This, in turn, had a disproportionately negative effect on poor households, many of which were no longer able to purchase grain at free-market prices – or even at the subsidised prices that were later introduced as a stop-gap measure when malnutrition was becoming severe. What the photograph does not and cannot illustrate is the fact that the Nigerien government denied the existence of food shortages in certain parts of the country, whereas foreign actors (whether Western states or the United Nations World Food Programme), prompted by, and complicit with, the IMF’s neo-liberal orthodoxy, initially refused to distribute free or subsidised food to vulnerable segments of the population. It was believed that supplying such goods below prevailing market rates would interfere with the ‘free play’ of private-sector forces and thereby delay what were deemed to be essential processes of economic restructuring and development in Niger (Vasager, 2005). These foreign actors eventually relented, and international aid agencies were able to provide relief on the ground, but not before millions had to confront severe malnutrition and starvation. Beyond the image, then, it took the preventable deaths of countless persons to sway the world community belatedly to suspend, if only temporarily, the foisting of the sacrosanct principles of laissez-faire capitalism onto one of the poorest countries in the world.15 Perhaps more than anything else, the image of Ousseini and Galisou stands as an indictment of the callousness of the Euro-American world, which ignored warnings that were issued as early as November 2004 (Sturcke, 2005) about a looming famine in Niger and failed to meet minimal levels

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of aid and emergency relief. In June 2005, as the crisis was deepening, a United Nations (UN) emergency appeal had raised only 12 per cent of the requested funding for Niger, and, while more funds were eventually released by donor countries, these did not even meet the modest target of some $30 million sought by the UN. As such, the photograph is iconic of the continued reproduction of the North–South gap and of massive structural inequalities in the current world order, which condemn vast segments of the world population to chronic poverty and insecurity.

Conclusion Through its representation of distant strangers, the humanitarian scopic regime is a key element of the liberal democratic project in our globalized age. I have argued that, as a manifestation of a certain mode of cosmopolitan visuality, this scopic regime is constituted by an inescapable aporia, for it simultaneously negates and produces sociocultural alterity in the images of persons and groups in the global South that it generates; hence, visual material both shies away from the otherness of humanitarian crises and their victims (by reducing them to the normal and the same, respectively) and inscribes stigmatizing modes of difference onto them (by pathologizing subjects and societies). Nonetheless, contra an anti-representational or iconoclastic response that would simply eliminate any image of distant strangers in situations of acute vulnerability, I have claimed that a critical practice of cosmopolitan visuality may employ representation to emancipatory ends. Yet such a reformulation of a visual cosmopolitanism must also be attentive to representational ambiguities and contradictions, which can both obscure and illuminate relations of power. Accordingly, progressive forces can strive to incorporate strategies of dereification and public engagement with the visual into projects of global justice in two ways: by phenomenologically intensifying images of humanitarian crises in order to interpellate ordinary citizens in Euro-American societies to imagine partially the intensity and scale of specific limitexperiences, and by structurally expanding these same kinds of image to reveal the systemic causes of the events or

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situations portrayed, thereby fostering discussion of transnational socio-economic inequalities within Western public spheres. The crisis of democracy is also, perhaps, a crisis of representation. This is so to the extent that attempts to expand the democratic imaginary beyond its current liberal iterations – in the direction of a project of radical democracy, in which processes of collective autonomy seek to articulate the recognition of difference with egalitarian principles – are akin to the invention of a new visual economy that can take the place of the humanitarian scopic regime. This state of crisis and creation, of the perpetual interrogation of democracy and of its representational modalities, may also enable a questioning of the alterity of mass and extreme suffering; no longer a violence that touches others, far away and essentially different, it becomes the ethical and political core of our responsibility to overcome its sources by struggling towards an alternative world order.

Acknowledgements Research and writing were made possible by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes 1 Could Plato’s allegory of the cave or the Byzantine iconoclastic controversies demonstrate more strongly the significance of visuality? 2 This was the key insight of Baudrillard’s (1995) polemical claim about the 1991 Gulf War not having occurred, a point that was lost in the firestorm of controversy that greeted the essay upon its publication. 3 For example, a critical theory of visuality would contest the radical Right’s dismissal of the Abu Ghraib photos as no worse than an average fraternity hazing (‘just boys being boys’) or legitimate ‘payback’ to terrorists. 4 Consequently, groups deemed morally inferior (whether women, people of colour or colonized populations) could be denied suffrage or the right to collective self-determination. 5 Partly following Boltanski (1993), I use the phrase ‘distant suffering’ to refer to the ensemble of cases of mass and extreme situational and structural violence (genocide, famine, chronic poverty, pandemics, etc.)

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occurring outside of the North Atlantic region and visually represented to audiences in this region via the media. 6 For a more elaborate discussion of the tasks and perils of the practice of bearing witness, and its contributions to the project of global justice, see Kurasawa (2007: 23–55). 7 The recent launch of Al-Jazeera’s English-language service may well alter the global media balance, though much depends upon subscription and viewership numbers in relation to established Western outlets (CNN, BBC, etc.). 8 This phenomenon is akin to Jameson’s claim about postmodern depthlessness or superficiality, as emblematized through Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (Jameson, 1991: 8–9). 9 The body of work produced by Sebastião Salgado, arguably the world’s most-acclaimed photojournalist, exemplifies the tensions between the aestheticization of suffering and the portrayal of human dignity. In particular, his series of photographs of the 1984–85 famine in the Sahel has been the subject of much debate along these lines (Salgado, 1990; Stallabrass, 1997). 10 The ethical dubiousness of this process of objectification comes into light glaringly when we consider whether any of us would ever agree to have our most intimate instances of pain or loss broadcast to, and consumed by, the rest of the world. 11 The photograph is available at the following URL: www.worldpress photo.org/index.php?option=com_photogallery&task=view&id=903&It emid=115&bandwidth=low (accessed 2 December 2007). World Press Photo is the largest and most prestigious photojournalism competition in the world. Winning entries are reproduced and broadcast around the planet, as well as being the subject of an exhibition tour that stops on five continents. 12 For a powerful, eloquent and visually striking condemnation of structural adjustment programs, as they have affected Mali, see Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Bamako (France, 2006). 13 At the conclusion of his visit to Niger in May 2005, as the famine was raging, the IMF’s Managing Director, Rodrigo de Rato, asserted that the country needed to stay the course by continuing the process of neo-liberal restructuring that the international community had set for it: ‘In my discussions with the President [of Niger] I noted that, over the last five years, Niger has made significant progress in restoring macroeconomic stability and liberalizing the economy . . . [T]he President and I agreed that a strengthening of the public finances was key to the maintenance of macroeconomic stability and that a robust structural agenda was essential to lay the foundation for private sector-led growth. . . . In the discussion, there was a general agreement on the need to expedite the development and implementation of sectoral strategies, especially those for the rural sector and for health and education. The implementation of these strategies, and completion of the privatization and financial sector reform programs, are key to strengthening economic growth and reducing poverty in Niger.’ See www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2005/pr05119.htm (accessed 10 June 2007). 14 Between 2004 and 2005, the price of millet nearly doubled in Niger (Vasager, 2005).

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15 In 2005 and 2006, Niger was ranked last of 176 countries on the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index. According to the 2007/2008 Human Development Report, Niger is ranked 174th out of 177 countries. See http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics (accessed 10 December 2007).

References Agamben, Giorgio (1998), Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Badiou, Alain (2003), L’éthique: essai sur la conscience du mal (Caen: Nous). Baudrillard, Jean (1995), The Gulf War did not take place (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Boltanski, Luc (1993), La Souffrance à distance: Morale humanitaire, médias et politique (Paris: Métailié). Cohen, Stan (2001), States of denial: knowing about atrocities and suffering (Cambridge, UK: Polity). Crignon, Philippe (2004), ‘Figuration: Emmanuel Levinas and the image’. Yale French Studies, 104: 100–25. de Beauvoir, Simone (1985), ‘La mémoire de l’horreur’ in C. Lanzmann, Shoah (Paris: Fayard): 9–14. Debord, Guy (1992 (1967)), La société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard). Galeano, Eduardo (1990), ‘Salgado, 17 times’, in S. Salgado, An Uncertain Grace (New York: Aperture): 7–15. Harvey, David (1989), The condition of postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell). Jameson, Fredric (1991), Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Jay, Martin (1993), Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentiethcentury French thought (Berkeley: University of California Press). Kurasawa, Fuyuki (2007), The work of global justice: human rights as practices (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press). Lanzmann, Claude (dir.) (1985), Shoah (France). Levinas, Emmanuel (1971), Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff). Levinas, Emmanuel (1978), Autrement qu’être, ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff). Levinas, Emmanuel (1995), ‘Interdit de la représentation et “droits de l’homme” ‘, in Altérité et transcendance (Paris: Fata Morgana): 127–35. Mitchell, William J. Thomas (2005), What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Mondzain, M.-J. (2005), Image, icon, economy: the Byzantine origins of the contemporary imaginary (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Rosler, Martha (1989), ‘In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)’, in R. Bolton (ed.), The contest of meaning: critical histories of photography (Cambridge: The MIT Press): 303–42. Salgado, Sebastião (1990), An uncertain grace (New York: Aperture). Sissako, Abderrahmane (dir.) (2006), Bamako (France).

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Stallabrass, Julian (1997), ‘Sebastião Salgado and fine art photojournalism’. New Left Review, 223: 131–61.

Internet sources Sturcke, James (2005), ‘Niger famine crisis “at 11th hour”’, The Guardian (20 July), available at www.guardian.co.uk/society/2005/jul/20/ internationalaidanddevelopment.famine (accessed 10 April 2008). Vasagar, Jeevan (2005), ‘Plenty of food – yet the poor are starving’, The Guardian (1 August), available at www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/ aug/01/famine.jeevanvasagar (accessed 10 April 2008).

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7 Alterity as democracy-to-come Stella Gaon

The increasing force of global capital, together with the rise of inter- and intra-state violence all over the world, has profoundly undermined the sovereignty of nation-states, the solidarity of multi-ethnic political communities and the quality of democracy, even where it does already exist. The 2003 invasion of Iraq in the absence of United Nations support, the introduction of the Patriot Act in the United States, the race riots in France and the ratification of antiterrorist legislation in Canada are only a few of many examples that signal this development. The fact that these recent events, policies and legislation have themselves been undertaken in the name of ‘democracy’ suggests a crucial need to reopen the debate about what democracy is, how it is being practised today in various countries around the world, and how it might be otherwise conceived. But reconceiving democracy is no easy task. For on one hand, the demand for ‘democracy’ entails above all ‘the radical premise – and promise – that in a democracy it is the people who rule’ (Keenan, 2003: 1). As Alan Keenan says, ‘For democratic to be a meaningful description of a political society . . . there needs to be more than simply debate and the public space and rights that enable it. We must also be able to make a plausible case that the community as a whole in fact manages its own affairs’ (2003: 7; original emphasis).1 On the other hand, as Keenan quickly points out, ‘a close analysis of the logic of democratic autonomy, which promises a collective political entity in charge and in control of itself’ leads to ‘something very much like [Claude] Lefort’s democratic uncertainty, openness, and questioning’ (2003: 9) – particularly, I would add, in the face of alterity. In fact,

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the promise of unqualified access to truth, to objectivity and to agency (both moral and political) attributed to the autonomous hero of Western thought and Western politics (whether conceived in individual or collective terms) has become increasingly implausible in the face of continental critical theory and post-colonial analyses of difference over the past forty or so years. One might mention in this regard a wide set of challenges to the logic of sovereignty and autonomy, including the rhetorical and logical undecidability that undoes logical determination (Derrida, 1978; de Man, 1982), the unconscious drives that undermine conscious mastery (Freud, 1979, 1984, 1985; Lacan, 1981, 1982), the implications of power in knowledge (Foucault, 2006), the phenomenological challenge of ethical experience to ontological solidity (Levinas, 1981), the ideological effects of state apparatuses on political agency (Althusser, 1971), the threat of ‘Orientalism’ to the identity and centrality of the Occidental West (Said, 1995; Bhabha, 1990; Spivak, 1988), and the ways in which temporally paradoxical modes of memory, witnessing and trauma undo the linearity of psychic experience (LaCapra, 1994; Oliver, 2001; Caruth, 1996; Belau and Ramadanovic, 2002).2 Insofar as each analysis demonstrates that the ‘other’ cannot be contained within the confines of the ‘same’ (that is, within the self-same, within identity, and so on), these critiques of the logic of (democratic) autonomy have all but annihilated the satisfied conviction that we can ever be fully present to ourselves, masters of our own consciousnesses or consciences, and so ever fully ready for, available to, or capable of, complete moral and political agency. Alterity, so to speak, keeps coming to the fore in each and every one of the questions that are put to the categories of autonomy, identity and self-determination, the very categories upon which the understanding of democracy as collective self-rule seems to depend.3 This has significant implications for what Jürgen Habermas so aptly called ‘the philosophical discourse of modernity’ (1987) and, a fortiori, for the political projects that have attended it. For to say that the pretences of abstract, all-inclusive categories (such as ‘citizen’, ‘human’, ‘subject’ and so on) came into question, to say that the veils masking their partiality began to be pulled away, and to say

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that this is ironically just what has allowed for at least a modicum of progress with respect to the civil, social and political rights granted or extended in Western democracies, is also at once to say that these categories have by now irreversibly lost their foundational and categorical status. There can be no putting the genie back into the bottle, no new categorical understanding of ‘citizenship’, ‘humanity’ or ‘subjectivity’ that is not itself open to contestation and dispute, and that is not itself liable to effect the same mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that have always attended the operation and mobilization of these categories in the past.4 This was precisely the outcome at the level of theory during the 1980s, for example, when the ‘equalitydifference’ debate among feminists exploded with the proliferation of new identities – queer, transgendered, women of colour and so on – each of which demanded its own internal boundaries and protections in the name of identity, voice and self-determination. And it is similarly the outcome at the level of practice, I contend, insofar as Western democratic responses to the insurgence of alterity have become increasingly violent, both domestically and internationally, as the examples given above suggest. This insight – regarding the self-contradictory nature of sovereignty, autonomy, identity and the politics to which these give rise – is, arguably, just what lies behind Daniel Ross’s recent remark that Nothing is more available for deconstruction than ‘democracy,’ since, not only in its implementation but also in its very idea, democracy seems nothing but a set of aporias. However democracy is imagined in every case it depends on a set of impossible concepts: people, border, law, life, liberty, decision, foundation, sovereignty, etc. It is not difficult to make manifest the aporetic if not simply contradictory basis of each of these democratic pillars. (2006: 75)5

Ross is among a number of contemporary thinkers for whom it has become increasingly difficult to determine what ‘democracy’ even means, let alone what a ‘radical’ democratic practice might actually entail (see also Brown, 1995: 11; Keenan, 2003: 2). He is therefore among those taking part in a particularly interesting discussion that has recently emerged concerning the concept of ‘freedom’ and its relation,

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or (more notably) its lack thereof, to the possibility of popular, ‘democratic’ rule. This discussion is characterized by one fundamental, guiding question: how can we achieve, or at least better advance the prospect of, ‘a more robust, egalitarian, and participatory form of democratic politics’, given what is diagnosed as ‘uncertain democratic legitimacy and the difficulties involved in the people’s perpetual “state of transition”’? (Keenan, 2003: 15). Putting a slightly different spin on this, Wendy Brown asks whether ‘the desire for some degree of collective self-legislation . . . [might] remain a vital element – if also an evidently ambivalent and anxious one – of much agitation under the sign of progressive politics?’. And, ‘equally important’, she immediately adds, ‘might the realization of substantive democracy continue to require a desire for political freedom, a longing to share power rather than be protected from its excesses, to generate futures rather than navigate or survive them?’ (1995: 4; emphases added). At the same time, for thinkers such as Ross, Keenan and Brown, among others, claims to self-determination that appeal to sovereignty are simply no longer plausible. This chapter takes its cue from these investigations and insights. Specifically, the question they prompt is whether – given uncertain democratic legitimacy and evident ambivalence – strategies to achieve a ‘substantive democracy’ (Brown, 1995: 4) or a better ‘form of democratic politics’ (Keenan, 2003: 15) are exactly what we want or need? Certainly, from a liberal point of view – one that draws on a set of assumptions that concern self-determination, agency, identity, individualism, equality and community, and that is rooted in the analytical tradition of Western political thought – the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. The consensus here is that liberalism and liberal-democratic states need to be democratized in order to contain the excesses of alterity and, to this end, what is offered is for the most part a ‘diversity-within-unity’ model of community.6 The liberal response can thus be said to imply that alterity is a problem for democracy that remains to be solved through tolerance or reasonable accommodation (as in Québec, for example). In contrast to this, I begin from the premise that claims to self-determination, agency, identity and individualism (inter alia), however compelling, do not serve democratization; indeed, they cannot do so, insofar as

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they unwittingly reinforce the myths of the sovereign subject, sovereign power and the sovereign state, and thus ensure that every difference will turn into another given (self-)same form, in which alterity and difference are once again suppressed. From this point of view, what emerges is that claims to self-determination and identity are themselves a problem for democracy, and that in fact alterity – what may be understood in this context as radical, irreducible difference – is actually its greatest strength. Rather than asking how we might reformulate the Enlightenment motifs of autonomy, identity or self-determination to combat domination based on cultural and other forms of difference, therefore – and, relatedly, how we might improve upon our democratic regimes despite their excesses, their alterities and their infinite vulnerability to deconstruction – it might be productive to investigate how these excesses and these alterities relate to (so-called) ‘democracy’ to begin with – if, that is to say, one is prepared to rethink what one means by ‘democracy’. Perhaps the loss of foundational categories and the recognition of alterity are not bad things for democracy at all. ‘The call for democracy’ may indeed be ‘traversed by a dynamics of hope and becoming’, as John Dalton has recently suggested (Dalton, in Brown 2006, 40). But what is it, exactly, that radical democrats are hoping for? Two extremely innovative responses to this question that merit particular attention are interrogated below. The first is given by Ross (2006), who defines ‘politics’ in terms of the subject’s self-governance and the governance of alterity. Within this frame, there is very little room for any kind of hope. Ross first reduces democracy to political sovereignty or self-rule, and then goes on to argue that the possibility of political sovereignty, and indeed of politics as such, has reached its end. The second response is given by Patchen Markell (2006), for whom the source of hope is the engagement with others, but for whom democratic ‘freedom’ does not bear directly on the realm of the political, understood as governance. Markell thus reverses Ross’s approach by expanding the definition of political action so far beyond the sense of rule or sovereignty that it comes to have very little bearing on politics at all. Markell, in effect, deduces ‘politics’ from an ideal of ‘democratic practice’, which is defined as public action that is ‘free’ in an Arendtian sense.

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Neither of these responses is satisfactory on its own, I argue, for neither does justice to the relationship between democracy and alterity with which radical democrats are trying to contend. While for Ross alterity is ultimately subordinate to the project of self-legislation, for Markell the question of governance disappears from view. But what we gain from their analyses when these are taken together, I contend, is an understanding of democracy as a practical engagement with alterity, in distinction from political governance, structure or form. In other words, the distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘democracy’ that emerges here allows us to formulate difference (qua alterity) as valuable insofar as it is a condition for – rather than an obstacle or an impediment to – radical democratic praxis. In this sense, the relationship between democracy and radical otherness that I propose builds on and refines Jacques Derrida’s notion of the democracy-to-come, insofar as I insist that, inherent in the very possibility of ‘democracy’ as such, there lies a constitutive demand for openness to an unanticipatable future (an alterity) that the encounter with an other provokes. To be sure, this openness to radical otherness at the heart of democracy is merely the minimal condition of possibility, not the guarantee, of democracy. Nonetheless, I will go as far as to conclude that such radical democratic ‘praxis’ – by which I mean democratic action, the practice of which is to put itself in question – is the very promise that ‘democracy’ necessarily entails.

Democracy as politics For Daniel Ross, ‘ “politics” is the name of the endless problem of articulating or composing the individual and the collective’ (2006: 78). He argues that, since the onset of modernity, ‘politics’ (understood as this articulation) has taken the form of ‘democracy’ insofar as ‘modern conceptions of democratic sovereignty are born of the decline and secularization of theological sovereignty, that is, of a loss of putative certainty’ (2006: 74). But with this loss, this ‘narcissistic wound’ as he calls it, there was a corresponding gain. If, for example, Galileo’s insistence that the earth revolves around the sun radically undermined our certainty

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that ‘the most obvious thing in the world – that the earth is still . . . can be made to appear false’, he writes, and that ‘nothing [therefore] ever guarantees the interpretation by which [observations] . . . are translated into the abstract form of laws’ (2006: 79–80; original emphases), then the advent of modern scientific technology redressed this loss by enabling the authoring and authorizing of a ‘necessary fiction’: the fiction that abstract laws must be believed (2006: 80). As Ross explains, the force of the experimental [scientific] apparatus is to make ‘something visible for the first time . . . and then repeatedly’. Thus, for instance, ‘the invention of the inclined plane as an apparatus for seeing motion [allows us to] grasp movement theoretically’ (2006: 80). And similarly, he continues, ‘a vision of humankind’s originary “state of nature” [arose]’. A certain ‘nature of humanity [was] invented or discovered, authorizing the abstracted form of law on which modern democracy is based’ (2006: 81; original emphasis). Thus the history of the development of scientific technology bears directly, he argues, on the Hobbesian innovation, namely, ‘the emergence of the Leviathan, that separation of law and life from which classical sovereignty and modern democracy emerge’ (2006: 81). Thus all political action since the onset of modernity can be said to have taken the form of ‘democracy’ for Ross, not because democracy is anywhere happily assured, but because our newly found ability to rewrite or to remake the world, and ourselves, mechanically and experimentally as it were – our ability to grasp ourselves theoretically in the image of ‘our’ own reason7 – ultimately gave rise to a situation in which ‘democracy’, ‘the thought that the sole ground of sovereignty is “the people”’ (2006: 74), became ‘the horizon beyond which it seems impossible to think’ (2006: 74). To say that we [the demos] can rule ourselves, in other words – to say that we want, and even that we ought, to – is simply to say that, after the decline of religious and traditional authority over the course of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, there was no longer any better, or in fact any other, body to do it. What concerns Ross, however, is that this authorship whereby we engage in ‘politics’ by articulating or composing ourselves (that is, by posing ourselves with others and by writing ourselves into existence) – in other words, the

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authority of our political fictions – is now under attack from two specific directions. In the first place, the ‘state of exception’ diagnosed by Giorgio Agamben illuminates the way in which democracy is being gradually undone (Ross, 2006: 75). Specifically, Agamben argues that what was previously understood as no more than a provisional and temporary measure – the juridical suspension of the law in the event of a national ‘emergency’ – has now become the ‘dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics’ (Agamben, 2005: 2). Thus ‘state power’s most immediate response to the most extreme internal conflicts’, a ‘legal civil war’ in which ‘the law encompasses living beings by means of its own suspension’, now increasingly characterizes the business of states ‘as usual’ (2005: 3). This was exemplified in Canada by the federal government’s invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970, for example, just as it is manifest in the extra-legal actions undertaken at Guantánamo Bay that have been authorized since 2002 by the executive branch of the American government. It is what Ross has in mind when he says that ‘democratic government . . . seems progressively to be expanding the kinds of violence undertaken in its name’ – so much so that so-called ‘legitimate’ violence (most frequently undertaken in the name of ‘security’) ‘is becoming the very means and end of the state’ (2006: 74; original emphasis). Thus, the very distinction between law and life, means and end, Leviathan and state of nature on which democracy depends is now in danger of collapse, and there is no longer any other way to engage in politics, given theological sovereignty’s decline. In the second place, Ross argues, in order for the authority and authorship that constitute democratic sovereignty to obtain, what is required is the possibility of ‘narcissism’ – not in a pathological sense, but rather as Bernard Stiegler defines it, in the sense of a ‘primordial self-love’, without which the extension of love to others is impossible. As Ross writes, [Primordial narcissism] is . . . the very possibility of being an I as much as it is the possibility of being a we. It is only if there are I’s that there can be a we, but every I is an I only as belonging to one, or more than one, we, and to this extent narcissism is the condition of being-together . . . I and we are always unfinished, never quite identical to themselves, always more or

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less out-of-phase with themselves, conserving themselves in the form of permanent individuation. (2006: 82; original emphases)

Following Heidegger here, Ross argues that, beyond the collapse of life and law diagnosed by Agamben, the authority and narcissism through which individuals and collectivities are articulated are now threatened by ‘our global technological situation and its future’ (2006: 78). Thus Agamben’s vision of a possible antidote to violence undertaken on the grounds of exceptionalism – ‘the transformation of law’ into pure means without ends, without any ties to ‘violence against life’ – emerges as inadequate, but not because Ross disagrees with Agamben’s analysis (2006: 76). On the contrary, it is because he thinks Agamben is quite right about the threat to democracy posed by exceptionalism, but that he fails to appreciate the gravity of the problem in its full magnitude. For what is at stake in the emergence of the spectacular-state8 is the very possibility of politics itself, insofar as the ‘exposure’ or ‘confounding’ of life and law that Abamben diagnoses in emergent ‘states of exception’ may itself be, in turn, no more than ‘an element of the unfolding process by which’ the contemporary interpenetration of economics and technology (or ‘ecotechnics’) ‘undoes politics’ altogether (2006: 78, 77; original emphases). In effect, Ross is saying, if we really have exceeded the possibility of ‘democracy’, then we have exceeded the possibility of politics as such, indeed, perhaps even of life, as well. For insofar as technology produces or constitutes ‘the individual in its encounter with the collective’, there is a danger with respect to our capacity to engage in politics at all. In response to this lament, it is necessary to underline two points that bear on the formulation of democracy I am trying to develop here. The first is that Ross is arguably correct to say that politics is the name for that ‘endless problem of articulating or com-posing the individual and the collective’. For to say this is to say that the term ‘politics’ refers to those public, social processes – both emancipatory and reactionary – through which we are divided and differentially privileged (com-posed, or posed with and against one another), and by virtue of which our radical, irreducible singularity and otherness are reduced to pre-given, socially determined categories and norms that appear to be ‘natural’

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or ‘real’. To say that political power operates on the field of these differences and divisions is thus to radicalize Carl Schmitt’s conception that ‘politics’ – like other ‘relatively independent endeavors of human thought and action’ such as morality, aesthetics and economics, for example (see Schmitt, 1996: 25–6) – is constituted on the basis of specific, foundational categories, notoriously the categories of ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. Where the present analysis departs from Schmitt’s is in its insistence that these categories are not fixed once and for all, but are instead socially constituted and therefore contingent. Indeed, I submit, ‘politics’ is not constituted by its categorical distinctions, but is rather the very activity – an activity of discursive structuring9 – through which those distinctions are established.10 If this is so, we must nuance Ross’s definition of ‘politics’ with the additional understanding that ‘individuation’ (the articulation of I’s and we’s with and against one another) occurs not merely at the institutional (eco-technical) level, but also through an infinite number of minute, daily, quotidian, ubiquitous discursive processes, processes of what one might call ‘structuration’. These are exemplified by, for instance, the state-founding praxis embodied in the US Declaration of Independence, whereby the very words ‘we hereby declare’ founds a state and authorizes its territorial jurisdiction (see Honig, 1991). One might equally refer to the way in which hate-speech is redressed in the law through the legal entrenchment of various categories of injury, as analysed by Butler (1997) and Brown (2002: 423), or the way in which gender is encoded and entrenched in virtually every moment of social interaction. ‘Politics’, in short, refers, in my view, to those ineradicably injurious processes through which alterity (irreducible otherness) becomes mere ‘difference’ – becomes what is other-than: ‘citizen’ or ‘alien’; ‘visitor’ or ‘terrorist’; ‘legitimate’ state or ‘rogue’ state – and is thereby governed, shaped, categorized and produced.11 It is precisely this discursive dimension of the governance of alterity (i.e. ‘politics’) against which progressive democratic resistance (which is to say, ‘democracy’) can and should be aimed. For, and this is the second point, there is arguably nothing fundamentally ‘democratic’ about the assumption of the authority to rule over, divide or conquer ourselves with our

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necessary fictions or our governing structures – nothing in spirit, that is to say – even if democracy does signify collective self-legislation (demos [people, mob] + kratos [rule]) according to the letter of the word. Isaiah Berlin, for instance, explicitly criticized the argument that freedom means self-legislation. He called this ‘positive freedom’ as compared with the ‘negative freedom’ that consists of a much more modest sphere of non-interference, and he chastised a whole contingent of the liberal theoretical tradition for succumbing to its dangerous charms. His point, in effect, was that rules remain rules, and while it is undoubtedly more palatable to impose them on, or to write them for, ourselves rather than to have them imposed upon us, they are no less constraining for that. Moreover, he warned, the self-mastery that positive freedom entails gives rise to a split within the individual between our higher, rational ruling parts and our lower, bodily, passionate parts – a split that can and has been extended to authorize a tribe, a race, a church or a state to impose itself on its ‘recalcitrant members’, as he puts it, in the name of rationality, freedom or truth (Berlin, 1969: 132). From this point of view, there is arguably nothing less free than the promise of sovereignty that ‘democracy’ as ‘politics’ is believed to entail. The conflation of democracy and politics suggested by Ross is thus highly problematic. Indeed, it is only because democracy is conflated with self-rule (life-law), and only because the sphere of rule is in turn limited to a monolithic conception of instrumental power, that the separation of life and law can so plausibly be said to evolve as a dialectic with an unhappy end: from the moment that democracy emerged as a form of rule, from the moment it built its premise and its promise on the stones of the dream of sovereignty, from the moment we understood our own freedom in terms of the possibility of making the law with our own hands and of reflecting ourselves artificially or ‘fictionally’ within it, the battle for democracy was already lost, for the chance of engaging as and with the unfinished beings that we are was immediately undone. In other words, if ‘individuation’ occurs through the negotiation of always incomplete, never selfidentical I’s with other I’s, of I’s in relation to we’s, and of we’s in relation to I’s, then the entrenching of the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ in the law – the sedimentation of their fictional

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separation – is the end, not the beginning, of ‘democratic’ freedom. A return to ‘democracy’ as ‘politics’ in Ross’s sense surely cannot be what radical democrats are hoping for.

Politics as democracy No one, of course, more brilliantly disarticulated the link between freedom and sovereignty than Hannah Arendt. As Patchen Markell explains, by ‘democracy’ she means something like the public conditions in which one is provoked to respond, and so to desire political freedom in contrast to sovereignty or rule. According to Markell, therefore, various proposals for ‘radical democracy’ – and, indeed, the very dilemmas that initially inspired them – represent a false turn: democracy is not best conceived in terms of rule, and it is not most directly about the freedom to have or to be immune from power, at all. On one hand, to be sure, theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe, Wolin, Lefort, Hardt and Negri and Rancière have ‘thrown the idea of rule into relief’ – by picking up on the ancient anti-democratic contention that ‘the people’ are a disorderly, unstable bunch, and by arguing on this basis that ‘democracy’ ought to be conceived instead in terms of (respectively) the agonistic contestation for hegemony, anarchic insubordination, an emptiness at the heart of power, the multitude or rupture (see Markell, 2006: 1–3). On the other hand, insofar as all of these radical democratic proposals issue from an ‘inversion’ of democracy as rule rather than from a reconceptualization of its fundamental meaning, the theories in which they are embedded are all characterized by a tension between the rejection of rule and the acknowledgement of its inevitable place (2006: 3). And, while the poles of this tension between rule and unruliness have been found in the work of Arendt as well – for good reasons, as Markell concedes (2006: 4) – an exploration of Arendtian ‘action’ provides grounds on which to see that her own critique of rule goes deeper than an outright rejection or an ambivalent acceptance of its necessity. Specifically, Markell argues that, in the first place, Arendt ‘aims her critique at the interpretation of the world that the word “rule” carries with it (and which underlies both positive and

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negative assessments of rule’s place in politics)’ (2006: 5; emphases added). In the second place, he continues, ‘the point of her critique of rule and her recovery of beginning is not to celebrate those phenomena that are conventionally taken to be rule’s opposites . . . but to prise apart phenomena that the idea of “rule” has taught us to see as inseparably connected’ (2006: 5). In particular, to affirm rule as such, to applaud unruliness in its place or to concede the paradox of their impossible congruence would be to take a wrong turn in the sense that it would entail the failure to separate, in Markell’s view, the political quality of ‘action’ as ‘beginning’ inherent in the Greek meaning of rule (archê) from the antipolitical sense of rule as command over others (2006: 4). Markell’s ‘unorthodox’ reading of Arendt (2002: 6) thus issues in a conception of ‘democracy’ that does not seem to accord with any of the previous accounts; here democracy emerges as what I want to characterize as the ‘engagement with alterity’ – a phrase I propose in order to capture the unique way in which Markell links democracy to the Arendtian notion of political ‘freedom’. Specifically, Markell explains that political action defined as ‘free’ in the Arendtian sense of ‘beginning’ (or ‘natality’) is not ‘the power to break with a series, change direction, or act differently’ (Markell, 2006: 6; see also Arendt 1958, 177–8). It is neither the assumption of rule nor its refusal. Rather ‘freedom’ as ‘beginning’ signifies the ‘kind of unexpectedness and novelty . . . [that is] a feature of all events, including those that are hoped, feared, or foreseen’, because ‘when an event passes from possibility to actuality . . . something changes in a different register; namely the register in which the happenings are not only caused states of affairs but also meaningful events, features of a world, and, in particular, occasions for response’ (2006: 6). He continues, To say that all events exhibit unexpectedness in this sense, then, is to say that no degree of certainty about whether something will or will not happen, and what it will turn out to be, can smooth over the difference between ‘not yet’ and ‘already.’ Beginning is tied to the stance in which that difference matters. (2006: 7)

Markell’s understanding of ‘democracy’ must thus be distinguished from Ross’s understanding of ‘politics’, which was given earlier as the governing of alterity. For, most

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significantly, Markell’s reading of Arendt suggests a role for radical difference (for alterity, that is to say) in the very practice of politics, and thus points towards a second answer to the question of what it is we may hope: our every action is a reaction to an unanticipatable otherness, and itself enables something new. To conflate democracy with rule is thus to obscure this notion of action as beginning, as Markell says, either by ‘teaching us to associate phenomena such as regularity and continuity with hierarchical relations of command and obedience’, and thereby to produce a ‘withdrawal from practical engagement’ or, conversely, by ‘leading us to embrace a countervailing commitment to openness and interruption – which, however, we seem to be tragically bound to violate every time we make a decision [or] . . . move in one direction rather than another’ (2006: 7–8). The self that undertakes ‘free’ action in the public sphere, Markell insists, is neither permanently fixed (ruled) nor wholly undetermined (unruly). ‘Selves’ are, rather, ‘the intersection between [or, in Ross’s terms, the “articulation” of] these worldly happenings and circumstances, on the one hand, and the biologically individuated human beings for whom they are meaningful, whose bodily trajectories from birth to death serve as the threads that organize this latent stuff into selves’, on the other (2006: 10; original emphasis). In response to the ‘what’ that happens, therefore, Markell proposes a democratic practice through which we can always ‘begin’, and this suggests that ‘the being of a beginning is actually not best conceived as a state’, but, rather, ‘always as a second step rather than a first: if we can never quite lose our capacity to act altogether, this is because there never ceases to be a fund of doings and happenings – beginnings – in the world to which we might respond’ (2006: 11, 12; internal citations omitted, original emphases). On this Arendtian view of ‘freedom’, rights, sovereignty and collective self-rule are basically misnomers for what it is simply to be oriented to our own futures, to want to encounter and so to change what is. This reading of Arendt illuminates a crucial role for alterity in the practice of democracy to which radical democrats should attend. Given not only the extent to which, but more importantly the ways in which, the contemporary continental deconstructions outlined earlier – of

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unconsciousness/consciousness, power/knowledge, ethics/ ontology, structure/agency, Orient/Occident and so on – have shattered the very possibility of the identity or coherence of the ‘one’, the subject or the people, it seems counterproductive to continue to apply our best and most ‘progressive’ efforts on the production of ‘autonomy’, ‘sovereignty’, ‘self-determination’ or ‘identity’ in the face of political difference. Indeed, rather than responding to the wideranging and deeply penetrating analyses of each of these ‘pillars’ of democracy with anxiety or ambivalence, one might even consider whether it can be anything but alterity, both within us and without, that produces in us the desire to respond and to become, and that perhaps it is simply this desire – this futural hope for that which comes and comes to surprise us, and which thereby changes everything – that drives our demand for democracy, a demand that we think will be satisfied by inclusion or plurality or the opportunity to assert our selves in a ‘secondary’ or pathological, narcissistic sense (Freud, 1984: 65–97). In other words, it is only insofar as the subject is conceptualized in pathologically narcissistic terms that the reduction of democracy to sovereignty makes sense to begin with, and it is precisely insofar as this conceptualization fails to account for the ways in which we are heteronomously constituted that the institutionalization of democracy as sovereignty will continue to fail. Taken on its own, however, a futural desire to be or to become ‘freely’ is surely not ‘politics’ in any recognizable sense. In a way, it is really just life, for the political ‘freedom’ Markell advocates signifies no more than public, human engagement, and therefore has nothing directly to do with governance (and is not even compatible with it) any longer at all. Consequently, ‘freedom’ in Markell’s Arendtian sense cannot inform what Keenan calls ‘a more robust, egalitarian and participatory form of democratic politics’ – it cannot satisfy radical democrats – either.

Democracy as the praxis of critique Neither Ross nor Markell ultimately describes a relation between democracy and politics that captures what radical

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democrats seem to be hoping for. Quite a lot, however, can be made of their difference. Let us begin by recalling that, on Markell’s reformulation of Arendtian freedom, democracy is nothing but the engagement with radical difference and so should not be confused with sovereignty. In hoping for ‘democracy’ on this view, Markell does not anticipate that our theories will be realized in practice, and that we will thus come to know ourselves as the authoritative legislators of our own world. For ‘democracy’ as such is not an ‘as such’ at all; it is not an ideal, a state of affairs nor even less a form of political regime. It is merely the encounter that opens us in response to alterity, and that is provided and provoked by it. This opening is democracy’s ‘premise and its promise’, to borrow Keenan’s phrase. And, so understood, it is not clear that such a possibility should be called ‘democracy’ at all. ‘Politics’, in contrast – if we modify Daniel Ross’s formulation – is the articulatory process of individuation through which alterity is structured and governed. It takes a textual and (concomitantly) an institutional form, and this is not synonymous with ‘democracy’ either. On the contrary, so understood, ‘politics’ would be more radically progressive (more ‘democratic’, as it were), not by returning to or reinstating sovereignty, but rather by allowing for, and indeed engaging in, its own disruption; rather, by letting itself be questioned by the other that provokes democratic practice, perpetually, to begin. This is how we can recognize (as revolutionary), and can engage in, a ‘politics’ (so to speak) of resistance. Such a politics would take the form of a disruption, a destructuration of those discursive structures through which we are governed and thus come to appear as divided into the particular (merely ‘different’) subjects that we ‘are’: citizens of a given state, sexed, raced and otherwise differentiated bodies or, indeed, as unequal players in a capitalist system of economic exchange. In other words, processes of structuration produce us in distinctly political ways: as either more or less privileged, more or less worthy, more or less deserving of respect and, most importantly, as more or less cognizant of the truth. To see this, moreover, is also at once to see that the appeal to self-determination and agency will always miss its aim, precisely because, when it comes to the production of social difference, there is no locus of power as such, no sovereign centre that might be

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moved from the oppressor to the oppressed in the name of political democracy. What there is, rather, is a myriad of microphysical, discursive practices of recitation, practices that produce the very structures of difference (as other-than) by virtue of which certain forms of oppression take place, and through which certain bodies and a certain resistance become possible or impossible at all. These practices are, and should be, subject to deconstruction. I might go so far as to say, therefore, that the phrase ‘democratic politics’ is an oxymoron. But I would rather say that there, where the letter of ‘democratic politics’ meets the spirit of ‘democracy as the engagement with alterity’, the impossible has already occurred. This would be to draw on Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ‘democracy-to-come’ – by which he means democracy that is not only always not yet, but that is also always already here-now, as well, as I have elaborated elsewhere (Gaon, 2008: 351). Democracy-to-come is not, thus, a horizon or a vision or a finality at which we should aim in the future, any more than it is the call for an ideal that once existed in the past. For democracy-to-come is not coming; it has, as Derrida says, no horizon of expectation. ‘But for this very reason’, he writes, justice (as the democracy-to-come) ‘may have an avenir, a “to-come,” which I rigorously distinguish from the future that can always reproduce the present.’12 This ‘to-come’, one might say, is the alterity in or of ‘democracy’. Indeed, Derrida goes on, justice ‘will always have it, this à-venir, and always has. Perhaps it is for this reason that justice . . . opens up for l’avenir the transformation, the recasting or refounding of law and politics’ (1992: 27). The praxis associated with democracy-to-come, then – which I am formulating here as the opening that occurs when the letter of ‘democratic politics’ meets the spirit of ‘democracy as the engagement with alterity’ – is very different from what is normally meant by the term ‘democratic politics’. Indeed, one might say that radical, irreducible difference is precisely what poses itself as a question, as a critical provocation to democracy in its institutional form, that alterity is that without which democratic practice cannot ‘live on’. Moreover, it is, arguably, precisely ‘democratic politics’ in its customary sense – which is to say, ‘democracy’ as it is institutionalized

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and practiced in liberal regimes – that must be resisted today. For the liberal regimes that exist now seem at best to be less and less able to fulfil the hope for what it is that radical democrats seem to want and, at worst, to be working directly to oppose it. The almost cavalier use of violence and penalization undertaken in the West in the name of ‘security’ since (but also before) 9/11, and the mammoth increase of oppression that has resulted everywhere from the ‘free’ markets of global capital in the Western, ‘democratized’ world, are unmistakable signs of this tendency. What is increasingly unclear, therefore, is whether democracy as a present or a promised form of rule based on sovereignty – no matter how much ‘better’ or robust – can be what we hope for or need. What is clear, is that with alterity there ‘is’ at least the promise of a future (here-now) to come. The relationship between democracy and alterity I would propose on this view, in short, is that democracy is only possible by virtue of the radical opening that alterity provokes. For what this produces is a questioning, a problematization and a willingness to proceed without a clear trajectory or a predetermined understanding of what our political demands and our ‘community’ must be (Brown, 2006: 36–7). This willingness and openness, this alterity at the heart of political action, it seems to me, is the very essence of democracy. In contrast, without the critical provocation of alterity to identity and the democratic praxis this entails, we may not hope at all.

Notes 1 Compare John Dalton, who writes, ‘as the current attempt to impose democracy at gunpoint in the Middle East bears out, a functional democracy requires more than just the formal presence of institutions. It requires a liberated citizenry, inspired by the dream of democratic futures’ (in Brown, 2006: 40). 2 I am indebted to Ewa Płonowska Ziarek (Chapter 12, this volume, p. 283, note 4) for references to trauma theory. 3 ‘Alterity’ is a Levinasian term that signifies otherness in an ethical rather than in an ontological sense. For further elaboration, see the Introduction to this text (15–16, above). See also Ziarek (Chapter 12, this volume, pp. 263–4). 4 The determination of so-called ‘rogue’ states within the ostensibly ‘cosmopolitan’ arena of global democracy is a good example of the

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mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that accompany claims of identity (see Derrida, 2005). Keenan (2003) focuses specifically on the concept of ‘people’, whereas Wendy Brown (1995, 2006) interrogates the concepts of ‘liberty’ and ‘sovereignty’. See Markell for a good overview of this literature (2006: 1–3). See for example, Arneil et al. (eds) (2007), Barry (2001), Carens (2000), Eisenberg (ed.) (2006) and Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev (eds) (2005), as well as Baumeister (2000), Deveaux (2000), Festenstein (2005), Ivison (2002), Kenny (2004), Mason (2000), Parekh (2000) and Young (2000). I am indebted to Rita Kaur Dhamoon for this point. I use the word ‘our’ advisedly; it is, was always, and must be particularized. This is Agamben’s term for the democratic state that has been ‘colonized’ by the state of exception (see Ross, 2006: 78). A specific analysis of how visuality also structures socio-political meaning is beyond the scope of this chapter. For an elaboration of the political importance and impact of visual depictions of ‘otherness’, see Kurasawa (Chapter 6, this volume). See also Judith Butler, who argues, ‘The exercise of sovereign power is bound up with the extra-legal status of . . . official acts of speech. These acts become the means by which sovereign power extends itself . . .’ (2004: 80). Discursive processes through which alterity becomes mere ‘difference’ are ubiquitous and ineradicable. In other words, no moment of discourse is ever immune from these effects. To imply as much would be to suggest that signification could somehow be rendered each time in a singular way, such that it would avoid the pitfalls of the very generalization on which it depends. Nonetheless, not all discursive structuring is equally injurious. The nature and extent of any given injury is highly contextual, as well as deeply ambiguous (both emancipatory and reactionary, as mentioned above), and is thus not specifiable in abstraction or in advance. Given Derrida’s own explication of this neologism, the suggestion that ‘Derrida’s notion of the democracy to come (avenir) . . . suggests an infinitely perfectible horizon for democracy’ is apparently mistaken (Newman, 2008: 228; emphasis added).

References Agamben, Giorgio (2005), State of exception (translated by K. Attell) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). Althusser, Louis (1971), ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation)’, in Lenin and philosophy and other essays (translated by Ben Brewster) (New York and London: New Left Books). Arendt, Hannah (1958), The human condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Arneil, Barbara, Deveaux, Monique, Dhamoon, Rita Kaur and Eisenberg, Avigail (eds) (2007), Sexual justice/cultural justice: critical perspectives in political theory and practice (London: Routledge University Press).

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Barry, Brian (2001), Culture and equality (Cambridge: Polity Press). Baumeister, Andrea (2000), Liberalism and the ‘politics of difference’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Belau, Linda and Ramadanovic, Petar (eds) (2002), Topologies of trauma: essays on the limit of knowledge and memory (New York: Other Press). Berlin, Isaiah (1969), ‘Two concepts of liberty’, in Four essays on liberty (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Bhabha, Homi K. (ed.) (1990), Nation and narration (New York: Routledge and Keegan Paul). Brown, Wendy (1995), States of injury: power and freedom in late modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Brown, Wendy (2002), ‘Suffering the paradoxes of rights’, in W. Brown and J. Halley (eds), Left legalism / left critique (Durham and London: Duke University Press). Brown, Wendy (2006), ‘Learning to love again: an interview with Wendy Brown’. Contretemps, 6 (January): 25–42. Butler, Judith (1997), ‘Sovereign peformatives in the contemporary scene of utterance’. Critical Inquiry, 23:2 (Winter): 350–77. Butler, Judith (2004), Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence (London and New York: Verso). Carens, Joseph (2000), Culture, citizenship and community: a contextual exploration of justice as evenhandedness (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Caruth, Cathy (1996), Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, history (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). de Man, Paul (1982), ‘The resistance to theory’. Yale French Studies, 63: 3–20. Derrida, Jacques (1978), Writing and difference (translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by A. Bass) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Derrida, Jacques (1992), ‘Force of law: the “mystical foundation of authority” ’, in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D.G. Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the possibility of justice (New York: Routledge). Derrida, Jacques (2005), Rogues. Two essays on reason (translated by P.-A. Brault and M. Nass) (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Deveaux, Monique (2000), Cultural pluralism and dilemmas of justice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Eisenberg, Avigail (ed.) (2006), Diversity and equality (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press). Eisenberg, Avigail and Jeff Spinner-Halev (eds) (2005), Minorities within minorities: equality, rights and diversity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press). Festenstein, Matthew (2005), Negotiating diversity: culture, deliberation, trust (Cambridge: Polity Press). Foucault, Michel (2006), Psychiatric power, lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974, J. Lagrange (ed.) (translated by G. Burchell) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).

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Freud, Sigmund (1979), On psychopathology: inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety and other works. The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 10, A. Richards (ed.) (translated by A Richards) (London: Penguin Books). Freud, Sigmund (1984), On metapsychology: the theory of psychoanalysis, The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 11, A. Richards (ed.) (translated by A. Richards) (London: Penguin Books). Freud, Sigmund (1985), Civilization, society and religion: group psychology, civilization and its discontents and other works, The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12, A. Dickson (ed.) (translated by A. Richards) (London: Penguin Books). Gaon, Stella (2008), ‘When was 9/11? Philosophy and the terror of futurity’. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 34(4): 339–54. Habermas, Jürgen (1987), The philosophical discourse of modernity: twelve lectures (translated by F.G. Lawrence) (Cambridge: The MIT Press). Honig, Bonnie (1991), ‘Declarations of independence: Arendt and Derrida on the problem of founding a republic’. American Political Science Review, 85(1): 97–113. Ivison, Duncan (2002), Postcolonial liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Keenan, Alan (2003), Democracy in question: democratic openness in a time of political closure (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Kenny, Mike (2004), The politics of identity: liberal political theory and the dilemmas of difference (Cambridge: Polity Press). Lacan, Jacques (1981), The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, J. Alain-Miller (ed.) (translated by A. Sheridan) (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company). Lacan, Jacques (1982), Feminine sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, J. Mitchell and J. Rose (eds) (translated by J. Rose) (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company). LaCapra, Dominick (1994), Representing the Holocaust: history, theory, trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Levinas, Emmanuel (1981), Otherwise than being or beyond essence (translated by A. Lingis) (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press). Markell, Patchen (2006), ‘The rule of the people: Arendt, Archê, and Democracy’ American Political Science Review, 100:1 (February), 1–14. Mason, Andrew (2000), Community, solidarity and belonging: levels of community and their normative significance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Newman, Saul (2008). ‘Connolly’s democracy pluralism and the question of state sovereignty’. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 10(2): 227–40. Oliver, Kelly (2001), Witnessing: beyond recognition (Minneapolis Minnesota University Press). Parekh, Bhikhu (2000), Rethinking multiculturalism: cultural diversity and political theory (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd). Ross, Daniel (2006), ‘Democracy, authority, narcissism: from Agamben to Stiegler’. Contretemps, 6 (January): 74–85.

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Said, Edward (1995), Orientalism (London: Penguin Books). Schmitt, Carl (1996), The concept of the political (translated, with introduction and notes, by G. Schwab) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988), ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press). Young, Iris Marion (2000), Inclusion and democracy (New York: Oxford University Press).

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8 The ends of democracy: who, we? Catherine Kellogg

Jacques Derrida first delivered his essay ‘The ends of man’ (1982) at a colloquium in New York in October 1968 on the proposed theme of ‘Philosophy and anthropology’. This text, written in the shadow of an ‘American’ war on Vietnam, the uprisings in Paris, and general political unrest in the West, begins by meditating on what he calls ‘philosophical nationalities’, by which he meant national differences of philosophical language, style and doctrinal attitudes. He points towards how the colloquium attempted to negotiate those national differences in the name of what he calls a ‘promised complicity of a common element’, which is nothing other than the so-called universality of philosophical discourse. Noting that such philosophical colloquia are therefore politically significant, Derrida proposes that the significance of this colloquium might be best termed ‘democracy’ or, more precisely, democracy’s form. In this text, we thus find one of the earliest articulations of three important themes: that democracy is tied to the possibility of the sovereign, self-identical, universal man of philosophical anthropos, that the fate of this being is itself fundamentally tied up with the fate of the sovereign nation-state, and, finally, that the question of philosophical anthropology poses itself only in a kind of crisis or limit of democracy. The enigmatic question Derrida asks at the end of the essay – ‘who, we?’ – exposes the limits of we, and in so doing points at once both to the end of the sovereign anthropos and the idea of democracy associated with it, and towards the idea he was later to formulate as ‘the democracy to come’. Forty years later, the ‘national’ differences to which he was referring bear down on us quite differently than they

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did then, although we do see the continued attempt to interiorize them (in such efforts as multiculturalism, transnationalism or cosmopolitanism). These political innovations of the late twentieth century have ultimately failed to shore up or guarantee either ‘sovereign’ subjectivity or an increasingly imperilled system of sovereign national states. As Michael Naas recently put it, ‘something is clearly happening today not just to sovereign nations, but to the very idea of sovereignty itself, as the sovereignty of nationstates continues to be threatened by other nation-states, to be sure, but also by the transnational sovereignty of international organizations, multi-national corporations and non-state terrorist networks’ (2006: 17). In the context of a crisis of sovereignty, Derrida’s forty-year-old text thus emerges as remarkably prescient and even contemporary.1 A volume on the crisis of democracy therefore presents an opportunity to trace the itinerary of Derrida’s thoughts, not only concerning the ‘end’ of the ‘we’ of philosophical anthropology, but also concerning the canonical answer to the question, ‘who, we?’, which takes the form of an analogy between the friend and the brother. Indeed, as Derrida has gone to great pains to point out, the idea of the friend as brother has organized the idea of democracy from its inception in the classical Greek city-state to the present moment. Based on this itinerary, I argue that Derrida’s contribution to thinking democracy can be summed up as follows: democracy is an impossible possibility, insofar as it is both enabled and ultimately threatened by what can never be brought under the sign of ‘we’. Derrida’s various attempts to define democracy within the history of Western political thought allows him to trace its fundamental aporias, most notably, the contradiction between freedom (qua unconditionality), on the one hand, and equality (which is necessarily about measuring or conditioning), on the other. In the definitional void – indeed, the freedom – he discovers at work in the concept of democracy, which is to say, in its form, Derrida points towards its possibility, its potential tendency towards perfectibility (to include, always, those ‘others’). Here, he discovers democracy’s status as always ‘to-come’, as the promise of that absolute inclusion, but only insofar as democracy remains formal, free or unconditioned. On the

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other hand, insofar as democracy tends in its very perfectibility towards the canonical form of friendship that constitutes the grounds of democratic community – whereby the friend is formally regarded as another ‘self’, equal or a brother (and, in that sense, conditioned) – democracy’s possibility embodies ‘dangerousness’. In its most benign version, this means that democracy as a practice tends to reduce all citizens – in their equality – to ‘the same’, and thus to undermine the freedom of its form, which is to say, its status as ‘to come’. Democracy as equality is captured in such practices as declarations of ‘universal human rights’ or even in establishing an international criminal court. In its more malignant version, the conditioning of democracy’s freedom annuls the distinction between friend and enemy that has been marked for the last three hundred years by the borders of sovereign national states, and this means not only that freedom is reduced to equality, but that justice is reduced to law. To unpack these claims, I begin with a reading of Derrida’s 1968 text, where he first points towards the ruse of ‘man’ and his ends, the ruse of thinking the demos as self-same, able to maintain itself over time and through space, the ruse of thinking the demos as sovereign. In 1968 he challenged his readers to think democracy otherwise, a task he began himself in 1988, in The Politics of Friendship (1997). The Politics of Friendship is organized around the statement ‘Oh my friends, there is no friend’ – a phrase attributed to Aristotle. The comma or hesitation between the friends addressed and the friend not present and perhaps yet-to-come points towards a division in the history of friendship (or the history of the West’s thinking of democracy), a division between the possibility of a sharing among freemen and the impossibility that those who were free could actually be equal (or measured). And with the 2004 publication Rogues (2005), Derrida offers his most definitive statement on the meaning of ‘democracy-to-come’. Taken together, these three texts reveal that Derrida poses the question of the future of democracy in increasingly stark ways, in terms of two ‘ends’. On the one hand, what I am calling here the ‘end’ of democracy is also the end of ‘man’ in his Western, humanist, male (or fraternal), self-identical, sovereign incarnation, an end that is announced by the

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question ‘who we?’. Derrida points towards this when he mentions Zarathustra’s ‘last man’ who is, as Nietzsche tells us, the ‘descendent of God’s murderer’ (Nietzsche, 1961: 5). For this man, there are ‘no herdsmen, no herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same’ (Nietzsche, 1961: 46). On the other hand, the ‘end’ of democracy also refers to the democracy to come that will be marked by justice beyond the law, and freedom beyond equality. The ‘end’ at stake here is not just the termination, but the beyond, or the exorbitance, of democracy. The being who figures this form of politics and this friendship to come is Nietzsche’s ‘overman’, who is, as Derrida himself points out, not the ‘last man’, but rather something or someone other than (or beyond) the human type altogether (Derrida, 1982: 136). In an idiom that Derrida takes up in Rogues, this end of democracy refers to democracy’s ‘death instinct’. This ‘instinct’, Freud explains, seems to violate nature, insofar as it seeks what is beyond pleasure, beyond the simple biological homeostasis that all previous ideals of ‘the good’ attempt to reach, and thus beyond the human thought as anthropos, beyond human rights, or justice rendered commensurable with law. The way Derrida thinks beyond the ‘human’ is important for my purposes. As Leonard Lawlor recently put it, ‘[i]f, on the basis of Aristotle, life has been thought as pure actuality or presence, as the full and proper possession of all one’s powers and possibilities . . . then life thought otherwise than being-present will consist in a “weak force”’ (Lawlor, 2007: 8). This ‘weak force’ is, as Derrida has regularly pointed out, the ability to be unable; it is the ability to reserve or put away a power (Derrida, 2005: xiv). This weak force, or this ability to reserve power, might also be usefully thought in the way that Derrida describes it elsewhere, as ‘the gesture that is least violent’, or as ‘violence against violence’ (Derrida, 1978, 130). In Rogues, Derrida suggests that in this moment this weak force is the only hope for politics at all. This is because the sovereignty of national states is so intimately linked to the juridical concept of war, that insofar as the former seems to be imperilled, the latter is too. However, the end of the juridical form of war in no way suggests peace (Derrida, 2005: 124). The becoming-one of the world (what English-speakers call ‘globalization’ and Derrida

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insists on leaving untranslated as mondialisation) is not the cosmopolitan utopia of Kant’s Perpetual Peace, but rather its opposite: mondialisation (‘worldwide-ization’) is world ‘war by other means’, whose absolute violence or limitlessness is, precisely, its global scope. As Derrida says, ‘a new violence is being prepared, and in truth, has been unleashed for some time now, in a way that is more visibly suicidal or autoimmune than ever. This violence no longer has to do with world war or even with war . . . It consists in accusing and mounting a campaign against rogue states’ (Derrida, 2005: 156). The only antidote to this violence without limit, a violence whose object is life itself, is the weak power of the force of that life: violence taken up against that violence, which would be the end of democracy’s practice (crudely speaking, the rule of law) and a reaffirmation of democracy’s form (freedom beyond equality, justice beyond the law), a reaffirmation, that is to say, of democracy’s ‘impossible possibility’.

Ends of man: ‘who we?’ Derrida’s central focus in 1968 was the humanist existentialism that characterized post-war French philosophy. This is no accident, for the conference at which he presented his paper explicitly thematized ‘national’ doctrinal attitudes. Indeed, Derrida diagnoses the proliferation of international philosophy colloquia in the second half of the twentieth century as a concerted attempt by the West to dominate those parts of the world where such questions as ‘philosophical anthropology’ simply made no sense (Derrida, 1982: 112). In other words, Derrida notices already in 1968 that international philosophy colloquia are techniques of colonialism by other means. His specific argument concerning so-called French philosophy was that the postwar, anthropological reading of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger that was then so dominant may have been a philosophical ‘mistake’, but that, ‘whatever the breaks marked by this Hegelian–Husserlian–Heideggerian anthropology as concerns the classical anthropologies, there is an uninterrupted metaphysical familiarity with that which, so naturally, links

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the “we” of the philosopher to the “we men” to the “we” in the horizon of humanity’ (Derrida, 1982: 116). The ‘who, we?’ question, then, implicates not only the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy, but also those ‘last men’ who may well be standing on its eve. Derrida’s first insight is that the question of philosophical anthropology – the question of man’s ‘identity’ – is also the question of the limits of man, the question of how to delimit what is proper to ‘man’ alone. He gestures towards this insight in two of his epigraphs. The first comes from JeanPaul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, a text that poses the existentialist–humanist question of the proper ‘ends’ of ‘human reality’. The second epigraph is from Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which Kant alludes to his profoundly influential preoccupation with man as an end in himself – an object of dignity – rather than a mere means. The question of man’s identity is necessarily the question of the limits of man, the question of the point at which man is no longer identical to itself and thus is no longer ‘man’ at all. In this way, the question of the identity of the anthropos opens onto the idea of what is proper to man, what is exclusive to the being named ‘man’ and thus to the question of ‘man’s’ ‘proper’ end. Derrida’s second insight follows from this. It is that, in questioning the identity or limits of the anthropos, the question of the end itself is brought into view. Here, the issue of man’s identity reaches a limit and a crisis. This insight is signalled in Derrida’s choice of the third epigraph, from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, in which Foucault points to the ‘end’ of the anthropological metanarrative. The problematic of the ‘ends’ of man – its limits or its goals – signals a crisis in the idea of man qua anthropos and thus threatens to exhaust the very idea of ‘man’ altogether. The idea of ‘man’ – as self-identical, as essential, as anthropological – undoes itself from the inside. To this extent, the anthropological question – ‘who we?’ – is both the inside and the outside of the ‘humanist’ notion of ‘Man’. The implications of this thought are profound and have been decisive for thinking the political over the past forty years. It suggests, on the one hand, that the description of any category of identity is necessarily about the limits or ends of that identity; all forms of identity bear the mark

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of the question of the anthropos – the question ‘who, we?’ – and thus deconstruct. On the other hand, it also suggests that the sovereign notion of ‘man’ cannot simply be replaced with a putatively less sovereign one. What Derrida proposes, therefore, is a radical challenge: ‘we’ (who, we?) must make use of the only resource ‘we’ have for thinking otherwise. This challenge issues from the argument that the idiom of the Western philosophical tradition is fundamentally Greek, which is to say, it is an idiom in which the question of the (self) -identity of ‘man’, its truth or its being, is one of essence, of universality and, thus, also of man’s ‘ends’ or telos. There is, in other words, only this relentlessly metaphysical idiom with which to work. This may be a troubling inheritance, but it cannot simply be wished away. For, as Derrida says, ‘the entirety of philosophy is conceived on the basis of its Greek source . . . the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to speak philosophically outside this medium’ (Derrida, 1978: 81). Therefore ‘what is difficult to think today’, he goes on to say, ‘is an end of man which would not be organized by a dialectics of truth and negativity, an end of man which would not be a teleology in the first person plural’ (Derrida, 1978: 112). This task requires a radical form of self-interrogation, one which includes, among other things, the willingness to follow the question ‘who, we?’ to its end. To repeat or retrace what is implicit in the founding concepts and the organized problematic – to retrace the Western, philosophical, anthropological notion of ‘man’ – is to engage in this task, insofar as it produces a ‘trembling’ in this concept. As his reading of the ‘crisis’ reached by rigorously holding the idea of man to its own premises suggests, what emerges is a ‘being’ that traces its own impossibility, a being that relentlessly interrogates the ‘essence’ of anthropos itself. And, perhaps more interestingly, to the extent that the internal undoing of the Western, metaphysical idea of ‘man’ throws the very nature of ‘we’ in the West into question, to the extent that it challenges the way in which ‘we’ represent ourselves as ‘being’ in the West (Gaon, 2005: 387), it challenges the very meaning of being-together for ‘us’, which is to say, of ‘democracy’. The crisis of the identity of the anthropos, in other words, is, at the same time, the crisis of the tradition that produces

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it. As Robert Young argues, ‘deconstruction is and always has been the deconstruction from the inside of the presumed naturalness, transparency and ascendancy of the West itself’ (2004: 226). What Derrida points towards in this text, written forty years ago, then, are in general the intensely political themes of the work that followed in its wake, and in particular the way that rigorously holding the idea of democracy to its own premises reveals a distinctive form of ‘the political’ – the rule of the people – one characterized by a Western and arguably imperialist underbelly. In an interview with Elisabeth Roudinesco conducted a few years ago in Paris, for example, he said: What is undergoing a ‘deconstruction’ is no doubt the very concept of the political, from its Greek origins through all its mutations. What is called the political can no longer be bound in its very concept, as it always has been, to a presupposition of place, of territory – and of what pertains to the state . . . Some would like to continue to think . . . that the political necessarily takes the form of a state, and that is bound to an irreplaceable territory, to a national community. But this is exactly what is being dislocated today. (Derrida and Roudinesco, 2004: 96–7; original emphasis)

This challenge to rethink the political is not pursued in the 1968 text. However, throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Derrida does attempt to think against thought – against truth and against metaphysics – through the idea of the singular, precisely that which Western philosophy cannot think on the basis of its Greek idiom. He attempts to move from metaphysics to the political through the impossible possibility of democracy ‘itself’ – as against the ‘presence’ of the anthropos. Thus, what Derrida evoked as early as 1968 was precisely an ‘end of man’ and, thus, the possibility of something new.

End of metaphysics: ‘who is the friend?’ For a starting point for thinking about the ‘ends of man’ and the end of metaphysics in terms of a new beginning, we might turn to Hannah Arendt. She specifies that one advantage of the present circumstance is that it allows us to view history freshly, without preconceptions (Arendt, 1978: 12). In other words, for Arendt, a break from tradition

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is not a break from the past. Rather, it is a break from the prescriptions of how to read the past. We remain the inheritors of a ‘tremendous wealth’ of values and ideas, but they come with no instructions for their best use. For Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other hand, the break from the past does not just relieve us of prescriptions of how to read; it enables the ‘mad philosophers of the future’, who will concern themselves with nothing but the dangerousness of what he calls the ‘perhaps’ (Nietzsche, 1973: 2). Tying together Arendt’s insight about the break from how to read the past with Nietzsche’s insight concerning the radical openness of the future, Derrida writes, ‘there is no more just category for the future than that of the “perhaps”.’ ‘[S]uch a thought’, he continues, ‘conjoins the future and the “perhaps” to open on to the coming of what comes’ (Derrida, 1997: 29). Most importantly, moreover, he adds that ‘one must love the future’ (Derrida, 1997: 29). To articulate the dangerousness of the ‘perhaps’ with love for the future, and to do so in light of the permission to make use of such ideas as justice, equality, freedom etc. without explicit instruction, is to open up the question of what Derrida means by the democracy and the friend ‘to come’ in potentially fruitful ways. Specifically, this articulation helps us to think about how, despite its impossibility, this love will have occurred, and about the relation to the future the experience of that love entails. On one hand, as Derrida makes plain, it is impossible to love the future, because one cannot love what is not yet. At the same time, however, insofar as Nietzsche himself called for the philosophers of the future, he undertook a performative gesture. As Derrida says, ‘Nietzsche’s critique . . . [is] made in the name of a future that is promised. The promise does not come over and above the critique, as a post-face at the end. The promise inspires the critique in the first place’ (Derrida, 2002b: 225). The promise or performance of futurity is the trace of the future here-now. In other words, it is the radical selfinterrogation that thinking ‘man’ and his ends demand; it is (at this moment) the question, ‘who, we?’. Thus, while it is precisely the radical openness of the future that makes our love mad (for it is impossible to love what is not yet), it remains that, if I am to love at all, I must love the condition for love, which is nothing other than the radical openness

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to what comes. This in no way defuses the openness of the future, which is to say, it does not render the future any less risky. But it does mean that our relation to the openness might be an affirmative one; it is a chance, perhaps. In this view, politics cannot be properly understood as futural if it limits what the future will or should be. If the ‘to-come’ is simply another mode of presence – if it is a mode of life that is just what we know or can imagine now – it is not futural. As Derrida points out, a future ‘accessible in advance, would be a poor possible, a futureless possible’ (Derrida, 2002a: 254). In contrast, the mad philosopher of the future, here-now, who announces the promise of the future, moves from the demise of metaphysics onto the question of the political. Derrida’s focus in The Politics of Friendship is precisely the relationship between this mad thought of loving what is not present (the future), on the one hand, and the kind of love (or friendship) that constitutes the canonical grounds for democracy, on the other. For, since Aristotle, democracy has been understood as analogous with friendship, which is to say on analogy with the Greek proverb that friendship is the ‘sharing of things in common’. And indeed, Derrida organizes his book around a saying first attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laertius: ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ In charting the ‘canonical’ history of democratic thought as friendship, Derrida finds a non-homogeneous, counter-narrative in the division between those addressed (o my friends) and the friend not-yet present. There are (at least) two versions of the friend at work in the narrative of democracy thought as friendship; one version conveys the ‘friend’ in terms of the other self (or mirror), that is, as identical, present and close, while the other invokes the friend’s alterity, distance or withdrawal. For instance, while Aristotle tells us famously that perfect virtue is being a friend-as-mirror, he also says that by remaining loyal to the dead, we befriend those who cannot reciprocate our friendship. For Aristotle, being a friend is found more in the activity of loving than in the passivity of being loved. Thus, even in Aristotle’s infamous portrait of the friend as another ‘self’, we find the articulation of a kind of friendship or love that is other than that of sameness or symmetrical recognition (see Aristotle, 1992: 1239a4).

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Indeed, as Aristotle first articulated it, democracy may be a community of equals, but it is a community of those who are equally excellent or superior, which (among other things) could only have been characteristic of property-owning men. This is one of the reasons why the equality so important to democracy’s idea of itself is regularly figured as brotherhood. The entire tradition of thinking democracy through friendship is organized through the third essential term of democracy: fraternity. As Derrida points out, the friend-asbrother is an astonishingly ubiquitous motif in the Western tradition: from Athens and Jerusalem to Christian Rome, from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche and Heidegger. From Aristotle’s notion of the friend as another self to Cain and Abel, from Freud’s brothers shaking in guilt together after the murder of the father to the Christian brothers who share holy Eucharist, the friend is always a brother. Against this backdrop of what he calls a ‘double exclusion’ – of women and their friendships with each other as well as of women’s friendships with men – Derrida finds another logic, a ‘relation without relation’ (Levinas) or ‘community without community’ (Blanchot). He speaks of this most pointedly in the chapter entitled ‘For the First Time in the History of Humanity’ (1997: 271–306).2 There he draws on Blanchot’s insight that, in order to be faithful, love must entail openness, not only towards what I know, but also towards what I do not and cannot know. For while I cannot ever know the friend, Blanchot argues, the (temporal) interval or (physical) space that separates us does not destroy the relation between us. On the contrary, this interval defines friendship’s precise nature. As John Caputo puts it, ‘the very withdrawal of the friend draws me out of myself, in a ceaseless act of going where I cannot go, in the happy futility of a pursuit that Blanchot calls le pas au-delà, the step (pas) beyond I can not (pas) take’ (1999: 196). What constitutes the friend for Derrida is neither the fixity of a permanent relation, nor even the profound distance effected by death, but rather the instability of an approach that withdraws and a withdrawal that approaches, the le pas au-delà (not just beyond where we can go, but also ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ (Freud, 1984)). If I love you only insofar as you are familiar to or like me (which is the Aristotelian understanding of love as ‘perfect virtue’), I am caught up in

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a narcissistic circuit whereby there is ‘no friend’ at all. If I am to love you, I must love also what is unfathomable about you. I love you in your difference from me – in your infinite unknowability – and this difference includes the unknowability of your future. The love in this version of friendship entails a love of or for the future as radically open. The friends who are not yet present, then (‘o my friends, there is no friend’), are those relations that remain, like the future, or like the promise, to-come, as an impossible possibility (see Derrida, 1997: 235). It is in the name of this friendship to come that Derrida says there is no friend at present. By the same token, in addressing ‘my friends’, he calls upon the friends among whom he finds himself, recalling a sort of friendship that is already there, a relation that provides the horizon for the invocation of a friendship to come. The difference between the questions ‘what is this friendship we are charged with loving, impossibly?’ and ‘who is the friend?’ radicalizes the experience of friendship or love itself. To really love someone is to love them also for what will come for them; it is a radical state of certain uncertainty. From this point of view, in any friendship worthy of the name, the future – its unknowability – is here-now, without presence. But how is democracy (thought as friendship) reoriented, if we embrace the possibility that we cannot know in advance who the friend might be? In a precise way, this possibility makes the distinction between friend and enemy unstable. This is why, for Derrida, a tradition of speaking of friendship or about the friend must be distinguished from a mode of address that is to a friend (even if it is a friend who is not yet present: ‘o my friend, there is no friend’). The second notion of friendship interrupts and displaces the terms privileged in the ‘canonical’ history – proximity, presence and self-identity – in favour of such terms as distance, withdrawal, difference. Of course, the political distinction between friend and enemy is the ground upon which Carl Schmitt organized his thinking of the political. For Schmitt, ‘the concept of the political’ cannot be reduced to economic or juridical categories. Schmitt’s case rests in part on a critique of the Weimar Republic’s apparatus, for, in his view, extensive state action in the economy blurred the traditional state/society

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divide and meant that the Weimar state lost its constitutional integrity. The institutional structures that might have been able to act in an adequately decisive manner were effectively taken over by powerful interest groups. In response, Schmitt developed a conception of the ‘political’ realm as centred on a normatively unregulated act or ‘decision’ directed against an enemy. For Schmitt, noticing the specificity of the political reveals that politics is always founded on a moment of decision which itself has no prior justification or foundation. His definition of sovereignty is developed in terms of the capacity to act effectively in a potentially violent crisis, one that cannot be resolved by any general norms or rules. Like God, who stands both inside and outside the world he creates, the Sovereign stands both inside and outside the law, and so has the power to break the law, which is to say, to declare the exception. This completely ungrounded moment of decision establishes what Schmitt calls the fundamental distinction of politics: the demarcation between friend and enemy, inside and outside, inclusion and exception (see Schmitt, 1985). Moreover, knowing who is a friend and who is an enemy is not a kind of ‘knowing . . . in the mode of theoretical knowledge but in one of a practical identification’ (Derrida, 1997: 116). This is perhaps why Derrida begins his chapter on Carl Schmitt with a citation from Freud (Derrida, 1997: 112). Once one has conceded the unknowability of the future (although not necessarily in the Schmittian mode), one has already taken on board Freud’s repugnance at the injunction to love one’s neighbour. As Freud argues in Civilization and Its Discontents, if all neighbours are to be loved, who remains to be the special one for whom one reserve one’s love, a resource precious enough? (Freud, 2005) Or, to put it in Schmittian terms, if we are all friends, who are our real friends? Without entering into a discussion about Schmitt, it is possible to conclude with Derrida that, if we radicalize the concept of friendship on the basis of our experience of loving what is not-yet about the future, democracy based on friendship will be deferred to another day, a day that is promised to-come. Insofar as it is still to-come, it is a possibility. Insofar as it must traverse the hesitation of the perhaps – which includes the imponderability of who the friend might be – it is impossible.

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Rogues, democracy and auto-immunity Rogues is surely Derrida’s last and the most extensive treatment of the phrase ‘democracy to come’. In the paper that forms the core of the book, ‘The Reason of the strongest (Are there rogue states?)’, Derrida announces that, ‘America will have been my theme’ (Derrida, 2005: 14). This paper was first presented on 15 July 2002 at a conference in France. So, while ‘The ends of man’ announces (in New York in 1968) that the ‘presumed complicity of a common element’, namely the universal anthropos in French philosophy, purportedly addressed national differences – while it suggests, in effect, that even the most seemingly benign, left-liberal undertaking such as international colloquia on philosophical anthropology might be tools or techniques of imperialism – the first iteration of Rogues was presented in France in the summer of 2002, and its theme was ‘America’. And to speak of ‘America’ that summer was necessarily to speak of the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the ‘war on terror’, which had already become the leitmotif of a country that had long presented itself as the world’s leading democracy. Like Politics of Friendship, Rogues takes up concepts at the heart of the philosophical tradition of democracy, such as freedom, equality, the people, sovereignty and so on. But, written after the events of 9/11, this text is a thoroughgoing denunciation of the notion of sovereignty itself. Derrida agrees with the thinkers of sovereignty – from Plato to Bodin to Schmitt – that sovereignty is essentially indivisible and therefore that it cannot be shared, transferred or referred to. As soon as it tries to extend itself in space or to maintain itself over time – which is to say, as soon as it attempts to maintain itself as sovereign – sovereignty opens itself up to law and to language, to the counter-sovereignty of the other, and so begins to undo itself. The ambiguous quality of what Derrida calls ‘roguishness’ proceeds from these aporias, in which the claim to universality undercuts the claim that sovereignty is self-same. By the same token, ‘democracy’s’ association of the notion of sovereignty with something called ‘the people’ (the demos) sets the stage on which what Derrida calls democracy’s ‘autoimmunization’ begins to play itself out. Indeed, Michael Naas suggests that auto-immunity is the ‘last iteration of deconstruction itself’ (Naas, 2006: 18). As Naas explains,

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while the concern with the autos was central to Derrida’s thinking at least from his writings on Husserl and on the question of ‘auto-affection’, the shift to auto-immunity reorients Derrida’s discourse around the process by which the ‘self seeks to protect itself against external dangers and, in so doing, to weaken its own defences’ (Naas, 2006: 22). Like its biological counterpart, political auto-immunity is a process that weakens or destroys itself in its very effort to safeguard itself. To illustrate this process, Derrida offers an analysis of the 1992 Algerian elections – wherein a democratically elected government suspended elections because it suspected that the majority would elect a party that would end democratic rule and instigate a theocratic regime (Derrida, 2005: 36). However, the American Patriot Act, which suspended habeas corpus and instigated domestic surveillance without due process, seems a more obvious example of democracy’s auto-immunity, or its suicidal tendencies. As in the Algerian case, the Patriot Act exemplifies ‘an autoimmune necessity inscribed right into democracy, right onto the concept of a democracy without concept . . . a democracy whose concept remains free’ (Derrida, 2005: 36–7). The paradox of auto-immunity is that, on the one hand, it is precisely in democracy’s freedom that Derrida finds its possibility, its desire, as it were, to include those who have been excluded, and thus democracy’s status as always ‘tocome’, as a promise of freedom. On the other hand, however, this promise carries the ‘dangerousness’ of the ‘perhaps’, not the least of which is the possibility that, in making us all friends, we might all become, in effect, enemies. Derrida’s turn towards the term ‘autoimmunity’ captures this danger insofar as it demonstrates – more than a term like ‘deconstruction’ (which might require a ‘deconstructor’) – the automaticity of democracy’s self-destructiveness. Explaining why he turned to this biological metaphor, Derrida says that it allowed him not only to take into consideration the distinction between life and death, but also to take ‘into account within politics what psychoanalysis once called the unconscious’ (Derrida, 2005: 109–10). Yet, if psychoanalysis provides indispensable conceptual resources for rethinking the political, it is also a symptom of the fact that the master sign or the entire process of

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signification has come under stress, that meaning itself can no longer be assured: what I mean, what you mean, what we all will have meant. For the death of the father, of God, does not only inaugurate a science of man that begins with a fratricidal myth. It also inaugurates a science of man that accepts, first, that the subject is no longer and was never ‘sovereign’ (as Lacan says, ‘God, then, is dead. Since he is dead, he always has been’) and, second, that meaning is not and cannot be assured (Lacan, 1992: 203). The ability to answer for oneself, the ability to know what one means, the ability to be master of oneself, freely and autonomously, emerges as strictly unattainable in the face of the ‘discovery’ of the unconscious. Yet if ‘man’ is not and has never been sovereign, if meaning cannot be assured, then the seemingly certain terms of democracy – equality and fraternity – emerge as much less benign than they might first appear. As Derrida has always insisted, thought itself is a kind of violence insofar as it numbers or renders the unequal equivalent, which is to say that it rationalizes. Certainly, the violence of ‘identification’ was never the ‘worst’ violence, but it is also not the ‘least’. In this context, the ability to not be able is (among other things) the ability to not identify either friend or enemy, to leave the difference undecided. The ‘weak force’ of life, in other words, is precisely the ability to reserve or put away the force of reason or thought itself. At the same time, if the worst (violence) is always possible, the worst is still to come (Derrida, 2005: 104). In the name of life, this worst violence – the world war without limit that Derrida calls mondialisation – threatens to kill everything. It is precisely the potential limitlessness of this violence that makes it ‘the worst’. This is not the possibility of the worst possible world, it is the possibility of the end of the world, the end of life, as such, the possible loss of all futures. Derrida thus calls for a rationality that is more than calculative. If thinking or identifying is always a question of number – of calculation or conditioning – then the democracy, friend or politics to come can only remain possible by way of thinking against, a dislocation of the ‘political’, itself. Such a force may not amount to much – in fact it is ‘very little – almost nothing’ (Derrida, 1978: 80) – but it is democracy’s only chance.

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Conclusion The ‘world’ no longer serves as a backdrop for human endeavours (that is to say, for capitalism). Globalization means that the ‘world’ is not a world at all. It is a parcel of the West, ‘the United States and its allies’, and we have now what Derrida calls ‘war without war’. The crisis of ‘sovereignty’ reflected in the term ‘mondialisation’ implies that the concept of the enemy emerges as terrorism in a state of potential world war, where the distinctions between military and civilian, army and police, are losing their pertinence (Derrida, 2005: 154–5). It becomes more and more difficult to tell the difference between friend and enemy: one’s state (‘us’) includes more and more of ‘them’, and so one must eliminate more and more of them (of ‘us’?) in order to immunize the nation. This is very different from the ‘iron curtain’ that defined the cold war: then there was an identifiable enemy. But here and now, the number of enemies (all of us are rogues) is potentially unlimited. Now, if there is a plurality of rogue states (including most especially those which most loudly pronounce and denounce other states as ‘rogue’), and if the traditional understanding of state power is that it is ‘sovereign’ (which is precisely to say that it is indivisible and thus singular), then the appearance of ‘rogue states’ announces the dissolution of ‘sovereignty’ as a politically meaningful concept. From this, Derrida draws two conclusions. First, that ‘there are . . . only rogue states’ and, second, and even more startlingly, that ‘unavowable silence, denegation: that is the always unapparent essence of sovereignty . . . A pure sovereignty is indivisible or it is not at all . . . This indivisibility excludes it in principle from being shared, from time and from language’ (Derrida, 2005: 100–1). Yet the silence that belongs to the essence of sovereignty does not mean, as Derrida clarifies, that sovereignty cannot speak – on the contrary, it speaks all the time. What it means is that its discourse lacks meaning or rational sense. In its own tendency to ignore established international and domestic law – whether in terms of the foreign policy of endorsing pre-emptive war or of the domestic policy of suspending the legal rights of ‘terrorist suspects’ imprisoned at Guantánamo – the democratic superpower increasingly resembles what it seeks

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to oppose as its mortal enemy, the ‘terrorist’ or ‘rogue states’, and thus belies its own singularity. Near the end of Rogues, Derrida argues that the Enlightenment to come would have to ‘enjoin us to reckon with the logic of the unconscious’ and thus with ‘this poisoned medicine, this pharmakon of an inflexible and cruel autoimmunity that is sometimes called the “death drive” and that does not limit the living being to its conscious and representative form’ (Derrida, 2005: 157). This brings us back to his conclusion in 1968: that there are the two ‘ends of man’. He says: ‘We know how, at the end of Zarathustra . . . Nietzsche distinguishes, in the greatest proximity, in a strange resemblance and an ultimate complicity . . . between the superior man and the superman. The first is abandoned to his distress in a last movement of pity. The latter – who is not the last man – awakens and leaves, without turning back to what he leaves behind him’ (Derrida, 1982: 135–6). The question that emerges from the trajectory of Derrida’s interrogation of ‘democracy’, it therefore seems to me, is this: can democracy be induced to reconsider the processes that have led up to this point, and to the alternatives that have been marginalized along the way? For if democracy can be induced to reconsider its relation to sovereignty – its requirement, that is, for a self that defines its freedom in terms of an ‘I can’, which is in turn its power to stay the same over time and space – a democracy to come could begin to envisage itself as something other than it has become. As Derrida says at the end of the first essay in Rogues, ‘All that is not for tomorrow’, c’est pas demain la veille, which might be more accurately translated as ‘tomorrow is not the eve’ (2005: 114). Tomorrow might not be the eve, but it is ‘we’, in May 1968 and in the spring of 2009, who stand between the last man and the overman, and in whose standing the temporality of the end is deconstructed by the undecidability of what it means to talk about ‘man’ and ‘ends’. Will we open something up or close something off? Who, we?

Notes 1

The phrase ‘crisis of sovereignty’ embraces a wide variety of linked phenomena, including the sense that the nature of ‘threats to democracy’ is no longer identifiable by nationality (are those threats

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2

terrorists? homosexuals? immigrants?), the notion that there are nationstates considered ‘rogue’, and the ways that war itself is no longer conducted between nations, but rather might be located in non-state ‘networks’ or, more frighteningly still, within the immune system of the state itself. This chapter was included in the English translation to the text, but did not appear in the original French. On the other hand, a chapter that included Derrida’s response to Heidegger was excised from the English. For commentary on the inclusion of the text on Blanchot and psychoanalysis in the English translation, see Michael Naas (2003). For commentary on the excision of the chapter on Heidegger from the English translation, see Caputo (1999: 191).

References Arendt, Hannah (1978), Life of the mind (San Diego and New York: Harvest Books, Harcourt Press). Aristotle (1992), The Eudemian ethics (translated by J.K. Thomas) (London: Penguin). Caputo, John (1999), ‘Who is Derrida’s Zarathustra?’. Research in Phenomenology, 29: 184–98. Derrida, Jacques (1978), ‘Violence and metaphysics’, in Writing and difference (translated by A. Bass) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Derrida, Jacques (1982 (1968)), ‘Ends of man’, in Margins of philosophy (translated by A. Bass) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Derrida, Jacques (1997 (1988)), Politics of friendship (translated by G. Collins) (London and New York: Verso). Derrida, Jacques (2002a), ‘Force of law: the mystical foundations of authority’, in G. Anidjar (ed.), Acts of Religion (London and New York, Routledge). Derrida, Jacques (2002b), Negotiations: interventions and interviews, 1971–2001, E. Rottenberg (ed.) (translated by E. Rottenberg) (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Derrida, Jacques (2005), Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (translated by P.-A. Brault and M. Nass) (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Derrida, Jacques and Roudinesco, Elisabeth (2004), For what tomorrow. . .: a dialogue (cultural memory in the present) (translated by J. Fort) (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Freud, Sigmund (1984), ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, in On metapsychology (translated by J. Strachey) (New York: Penguin). Freud, Sigmund (2005), Civilization and its discontents (translated and edited by J. Strachey) (New York: Norton). Gaon, Stella (2005), ‘Communities in question: sociality and solidarity in Nancy & Blanchot’. Journal for Cultural Research, 9(4): 387–403. Lacan, Jacques (1992), Ethics of psychoanalysis, J.-A. Miller (ed.) (translated by D. Porter) (New York and London: Norton). Lawlor, Leonard (2007), This is not sufficient: an essay on animality and human nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press).

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Naas, Michael (2003), ‘Just a turn away: apostrophe and the politics of friendship’, in Taking on the Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Naas, Michael (2006), ‘“One nation . . . indivisible”: Jacques Derrida on the autoimmunity of democracy and the sovereignty of God’. Research in Phenomenology, 36: 15–44. Nietzsche, Friederich (1961), Thus spoke Zarathustra (translated by R.J. Hollingsdale) (London: Penguin). Nietzsche, Friederich (1973), Beyond good and evil (translated by R.J. Hollingdale) (London: Penguin). Schmitt, Carl (1985), Political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty (translated by G. Schwab, with a new foreword by T.B. Strong) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Young, Robert (2004), White mythologies: writing history and the West (London: Routledge).

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9 From fear to democracy: towards a politics of com-passion Dorota Glowacka

Majority does not mean large number, it means great fear. Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) So love may well be called the perpetual bond (nodus) and juncture (copula) of the world. Marsilio Ficino (1433–99)

The affective pitfalls of democracy In her influential work The democratic paradox (2000), the French theorist Chantal Mouffe argues that, by privileging rationality, current aggregative and deliberative models of democracy ‘leave aside a central element which is the crucial role played by passions and affects in securing allegiance to democratic values’ (2000: 95). She contends, therefore, that we must mobilize affects and passions towards democratic ends; what is needed is ‘a life politics’ that would enable the creation of ‘a democracy of emotions’, although she never names or describes these emotions (2000: 15). In this chapter, I examine the affective modalities of the dilemmas of democracy, focusing on the articulation of affect in current theoretical and popular reflections on the possibility of democracy. Specifically, I will look at what I see as two dominant, and at first sight diametrically opposite, streams within those debates, namely, the discourse of fear and the discourse of love. The recent attention to the radically polarized sentiments of fear and love, as they have been traversing the forms of communal being-together, suggests a need to investigate the affective dimension of the

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processes of nation building and of the community’s will to democracy. As Kahn and Saccamano write, ‘at the time when the rhetoric of terror is a central feature of our common political life, when political ideologies on the right and left vie to characterize themselves as “compassionate”, and when religious passions lead to shocking acts of violence’, Western reflection on politics and the passions merits new scrutiny (Kahn et al., 2006: 1). The point of departure, and the immediate impetus for my investigation, was the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book, Fear: anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (2006), in which the American historian (of Polish–Jewish descent) describes the murder of dozens of Holocaust survivors on 4 July 1946, in the Polish city of Kielce.1 Overall, an estimated five hundred to fifteen hundred Jews were killed in Poland in different anti-Semitic incidents immediately after the war, signalling ‘a moral failure that touched some core of collective being’ (2006: 29). The violence and widespread hostility against the Jews obviated the common denominator of shared citizenship and revealed the absence of an ‘overarching civic frame of reference’ (2006: 170) that would allow Polish and Polish-Jewish victims affected by the war to reorient themselves in the new political reality of the country and to begin to come to terms with their respective sense of the loss of life, identity and human dignity. The anti-Semitic excesses coincided with the events of the communist take-over, following closely the forged results of the national referendum which marked the turning point in solidifying communist power in Poland. The anti-Semitic excesses, compounded with forced relocations of ethnic populations, precipitated a transformation of the formerly multi-ethnic country into a homogenous entity, in which ethnic, cultural and religious differences were increasingly suppressed. In her book Poland’s threatening other: the image of the Jew from 1880 to present, Joanna Michlic writes: ‘In Polish history attitudes toward Jews and other minorities have constituted a litmus test of democracy, which is embodied in the concept of modern civic nationalism’ (2006: 3; emphasis added). Throughout the ages, perceptions of the Jewish other in Poland have been a symptom of the nation’s civic condition and, often, of a malaise in the Polish body

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politic. During the formative periods of Polish history, such as the emergence of the Soviet-sponsored government immediately after World War II and the transformations following the collapse of communism after 1989, these perceptions, stubbornly embedded in the social and political fabric, had a significant impact on the country’s will to democracy and, in general, shaped and determined the forms of public ‘being-in-common’.2 The phantasm of the menacing Jewish other became entrenched in the cultural imaginary throughout the history of post-war Poland, even when, after the purges of 1968, there were very few Jews left in the country. It erupted into waves of anti-Semitism during each economic or political upheaval, and it resurged again in the summer of 2006 during the debates surrounding the sixtieth anniversary of the Kielce pogrom. These debates intensified, and the opposing positions became more polarized, following the Polish translation of Gross’s book in January 2008.3 While in the conclusion of her book Michlic notes a certain positive transformation of the image of the Jew in Poland, away from the stereotype of the threatening Other, this cautiously optimistic note must be evaluated in the context of a pronounced shift to the right during the tenure of the Kaczyn´ski brothers’ ultra-conservative government (2005–07). While a growing interest in Jewish history and culture, among the younger generation in particular, is indicative of the country’s growing receptiveness to the idea of an open, pluralistic and multicultural Poland, as well as of the recognition of its status as a member of the European Union and a partner in the global dialogue, the incidence of anti-Semitism has also increased in that country, as has xenophobia in general, signalling the durability of ethnonationalist attitudes. These developments, often resulting in the curtailing of citizens’ democratic rights, have been in tune with the conservative political ambiance in a number of other countries that are members of the European Union.4 As indicated in the title of Gross’s book, the prevailing emotion that animated the crowd in Kielce and in other infamous anti-Semitic incidents after the war was fear, even if it may have been disguised as rage or even as a sense of moral righteousness over meting out punishment on the nation’s enemy. Gross writes: ‘The postwar hatred of the Jews in Poland was too lethal, too widespread, too untamed

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to be grounded in anything but concrete, palpable fear. It would have mellowed, subsided, or ossified had Jews not represented an existential threat to the Poles’ (2006: 247; emphasis added). While it is understandable, albeit tragic, that the Holocaust survivors experienced fear when, upon returning home from the death camps, places of hiding and exile in the Soviet Union, they were greeted with threats by their former neighbours, Gross’s claim that the murderous acts themselves were catalysed by fear merits further scrutiny. Gross argues that, under conditions of acute social anomie, Poles were afraid of the people who were returning from the dead to reclaim their property which had been taken over during the war, often in a violent manner. Poles feared their former Jewish neighbours because ‘living Jews were both a reminder and a threat that they might need to account for themselves’ (2006: 248). Thus, the violence against the Jews was the mechanism of getting rid of the Jewish witnesses to the Poles’ moral collapse during the war. Gross implies that the subsequent lack of atonement for the violence against the Jews and the ubiquitous silencing of their memory have resulted in the perpetuation of that fear in contemporary Polish society, manifesting in anti-Semitic attitudes and behaviours. As Gross claims, the climate of fear in post-war Poland led to violence and even murder in the situations where many would normally expect compassion for the former neighbours so disastrously afflicted by the Holocaust. The shocking unravelling of neighbourly bonds was particularly striking in this deeply Christian country, where fear seemed to have disabled, if not annulled, the Christian precept of loving one’s neighbour. The ubiquitous affect of fear functions in Gross’s book not only as an all-encompassing descriptor of post-war reality, but also as a metaphor for the diremptive force that signals a complete breakdown of the community of neighbours. In Gross’s analysis of the conditions in post-war Poland, fear is described as an ‘anti-democratic’ sentiment, one which contributed to the foreclosure of the possibility of non-violent togetherness between ethnic Poles and Polish Jews. Fear is an affective expression of the uncompromising intolerance of the Other who is perceived as a threat to the cohesion of the collective. To this negative affect of fear, Gross juxtaposes compassion, and he posits it as a desirable – albeit utopian within the

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framework of the book – moral sentiment that signals the welcoming of otherness and tolerance of difference. Gross cites Polish poet Mieczysław Jastrun, who wrote in June 1945: One would expect that this murder, unprecedented in history . . . would evoke in Polish society – which had itself been tortured and abused – a collective response of compassion, a sense of brotherhood in suffering . . . But instead the Jewish blood spilled so profusely by the barbaric enemy of the Polish nation and free humanity only awakened the mob instincts . . . In terms of moral evaluation this fact is no less horrifying than the fact of Hitlerite mass murder. (2006: 129)

In contrast to fear, compassion is projected as a ‘democratic’ affect, one that opens up the community to difference and thus enables political forms of human association. Although Gross does not explicitly politicize the affects of fear and compassion as, respectively, destructive or constitutive of political communities per se, his analysis implies the need to re-articulate such antagonistic passions as political sentiments. They operate not only on the level of personal animosity or sympathy, but are also intertwined with the functioning of civic institutions in the country. At one end of the affective spectrum, at the intersection of passions and politics, is a widespread belief that ours is a culture of fear, as announced by such titles as, for instance, Wole Soyinka’s The climate of fear (1999), Barry Glassner’s The culture of fear (1999) and, more recently, Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid fear (2006). At the other end is a call for the recovery of love as ‘the basis of our political projects in common’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 352) and as a remedy against the global crisis of democracy on a planet mired in violence and war. Exemplary for the discourse of love is JeanLuc Nancy’s influential essay ‘Shattered Love’ (1991), as well as a number of feminist critiques, such as Julia Kristeva’s Tales of love (1987), bell hooks’ All about love: new visions (2001), and Luce Irigaray’s The way of love (2002). Although Gross did not take part in these theoretical debates on affective politics, I am convinced that his ‘historical interpretation’ of the events in post-war Poland was influenced by this peculiar dialectic of love and fear, the two sentiments that, at present, seem to be ‘in the air’.

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The dichotomy of love and fear has pervaded the discourse of politics from its inception; beginning with Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have reflected on the role of those countervailing affects in the development of human knowledge, the transformation of individual experience and the shaping of human collectivities. As Niccolò Machiavelli already knew, ‘Human beings seem to be constitutionally determined and limited in their choice of love and fear’ (cited in Patapan, 2006: 125). The affective split was reflected in the foundational texts of modern democracy by Rousseau and Hobbes, wherein the reflection on passions also shifted considerably towards political concerns. The current resurgence of this peculiar affective problematic – in political philosophy, sociology and social anthropology, as well as in popular culture – signals the dire need for its alternative articulations, especially in relation to the diagnosis of ‘democracy in crisis’. In The democratic paradox, Mouffe avers that the reflection on democracy – from its earliest articulation in Rousseau’s texts to today’s much more open models, such as the one based on Jürgen Habermas’s notion of communicative reason – has failed to recognize the irreducibility of the conflict between the liberal values of individual freedom and human rights, on one hand, and the democratic values of equality and popular sovereignty on the other. This resistance to conflictual visions of society within the philosophical discourses that have shaped democratic institutions, which is reflected in their appeal to universal moral consensus, has rendered democratic politics not only ineffectual but also potentially complicit in constructing totalizing models of global community. To counter that danger, Mouffe argues that we must acknowledge the insoluble democratic paradox if we are to grasp and promote ‘what is the real strength of liberal democracy’ (2000: 9). She refers to the model of democracy grounded in the affirmation of this paradox as ‘agonistic pluralism’. This leads me to ask, by analogy, whether the dichotomy between the destructive, even murderous, sentiment of fear underscored by some theorists, and the positive, community-building sentiments of love and compassion, which are the focus of the other set of theorists that I consider in this chapter, does indeed have to function as such an irreducible polarity. Guided by

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Mouffe’s (2000) and also Płonowska Ziarek’s (2001) arguments that democracy requires the intertwining of politics and passions, I posit that the democratic paradox – a constitutive, ineradicable tension between the values of liberal democracy – also entails an affective paradox, a fundamental, aporetic relation between the countervailing passions of fear and love which, insofar as they permeate and even found the existing relations of power, must be reexamined as political affects.5 Such an affective paradox can be seen as fundamental to Mouffe’s model of agonistic pluralism.6

Fatal fear In a series of lectures delivered at the Royal Institution in London in March 2004, Nobel Prize recipient Wole Soyinka diagnosed a new ‘climate of fear’ in the world today. Under the conditions of ‘global anomie’, Soyinka argues, the flames of this omnipresent fear are fanned throughout the world by religious fundamentalisms of various stripes, which, when coupled with political power, respect no ethical limits (2005: xxi).7 Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman agrees that fear is the most pervasive affective state of the contemporary ‘liquid world’. The metaphor of liquidity – very pertinent considering that Bauman’s central example is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – describes the mutability, unpredictability and the lack of stable points of reference in the contemporary world, which are manifested in the increasing frailty of inter-human bonds. In the liquid world, human relations have become a source of anxiety rather than stability and comfort. For Bauman, ‘the wilting of solidarity’ and ‘the crisis of trust’ have been caused by the disappearance of transcendental foundations and the resulting lack of normative regulations that would provide rules for human interaction (2006: 146, 67).8 Bauman points to an inverted relation between fear and democracy: while the modern democratic state was founded as an agency intended to eliminate fear and to ensure the security of its citizens, these hopes have never been realized; as a result, ‘[o]bliquely, it [fear] saps the foundations of democracy’ (2006: 154). It is important to recall that

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Bauman’s analysis of fear grows out of his earlier reflection on love. In Liquid Love (2003), Bauman notes that the human desire for closeness, relationality, communion and permanent mutual bonds has been increasingly replaced by a fear of lasting commitments. Relations have been transformed into ‘networks’, that is, into impermanent, non-committal alliances and virtual communication strategies. Bauman’s focus on the fear of living together and of offering oneself to another as the dominant modern affect thus overlays his consideration of love. As he writes, the relations between human beings are now negatively determined, transforming ‘the solidarity of mankind’ into ‘the solidarity of dangers, risks, and fears’ (2003: 128). Similar to Gross, Bauman places great value on the sentiments of love and compassion and the precept of ‘loving one’s neighbor’ (Bauman, 2003: Chapter 3): he sees in them the very basis of human morality and, implicitly, the basis of viable politics. In the liquid world of short-lived commitments, uncertainty and ‘endemic insecurity’, however, fear seems to be the only palpable, enduring and all-pervasive affective modality, just as, according to Gross, it was in post-war Poland, which was ruled by moral chaos (Bauman, 2003: 92; original emphasis). The underlying instability of social bonds results in compensatory efforts to allay ubiquitous fear, efforts which consist of an increasing escalation of safety measures designed to protect our bodies and homes. Fear, Bauman writes, has certainly benefited commercial forces, which have capitalized on the sharp increase in the demand for safety-enhancing equipment and services. On the other hand, political power has seized this opportunity to encroach on individual freedoms under the guise of enhancing national security. Bauman argues that the obsession with safety is symptomatic of the displacement of a deep-seated ‘existential’ insecurity, the ‘real’ fear, whose sources cannot be diagnosed and which is characterized by the projection of uncertainty and the lack of identifiable objects of terror onto concrete, nameable threats and sources of danger. Bauman’s proposition that it is imperative for a sociologist in the liquid world to ‘see through down to the roots of fear’ is an important one to ponder. At the same time, his call that the main task is ‘cutting out these roots’ is puzzling, considering that, in Chapter Two, he evokes ‘the existential

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foundations of fear’ and locates them in the fear of death (2006: 177). Bauman’s omission, in this context, of Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety and of ‘Being-toward-death’ is striking and perhaps indicative of his reluctance to engage ontological categories. The distinction between anxiety and fear, towards which Bauman nevertheless seems to gesture, is central to Heidegger’s analysis. For Heidegger, anxiety is a disclosive state of mind that brings Dasein (the ontological structure of selfhood) face to face with being and thus with itself as being-in-the-world. In anxiety, Dasein becomes aware of its own existence, which is always already Beingtowards-death. Thus, anxiety is a basic state of mind, to be distinguished from fear: while we fear something, a determined event or entity, in anxiety we are faced with nothing: ‘That in the face of which one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world . . . That in the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite’ (Heidegger, 1962: 231). Fear is then symptomatic of inauthentic modes of existence, of Dasein’s turning away from itself. In his effort to locate the origin of fear in the awareness of mortality, Bauman thus seems to be alluding to what Heidegger describes as ‘anxiety’. In that case, the ‘roots of fear’ cannot be extirpated, since they are constitutive of who we are as humans in the ontological, and also psychoanalytic, sense. Writing from a psychoanalytic perspective and drawing on Freud’s discussion of the uncanny, Julia Kristeva locates the sources of fear in the self-other dynamic of the unconscious (1991). As described by Freud, the sensation of the uncanny is an affective irruption of otherness within the familiar. It manifests as an emotive trace of the rift in the unconscious, which has been precipitated by the primordial encounter with one’s own ‘strangeness’. The figure of the stranger, in this view, is a projection of the unconscious forces that the psyche has been unable to contain or to bind. Cathexed onto the intersubjective space and projecting itself as the fear of the unknown, the uncanny functions as a defensive mechanism, often turning into rage and hatred against those whom we perceive as strangers. Kristeva enjoins us to embrace the stranger within and, by respecting our own constitutive foreignness, to transvalue fear so that we may welcome strangers in our midst instead of ‘hounding’ them (1991: 191). It is important that this discussion takes

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place in Kristeva’s most political book, written in response to the rise of xenophobia in France and out of a concern for the future of democracy in that country.9 Unlike Bauman, who proposes that we eliminate the causes of fear, Kristeva makes it clear (as does Heidegger in ontological terms) that these roots are constitutive of our psychic make-up. They can, however, be worked through (in a psychoanalytic sense) so as to initiate a positive, welcoming relation with the other.

Lucky love In Machiavelli in love: the modern politics of love and fear (the only contemporary source I have located in which the two sentiments appear together in the title), Haig Patapan argues that love – in its various guises as Eros, as love of wisdom, or as agape or caritas – has been central in Western political, theological and philosophical thought. First announced in Plato’s Symposium, it re-emerges in the neoplatonic writings of Plotinus, as well as in the major works of Christian thought, that is, in the texts by St Paul, St Augustine and St Thomas Acquinas. In The way of love, Irigaray observes that, while philosophia means first of all ‘the wisdom of love’, the tradition has imposed ‘the reverse order’ in the translation of the term as ‘the love of wisdom’ (2002:1). For the feminist theorist, that gesture, initiated by Plato, sublimated carnal love into the love of philosophy, which was tantamount to the misappropriation and eventual silencing of the woman’s (Diotima’s) voice (Irigaray, 1993: 20–33). It also expropriated ‘present life, in its concrete and sensible aspects’, from the proper domain of philosophy (Irigaray, 2002: vii). Attending to the same foundational moment in the intellectual trajectory of the West, Nancy writes that, while the discourse on love has been abundant in both philosophy and literature, the very essence of love has eluded philosophical inquiry proper (Nancy, 1991). This dearth, moreover, is not a mere omission but inheres structurally in Western philosophy. In fact, Nancy argues, thinking itself is love and, as such, love has eluded thought’s representational capacity (1991: 84). Nancy therefore proposes a quest for this

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unarticulated ‘essence’ – or heart – of thinking, that is, for a way to acknowledge that the thinking of love is necessary for thinking to be possible in the first place. This does not mean that love is the truth of thinking; on the contrary, love undoes the very will to truth. It means, rather, that love, as the very heart of being, is the passion and the vital force of thinking before thought begins to articulate itself and to ‘make sense’. According to Nancy, such an opening of thinking to love – or rather thinking love as the very opening of thinking – happened ‘one single time’ in Plato’s Symposium, wherein Plato’s Socrates brought forth testimony, which was ‘midwifed’ by a stranger (Diotima), that philosophy is animated by love that ‘receives and deploys the experience of thinking’ (1991: 85). Nancy agrees with Irigaray that, at this originary moment of its announcement, the thinking of love was foreclosed when it presented itself to itself in the figure of the love of wisdom; henceforth, in Plato, ‘love is missing from the very place where it is prescribed’ (1991: 88). Nancy notes the double and contradictory nature of love: on one hand, love is always a movement beyond the self, transporting it towards the other and figuring nothing except the very cut of that exposure; yet, at the same time, in love, the self completes and fulfils itself – through the other (1991: 87).10 Unlike dialectics (the process through which the subject appropriates its own becoming in order to be), love is exposition, offering itself to the outside, to others (1991: 89). It does not negate, affirm or sublate the other into itself; the exposed being ‘incompletes’ itself, declares itself to what is not its proper being. At the same time, in so far as love is the condition of thinking and thinking arises within the primordially singular-plural, that is, it is ontologically relational and as such opens up ‘a time and space of humanity’, love also makes possible such modalities of human relations as friendship, erotic love or, finally, the love of philosophy (1991: 83). Thus, it announces the possibility of a community. Indeed, love is what ‘cuts the figure’ of the community; it is what allows a group to represent itself to itself in a figure, to ‘give itself (as) an interiority’ (Nancy, 1991: 106). Yet love is also the force that shatters or ‘unworks’ that figure: knotting and unknotting it at the same time, (not) taking place only as a promise, it

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is the syncope of the heart pulsating at the limit of the figurable (1991: 107). According to Nancy, love thus consolidates identity while rupturing it at the same time, bringing forth and suspending the dialectic that constitutes the subject. The duality of love (which is both the force of immanence and closure, and the possibility of opening towards the other) frustrates the binaries, including the opposition between gift and property.11 In returning to itself through the other in love, the self always misses itself and returns to itself as always already ‘shattered’, emptied out of its proper essence by the cut of that exposure. In a round-table discussion at the European Graduate School in 2001, Nancy brings out the political dimension of love: ‘We think the body of political thought not as an organicity, but of community as the living to share precisely an impossibility of being-in-common. I would say the community of love is a community living to share the absence of common being’ (2001: 3). For Nancy, love always remains situated between ontology and politics. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, on the other hand, argue for an unequivocally political conception of love, one which may require the recovery of love in its premodern understanding in Christian and Judaic traditions (2004). Love conceived politically is the basis of hope for radical democracy. It does not imply unification or subordination of differences, but instead names a process of continuous ‘self-transformation, hybridization and miscegenation’ (2004: 356) and works towards the creation of new humanity: ‘When love is conceived politically, then, this creation of new humanity is the ultimate act of love’ (2004: 356). For Hardt and Negri, the consummate power of love as a transformative, political affect manifests itself in the acts of ‘multitude’, the term that signifies a collectivity loosely composed of ‘radical singularities that cannot be synthesized into an identity’ (2004: 355). Such groups (NGOs or demonstrations against global institutions, for example) have been brought together by a common cause. Love permeates the shifting networks of political allegiances between them and instantiates their spontaneous efforts (2004: 108). It is interesting to note that Bauman also focuses on spontaneous groups and networks of individuals who act

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together based on solidarity, except that his main references are to terrorist cells. Thus, what could also be seen as examples of Hardt and Negri’s local ‘acts of multitude’ is brought out in Bauman to symbolize global fear rather than the positive affect of love. This radical disparity between Hardt and Negri’s and Bauman’s interpretations of smallgroup affiliations should be seen as symptomatic of the dichotomous thinking about love and fear, and the respective theorists’ inability to conceive of what I will refer to subsequently as ‘affective aporias’. Another striking indication of a tendency to privilege one affective modality at the cost of excluding the other pole is the fact that Bauman’s focus on fear corresponds to his emphasis on the fragility (‘fissiparousness’) of human bonds, while Nancy’s privileging of love coincides with the French philosopher’s affirmation of the ontological condition of relationality. Although the constraints of this chapter do not allow me to account fully for the variety of the discourses on love in contemporary theory, it is important to underscore, once again, the interventions of feminist theorists, such as Irigaray or bell hooks. Central to hooks’s attempt to challenge ‘lovelessness’ in the contemporary world is her exposition of the direct correlation between the spheres of intimacy, in which the inter-human bonds are forged (such as parent–child interactions, friendships or the exchanges between lovers), and the social and political realm. For hooks, the ethic of love as the foundation of the communal bond (the ethic advocated, for instance, by Martin Luther King) is nourished by loving and respectful relations between individuals, and, conversely, a healthy community fosters the growth of loving personal involvements. hooks poignantly relates the two spheres: ‘There can be no love without justice’ (2000: 19). hooks’s perspective is important since it helps avert the danger of losing the intimate perspective from sight, as happens, I would argue, when Hardt and Negri focus exclusively on love as a political sentiment.

Affective aporias: between love and fear As Nancy himself has shown, in its concrete manifestations, channelled towards either objects of affection or identifiable

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essences (to which he refers as ‘predilections’), love can be the force of narcissistic, immanentist self-identification. As such, the double-edged embrace of love also labours to exclude the other and thus – we can infer – foster the sentiment of fear. Nancy argues, nevertheless, that what underlies all such concrete figurations of love is love as the force of relationality, as the sharing [partager] of the absence of common essence. On Nancy’s account, then, love conceived as the ontological force of relationality is also the condition of possibility of the political distinction into friend, whom we love, and enemy, whom we fear, although Nancy never expressly comments on the negative sentiments of fear or hate. In order to bring out this disarticulated tension between love and fear in Nancy’s (as well as Bauman’s) texts, it is helpful to consider, once again, Kristeva’s psychoanalytic account of the ‘stranger within me’. For Kristeva, the primordial experience of fear – which manifests itself as the uncanny – is necessary so that the subject can recognize the stranger within and thus become capable of welcoming the stranger without, that is, of welcoming another human being whom one perceives as different. In other words, ‘working through’ fear can enable the opening to alterity. It is telling that, in Hoffmann’s ‘Sandman’, examined by Freud in ‘The Uncanny’, the uncanny resurfaces in the main character Nathanael ‘on the occasion of the state of love’ (Kristeva, 1991: 183). Kristeva proceeds to locate, in the feeling of uncanniness, a possible moment of an unconditional opening to the other, as it is coupled with the sentiment of love: ‘Confronting the foreigner whom I reject and with whom at the same time I identify, I lose my boundaries, I no longer have a container’ (1991: 187). Kristeva notes the irreducible duality of fear: it can either surface as a psychotic symptom of the destructuration of the self or ‘fit in as an opening toward the new’ (1991: 188). Let us recall that Freud himself frequently dwells on the phenomenon of affective ambiguity and notes the dual psychic function of fear. In ‘Inhibition, symptom, fear’, for instance, he argues that Little Hans’s animal phobia was produced by the unresolved ‘conflict caused by the ambivalence: well-founded love and equally justified hate, both directed at the same person’ (2003: 169). The root of Little Hans’s phobia, for Freud, is the Oedipal fear of castration and the loss of the

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object of love, which in turn reproduce an earlier prototypical fear experienced by a child at the moment of birth, caused by the traumatic separation from the mother. At the same time, however, Freud makes a distinction between the negative, ‘phobic fear’ that leads to affective paralysis and what he calls ‘normal fear’. Normal or, we can say, ‘positive’ fear is not only a mere condition of survival insofar as it enables us to avert danger. Through processes of sublimation, it also spurs us to imagine and invent new strategies of relating to others; thus it allows for a transformation of an initially hostile circumstance into a possibility of social coexistence. What emerges in this perfunctory examination of Nancy’s (and others’) exposition on love and Kristeva’s (and others’) discussion of fear is that both love and fear are ‘shattering’ sentiments that signal a limit of the self-possessed, selfidentified subject, and mark its dehiscence in the exposure to the other. Both are also ‘dual’ sentiments, although we tend to invest them with diametrically opposite values. As we have seen, just as the negative affect of fear can turn out to be a constructive force that leads to an ethical embrace of the other; love, normally valued as a positive sentiment, can, in some of its manifestations, become a force of destruction. This is the conclusion Nancy himself gestures toward: It is perhaps that . . . in love and hate [and I concur with Kristeva’s diagnosis that hate is born out of fear], but according to a regime other than that of Freudian ambivalence, there would not be a reversal from hate to love, but in hate I would be traversed by the love of another whom I deny in his Alterity. (Nancy 1991: 102; parentheses added)

This affective aporia of love and fear – their constitutive intertwining – is reflected in idiomatic English insofar as the metaphorical seat of both affects is the same human organ, ‘the heart’. I love with all my heart, but that which terrifies me strikes fear in my heart. These are fortuitous turns of phrase, since both the objects of love and the objects of fear affect the functioning of the heart, producing a quickened rhythm, a rapid, uncontrollable diastole. Kristeva asks, for example, ‘A body swept away, present in all its limb through a delightful absence – shaky voice dry throat, starry eyes, flushed or clammy skin, throbbing heart . . . Would the symptoms of love be the symptoms of fear?’ (1987: 5).12

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This affective paradox animates Nancy’s own moving reflection on his heart transplant in ‘L’Intrus’, where the hackneyed expressions pertaining to the human heart suddenly come to life as they become intertwined with the physiology of the philosopher’s own body. Life-giving and terrifying in its strangeness, the pulsating heart of the intruder can be seen as naming the constitutive power of both love and fear. Indeed, Kristeva’s articulation of the stranger within me almost uncannily resonates with Nancy’s description of the physical experience of receiving a stranger within himself, or rather of receiving the other’s gift of death to make the continuation of his own life possible. Nancy writes that, throughout his illness, he experienced the physical sensation of the becoming-stranger of his own malfunctioning heart: ‘My heart was becoming my own foreigner . . . A gradual slippage was separating me from myself’ (2002: 2). In that sense, the process of self-estrangement preceded the intrusion of another’s organ. When describing the ego-destabilizing moments as ‘the strangeness revealing itself at the heart of what is most familiar’ (2002: 6), Nancy (almost) names the affect of the uncanny and gestures to it as the moment of exposure to alterity, which he will subsequently articulate, in his political writings, as love. In the moment of pain and fear, caused by mortal illness, the self is split and burst open, in the same way as it becomes shattered [en éclat] at the moment of ecstasy, that is, when it is in love (1991: 107).13 The giving of the heart – the posthumous gift – marks the furthest frontier of ‘the possibility of a network wherein life/death is shared out, where life connects with death, where the incommunicable communicates’ (2002: 5). Here, again, Nancy speaks of the heart in the very idiom of the ontological possibility of community.

Towards an affective democratic politics Having fleshed out the underlying instability of the traditional dichotomy between love and fear, let us return to the implications of this hypothesis for democratic politics. Mouffe argues for an agonistic model of democracy in which contending forms of citizenship identification are allowed

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to be at play and where resolutions of conflicts do not entail an exclusion of incompatible perspectives. In the violent reality of post-war Poland, as described by Gross, the love of the Christian God went hand-in-hand with the fear of the Jew, and the love of one’s neighbour did not exclude the murder and plunder of the neighbour who was Jewish. Considering such apparent – and often deadly – contradictions, it is imperative that we recover the aporetic logic of the affective investments that subliminally shape and traverse communities of neighbours (including, as Soyinka and Bauman have shown, the global community). In a way, Kristeva arrives at a similar conclusion when she proposes that a remedy for the ills of French democracy is ‘a journey into the strangeness of the other and of oneself, toward an ethic of respect for the irreconcilable’ (1991:182). Just as fear always inheres in the social order as both the threat of diremption and its ever-present, constitutive possibility, so is love both a shattering force and a ‘clinamen’ that draws us towards one another, although undoubtedly these are very different sentiments (1991: 4). In investigating the ontological (non-)foundation of the simultaneous dichotomy and connivance between sovereignty and community, between the subject and the citizen, against the horizon of the current retreat of the political, Nancy argues for ‘a politics without dénouement’, in which the contradictory imperatives of figuration (and myth) and of the refusal of any such autoteleology of the common substance are knotted together: ‘This politics requires an entire ontology of being as tying’, away from the instituted orders of meaning and regimes of signification (1997: 112). The urgency of this task is related to the fact that the ‘crisis of sense’ is first of all and most visibly a crisis of and in ‘democracy’ (1997: 90). As Angela Mitropoulos and Brett Neilson write in their response to Nancy, democracy ‘leaves us bound in an indissoluble knot, where divergent tendencies . . . tighten against each other in ways that are at once mutually reinforcing and mutually antagonistic’ (2006: 10). Finally, relating Nancy’s call for an aporetic ‘sense’ of democracy to ethical contexts, let us evoke Bauman’s remark from his earlier influential work Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) (in which he argued that the horrors of the Holocaust were made possible by the separation between

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rationality and morality), that ‘[t]he voice of individual moral conscience is best heard in the tumult of political and social discord’ (1989: 166). Within the stark opposition of fear and compassion, as diagnosed by Gross, or fear and love, as described by Bauman, we can only hope naïvely that, one day, ‘love will conquer all’. A sound political perspective, however, requires the recognition that compassion is com-passion, in the sense of both an affective ‘mêlée’ (to use another one of Nancy’s opportune terms) and as a ‘feeling-with’ that permeates the constantly changing force fields of power.14 With respect to the pluralistic yet paradoxical forces of democracy, Mouffe advises us to work to transform antagonism into productive agonism. Supplementing Mouffe’s political analysis with Nancy’s ontological perspective and with Kristeva’s psychoanalytic insights allows us to conceive of ‘pluralistic agonism’ as a ‘mêlée of passions’, that is, as the play of forces that makes the coincidence of community with its essence impossible, but which also announces the possibility of ‘us’ as the sharing and communicating of this very impossibility, this no-thing of our passionate commitments. As Jewish theologian Zev Gaber writes in his response to the crisis in Polish–Jewish relations first provoked by Gross’s earlier book about the murders of Jewish neighbours in Jedwabne, ‘When we can know each other’s fear, see with each other’s eyes, perhaps the Jew and the Pole can journey together from animosity to amity’ (2007: 249).

Notes 1 Fear was written as a sequel to Gross’s book Neighbors, in which the historian described the burning in the barn, on 10 July 1941, of the Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbours. The publication of Neighbors (2001) initiated a stormy public debate and prompted an inquiry by the Institute for Public Memory (IPN). 2 In the phrase ‘Being-in-common’ Nancy reformulates Heidegger’s ‘Being-with’ (Mitsein) to articulate the relevance of this ontological concept for the possibility of political community (Nancy, 2000). 3 Fear: anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz was translated by the author himself, and it appeared in Polish under a modified title Strach: . Antysemityzm w Polsce tuz po wojnie. Historia moralnej zapas´ci [Fear: anti-Semitism in Poland immediately after the war. A history of moral collapse].

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4 One of the examples of such attempts to limit democratic rights is the amendment to the Polish Criminal Code that states that whoever ‘publicly accuses the Polish nation of participation in, organization or responsibility for the Nazi or communist crimes’ will be sentenced to three years in prison. In January 2008, the office of the public prosecutor in Kraków made initial steps to indict Gross under this paragraph. In the end, the prosecutor decided that there were insufficient grounds to proceed with the charges. 5 In her analysis of Laclau and Mouffe’s seminal work, Hegemony and socialist strategy (1994), Ewa Płonowska Ziarek points out a weakness in Mouffe’s model of radical democratic politics: ‘it excludes the questions of affect, passion, and sexuality from the public realm and thus perpetuates the split between the agonistic political communities and the intimate communities of passion, between the ethics of rights and the ethics of love’ (2001: 80), the position that Mouffe later revises (2000). 6 Mouffe acknowledges her indebtedness to Carl Schmitt’s articulation in The Concept of the Political of the insolubly conflictual nature of the state, founded upon the friend/enemy distinction and the relations of inclusion/exclusion, which liberalism is ultimately unable to conceptualize (2000: 43). 7 Soyinka’s wide-ranging examples include the deadly siege of a school in Dagestan by a Chechnyan warrior, Shamil Basayev, Israeli reprisals in the Palestinian territory, the attacks of 9/11 and the United Statesled war in Iraq. However diverse, all of these manifestations of power, whose aim is to instil fear, are governed by the logic of ‘I am right: you are dead’ (2005: 116). 8 In her commentary on Nancy’s ‘Shattered love’, Catherine Kellogg writes that the idea of immanent community ‘signals a fear that what we understand to be perfect, whole, unified, complete-unto-itself and absolute, is no longer guaranteed by any kind of supreme being’ (2005: 341; emphasis added). 9 See also Kristeva’s discussion of fear in Powers of horror (1982). 10 For an excellent account of the double nature of love, that is, the tension between love and self-love, which can never be resolved through dialectics, see Secomb (2006). 11 Kellogg explains that these two poles of the discourse of love correspond, respectively, to ‘the thought of love’, which always returns the ambivalence of love to finite meaning, and ‘the experience of love’, which shatters ‘the thought of love, the idea of an immanent or perfect meaning’ (2005: 346). 12 Freud also mentions these symptoms, but only in relation to the physiology of fear: ‘It will be sufficient for us to mention just one or two representative examples of these sensations. The most frequent and most obvious being those involving the respiratory organs and the heart’ (2003: 201). 13 It is important to point out that the motif of affective ambiguity is central to Nancy’s reflection on the sublime, that is, in relation to the discourse of aesthetics (Nancy, 1993). As Kahn and Saccamano also point out, already starting in the eighteenth century (when the concept of the sublime was reformulated in Burke and then Kant), the moral and political discourses on passions derive from the idiom of pleasure and pain and are thus essentially related to aesthetics (Kahn et al., 2006:4).

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14 In his essay-tribute to Sarajevo, Nancy defines ‘mêlée’ as ‘a crossing and a stop, a knot and an exchange, a gathering, a disjunction, a circulation, a radiating’ (2000: 145). In politically fraught contexts (such as the Balkans in 1993), ‘mêlée’ signifies the movement of mixing, communicating and relating. At the same time, it is a promise of a hybrid political reality in which differences and constructive discords are respected rather than absorbed into a common substance.

References Bauman, Zygmunt (1989), Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Bauman, Zygmunt (2003), Liquid love: on the frailty of human bonds (Cambridge: Polity Press). Bauman, Zygmunt (2006), Liquid fear (Cambridge: Polity Press). Freud, Sigmund (2003), ‘Inhibition, symptom, fear’, in Beyond the pleasure principle and other writings (translated by J. Reddick) (London: Penguin Classics). Gaber, Zev (2007), ‘The vision and language of the other: Jedwabne versus the Auschwitz convent controversy’, in D. Glowacka and J. Zylinska (eds), Imaginary neighbors: mediating Polish-Jewish relations after the Holocaust (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press): 236–52. Glassner, Barry (1999), The culture of fear: why Americans are afraid of the wrong things (New York: Basic Books). Gross, Jan Tomasz (2001), Neighbors: the destruction of the Jewish community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Gross, Jan Tomasz (2006), Fear: anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (translated by J.T. Gross) (New York: Random House). Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2004), Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire (New York: Penguin Books). Heidegger, Martin (1962), Being and time (translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson) (New York: Harper and Row). hooks, bell (2000), All about love: new visions (New York: HarperCollins). Irigaray, Luce (1993), ‘Sorcerer love: a reading of Plato, Symposium, Diotima’s speech’, in An ethics of sexual difference (translated by C. Burke and G.C. Gill) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press): 20–33. Irigaray, Luce (2002), The way of love (translated by H. Bostic and S. Pluhàcˆek) (London and New York: Continuum). Kahn, Victoria, Saccamano, Neil and Coli, Daniela (eds) (2006), Politics and passions, 1500–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Kellogg, Catherine (2005), ‘Love and communism: Jean-Luc Nancy’s shattered community’. Law and Critique, 16: 339–55. Kristeva, Powers of horror: an essay on abjection. Kristeva, Julia (1987), Tales of love (translated by L.S. Roudiez) (New York: Columbia University Press). Kristeva, Julia (1991), Strangers to ourselves (translated by L.S. Roudiez) (New York: Columbia University Press).

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Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal (1994), Hegemony and socialist strategy: toward a radical democratic politics (London: Verso). Michlic, Beata Joanna (2006), Poland’s threatening other: the image of the Jew from 1880 to the present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Mitropoulos, Angela and Neilson, Brett (2006), ‘Cutting democracy’s knot’, in D. Glowacka (ed.), Culture machine: e-journal, 8. Mouffe, Chantal (2000), The democratic paradox (London: Verso). Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991), ‘Shattered love’, in The inoperative community (translated by P. Connor et al.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press): 82–109. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1993), ‘The sublime offering’, in Of the sublime: presence in question (translated by J. S. Librett) (Albany: State University of New York Press): 25–53. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1997), The sense of the world (translated by J.S. Librett) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Nancy, Jean-Luc (2000), Being singular plural (translated by R.D. Richardson and A.E. O’Brian) (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Nancy, Jean-Luc (2002), ‘L’Intrus’ (translated by S. Hanson). CR: The New Centennial Review, 2(3): 1–14. Patapan, Haig (2006), Machiavelli in love: the modern politics of love and fear (New York: Lexington Books). Schmitt, Carl (1996), The concept of the political (translated with introduction and notes by G. Schwab) (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). Secomb, Linnell (2006), ‘Amorous politics: between Derrida and Nancy’. Social Semiotics, 16(3, September): 450–60. Soyinka, Wole (2005), The climate of fear: the quest for dignity in a dehumanized world (New York: Random House). Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska (2001), An ethics of dissensus: postmodernity, feminism, and the politics of radical democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

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10 Meditations on turning towards violently dead Sharon Rosenberg

Violence is neither a just punishment we suffer nor a just revenge for what we suffer. It delineates a physical vulnerability from which we cannot slip away, which we cannot finally resolve in the name of the subject, but which can provide a way to understand that none of us is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy [asymmetrically]. This is a situation we do not choose. It forms the horizon of choice and it grounds our responsibility. In this sense, we are not responsible for it, but it creates the conditions under which we assume responsibility. We did not create it, and therefore it is what we must heed. (Butler, 2005: 101)

Taking heed in this essay from Judith Butler’s articulations of violence, community, responsibility, I am immersed (I immerse myself) in a vulnerability of thinking selves in each other’s hands, selves violently dead, hands of the ones left behind, endeavouring to face a responsibility that is the condition of living (on). This is vulnerability, this is thought, immersed in Western democracy in the early twenty-first century, in which the crisis of (my) particular concern is the crisis of violent death rendered under the norms of who belongs (and whose lives are thought extinguishable) in the making of contemporary Canada. At stake: what might it mean to turn the question of democratic community towards the thought of living-in-relation to the violently dead? Such dead are piling up; too many to count, too many to account for, in the names of progress, home, normalcy. I cannot take them all in (there lies madness); there is failure here, necessarily, but perhaps also that elusive radical hope of democracy’s otherwise, its possibilities, illuminated in the smallest of scales of reckoning (me to you).

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Endeavouring to turn towards the alterity of violently dead means, in part, from the beginning, a turning that passes out of figuring these dead as caricature, symbol, lesson, object, or as non-beings, no mattering, of indifference. This is a turning that assumes a particular responsibility of inhabitation; an inhabitation that must reckon with, and endeavour to think beyond, the limits of thought that organizes dead into identity categories (same, other); an endeavour that is, by necessity, anxious, outside of itself, a giving over that cannot guarantee its endpoint nor even its precise contours. There is no resolution here, there is only trying – a trying compelled by a frustration with prevailing modes of memorial thought and practice that allow a sense of nonresponsibility for those of us who neither rendered the harm nor feel ourselves implicated in its rendering. Violence. Selves. Hands. Vulnerability. Thought as comportment.

Comportment I: how are we constituted, you and I? At the most intimate levels, we are social; we are comported toward a ‘you’; we are outside ourselves, constituted in cultural norms that precede and exceed us, given over to a set of cultural norms and a field of power that condition us fundamentally. (Butler, 2004: 45)

I cannot make marks on this page, delineate thought into its neat and even typeface (too neat, too even, for what grasps at me), without imagining something (precarious, contingent imaginings) of who you may be, reader, and what might be anticipated from what you read on these pages and how you may respond. Such imaginings, of course, such comportments towards you, must necessarily reckon with how I am – and how I anticipate you are – constituted by the norms of the contemporary academy, norms which, as Butler reminds, ‘condition us fundamentally’. There is no outside from these norms when one expresses one’s self and is titled a scholar in an academic institution, or when one responds as a scholarly reader; instead, one is made outside of one’s self in a particular way, as writer and reader, in and through the reckoning. This is all to say: I am deeply aware that scholarly norms would have me distance myself from this

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comportment (towards a you, outside of myself, in a certain intimacy), would have me begin this essay somewhere altogether different, preferably, from nowhere. But I am heeding Butler’s call to responsibility, although I cannot know in advance (or in any final sense, at all) what such a turning might mean and how it may play itself out. For, as Peggy Phelan remarks, ‘At the heart of my hearing is something I cannot hear until you repeat it in such a way that I might begin to sound it out’ (2001: 38). Turning. Turning again.

Comportment II: how are we constituted, you (and I)? We might have shared some of what I share now with colleagues and readers, but that is no longer, and it is not what binds us here (if, indeed, there is a binding to be had as I reach towards you and recoil from what I cannot bear to know). For you are murdered; names and singular photographed faces are what I know of you, bits of mediated stories, disparate understandings of how you died, contested remembrance in the wake of your death. Some of you may have known each other in life, others not at all. Some of your deaths were separated by minutes and the floors of a building; others, by months, years and miles between fields. Some of you were killed by a single gunman, wielding a semiautomatic rifle and an affect named as hatred of feminists. It is as yet unknown who killed others of you, and with what weapons, and when, where, how, but some manifestation of hatred surely cannot be assumed irrelevant. Some of your murders were constituted as unassimilable, a rupture of the expected when one attends classes, works in a university, is undertaking a degree of higher education. The deaths of others among you have not been constituted as a rupture of social expectation or as unassimilable into the discourse of the risk of ‘high risk lifestyles’. Some of your deaths have been organized under the sign of the ‘Montréal massacre’; for others, ‘sex trade worker’ is the sign of association.1 While all of your deaths were ‘bad deaths’ – untimely, violent – efforts at social remembrance have been strikingly uneven. Some of your deaths have been barely mourned, or were poorly, if at all, witnessed – beyond those who knew you in

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life and feel your death as a loss (Bennett, 2005: 51–2).2 Others among you have been constituted as figuring highly in a public imagination: a Day of Remembrance has been announced in your name, gun control legislation, art shows, films, vigils, monuments, memorials and curriculum units created as a felt response to the loss of you. Norms are constitutive here too, and here too I am reckoning, turning, recoiling, struggling to hear and see what remains of you.

Comportment III: how are we constituted (you and) I? In comporting myself as a writer of theory, remembrance, relationality and affect, towards you, I am, by necessity, moving outside of myself, seeking terms of being otherwise in the now – a now that is occupied not only by living (readers) but also by dead. Already I am risking both a binary (living/dead) and a concomitant stability of identity (Living. Dead.) that I do not wish to reinscribe. In the voice of the main character in Mouthing the Words, Camilla Gibb writes: ‘People don’t understand dead. They think it is all or nothing. I used to move between live and dead several times in the course of a day. Sometimes the transition was as brief and unremarkable as a sigh or a sentence’ (1999: 166). Here, Gibb opens up the sense that the distinction between living and dead is much more porous than prevailing thought would have it. Thus, to remember (other) dead is to engage in a practice of thought and living that must weaken and open to loss such terms of the present (as I will go on to argue). I am stumbling along here; if sometimes I sigh, I hope you will allow for that. Two crises and two alterities thus form what I am endeavouring to turn myself towards in these pages: there is the crisis of violent death and the alterity of the violently dead who can never be fully known. And, there is a crisis of thought as alterity, as it struggles to face what is (almost?) impossible to bear about the socialities in which we live and the ‘we’ which we inhabit: a piling up of violent losses as the condition of our inheritance, our responsibility, our democracy. If we are to make something of democracy other than other as same, history as past, and progress as necessitating destruction, such crises of violence and thought

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are inseparable. In the realm of the logics of remembrance, however, such crises are largely foreclosed, sutured over, by rendering the alterity of violent losses as a lesson of history (for non-repetition), as resolved by remunerative justice, or as a site of caution – in which ‘too much’ remembering is an index of disorder. While none of these positions proffers forgetting over remembrance, each animates and keeps in play delineations of past from present, self from other, suffering from continuance, death from life, me from you. Contrary to these prevailing logics, the mode of comportment I am endeavouring to animate is compelled by thinking about remembering as an unsettlement of certainty, as a risk, an undoing, a turning towards that cannot bear its own movement. This is a mode of remembrance that takes seriously the need for ‘democratic civic pedagog[ies]’ that ‘create places in which to think about “we” without knowing already who “we” are’ (Ellsworth, 2005: 95). Michael Taussig gives particular and pertinent texture to thinking about that ‘we’ when he asks us to imagine a city ‘with an additional borough . . . the borough of the dead, bigger than all the other boroughs put together. What lives might the dead lead there? How do they communicate with the living?’ (2001: 307–8). Reading Gibb through Taussig, I want to push further – to imagine a democratic community that can help us to bear the porousness of lifedeath, one in which violently dead are reckoned with as part of living community (Simon, 2005), more, as part of what it means to live, here, now. In the words of Jill Bennett, this is a life of learning ‘to inhabit a world made strange and uninhabitable by [violent] death’ (2005: 63). What I am endeavouring to inhabit in thought, here, is something of the stakes of such learning. Thinking something of the state of things What interests me is not so much the state of things but the relations between them. I’ve concerned myself with nothing but relations for my whole life. Relations come before being . . . [W]hen our relations to death, the body, the world, other people and knowledge change, humanity itself is transformed. (Serres and Zournazi, 2002: 204, 208)

Two ‘events’ of violent death compel the thought of this essay – events that I will go on to think in relation, but that

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are first, here, noted by their distinction. One is the Montréal massacre, killings that occurred on 6 December 1989 during a half-hour shooting spree at l’École Polytechnique at the Université de Montréal in Québec. Fourteen women (thirteen students and one staff member) were shot and killed, accused as ‘feminists’. The other, less easily coalesced into ‘an event’, is the accumulation of the bodies of women abandoned on the eastern outskirts of Edmonton, Alberta. Here the numbers are less stable, but, according to news reports, Project Kare, a special Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) taskforce, is reviewing twenty-seven cases in the greater Edmonton area (Canadian Press, 2006).3 According to the Prostitution Awareness and Action Foundation of Edmonton (PAAFE), twenty-six women working in the sex trades have been murdered since 1983, and only five cases have been solved (Slobodian, 2005: A3). Specifically, ‘In the past 16 years, 12 women who have worked in the sex trade in Edmonton have been found dead in the [surrounding] rural area . . . Police believe a serial killer is responsible for some of the deaths’ (Withey, 2005: A1).4 In the case of Montréal, the gunman shot and killed himself at the site of the murders; in the case(s) of Edmonton, only one man has been charged thus far, with just two of the murders.5 The murders in Montréal provoked a national outcry, have been heavily marked and commemorated across the country and continue to compel remembrance response. The women who were murdered and abandoned outside Edmonton have been memorialized for the past two years by a march on 14 February; other than those events, little memorial attention is paid to their deaths.6 In dominant framings, these two events of violent death are rendered apart and distinct from each other. From the perspective of factual accounting – time, location and circumstances of death – this separation makes sense. However, the separation is also delimiting, particularly for those of us interested in asking what might be learned by asking after relations between these violent deaths. I am not alone in posing this question, although I will deliberate on it in terms that are somewhat different from other feminist responses. The prevailing feminist rendering of the relation between these violent deaths has been to focus on gendered workings of power, in which the murders of women on 6

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December 1989 are discursively linked to the more quotidian violences against other women across Canada.7 On one level, I appreciate the need for such a discursive rendering in the public politics of what Warner calls ‘headline temporality’, with its associated emphasis on ideology critique – particularly when these violent deaths have been symbolized on such radically uneven terms and when dominant narratives do not prompt thought of these deaths in relation (2002: 150). The problem as I perceive it, however, is that such renderings continue to animate and reinscribe identity as the basis for critique and memorial politics. Critics working at this register are caught in the association between identity categories and (more or less) social value: in order to claim the mattering of the lives and deaths of women known as drug-addicted sex workers, one must insist on their other identities (mother, daughter, friend, etc.), identities marked with ‘innocence’, identities that place them ‘among’, rather than outside, normative sociality.8 Indeed, these are the terms that allowed the murders of women in Montréal to be so readily constituted as an unassimilable rupture: young, white women murdered in an engineering school were our ‘bright and shining daughters’ (Cameron, 1990). On the one hand, it is a form of historical and political blindness not to recognize and reckon with how identity categories have been mobilized in and through these enactments of violent death (‘women’, ‘feminist’ and ‘sex worker’, to name the initial and obvious). On the other hand, to render the mattering only on these terms is to circumscribe and foreclose the kinds of claim that remembering the violently dead make on those still living and what it might mean to open prevailing discourses to a responsibility for their deaths – as a condition not of our choosing but of inheritance. To develop this argument, I turn next to thinking through the two events of violent death in Edmonton and Montréal in relation, through the contemplation of a memorial structure.

Thinking violent deaths in relation: I I am as much constituted by those I do grieve for as by those whose deaths I disavow [on the basis of public norms through

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which the ‘human’ is constituted], whose nameless and faceless deaths form the melancholic background for my social world. (Butler, 2004: 46)

Whereas there is an abundance of memorial visual culture in relation to the women murdered in Montréal, visual culture is sparse in relation to the women whose bodies have been found on the outskirts of Edmonton. Ideology critique would point us to the differential social value attached to these women (in life and death), a critique that forms one of the openings for what follows but is not sufficient, I will argue, for helping us grasp how the state of things might be otherwise. For example, a prevailing tenet of such critique would support the creation of more memorial responses to the women murdered and abandoned outside Edmonton. I anticipate and appreciate that extended memorial responses may be important to those feeling the loss of these women, those in need of public rituals in which to have that loss recognized and acknowledged with and among others. However, I am not convinced that ‘more’ memorial response per se is enough to intervene in, and open to alterity, prevailing discursive framings of these deaths; moreover, I am sceptical that such an increase will provoke those not previously connected to the dead women to feel ourselves to be living in a world made uninhabitable by their deaths, a world that is not democratic yet. To give some further texture to these concerns, I turn next towards one particular artwork as a site of deliberation. A small and relatively modest piece, Pati Beaudoin’s untitled work was originally included in the Don’t Remain Silent exhibitions held in Toronto, Ontario, in 1990 and 1991 (exhibitions curated by Susan Beamish in response to the murders on 6 December 1989).9 On a long panel, framed colour photographs of each of the women murdered in the Montréal massacre are aligned. Each is anchored with a nameplate inscribed with her name. At the far end is a fifteenth photograph frame, surrounding a mirror, underneath which is a blank nameplate. Seventeen years later, I am both reading this artwork as a memorial to the women murdered in Montréal (its original purpose), and I am translating its memorial structure to a reading of photographs of the women whose bodies have been left outside Edmonton. In doing so, my intent is not to suggest

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any simple correspondence between the groups, nor substitution of one group of dead for another. Rather, I am interested in exploring how Beaudoin’s piece structures a memorial relation between dead and living. Further, in the context of a dearth of memorial imagery in relation to the women killed in and around Edmonton, what is accessible are some photographs of their faces. Thus, photographs of the faces of the dead provide one mode through which to consider relations between these two events of violent death. In developing readings of Beaudoin’s artwork, as it was originally conceived and in my ‘translation’, I am drawing from three conceptualizations of how memorial artwork creates a relation of encounter: remembrance/pedagogy, hinge and antiphonic structure. The first notion is developed in Simon, Rosenberg and Eppert, where we articulate remembrance/pedagogy as an inextricable couplet (2000). What we mean by this, in part, is that remembrance is not about questions of learning simply when or because it occurs in sites of education (such as schools or museums, for example); rather, remembrance practices oriented towards engagement by others are always and inherently pedagogical, in that they are shaped by, and endeavour to configure, our thinking about history, sociality and relations between ‘then’ and ‘now’. Such shaping practices are not, of course, neutral, but depend upon and keep in play particular notions of what is to be remembered of ‘the past’, by whom, for whom, how and with what potential attachments among the living to that constituted past, in the always-becoming present, and for an imagined future. Pedagogies of remembrance, then, are not only about the transfer of knowledge (what happened), but also about the animation of affect as a relation to the now dead. Elizabeth Ellsworth’s notion of the ‘pedagogical hinge’ allows us to grasp further how such remembrance/pedagogies work. She argues that museum exhibitions, monuments, performances and architecture work through a force that puts, in her words, ‘inside and outside in relation’ (2005: 37). She goes on: ‘[t]heir work strives to create the experience of the learning self by putting inner thoughts, feelings, memories, fears, desires and ideas in relation to outside others, events, history, culture . . . [p]edagogy becomes the force that sets interior self-experience in motion to encounter

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the outside “not me”’ (2005: 37, 38). Ellsworth helpfully points here to how memorial pedagogy works as a constitutive force, a force that forms and gives expression to particular terms on which an ‘I’ might be comported towards a ‘you’ (to recall Butler) – dead or living. Bennett, who works in art theory, offers congruent ideas about the force of artwork. Of particular note is her notion of the ‘antiphonic structure’, a structure of ‘calls and responses’ through which art addresses its audience and compels a response (2005: 50). While Bennett does not mobilize the language of pedagogy, her ideas strongly resonate with those I have been outlining. Indeed, I would argue that we can read the antiphonic structure as a pedagogical hinge, a force through which inside and outside are put into relation and through which a response from viewers is structured. Turning these ideas towards a reading of Beaudoin’s panel, I propose its prevailing pedagogical force works through the hinge of the mirror positioned after the series of photographs of dead women; it is this mirror that puts inside and outside in relation, or compels the viewer into relation with the dead. But how are we to make sense of that relation? What does it mean to see (feel?) one’s self in relation to these dead? I will suggest two very different responses to these questions. First: the discursive framing of the exhibit, held within a year of the Montréal massacre when the feminist outcry was significant, heavily orients viewers toward what Bennett calls ‘bodily identification’ (2005: 17). The placement of the mirror and the blank nameplate ensures that the face that passes by (or stays transfixed in front of) the mirror and its associated name (mine, yours) is always positioned in relation to the women murdered (whose photographs recall a moment when they were still among the living, with us; these are not images from the morgue). In the structure of identificatory relations of power, markers of gendering, racialization, ethnicity, class, sexuality and disabilities are (to varying degrees) rendered on the face in the mirror. It is not that identity is ‘fixed’ (for either the women murdered or the face in the mirror, despite their killer’s ‘accusation’ of feminist), but that identification works relationally, such that the face in the mirror may be positioned as ‘like’ the women murdered (through a proximal sense of identification, e.g. as a white woman in a university) and therefore a(nother)

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potential victim, or as entirely ‘unlike’ the women murdered, as potentially more ‘like’ their killer or, in a more complicated and shifting rendering, in a position in which similarity and difference have more play (depending on how categories of identity figure both in readings of the women and in the self-readings in the mirror).10 Someone, such as myself, who shares many identificatory markers with these dead (at least, on the surface of the broad sweep of bodily identity markers), might be readily positioned to encounter Beaudoin’s piece as a strong hinge through which to attach the self to the ‘not me’ of the women murdered in Montréal. It was quite easy, for example, to see my face in that mirror, particularly because I have a prior history that locates me well for a close-to-seamless rendering of myself as the fifteenth face, and on those terms to feel their deaths as an impingement on my life. I avow their loss through memorial pedagogies such as this one that hinge our lives on the basis of being women in a university in Canada, as (potential) feminists, as ‘white’, as harmed through no ‘fault of my/our own’. But what is potentially, and problematically, erased in such an attachment, on the terms of this avowal, is the crucial difference between life and death. Whereas I concur with Gibb that one can move between living and dead (-ened) many times in a day, this is not the same as having one’s life taken, lying in a pool of one’s own blood, never to breath again. In this sense then, my avowal of their loss for me risks disavowing their loss as a you; I risk forgetting to comport myself towards them and instead produce them as substitutes for my (feminist, white, university-educated) self. Continuing this reading of memorial pedagogy and prevailing logics of identity as (not)binding, how might I imagine a piece, similar in memorial structure to Beaudoin’s, but picturing instead the women abandoned outside Edmonton?11 First, there is a striking difference to be noted: whereas the photographed faces of the women murdered in Montréal were temporally separated from any imaginings of their imminent death, I am not sure the same can be said for the women killed in Edmonton. While these are not photographs from the morgue, it is hard not to feel that they anticipate the women’s deaths, as the vulnerabilities that arise from street-level sex work might thin the difference

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between life and death, or, in Gibb’s idiom, might accelerate the movements between living and dead.12 On these terms, I am already positioned to read my face in the mirror, alongside theirs, differently. Even though (or perhaps because) I may rely on a discursive framing that allows me to recognize these names and faces as associated with the ‘sex worker’ murders in Edmonton, the hinge of identification is much weaker here – I cannot readily feel my self line up with the outside that is these women’s faces. ‘Being women’ in common is not enough by far (my face is not marked by the effects of poverty, drugs, street life and a legacy of colonialism that seem more the case for theirs).13 I might feel empathy, pity, a sense of voyeurism, or a bourgeois need to rescue them; I might feel indifferent, at a distance, unsure about why these deaths might matter to my life; I might sense in the abstract that I am inadvertently and unconsciously caught in social conditions that render their lives more disposable than mine – without really feeling what that means for my daily life, as a vulnerability of being in each other’s hands. Identity categories thus offer me thin terms for forming a relation with these dead: I might avow their loss ‘as’ women, but this is more likely to be overwhelmed by a discursive disavowal – a disavowal of how the differences between our lives are structured such that I am still among the living (and they no longer are), which is, in effect, a disavowal of the constitutive effects of their loss for my life (the avowal of which, as noted above, could not be rendered as entirely unproblematic either). While not nameless and faceless to the extent to which Butler alludes, the photograph–mirror pedagogical structure does not work as a strong memorial hinge through which to encounter the ‘not me’ of the women abandoned outside Edmonton. If we shift these more subjective readings onto the terrain of the identity and remembrance logics at work in contemporary democracies, I suggest we get a glimpse into the uneven distribution of what James Young calls a ‘burden of memory’ (1993: 127). In such renderings, the living – who are called upon to identify (and are identified) ‘as’, for example, woman, sex worker, Aboriginal – are presumed to either be bound or not bound to violently dead because of a shared (dis)identification with that identity (that is, it is identity that forms the terms of association, of community).

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If we read such animation of identity categories as a pedagogical hinge, to recall Ellsworth, then we can begin to grasp the limited and delimiting terms on which identity works as a remembrance strategy or a hinge between self and other – and, thus, as a basis for community – particularly when we read identity not as singular but as a complex and multiple configuration. In the broadest and most reductive brush, prevailing memorial framings produce the conditions under which a shared identity category (between living and dead) is assumed to translate into a transparent and obvious mattering, whereas those who do not share an identity are assumed to have a distant or less authentic or less binding relation to those dead (Butler, 2004). In this rendering, dichotomies tend to reign (victim versus perpetrator, innocence versus evil, us versus them), such that dead and living are particularized and regulated into a priori categories. It might be the case that Beaudoin’s artwork and my translation of its memorial structure mediate this animation of identity categories to some extent through naming the dead, a practice that allows the dead to be given their place as distinct individuals and not simply as representatives of an identity for which they lost their lives. The pedagogical hinge here is such that a binding between living and dead might be produced through putting individual selves in relation with individual others; this may be particularly important when prevailing discourses render those dead others as unnamed and, as such in late modernity, less-thanhuman.14 While recognizing the affective and political purchase of insisting on the naming of violently dead as individuals, I am hesitant to claim this strategy as one that sufficiently circumnavigates the problems of identity as a response to the call to respond that Beaudoin’s work animates. In part, the issue is that names rarely come into contested memorial significance in cases of singular deaths by intimates; in such cases, the name circulates briefly and has most purchase for those who knew the person in life. In circumstances when the naming of names becomes an issue, it tends to be because the conditions of death are socially and politically fraught. But when names are discursively framed through identity categorization (e.g. as sex workers), what kind of memorial hinge is conjured between the living and the dead? While a name may give some stickiness to

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this hinge for those who had prior affective connections to the named, I am less sure that this will readily be the case for those for whom names do not mark a previously known or loved person, and for whom the encounter is first as a name brought into significance via the (often grotesque) details of how they were harmed. Do listed names effectively, and perhaps paradoxically, animate both an avowal for a designated group (of dead), yet simultaneously a disavowal of the constitutive effects of that loss for a self that feels itself not to be hinged to that ‘group’? Or, in other words, might the hinge of the name, as the making of an inside/ outside connection, allow the living to learn of another’s violent death in such a way that it makes little to no impression on what it means to inhabit life after and in relation to their death?

Thinking violent deaths in relation: II By reading in relation the violent deaths in Edmonton and Montréal through the memorial structure Beaudoin provides, I have been grappling with the productive and the delimiting effects of the prevailing discursive framing of remembrance and/as identity. The central difficulty concerns the limited encounter with the alterity of violently dead – for the living’s relation with the memory of those dead – when that encounter is framed in terms of identity and identification. On what other terms might we imagine encountering that alterity? This question orients me towards my second reading of Beaudoin’s memorial artwork. What I want to pursue further is Bennett’s notion of the antiphonic structure, particularly with respect to the character of ‘response’. My thought is this: whereas an identity-based remembrance response orients viewers to see themselves in Beaudoin’s framed mirror as the self already is and then in relation to the women murdered, how might a self orient otherwise? That is, what if we understood seeing oneself in the mirror as a comportment towards violently dead, a turning and seeing through which one is partially constituting the self-in-relation, moving one’s self towards the dead you and thus outside the self? Taking seriously the alterity of the dead as an encounter requires that such an

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orientation would necessarily be incomplete, fragile, an unsettling learning. In Ellsworth’s sense, this is what it means to engage in a ‘democratic civic pedagogy’. Butler gives some texture to the terms of such a comportment-in-relation. She writes: Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance – to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven. (2005: 136)

On these terms, Butler points towards the logic of a discourse and associated subject formations through which to imagine, give expression to, and reckon with a self-in-relation to violently dead. In foregrounding risk of the self on these terms, she opens the possibility that response (now) may go some way to addressing ‘the bad deaths’ of the women in Montréal and around Edmonton. While nothing returns us to a time before their deaths (an impossibility), what does come into the realm of possibility is that selves, viewing the images of the dead through Beaudoin’s memorial structure, may feel themselves to be made vulnerable by these losses, may reckon with how their and our lives, and communities, have been made strange and uninhabitable by these deaths. Such vulnerability is not readily faced. However, Bennett’s notion of the recoil may be useful in thinking about and holding onto the doubleness required when anguish is read as loss and risk and also as necessary for the chance of life to continue otherwise. In her description, recoiling is a moment of regrouping the self, it is also the condition of continued participation, the sensation that works with and against the deeper-level response, which on its own is unbearable. The squirm [or recoil] lets us feel the image, but also maintain a tension between self and image . . . the recoil . . . is not a retreat but a way of negotiating the felt impact of the image. (2005: 43)

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I propose that Bennett’s conceptualization of recoil, read with Butler’s insights regarding comportment, helps us to reframe a discourse of memorial response, opening the terms on which we might rethink the antiphonic structure animated by Beaudoin’s memorial work. Let me illustrate the difference that a shift from identity to such a comportment-in-relation might make. I noted earlier that some of the women whose bodies were abandoned outside Edmonton were Aboriginal or Métis in descent. In encountering their faces within the memorial structure that Beaudoin provides and through a discourse that binds remembrance with particularized identity, that first reading dims the workings of colonialism under the glare of the workings of gendering. This reading was prompted in part by the structure of the murders in Montréal (in which the killer explicitly selected victims by gender), and by my translation of that memorial structure to read the murders in Edmonton. In contrast, reading the Edmonton dead first through discourses attentive to the workings of racialization and colonialism would likely bring forth other interpretations of the circumstances of their deaths; it would illuminate why and how their deaths do not register as an unassimilable public rupture. However, to the extent that such comportments are bound within the binary of self-other, comporting the self towards the dead you on identity terms means we are always caught within its bounds. This suggests that the identity-based mode of remembering and turning one’s self towards the dead perhaps, and paradoxically, may be a way of not attending to the dead by shielding one’s self from recoil and responsibility. That is, in reading the dead as (a singular category of) women, I was aware of trying to avoid reinscribing the dominant juxtaposition of ‘innocent’ daughters killed pursuing higher education versus presumednon-innocent, street-level sex-trade workers, subjected to the risks of their lifestyles. Evocations of the category ‘women’ circumnavigate this reinscription, but they may do so in ways that foreclose encounters with the more complicated alterity of these dead (and, for that matter, the complicated alterity of the dead in Montréal). Comporting towards a dead you through the dynamic tension of turning towards and recoiling from, as a mode of moving outside the self in and through making relation to

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a memory of those dead, involves an easing away from the stranglehold of identity categories while not obscuring how identity matters in contemporary democracies. It is reasonable from this position to suggest that the self, so comported, needs to feel the impact of the thirty-minute shooting spree, burned, decomposed and frozen bodies, blood, viscera and what is strewn in the wake of such violence. However, I am cautious here too: there is too much risk of further violence against the memory of the dead if such feeling is discursively framed and psychically contoured in such a way that the feeling self (comported towards the dead you) loses itself in its own suffering. As Bennett further cautions, via the experience of Yazir Henri, who gave testimony to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ‘the use of the image of a “victim” as a trigger for an affective response is a violation of the individual depicted. Such a strategy is presumptuous – even if well intentioned – because it fails to respect the dignity and autonomy of the subject, reducing him or her to the cipher of victimhood and thereby enacting a further form of colonization’ (2005: 64). Guided by this caution, comportment towards violently dead emerges as a fragile, precarious and contingent undertaking: as much turning towards as recoiling from, but recoiling as a mode of staying in relation, as a grappling with responsibility, as a form of radical hope for what democracy can mean. In the crisis of democracy that is the piling up of bodies of such dead – bodies that are the material reminder of the profound limit of democracy’s claim to tolerate difference – it might be the most we can hope for. As inhabitation. As thought. Without closure.

In Memoriam Georgette Flint, found 1988. Bernadette Ahenakew, 1989. Joyce Hewitt, 1997. Cara King, 1997. Kelly Dawn Reilly, 2001. Edna Bernard, 2002. Debbie Lake, 2003. Katie Ballantyne, 2003. Monique Pitre, 2003. Melissa Munch, 2003. Rachel Quinney, 2004. Samantha Berg, 2005. Charlene Marie Gauld, 2005. Ellie May Meyer, 2005. Theresa Innis, 2006. Bonnie Lynn Jack, 2006. Leanne Benwell, 2007. Their bodies abandoned on the outskirts of Edmonton.

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Annie St.Arneault, Annie Turcotte, Anne-Marie Edward, Anne-Marie Lemay, Barbara Daigneault, Barbara Maria Klucznik, Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Maryse Laganière, Maryse LeClair, Maud Haviernick, Michèle Richard, Nathalie Croteau, Sonia Pelletier. Murdered on 6 December 1989 in Montréal.15 Acknowledgments: I am appreciative of a SSRHC Standard Research Grant that has supported the research and theorizing undertaken for this chapter. As part of that grant funding, I have been fortunate to hire doctoral candidates, Amber Dean and Kara Granzow, as research assistants. I am profoundly grateful to them both – for their research acumen, our conversations and their own scholarship in the area – all of which inform this essay. I extend gratitude also to Roger I. Simon for feedback on an earlier version and to Tanya Lewis for lovingly remaining in a conversation of which this writing is part. My thanks also to Stella Gaon for her generous invitation to be a part of this project, for her keen editorial eye and for allowing this mode of writing as a practice of otherness for thought. My deepest thanks are to Jude Davidson, who, in the intimacies of daily life, makes these comportments towards violent death tolerable thought. Notes 1 In mainstream discourses, ‘prostitute’ is also the term of currency. In not simply repeating it here, I am endeavouring to mark some space (however slight) between the labour a person is engaged in to sustain a life and that labour as their identity. 2 These markers of a ‘bad death’ are drawn from Jill Bennett’s discussion of the work of Seremetakis (cited in Das, 1997: 78–9). 3 The mandate of Project Kare is described as follows: ‘The Project Kare Task Force will pursue strategies to minimize the risk of having additional High Risk Missing Persons (HRMP) murdered within the Provincial Capital Region. Furthermore, investigational strategies have been developed to investigate all leads, capture and prosecute the offender(s) responsible for these murders’ (Project Kare, 2007). 4 An additional body, that of Leanne Benwell, was found near Wetaskiwin, AB, in late June 2007. While Benwell is known to have been involved in sex-trade work, investigators report that ‘there are no known links to any of the unsolved homicides or missing persons cases currently under investigation in the greater Edmonton area’ (Shultz et al., 2007: B3).

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5 Thomas George Svekla was charged with second-degree murder of Theresa Innis (found 2006) and Rachel Quinney (found 2004); he was convicted by jury in June 2008 of Innis’s murder (Edmonton Journal, 2008). Joseph Laboucan was charged with second-degree murder in September 2008 for the death of Ellie May Meyer. 6 The first march was held in 2006. It is patterned after the more longstanding Valentine’s Day March held in Vancouver, BC. That march began as a response to the high rates of violence against Aboriginal women in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver (see Dean, 2005). 7 The Global Women’s Memorial Society web page is a good example of this approach. Across different pages of the site, the Montréal massacre is discursively linked to violences against Aboriginal women and women sex workers and is constituted within a war against women (Global Women’s Memorial Society, 2007). 8 I appreciate conversations with Amber Dean and Kara Granzow that underpin these observations. For elaboration on these points, see, for example, Dean (2005). 9 Beaudoin is a psychologist, and this is the only piece of artwork she has shown publicly (email correspondence, March 2005). 10 For example, someone whose face – or whose relation to their embodiment – figures in ways that make gender a question rather than a presumed given, would be in such a position. Similarly, for those who do not identify as, and are not identified as, ‘white’, alignment on the basis of gender may be more complicated. 11 Photographs of the women murdered and abandoned outside Edmonton can be found on the Project Kare website and at Prime Time Crime (Prime Time Crime, 2007). 12 Strikingly, Project Kare anticipates such a thin difference between life and death. On an online video on their website, the narrator, Constable Sonia Joyal, describes the work of the taskforce, while driving around Edmonton and engaging with street-level sex workers. She notes that one of their jobs is to collect ‘tombstone information’, which is described as follows: ‘name, address, phone numbers, tattoos, where they work, how they dress. We also ask them for a DNA sample, which [is] non-intrusive by asking for some hair. We also take their pictures’ (Project Kare). As Kara Granzow notes, ‘collecting DNA directly anticipates not only their murder, but also their particularly brutal murder (thus requiring DNA for identification). Once murdered [it is assumed] they will not be quickly missed (thus no one is looking for them or able to identify them)’ (from personal correspondence, 27 August 2007). My thanks to Kara for pointing me to the video and for the clarity of this insight. The term ‘tombstone information’ is also eerily deployed in this context; while it is a police term that refers to the gathering of basic information, its meaning is more pointed in this context. My thanks to Kevin Haggerty for confirming the police use of the notion of tombstone information. 13 While there are no precise numbers, it does appear that a number of the women were Aboriginal or Métis. 14 This is especially the case for the women abandoned on the outskirts of Edmonton who are not being held in public memory, but is also the case for the Montréal massacre, where it is their killer’s name that is widely known, not the names of individual women killed. As we get further and further from the date of these murders (as is the case in

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Montréal and for the murders in Edmonton from the 1980s and 1990s), it is less and less likely that the names will create recall for those for whom the deaths have not been felt as an impingement (or a call to respond). 15 In the context of this paper, I recognize that to list the names of the dead is to give a partial, inadequate index to their lives, and is not an innocent strategy. On one hand, as a remembrance/pedagogy, such listing provides a limited hinge between inside and outside and is a thin mode of comportment towards the violently dead ‘you’. On the other hand, not naming the names of these dead means that their alterity is necessarily subsumed by my rendering: there is no (dead) you for you (reader) to comport towards. I have, thus, included the names of the dead toward whom I am turning in this paper, as a recognition of what I – we – cannot know and as a learning to live with undoing and uncertainty.

References Bennett, Jill (2005), Empathic Vision: affect, trauma, and contemporary art (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Butler, Judith (2004), Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence (London and New York: Verso). Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an account of oneself (New York: Fordham University Press). Cameron, Stevie (1990), ‘Our daughters, ourselves’. Globe and Mail (6 December). Canadian Press (2006), untitled broadcast. Canadian Press, 23 May. Das, Veena (1997), ‘Language and body: transactions in the construction of pain’, in A. Kleinman, V. Das and M. Lock (eds), Social suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press). Dean, Amber (2005), ‘“Just another day / just another death”: ungrievability and Vancouver’s missing women’, presented at The Future of Memory: an International Holocaust and Trauma Conference (10–12 November), Manchester University, Manchester, UK. Edmonton Journal (2008), ‘“You didn’t destroy us”, Svekla told; Murderer gets life sentence, no chance of parole for 17 years’. Edmonton Journal (17 June): B1. Ellsworth, Elizabeth (2005), Places of learning: media, architecture, pedagogy (New York: Routledge Falmer). Gibb, Camilla (1999), Mouthing the words: a novel (Toronto: Pedlar Press). Phelan, Peggy (2001), ‘Converging glances: a response to Cathy Caruth’s “Parting words”’. Cultural Values: Journal of Cultural Research, 5(1): 27–40. Serres, Michel and Zournazi, Mary (2002), ‘The art of living: a conversation with Michel Serres’, in M. Zournazi, Hope: new philosophies for change (New York: Routledge). Shultz, Heather, Audette, Trish and Stolte, Elsie (2007), ‘Woman beaten before she went missing: Wetaskiwin body identified as sex-trade worker’. Edmonton Journal (12 July): B3.

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Simon, Roger (2005), A touch of the past: remembrance, learning, and ethics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan). Simon, Roger, Rosenberg, Sharon and Eppert, Claudia (2000), Between hope and despair: pedagogy and the remembrance of historical trauma (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers). Slobodian, Linda (2005), ‘Prostitutes risk death to earn cash for drugs: “the women are afraid, they’re high risk or sick”’. Calgary Herald (15 May): A3 Taussig, Michael (2001), ‘Dying is an art, like anything else’. Critical Inquiry, 28(1): 305–16. Warner, Michael (2002), Publics and counterpublics (New York: Zone Books). Withey, Elizabeth (2005), ‘A mother’s anguish: local family tried everything to save daughter before her death at 20’. Edmonton Journal (3 September): A1. Young, James (1993), The texture of memory: Holocaust memorials and meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Internet sources Global Women’s Memorial Society (accessed 10 August 2007), available at www.globalwomensmemorial.org/index2.html. Prime Time Crime (2007), ‘Edmonton serial killer’, available at www. primetimecrime.com/Recent/murder_Edmonton_Serial.htm (accessed 10 August 2007). Project Kare, available at www.kare.ca (accessed 10 August 2007).

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11 Democracy, accountability and disruption Rita Kaur Dhamoon

Over recent decades, there has been a proliferation of literature in contemporary political theory on the relationship between diversity, especially cultural diversity, and democracy. A wide range of theorists have developed and defended various models of democracy (e.g. dialogical, deliberative, communicative, representative or civic–republican democracy) as well as various norms and principles (e.g. reasonable disagreement, egalitarian reciprocity, differentiated citizenship, intercultural dialogue, recognition, non-domination) that aim to promote inclusion and pluralism for the sake of an ideal democratic regime. My goal in this chapter is not to develop or defend a particular kind of democratic model or ideal, but to consider the unending work of democracy in producing subjects. While the production of (racialized, gendered, classed, sexual, embodied, etc.) subjects occurs every day in every aspect of life, both explicitly (e.g. the law defines subjects as legal or illegal citizens) and implicitly (e.g. through the media, in the workplace, in familial relations), the processes of meaning-making that construct subjects are often unacknowledged and/or normalized. Yet subject formation is constitutive of democracy in that, insofar as democracy is concerned with ‘the rule of the people’, the production of subjects determines who ‘the people’ are and are not.1 The category of ‘the people’ has enormous symbolic and material implications for both the relationship between subjects and the organization of social hierarchies and, as such, it is central to democratic practice: it determines not only a sense of belonging, but also family ties, legal status and rights,

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work opportunities, educational levels, living arrangements, income, national territorial and legal claims, etc. While meanings of ‘the people’ are not stable or permanent, and while some subjects are simultaneously positioned as ‘the people’ and excluded from being part of ‘the people’ – for example, some non-white immigrants in Canada are legally, but not always substantively or equally, signified as part of ‘the people’ – the production of subjects as insiders/outsiders, citizens/non-citizens, the Norm/Other is central to the work of democracy. In considering this work, my concern is not with the need to overcome or reduce considerations of power, but with the necessity of making visible and disrupting the political effects of power. I begin by outlining how the crisis facing democracy has been misdiagnosed in various strands of recent liberal thought as one about the accommodation of diverse Others, and how a more precise diagnosis may be found by examining the work of democracy rather than theorizing its ideal version. In particular, I suggest that the crisis of democracy is ongoing, whereby the very production of ‘the people’ is in a constant state of flux. Second, I explicate what is meant by the idea that the work of democracy lies in meaningmaking processes that make and mark subjects. This work, I contend, is always and already taking place, but it tends to be obscured when democracy is conceptualized as an entity or ideal rather than as an activity characterized by relations of power. Third, I propose that the work of democracy in constituting subjects can be radicalized by taking accounts of meaning-making. I develop the idea of accountability by drawing specifically on the work of Sherene Razack (1998) and Judith Butler (2005). I argue that in radicalizing the work of democracy through accountability, processes of subject formation that produce representations of privilege and penalty can be disrupted. Accounts of meaning-making not only illuminate the nature and effects of specific processes of differentiation, they also disrupt those very processes. I conclude that the device of taking an account of meaning-making radicalizes the work of democracy (i.e. the production of subjects) by opening up and being responsive to the possibility of making new and different kinds of subjects.2

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Diagnosing the crisis in democracy In recent decades, liberal democratic theory has been preoccupied with two aspects of democracy: first, with the extent and limits of state tolerance of Others in liberal democracies, and second, with principles such as equality, recognition and inclusion that expand and pluralize the bounds of the public sphere. Various liberal perspectives and approaches are offered with regard to these two issues, but, overall, the prolific literature on identity politics (especially multiculturalism) attempts to respond to what is perceived as a crisis in democracy. The crisis is presented specifically as one in which the authority of the liberal state and the coherency of social/national unity are threatened by the presence of ‘different’ identities and bodies. This has been evident, for example, in the context of indigenous claims to inherent land and resource rights, which have challenged the authority of the Canadian settler state. Also, since the events of September 11, 2001 in the US and the start of the ‘war on terror’, there has been growing fear of so-called ‘home-grown’ Muslim and Arab terrorists in such countries as Canada, the UK, Australia and the US, as well as a growing backlash against those marked as multicultural Others (i.e. non-white immigrants and citizens). The crisis, in other words, arises for the state and those who benefit from a specific set of norms because dominant conceptions of a collective identity and community are supposedly threatened by the ‘unruliness’ of Others. As well as a political crisis, liberals also face a theoretical crisis, specifically because universalizing criteria that erase difference and atomistic conceptions of the individual are increasingly recognized as faulty by some liberals. Echoing the criticisms of liberal individualism made by communitarian philosophers like Charles Taylor (1979; 1991), Will Kymlicka, for instance, critiques neutral liberalism so as to argue that, rather than viewing the individual as transcultural and ahistorical, liberal perspectives can and should be developed so as to recognize the significance of cultural contexts for the individual (1989; 1995; 1997). In responding to the theoretical crisis, liberal pluralists like Kymlicka, as well as Joseph Carens (2000), Duncan Ivison (2002), Bhikhu Parekh (2000) and Iris Marion Young (1989; 2000), have

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specifically reconceptualized and/or reinterpreted liberalism, such that liberal values of state neutrality and universal citizenship are no longer taken as given. These scholars have made significant theoretical shifts within liberalism (specifically from neutral liberalism to versions of liberal pluralism); however, rather than viewing the theoretical crisis as one in which liberalism is misinterpreted or misrepresented, I understand the liberal crisis to be about the shifting terms in which to legitimize the governance of those marked as Others. In particular, since the terms of neutrality have come into question, liberalism faces a theoretical crisis because new terms are necessary to ensure that the authority of the state is maintained. To adjust the parameters of justified state coercion, liberal pluralists now focus not only on the extent of individual liberties but also on group liberties. Yet, rather than rectifying fundamental power differentials or confronting how social relations of difference are created and recreated in the first place, liberal pluralist thinkers continue to develop theories that aim to reconfigure the scope and limits of tolerance so as to manage group difference and regulate the bounds of inclusion and tolerance. In these instances, relations of penalty and privilege are often narrowly conceived, such that it appears that difference itself can be eradicated. Put differently, to a large degree, power in liberal thought is conceived as domination, as something that can and should be overcome or minimized, and, accordingly, democracy is presented as an ideal condition in which there will be less power. Yet, contrary to much recent liberal thought, power is always and necessarily at work in democracy. In the face of this ongoing condition of democracy in which modalities of power are always at work in producing subjects, ‘[t]he task for democratic theory’, as Barbara Cruikshank states, ‘could be understood as the effort to give power a face or name, to make it visible and accountable’ (1999: 15). Cruikshank specifically draws attention to the ubiquity of discursive power, and not just to obvious, statecentred and institutional structures of power or to negative and oppressive forms of power. On this basis, she argues that democracy is neither good nor bad, but political, for democratic relations are both voluntary and coercive. She states: ‘Democratic relations are still relations of power and

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as such are continually recreated, which requires that democratic theory never presupposes its subjects but persistently inquire[s] into the constitution of that subject’ (1999: 18). She goes onto to say that ‘it is misleading to separate the terms of subjectivity, agency, and citizenship from those of subjection, domination, and powerlessness in democratic theory’ (1999: 19). Her view – one which I share – is that to theorize democracy in such a way as to mask the messiness of politics is to do a disservice to the very project of democratic theory. In particular, Cruikshank continues, ‘What is required of democratic theory is less a solution to the conundrum of the political than a way to articulate the contingency of the political that neither exhausts nor determines any efforts to reconstitute political order and the space of politics’ (1999: 17). Thus, Cruikshank calls upon theorists to describe and explain the contingency of the political, and this contingency, I contend, is bound up with processes of subject formation. Her Foucauldian approach to questions of power and democracy specifically signals a way to address both the productive and the constraining aspects of meaning-making without valorizing, demonizing or revoking democracy (see, especially, 1999: 124–5). In particular, she argues that ‘the making of citizens is the permanent political project of democracy’ (1999: 123). Cruikshank’s insights are especially useful in confronting the creation and arrangement of relations of difference because she analyzes democracy not as a form of government or set of principles, but as a type of activity. Drawing on Cruikshank’s insight that democracy is an activity or practice of making citizens, I approach the crisis in democracy as one about the ongoing production of subjects rather than as one about accommodating diversity and simultaneously promoting social unity and the authority of the state. The theoretical implication of approaching democracy in terms of its work rather than an entity or an ideal is that the focus is not on the identities and bodies marked as different per se, but on the processes that lead to the production and reproduction of meanings of difference attached to those identities and bodies. A study of these processes does not presuppose that the presence of power can simply be equated with the absence of freedom; instead, because freedom and domination are understood as two sides of the same coin, my approach to meaning-making takes

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power as the constitutive element of democracy. This understanding of democracy differs from liberal theories that claim to focus on the activity of producing a ‘we’ or some version of community (e.g. political community, tolerant community, national community), in that no illusion is offered here of a fixed and monolithic collectivity that is intrinsically good. Such illusions constitute notions of ‘a community’ by violently dictating who belongs and who does not; this construct of community is illusionary in the specific sense that it is based on the myth that meanings can be definitively and clearly made, and it is violent in that the myth is imposed as a reality or as a necessity. Precisely because all existing regimes, government types, ideologies and practices always and necessarily entail power, a democratic regime no less than any other will comprise capitalist, patriarchal, gendered, disablest and racist systems of authority, systems that support and perpetuate economic and social inequities (Mansbridge, 1996: 56). This is not just an effect of imperfect practice, for, in principle too, it remains that no ideal of democracy can be taken as inherently good, pure or essentially desirable; this is because power is always present. Democracy, to repeat Cruikshank’s point, is political. To attend to this political dimension of democracy, the emphasis needs to shift away from ways of minimizing power to addressing how power constitutes subjects differently. This production and organization of difference, as I argue in the next section, occurs through a matrix of meaningmaking, in which multiple systems interact with each other. The idea of a matrix of meaning-making not only describes the operation of various interactions and their resulting effects, but it also serves to illustrate that subjects are relationally differentiated. After explicating how subject formation is contingent, varied and relational, I put forward the claim that the work of democracy can be radicalized by taking an account of meaning-making processes that make and mark subjects in and through such a matrix.

Subject formation as the work of democracy The political work of democracy in producing subjects is intrinsically contingent, as I noted earlier. The contingency

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arises because meaning-making processes that produce representations of subjects are continuous and ongoing (rather than fixed), inherently contested and contestable, varied because of the different communicative regimes that structure meanings, and spatially and temporally shaped. Because of the open-ended character of meaning-making, the activity of constituting subjects does not foreclose the possibility of variation in meanings, and it does not predetermine or assume the fixity of representations of identity. Instead, meaning-making processes produce wide-ranging, plural and incomplete interpretations of difference, even while the variety of meanings is circumscribed by differing norms. Further to this indeterminacy of content, whether meanings are self-directed, other-directed, chosen or imposed, they are perpetually deferred in that they are always subject to other interpretations in other socio-political contexts; consequently, meanings are never fully known but always interpreted through various lenses of dominance. To theorize this contingency, I draw on feminist theories of intersectionality, specifically to develop the idea that subject formation occurs in and through a matrix of meaningmaking. This idea of a matrix of meaning-making is a variation on Patricia Hill Collins’ notion of ‘the matrix of domination’ (1990: 221–38). Collins conceptualizes the matrix of domination in terms of multiple aspects of identity (e.g. raced, class-based and gendered identities) and various forms of interlocking modes of oppression (e.g. racism, capitalism and patriarchy).3 Her notion of the matrix is especially important because it describes the ways in which distinctive systems of oppression are ‘part of one overarching structure of domination’ (1990: 222). The matrix of domination specifically ‘expands the focus of analysis from merely describing the similarities and differences’ between systems of oppressions and domination to providing ‘greater attention to how they interconnect’ (1999: 222). When analysts pay attention to these interconnections, Collins argues, it becomes possible to examine the simultaneity of oppressions as well as to gain knowledge about the experiences of subjugated Others. I want to draw out three major insights regarding subject formation from Collins’ approach and her framework of the matrix of domination. First, subject formation occurs

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through interlocking systems of meaning-making, in which sometimes competing systems enable each other. As Collins argues with regard to Black feminist thought, systems of oppression such as gender, age, sexual orientation, race, social class and religion need each other (1990: 222). Put differently, systems that produce and organize relations of penalty and privilege function through each other (Fellows and Razack, 1998: 335). For this reason, an understanding of subject formation demands an interactive approach, rather than one that is uni-dimensional or hierarchal (in which primacy is assigned to one form of domination over and above others), or additive (in which previously excluded variables are added to existing ones). In other words, systems of meaning-making operate through one another, so much so that these systems are necessary and not just supplemental to each other. Second, variations in subject formation are produced through diverse interactions such that people not only experience categories of identity differently, but the shape of those categories is also varied because of power. As Collins notes, ‘whereas all systems operate in framing the experience of Black women transnationally, different configurations of such systems have saliency for Black women differently placed within them’ (2000: 248). As an example, interactions between systems of racialization and gendering do not simply produce representations of subjects as non-white and white men and women; rather, such subjects are differently constituted, depending on the interactions between racial and other systems of normativity and Otherness. As Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill say, ‘For example, people of the same “race” will experience “race” differently depending upon their location in the class structure as working class, professional managerial class, or unemployed; in the gender structure as female or male; and in the structures of sexuality as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual’ (1996: 321).4 The point made by Zinn and Dill, as well as Collins, about difference is relevant to my own conception of a matrix of meaning-making, in that subjects are produced through multiple systems, and within those systems there is also variation. Third, because all social differences (including those that are signified as privileged) are shaped by multiple interactive

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systems of oppression and privilege, relations of domination create few pure victims or oppressors. This, as Collins notes, is because ‘[e]ach individual derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege’ (1990: 229). This is important to the work of democracy and to an understanding of social difference, because a subject never simply signifies either the power to govern on the one hand, or a state of being governed on the other. Rather, the context determines the degree and form of power at play in each case. Consequently, not all dominant identities or all Othered identities are equally or similarly dominant or Othered; rather, differently situated subjects are produced through various relations of power. This, however, is not to suggest that we are all equally dominated, for this would be tantamount to arguing that power does not matter (Razack, 1998: 161). On the contrary, precisely because subjects are all differently and differentially privileged and penalized, power is central to subject formation. As a result, there is political efficacy in examining specifically how power operates to make and mark subjects differently in different contexts. Beyond these important points, which build on Collins’ insight that it is critical to pay attention to the relationship between systems of domination, I foreground a Foucauldian conception of power, whereby power is productive and not only dominating. Collins is certainly mindful of various forces and manifestations of power, but her conception of the matrix is primarily framed in terms of domination. As a way to attend to the ways in which power functions to govern difference and also to constitute and reconstitute it, it is useful to examine how differences are formed, not simply by constructing relations of domination between the Norm and the Othered, but also by producing relational distinctions between various representations of Otherness. Thus, while meanings that make and mark subjects are produced dialectically in various ways by virtue of constructions of the Othered as the mirror image of the norm – generating such representational binaries as the Oriental/Occidental (Said, 1978), Third World woman/Western woman (Mohanty, 2003), outsider/insider (Fuss, 1991) – it is the interactions between these binaries that, taken together, structure the matrix as a relational system. Reducing political systems, social relations or subject formation to a single binary carries

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the danger of eclipsing ‘the liminality of contradictory subject positions or the fluid, nomadic, and migratory [nature of] subjectivity’ (Friedman, 1995: 7). Indeed, a singular, binary-based understanding of power gives rise to an undifferentiated category of Otherness in which a multiplicity of hegemonies are masked, thereby occluding the fact that conditions of dominance are established through interactive systems of normativity that are irreducible to any one identity or social position. In other words, subjects are constructed, not through independent or absolute categories (of male/female, white/non-white, heterosexual/homosexual), but through relational systems of normativity and Otherness that shift in the context of different interactions within an overarching matrix. A relational approach to difference enables a fuller picture of the matrix of meaning-making by identifying how binaries work together so as to produce different Others in relation to one another. Put differently, relational processes of subject formation create and sustain various forms and degrees of privilege and penalty, which serve in turn to uphold the various conditions that structure the matrix of domination. In this sense, subjects are produced as dominant by relationally constituting various kinds of Others as abnormal, not only relative to a dominant norm, but relative to one another as well. So far I have argued that the unacknowledged and normalized work of democracy in making and marking subjects occurs in and through a matrix of meaning-making. As opposed to there being a crisis in democracy that arises from the diversity of (cultural, ethnic, racialized, etc.) identities – whereby democracy is threatened by the presence and claims of subjects who signify alterity – I therefore suggest that a crisis is already underway in the production of subjects. By this I mean that processes of meaning-making are inherently rife with contestation, so much so that there is no mode of representation that is definitive, stable, ideal or permanent, precisely because representations of subjectivity and subjection are produced through various interactions. In the following section, I suggest that this unacknowledged and normalized work of democracy can be brought to the fore by taking an account of these processes.

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Radicalizing democracy: accountability and disruption Accounts of meaning-making illuminate the unacknowledged and/or normalized processes of subject formation already underway and, in so doing, radicalize the work of democracy. An account of meaning-making is specifically a deconstructive praxis that entails the persistent questioning of processes of sign-production that generate categories of identity and organize socio-political differences. Accountability, in my usage, has two constitutive features: it is a social praxis rather than an individuated praxis, and it is a way to address the production of relations of difference rather than a way to respond to those subjects signified as different. Let me expand on both of these features. In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler explores how accountability might be understood as a social praxis. She argues that the communicative preconditions of giving an account are socially determined, whereby, even in the act of refusing to give an account, one remains related to the scene of address (2005: 11–12, 50). There is, as Butler argues, a performative relationship between the subject and society, in which an account of oneself is only possible in relation to somebody, in the context of other modes of intelligibility, and within ‘external’ regimes of knowledge that are always beyond the simple ‘me’. Butler describes this as follows: An account of oneself is always given to an-other, whether conjured or existing, and this establishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relation than a reflexive effort to give an account of oneself. Moreover, the very terms by which we give an account, by which we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others, are not of our making. They are social in character, and they establish social norms, a domain of unfreedom and substitutability within which our ‘singular’ stories are told. (2005: 21)

Moreover, Butler continues, it is only through contestation that the self can possibly appear; in other words, the ‘I’ only becomes an ‘I’ so long as there is no singular story of origin or universal regime of truth. In this sense, it is not simply that societal norms are created and recreated in relation to the self or individual, but rather that, since subjects are invested in identifying with a specific set of social norms

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(precisely because they appear through these norms), there is a causal relationship between the social and the self. Accordingly, an account reveals that the self is also implicated, as well as produced, in the structure of those very conditions. By extension, accounts of the meaning-making processes that make and mark subjects deconstruct the relationship between the self and the social conditions of subject formation, revealing that it is a dialectical one. While Butler places the emphasis on an account of oneself, my own emphasis is on taking accounts of the social processes of meaning-making. Such accounts not only require selfreflection of one’s own relational position, but they also serve as forms of intervention into the actions of others, who may understand themselves as innocent. The idea of challenging innocence is linked to the second feature of accountability, whereby an account provides a way to deconstruct the processes of meaning-making that produce relational representations of difference. In Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms, for example, Sherene Razack offers a conception of accountability that aims to address the lack of innocence that exists as a consequence of relations of privilege and penalty. Razack argues that accountability directs us to ‘invest our energies in exploring the histories, social relations, and conditions that structure groups unequally in relation to one another and that shape what can be known, thought, and said’ (1998: 10; original emphasis). She examines how identities are regulated through norms embedded in patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism, and argues that it is necessary to counter positions of ‘innocence by asking about how relations of domination and subordination regulate encounters in classrooms and courtrooms’ (1998: 10; original emphasis). In particular, I want to draw on Razack’s theory of accountability to deconstruct how processes of subject formation implicate differently situated subjects in the conditions that uphold a dominant matrix of meaning-making. As Razack states, accountability is ‘a process that begins with a recognition that we are implicated in systems of oppression that profoundly structure our understanding of one another. That is, we come to know

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and perform ourselves in ways that produce social hierarchies’ (1998: 10). Precisely because of the relativity of dominance and subordination, Razack calls for an account of who has voice, how voices are heard and re- or misinterpreted, and by whom (1998: 10). For Razack, accountability provides a way to challenge ‘hegemonic [and violent] ways of seeing through which subjects make themselves dominant’ (1998: 10; see also 170). While, at times, Razack places special emphasis on examining how ‘we [as individuals] are implicated in the subordination of other[s]’ (1998: 159; original emphasis) in ways that suggests that the first consideration is to gather full knowledge about individual complicity, I want to emphasize, not our place and role in those systems, but the other dimension of Razack’s theory of accountability, namely the importance of taking an account of the systems of subordination and domination. She states this is a key aspect of her theory early on in her book: ‘Without an understanding of how responses to subordinate groups are socially organized to sustain existing power arrangements, we cannot hope either to communicate across social hierarchies or to work to eliminate them’ (1998: 8). This dimension of her theory draws specific attention to an account of how and why social hierarchies are produced and reproduced in the first place. Building on the work of Butler and Razack, I suggest that accounts of meaning-making defetishize the apparent objectivity of identities by deconstructing the specific discursive processes through which subjects are socially constructed, within and through a matrix. Such an account starts from the social constructivist premise that assertions about a subject – which appear to be apparent, natural, universal, and sometimes permanent and unquestionable – are generated through systems of signification. Such an account deconstructs the philosophical and linguistic assumptions that implicitly and explicitly organize systems of meaning-making, rather than proffering what various terms ought to signify. To deconstruct, as Butler states, is ‘not to negate or dismiss, but to call into question and, perhaps most importantly, to open up a term, like the subject, to a reusage or redeployment that previously has not been authorized’ (1995: 49). This practice of deconstruction especially ‘exposes the limits of the historical

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scheme of things, the epistemological and ontological horizon within which subjects come to be at all’ (Butler, 2005: 17). An account of meaning-making so understood is thus a deconstructive praxis or a form of critique. The meaning of critique, in this usage, follows that of Stella Gaon, who remarks that the term is etymologically related to crisis. As Seyla Benhabib further explains, ‘Krisis refers to dissent and controversy, but also to a decision that is reached and to a judgment that is passed. “Critique” is the subjective evaluation or decision concerning a conflictual and controversial process – a crisis’ (quoted in Gaon, this volume, p. 22, note 2). As a form of critique, in this sense, an account of meaning-making brings into question or disrupts the processes of signification (i.e. the discursive conditions that uphold the matrix) that produce representations of difference and that thereby constitute ‘the people’. An account of meaning-making, thus, is not only a way to evaluate contingent interpretations of identity, but is also intrinsically disruptive in that it leads to a persistent questioning of those interpretations. Importantly, an account is simultaneously an analytic tool (theory) and a mode of radical action (practice) that disrupts processes of meaning-making. As such, an account of meaning-making can be understood as a political praxis. More specifically, as a deconstructive device, an account acts to disrupt interpretations of normalcy and otherness and, at the same time, serves as a form of reaction to processes of meaning-making by disrupting them. Disruption is therefore the specific character of what happens when an account of meaning-making takes place, and it takes the form of a response to the crisis/critique of meaning-making. In conceptualizing accountability as a praxis that is intrinsically disruptive, I am referring directly and specifically to a deconstruction of meaning-making on the level of discourse, and not only to physical, bodily or spatial disruption, although discursive production may lead to these too. In disrupting the terms of a matrix of meaning-making – and thereby the authority, legitimacy, relationality and contexts of meaning-making – an account demystifies and unsettles the relational processes of subject formation. In this sense, an account of these processes fundamentally

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disrupts the ontology, stability and character of given forms of representation so as to reveal that identities are not fixed, permanent, independent or natural. It is precisely the attention to power – as a productive and repressive force that constitutes subjects and characterizes the work of democracy – that makes disruption a radical praxis. The praxis of disruption that I advocate is not aimed at rescuing subject formation from contestation – from difference itself – for this would be to mistake ‘the irreducible conditions of social and political life for pathologies that might someday be overcome’, as Patchen Markell has eloquently argued (2003: 4). Instead, a disruptive account of meaning-making locates the problem of identity/difference in the necessary tension between productive and repressive processes of subject formation, rather than in the lack of sovereignty, freedom, agency or recognition of distinctiveness. In other words, it is precisely because subjects are made and marked through productive conditions that generate and repress relational representations of difference and nondifference, that difference itself cannot be resolved. On the contrary, since meanings about social difference issue from the effects of both freedom and coercion, the account I am prescribing here reveals that the activity of democracy in making and marking subjects is always and necessarily implicated in power. In bringing these power dynamics to the forefront of analysis, an account of meaning-making disrupts the matrix of meaning-making and, consequently, intervenes in democracy’s work. In particular, an account radicalizes subject formation by disrupting (i.e. putting into crisis or critiquing) interpretations of ‘the people’. Rather than attempting to dampen, manage or regulate Othered subjects, an account therefore disrupts how representations of ‘the people’ are produced and reproduced. This disruption serves as a response to processes of meaning-making that are entrenched and that close off the possibility of producing and legitimizing other meanings through subjugation. Thus, for instance, systems such as capitalism produce different kinds of racialized and gendered meanings regarding workers, owners, consumers, etc. Insofar as these meanings are treated as authoritative and constitutive of socio-political arrangements, disruption can serve as a critical response

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to processes of meaning-making that constitute subjects through lenses of dominance. Disruption therefore explicitly unsettles the processes of subject formation that implicate multiple interactive systems of meaning-making in the conditions that make and mark relational differences between subjects. From this analysis, it also follows that, since the terms by which we understand our own identities and the identities of o/Others are socially embedded, there is no process of subject formation that is void of power; as such, we are all implicated in the conditions that structure the matrix. The state of being implicated does not mean that all identities have the same degree or type of power. Nor does it mean that a person is (necessarily) bad or evil, or even intentionally oppressive. As Sarita Srivastava notes, being implicated is not simply an individual condition; primarily, it is a structural relationship (2005: 46).5 This condition of being implicated is particularly important to the study of democracy because it indicates that it is inconceivable to undo a particular mode of subordination without addressing all modes of subordination. Since, in other words, the conditions of a matrix of meaning-making are upheld relationally by interactive systems of normativity and Otherness, it is necessary to address the system as a whole in order to address any one particular form of oppression. For example, in order to disrupt racist systems of meaning-making, it is necessary also to disrupt representations of dominance that arise interactively from systems of patriarchy, homophobia, heteronormativity, ableism, capitalism and so on. In this regard, the praxis of taking an account of meaning-making is radical, in that it serves to disrupt the overall relational conditions that structure a matrix of power (rather than merely one dimension of domination or a binary of otherness/ normality), and in that it serves to disrupt, at the root, the ways in which specific subjects are relationally signified in and through such a matrix.

Conclusion Democracy, as I have approached it here, is the unacknowledged but ongoing work of subject formation, whereby

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representations of difference are made and marked in and through a matrix of meaning-making. An account of meaning-making, I have argued, is a radical praxis that illuminates how meanings are circumscribed by various norms, and that simultaneously disrupts (i.e. critiques, deconstructs or questions) these meanings, as well as the processes that produce them. In disrupting these relational and interactive processes of meaning-making, an account can be put to work by directly disrupting representations of ‘the people’. Such disruption is important, I conclude, because from it arises the possibility of making new and different subjects. In particular, my claim is that accounts of meaningmaking are not normatively valuable simply because they point to fields of plural, open-ended, indeterminate and contingent meanings, or just because they explicitly enable the disruption of oppressive meanings. Rather, this form of critique is normatively valuable because the activity of disrupting processes of meaning-making opens, rather than forecloses, the possibility of interpreting representations of difference in other ways. Indeed, in disrupting lenses of dominance through which meanings are interpreted, an account can serve to identify points at which meaningmakers can be responsive to other possible interpretations. Put differently, in disrupting existing meanings, an account indicates that it is possible to be responsive to alternative ways of signifying, making and interpreting signs of ‘the people’, such that the repetition, re-enactment and reinstitution of sedimented encounters of dominance are disrupted. An account does not, however, seek to eradicate power; this is because the conditions of freedom and domination are both constitutive of meaning-making. The eradication of power is not possible precisely because of the interplay between freedom and domination – between power as production and power as repression – in the construction of subjects. As Cruikshank says, Technologies of citizenship do not cancel out the autonomy and independence of citizens but are modes of governance that work upon and through the capacities of citizens to act on their own. Technologies of citizenship are voluntary and coercive at the same time; the actions of citizens are regulated, but only after the capacity to act as a certain kind of citizen with certain aims is instilled. (1999: 4)

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Similarly, I have argued, the praxis of taking an account of meaning-making serves to show that subjects are produced through modalities of both freedom and domination – whereby subject formation is characterized by representations of both subjectivity and subjection, albeit in different ways for different subjects, according to how relational differences are organized within a matrix of meaning-making – such that power can be disrupted rather than eradicated. To acknowledge the impossibility and danger of attempting to eradicate power when it takes on this Foucauldian meaning does not mean that we should resign in despair, however, for an account of meaning-making always leaves open the possibility of constituting subjects differently. In this regard, in as much as the work of democracy entails the formation of subjects, accounts of meaning-making contribute to democracy because they point towards the possibility of becoming subjects in new and different kinds of ways.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Stella Gaon for careful and constructive comments on drafts of this chapter. My thanks also to the participants of the ‘Democracy in crisis: violence, alterity, community’ workshop, held at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada) in June 2007, for their helpful questions and suggestions.

Notes 1 2

3

For an analysis that focuses on what is meant by ‘rule’ rather than how ‘the people’ are constituted, see Patchen Markell (2006). The idea of creating new and different kinds of subjects is taken from Cruikshank’s study of the production of democratic citizens and other subjects, in The will to empower (1999). While Cruikshank’s work is central to my own thinking about democracy and subject formation, I deploy the praxis of accountability as a way to deconstruct the contexts in which processes of meaning-making constitute and govern subjects in different and differential ways. Feminists from various perspectives have studied and developed the body of work described as ‘intersectionality’ scholarship. For examples of intersectionality-type analysis, see the work of bell hooks (1981; 2000); Patricia Monture-Angus (1995; 1999); Mary Louise Fellows and

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4

5

Sherene Razack (1994; 1998); Nira Yuval-Davis (2006); Himani Bannerji (1993; 2000); Chandra Mohanty (2003); Uma Narayan (1997; 1998); Gloria Anzaldúa (1999); and Ange-Marie Hancock (2007a; b). While some feminists, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989; 1994; 1997), have been instrumental in developing the concept of ‘intersectionality’, others tend to use such terminology as ‘interlocking’ (Collins, 1990; 2000), ‘multiple jeopardy’ (King, 1998) or ‘discrimination within discrimination’ (Kirkness, 1987–88). Yet others do not argue for a particular concept but specify the impossibility of separating out aspects of identity. My own preference is for such phraseology as ‘interactive’ or ‘interactions’, because the language of ‘intersectionality’ tends to suggest that aspects of identity or systems of oppression are separate entities that cross each other, as opposed to categories and systems that are integral to each other. The study of ‘interactions’ emphasizes, in particular, the dynamic relationship between systems and processes of identification and oppression. Notably, while Zinn and Dill are right to point towards these variations, they use the categories of race, class, gender and sexuality rather than racialization, capitalism, patriarchy and heteronormativity to address social differences. While, at times, the terminology of race and racialization, or capitalism and class, or gender, sexism, patriarchy is used interchangeably, my emphasis is on the ways in which subjects are differentiated through interactions between processes not entities or categories. Attention to the processes of differentiation provides a way to avoid essentialist and uni-dimensional representations of such categories as black, white, homosexual, heterosexual, poor and rich. I am not suggesting that there is no psychological or emotional dimension to recognizing one’s own implication in sustaining oppression or privilege. As Srivastava also argues (2005), critical self-reflection on the ways in which one is implicated in the subjection of Others provokes empathy, trauma, the desire for innocence and salvation.

References Anzaldúa, Gloria (1999), Borderlands/La Frontera: the new Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute). Bannerji, Himani (ed.) (1993), Returning the gaze: essays on racism, feminism and politics (Toronto: Sister Vision). Bannerji, Himani (2000), The dark side of the nation: essays on multiculturalism, nationalism and gender (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc). Butler, Judith (1995), ‘Contingent foundations’, in S. Benhabib, J. Butler, D. Cornell and N. Fraser (eds), Feminist contentions: a philosophical exchange (New York and London: Routledge): 35–58. Butler, Judith (2005), Giving an account of oneself (New York: Fordham University Press). Carens, Joseph H. (2000), Culture, citizenship and community: a contextual exploration of justice as evenhandedness (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Collins, Patricia Hill (1990), Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman).

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Collins, Patricia Hill (2000), Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment (New York and London: Routledge). Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989), ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1994), ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of colour’, in M.A. Fineman and R. Mykitiul (eds), The public nature of private violence (New York and London: Routledge): 93–118. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1997), ‘Intersectionality and identity politics: learning from violence against women of colour’, in M.L. Shanley and U. Narayan (eds), Reconstructing political theory: feminist perspectives (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press): 178–93. Cruikshank, Barbara (1999), The will to empower: democratic citizens and other subjects (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press). Fellows, Mary Louise and Razack, Sherene (1994), ‘Seeking relations: law and feminism roundtables’. Signs, 19(4): 1048–83. Fellows, Mary Louise and Razack, Sherene (1998), ‘The race to innocence: confronting hierarchal relations among women’. Journal of Gender, Race and Justice, 1(2), 335–52. Friedman, Susan Stanford (1995), ‘Beyond white and other: relationality and narratives of race in feminist discourse’. Signs, 21(1): 1–49. Fuss, Diana (1991), ‘Inside/outside’, in D. Fuss (ed.), Inside/out: lesbian theories, gay theories (New York and London: Routledge): 1–11. Hancock, Ange-Marie (2007a), ‘Intersectionality as a normative and empirical paradigm’. Politics & Gender, 3(2): 248–54. Hancock, Ange-Marie (2007b), ‘When multiplication doesn’t equal quick addition: examining intersectionality as a research paradigm’. Perspectives on Politics, 5(1): 63–79. hooks, bell (1981), Ain’t I a woman? Black women and feminism (Boston: South End Press). hooks, bell (2000), Feminist theory: from margin to centre (Boston: South End Press). Ivison, Duncan (2002), Postcolonial liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). King, Deborah K. (1998), ‘Multiple jeopardy, multiple consciousness: the context of a black feminist ideology’. Signs, 14(1): 42–72. Kirkness, Verna (1987–88), ‘Emerging native women’. Canadian Journal of Women and Law, 2(2): 408–15. Kymlicka, Will (1989), Liberalism, community and culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kymlicka, Will (1995), Multicultural citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Kymlicka, Will (1997), ‘Do we need a liberal theory of minority rights?’. Constellations, 4(1): 72–87. Mansbridge, Jane (1996), ‘Using power/fighting power: the polity’, in S. Benhabib (ed.), Democracy and difference: contesting the boundaries of the political (Princeton: Princeton University Press): 46–66.

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Markell, Patchen (2003), Bound by recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Markell, Patchen (2006), ‘The rule of the people: Arendt, Archê, and democracy’, American Political Science Review, 100:1, 1–14. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003), Feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity (Durham and London: Duke University Press). Monture-Angus, Patricia (1995), Thunder in my soul: a Mohawk woman speaks (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing). Monture-Angus, Patricia (1999), ‘Standing against canadian law: naming omissions of race, culture and gender’, in E. Cormack (ed.), Locating law: race/class/gender connections (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing): 76–97. Narayan, Uma (1997), Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism (London and New York: Routledge). Narayan, Uma (1998), ‘Essence of culture and a sense of history: a feminist critique of cultural essentialism’. Hypatia, 13(2): 86–106. Parekh, Bhikhu (2000), Rethinking multiculturalism: cultural diversity and political theory (Basingstoke, Hampshire: MacMillan Press Ltd.). Razack, Sherene (1998), Looking white people in the eye: gender, race, and culture in courtrooms and classrooms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Said, Edward (1978), Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Srivasatava, Sarita (2005), ‘You’re calling me a racist? The moral and emotional regulation of antiracism and feminism’. Signs, 31(1): 29–61. Taylor, Charles (1979), ‘Atomism’, in A. Kontos (ed.), Powers, possessions and freedoms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Taylor, Charles (1991), The malaise of modernity (Toronto: House of Anansi Press Ltd). Young, Iris Marion (1989), ‘Polity and group difference: a critique of the ideal of universal citizenship’. Ethics, 99: 250–74. Young, Iris Marion (2000), Inclusion and democracy (New York: Oxford University Press). Yuval-Davis, Nira (2006), ‘Intersectionality and feminist politics’. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3): 193–209. Zinn, Maxine Baca and Dill, Bonnie Thornton (1996), ‘Theorizing difference from multiracial feminism’, Feminist Studies, 22(2): 321–32.

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12 Dissensus, ethics and the politics of democracy Ewa Płonowska Ziarek

‘Which ethics for democracy?’, asks Chantal Mouffe, in her article of the same title (2000: 85–94). The numerous answers to this crucial question are mostly characterized by a seemingly irreparable split between obligation and antagonism in political life.1 In fact, responsibility for the Other constitutes one of the main blind spots in most political theories of antagonism, such as Foucault’s, Deleuze’s or Laclau’s and Mouffe’s, whereas most of the ethical theories of obligation, such as Levinas’s, Derrida’s, Irigaray’s and the numerous commentaries they have inspired, are limited by insufficient attention to the political and subjective dimensions of antagonism. If and when political philosophies engage the question of ethics, it is primarily in the context of freedom – implied, for instance, in Foucault’s invention of the new modes of life, Deleuze’s becoming or Laclau’s hegemonic struggle. By contrast, theories of responsibility sooner or later encounter the question of political praxis. Consequently, what are also implied in the disjunction between antagonism and obligation are the antithetical ethical claims of responsibility and freedom. Yet, despite the seemingly intractable divisions between the theories of antagonism and responsibility, most of them share a certain blindness to the racial and sexual dimensions of embodied subjectivity. Foucault, for instance, gives us a brilliant diagnosis of how power works in the constitution of bodies and sexualities, but fails to analyse the way modern regimes of biopower function in the context of race and gender. And Levinas offers an extremely suggestive elaboration of obligation for the Other in terms of sensibility, but fails to radicalize this analysis in terms of eroticism and sexual difference.

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To address these limitations of the contemporary debates on ethics and democracy, I would like to develop further my theory of an ethics of dissensus and feminist democratic praxis (Ziarek, 2001), by elaborating the notion of heteronomous freedom and its relation to ethical obligation, political antagonism and sexual difference. My approach to an ethics of democracy does not promise a transcendence of antagonisms but aims to articulate a difficult role of responsibility and freedom in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression. The ethics I propose opposes the conservative political work performed by privatized moral discourse and is inseparable from transformative praxis, which aims to change unjust power relations and to acknowledge infinite responsibility for violence and oppression of others. Ultimately, I argue that a feminist articulation of the ethical motivation of democratic praxis provides an alternative to the two seemingly mutually exclusive prospects facing feminism today: either a politics of difference without ethical stakes – a politics which risks deteriorating into an indifferent struggle of heterogeneous forces – or its opposite, the search for the normative criteria transcending the antagonisms of race, class, sexuality and gender.

Obligation and the politics of radical democracy I begin my discussion of the ethics of dissensus with a juxtaposition of the two diametrically opposed models of the ethical dimension of democracy suggested by Emmanuel Levinas and Ernesto Laclau, because their works dramatize, in a nutshell, the seeming incompatibility beween responsibility, antagonism and freedom. The crucial question emerging from this juxtaposition is whether the ethical ‘investment’ of democratic praxis proposed by Laclau does not imply an antecedent responsibility for the freedom of the Other. And conversely, one might ask Levinas whether responsibility requires an engagement in the struggles against multiple forms of domination and, if so, what the relation is between obligation and antagonism. Levinas’s answer to the first of these questions is that justice, solidarity and the desire for a better society are

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inconceivable without the ethical ‘relation’ to the Other, who calls the subject to responsibility. Since, for Levinas, the ethical character of politics originates in responsibility for the Other, who is neither an adversary nor the complement of the subject, the ethics of democracy is not primarily a manifestation of political will, decision or agency but already a response to responsibility preceding the initiative of all political agents. For instance, when I find myself obligated for anti-Black racism in the US or anti-Semitism in Poland, this responsibility is not my initiative; rather, it originates as my response to the encounters with others and with the history of oppression – encounters that make claims on my responsibility prior to my capacity to respond to them. Such an ethical encounter, which calls the subject to responsibility, has the status of an ‘anarchic’, disruptive and unforeseeable event, which befalls the subject prior to any decision, communication or understanding on her part. Irreducible to intentionality, obligation ‘traverses consciousness contrariwise inscribing itself there as something foreign, as disequilibrium, as delirium undoing thematization, eluding principle, origin, and will . . . This movement is . . . an-archic’ (Levinas, 1996: 81). As an exposure to radical exteriority, responsibility is something foreign to the subject rather than a commitment the subject assumes freely for herself. Manifesting itself as a disequilibrium, or even ‘delirium’, such responsibility reveals the fact that ethical alterity is not a relative term constituted within the differential network of power/knowledge, but rather an excess, or an interruption, of differential relations. Consequently, the ethical ‘relation’ to the Other is not a relation in the usual sense of the word – that is, it is neither a relation between already constituted identities nor constitutive of these identities. On the contrary, it is an ethical encounter that calls these identities into question. An ethical relation is therefore an event, which manifests as rupture rather than as constitution, as a disturbance of both subjective identifications and discursive power relations, as a trace of the call to responsibility that precedes the response of the subject. It is this disruptive ethical signification of alterity that is missing in the dominant articulations of feminist politics, where the category of the Other, most frequently associated

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with women, people of colour or colonized subjectivities, is treated as an effect of objectification, exclusion or domination. Otherness is either a negative foil for the identity of those who count as political subjects or a fetishistic screen for the projection of social antagonisms. In most cases, therefore, it is a relative alterity, or a political/cultural difference, the meaning of which is determined by its differentiation or exclusion from positions of political power and the subjects who occupy those positions. Associated with either devalorized or idealized difference, rather than with an ethical ‘non-indifference’ to the call of the other, this relative alterity is constituted by discursive power relations – by what Levinas calls the discourse of the same. In this context, the important task of the politics of difference is to transform the institutional conditions of inequality, to demystify idealizations and to demand the status of the subject for those who have been ‘othered’. I argue, however, that to challenge domination it is necessary, not only to reclaim subjecthood for the oppressed, but also to reclaim the ethical signification of alterity that exceeds the differential identities of the subject and the other. Positioning the Other as an interlocutor, as an ethical signification of alterity, avoids what bell hooks calls the reification of the other as a victim (1990: 152), as well as the opposite tendency criticized by Rey Chow, namely, the idealization of the other as ‘essentially good’ (1998: xx–xxi, 41). Consequently, to formulate a feminist ethics of democracy, we need first of all to rethink the logic of difference and ‘othering’ in the context of anarchic responsibility for others. The ethical signification of alterity dislocates cultural difference because it marks an insurmountable temporal gap between the anarchic encounter with the Other and the articulations of the Other’s socio-political difference: I am always already called or exposed to the Other prior to my knowledge of his or her difference. Constituted within the contingent and antagonist relations of power/knowledge, cultural difference, which manifests the Other in the political, also bears a trace of the antecedent ethical call to responsibility, which disrupts this manifestation: ‘The other is present in a cultural whole and is illuminated by this whole, like a text by its context . . . His cultural signification is revealed and reveals as it were horizontally, on the basis

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of the historical world to which it belongs . . . But this mundane signification is found to be disturbed and shaken by another presence, abstract, not integrated into the world . . . His presence consists in divesting himself of the forms which, however, manifest him’ (Levinas, 1986: 351). In other words, ethical alterity signifies an anarchic call to responsibility prior to ‘my’ awareness of Other’s identity. Such an anarchic call signifies as the undoing of cultural difference, as a disequilibrium within constitution, as a trace of withdrawal from the very identity that manifests the Other in political life. Thus, the implication of Levinas’s work for cultural and political theory is that any construction of the Other’s difference within the network of power/knowledge is split by a non-coincidence between ethical alterity and its political determination, by a disturbance within constitution.2 The crucial point is that ethical alterity not only disturbs the political forms that manifest it but, through this disturbance, calls the subject to responsibility. Such an ethical disturbance of political difference can be deduced from Levinas’s theory of language, which is based on the incommensurability between two modalities of signification: the ethical ‘saying’, or the call to responsibility, and the political/philosophical ‘said’, or discourse. The ‘said’ represents, for Levinas, the unity and systematicity of philosophical discourse, which aims at synchronizing and determining the relations between different terms. Whereas, on the linguistic level, it can be approximated to the symbolic order, on the political level, the Levinasian ‘said’ will have to be revised in terms of power operating already on the level of signification. By contrast, ethical ‘saying’ signifies the possibility of being addressed by the Other prior to any political act or choice of obligation. Neither a linguistic act nor the split structure of enunciation, the saying underscores the originary receptivity or ‘exposure’ of the subject, and in so doing shifts priority from the nominative ‘I’ of enunciation and agency to the accusative ‘me’ of the addressee. Although the saying is always already mediated by the said, that is, by the historical forms of power and knowledge, it nonetheless exceeds socio-political discourse, preserving in this withdrawal a trace of the ethical signification of alterity. In the context of Levinas’s double theory of discourse, we could say that, although politics

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occurs already on the level of the constitution of subjective identities and social relations, the ethical signification of alterity exceeds or disrupts such a constitution. In other words, the constitution of multiple identities in the oppositional network of power/knowledge represents, in light of Levinas’s work, only one aspect of politics – its ‘said’. For the disturbance of the political logic of difference by ethical alterity calls for the supplementation of discursive constitution by anarchic, ethical saying, which situates political agents as always already addressed by, and obligated to, the Other. The ethical relation to the Other suggests that the ethical motivation of political praxis is neither a subjective ‘choice’ nor an expression of collective norms, but always already a response to the Other. In light of Levinas’s work, different forms of political praxis elaborated by contemporary democratic theorists – whether it is a politics of recognition, redistribution or deliberation – are flawed, because they implicitly or explicitly originate in an ethico-political decision of the subject. By contrast, Levinas aims to reconceive politics in the context of the asymmetrical I/Other relation. Such a reconceptualization is based on the concept of the ‘third’. The ‘third’ refers to the multiplicity of others, which necessitates a transition from the singular ethical relation to collective political organization: ‘the extraordinary commitment of the other to the third party calls for control, a search for justice, society and the State’ (Levinas, 1981: 161). With the appearance of other Others, the limitless responsibility for a singular Other gives rise to the concern with political justice, which promises equality for all and in fact turns the asymmetry of the I/Other relation into a symmetrical equivalence: ‘Justice is necessary, that is, comparison, coexistence, contemporaneousness, assembling, order . . . intelligibility of a system’ (Levinas, 1981: 157). The crucial contribution of Levinas’s work to democratic theory is thus its stress on the ‘anarchic’, ethical orientation of political praxis, which begins with the asymmetrical encounter with the Other. Yet, in order to recover this ethical orientation for feminist democratic politics, we need not only to supplement the politics of difference with the ethical signification of alterity, but also to contest the limitations of Levinas’s notion of the political. In the context of feminist

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theory, Levinas’s rather abstract and underdeveloped definition of the political as the ‘assembling order’ of totality poses at least three problems. The first problem is that it fails to draw consequences from a peculiar vacillation in the concept of the third, which, on the one hand, refers to the necessary moment of universality and equality for all, and, on the other hand, implies an irreducible plurality, a countless dispersal of others – there is always another Other who makes a claim on my responsibility. Furthermore, this split in the conception of the third is not gender neutral: ultimately, the dispersal is embodied by femininity, whereas the constitution of collectivity is associated with fraternity. By failing to articulate the political implications of this unavoidable tension between universality and multiplicity, Levinas privileges the democratic (fraternal) ideal of equality, while ignoring the other implication of democratic politics, namely, the proliferation of differences that both constitutes social identities and prevents their full actualization. On the very few occasions when Levinas does speak about cultural, historical and political differences, these differences (in contrast to the radical exteriority of the ethical alterity) are articulated as moments of totality: ‘The other is given in the concept of totality to which he is immanent’ (1986: 351). Yet, can the cultural/political ‘context’ and the political modality of the said, which mediates the ethical encounter, be conceptualized in terms of totality? Levinas’s commentators have spent so much time arguing that the ethical signification of alterity exceeds its cultural/political/ historical context that this problematic equation of democratic discourse with totality has been left uncontested. This concept of politics as totality reveals the second limitation of Levinas’s notion of the political, namely the fact that, despite the priority of justice over truth, the political is identical with philosophical knowledge, which assembles differences into a synchronic whole. Levinasian politics is thus associated with a reconciled society of mutual reciprocities, even though it is interrupted by the withdrawal of ethical alterity. Finally, the third problem is that, by associating conflict primarily with violent acts and the will of the subject, Levinas fails to analyse the dispersal of antagonisms and their constitutive function in the formation of political identities. The constitutive function

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of antagonism means not only that conflict happens between the subjects/groups with established identities, but that in fact it forms the very identities of the parties in conflict. As these limitations of Levinas’s politics suggest, if we want to recover anarchic obligation as the basis of the ethical orientation of feminist democratic praxis, we need to revise, or perhaps even replace, Levinas’s model of political discourse (that is, the political ‘said’). Thus, if the first step in my formulation of a feminist ethics of dissensus consists in the revision of political difference in terms of ethical responsibility, the second step involves a revision of democratic discourse in the context of difference. This task entails nothing more than thinking through the tension between universality and the proliferation of differences implied already in Levinas’s concept of the third. It is precisely at this point that Laclau and Mouffe’s political theory of radical democracy is decisive. In contrast to Levinas’s totalizing view of politics, their theory foregrounds the radical contingency and the proliferation of differences (the logic of difference). Second, it shifts the notion of antagonism from the conflict between agents with already constituted identities (which predominates in Levinas’s work) to the irreducible operations of power in the formation of social identities (the premise of the constitutive antagonism). Finally, it calls for the partial articulation of ‘links of equivalence’ among divergent struggles and identities as a condition of creating coalitions against existing forms of oppression (the logic of equivalence). In light of their work, we could say that Levinas’s notion of the political does not develop the crucial consequences of democratic praxis, namely, the proliferation of differences and the modernization of power operating through multiplication of antagonisms. As a result, notwithstanding the importance of his contribution of the anarchic responsibility, Levinas fails to distinguish between philosophical totality and democratic equivalence. As Laclau and Mouffe argue against Hegel, once we take the proliferation of differences and antagonisms into account, equivalence has to be thought as a contingent articulation of similarities among different oppressions – such as gender, race and class – rather than a dialectical mediation that absorbs them into a totality (the totality of the State,

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according to Hegel, or the totality of communist society without exploitation, according to Marx). This articulation of equivalence is negative: it establishes links between different identities or struggles, between anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles, for instance, not by exposing their underlying similarity, but by referring them to what they are not (say, patriarchal white supremacy). Even though equivalence tends to unify the political, it never achieves totality because it is limited by the irreducible remainder of differences and antagonisms on which it depends. As Laclau and Mouffe argue, ‘two terms, to be equivalent, must be different – otherwise, there would be a simple identity’ (1985: 128). Operating in conjunction with difference, democratic equivalence is partial, contingent and thus open to alternative hegemonic articulations. The crucial importance of this formulation of equivalence for feminist politics is that it allows us to move beyond the ongoing debate between a feminism of difference and a feminism of equality (see Scott, 2001: 254–70). Instead of the false choice between difference and equality, the emphasis here is on the mutual coimplication and subversion of equivalence and difference. Consequently, a feminist discourse of political democracy would be characterized by the non-sublatable aporia between two incompatible logics: between difference and equivalence, freedom and equality. This enabling aporia reveals the impossibility of the final closure of the political, and the necessity of the ongoing negotiation of provisional links of equivalence. In the context of Laclau and Mouffe’s work, it becomes clear that Levinas’s notion of the political/philosophical discourse (the ‘said’), insofar as it is based on synchronization and universality, fails to articulate democratic politics. Consequently, what Levinas presents as politics can be more productively interpreted either as philosophy or as yet another ethical dimension of political praxis. Following Laclau, we can call this dimension an ethical ideal of egalitarian justice, an ideal that exceeds its political realization. As Laclau argues, particular political demands always aim at something other than their realization, at something that transcends them; they ultimately aim at the impossible ethical ideal of a reconciled society: ‘Only if I live an action as incarnating an impossible fullness transcending it does

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the investment become an ethical investment’ (2000, 84). The ethical orientation of democratic politics invoked by Laclau is characterized by the disjunction between the ethical ideal of the reconciled community – an impossible universalization and totalization – and the particular historical agents aiming to realize it. Since ethical investment can never be fully embodied, it uproots the particular identities of political agents by orienting them towards the impossible universal. The task of democratic ethics in Laclau’s formulation consists in maintaining both disjunction and conjunction between reconciliation and antagonism, universality and particularity. By confusing the two, Levinas in fact closes the gap between the ethical investment in egalitarian justice and its realization in political life. Yet it is precisely this gap that sustains democratic pluralism by keeping political justice open to conflicting renegotiations.

Antagonism and freedom The disjunction between the ethical investment in a reconciled society and the political aporia between equivalence and difference does not merely free democracy from the notion of totality. Ultimately, what is at stake in keeping this gap open is a different notion of freedom, irreducible to the will or agency of the subject. Despite the fact that freedom is held suspect by Levinas because it is associated with the initiative of the subject and implicated in the erasure of alterity, I, like other feminist critics, want to affirm the centrality of freedom for feminist ethics and politics.3 Yet, rather than opposing freedom to obligation, I argue that feminist ethics has to negotiate between the seemingly incompatible ethical claims of freedom and responsibility by redefining the relation between them on an entirely new basis: the disruptive yet transformative encounters with different forms of alterity. This approach to ethics shifts from moral law to the event, from normative criteria to political transformation. It locates responsibility in the asymmetrical, embodied relation to the Other and proposes a heteronomous notion of freedom that is not only not opposed to, but in fact depends on, the encounter with alterity. Such a heteronomous freedom beyond the agency of the subject

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stems from a productive tension between the response to the rupture of the event and the engagement in political praxis aiming to create new modes of life. To articulate heteronomous freedom exceeding the agency of the subject, we need first of all to radicalize antagonism, and not seek its transcendence through normative criteria. Second, we need to stress the irreducible relation of freedom to embodiment and alterity. Thus, if the notion of responsibility in political life provokes an ethical radicalization of political difference, the question of freedom calls for supplementing the constitutive role of power by what Laclau calls the ‘dislocating’ effects of antagonism. Consequently, both responsibility and antagonism dramatize the limits of the determination of power/knowledge, the interruption of subjective identities and initiatives. This productive tension between determination and disruption, agency and event, in the very concept of antagonism is implied in many theories of modern power, but it is never sufficiently developed. On the one hand, antagonism is conceived in terms of historical relations of power/knowledge and is said to constitute political identities, discourses and historical objectivity; on the other hand, antagonism is understood as a disruptive event that reveals the limits of such constitution. Stemming from the relational character of discourse and power, and reflecting the radical contingency of social relations in democracy, antagonism, as Laclau and Mouffe, Foucault, Judith Butler and most of the social construction theorists argue, does not take place between agents with already established identities. Rather, it constitutes political identities and the interlocking mechanism of oppression based on race, gender and class. At the same time, antagonism conceived as a disruptive event – for instance, Laclau’s dislocation (1990) or Fanon’s ‘leap’ (1967: 229) – disrupts existing power relations and thereby blocks the full constitution of historical objectivity and subjective identities. The unpredictable emergence of antagonisms disrupts the sedimented power structures and reveals their contingent character. It is precisely this twofold character of antagonism – one that reveals the contingent constitution of social reality and subjective identities of race and gender, and their vulnerability in the face of new conflicts – that opens a possibility of freedom and political change.

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Insofar as this twofold conception of antagonism emphasizes both the formative effects of power and the limits of constitution, it reveals not only the contingency of power but also another form of alterity in political life. Specifically, since a disruptive force of antagonism cannot be integrated into discursive formations, it forms an outside of history. According to Laclau, ‘the crucial point is that antagonism is the limit of all objectivity’ (1990: 17). Consequently, it is not only ethical alterity that exceeds the determination of social relations, but antagonism itself. As the ambiguity between constitution and dislocation demonstrates, neither conflict nor democratic politics can be thought on the model of totality. More importantly, the alterity manifesting itself through the dislocating effects of antagonism allows us to formulate a heteronomous notion of freedom exceeding the agency of the subject. For what emerges from the tension between rupture and determination in history is the insight that freedom is neither an attribute nor a manifestation of the unencumbered will of the subject. To give an example of the tension between rupture and determination, I would like to refer, all too briefly, to the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s. The irruption and the rapid spread of occupational strikes all over the country and the eventual overthrow of the communist regime surpassed all the expectations and organizational efforts of the participants in that movement. As this example suggests, ‘freedom’ signifies the modality of a subjective and collective response to the unexpected emergence of antagonisms that disrupt the sedimented power structures and thus enable their transformation. Insofar as the rupture of the event transcends the historical forms of power/knowledge in which it nonetheless occurs, the political response to it neither occurs ex nihilo nor is predetermined by historical conditions; rather, it involves a strong element of unpredictability and creativity. Such an approach to freedom redefines political agency, not only by foregrounding the contextualization of decision and the contingency of historical power, but also by stressing the subject’s exposure to the unpredictability of the event. Consequently, freedom emerges from the unresolvable yet productive tension between the receptivity and the agency of the subject, between the constitutive role of power and the alterity of the event. What this tension emphasizes is

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both the indebtedness of freedom to alterity and the possibility of political transformation. The heteronomy of freedom is extended further beyond the initiative of the subject by the traumatic impact of the dislocating event. Although I cannot do justice, in this chapter, to the complex problematic of trauma and the enormous secondary literature it has produced, I do want to stress that trauma emphasizes most starkly the heteronomous and inassimilable aspects of freedom, which divides the subject from within and exposes her to what exceeds subjective experience, and yet enables the subject to move beyond the habitual and often defensive parameters of that experience.4 As Zˇizˇek suggests, Lacanian psychoanalysis redefines the dislocating effects of antagonism as encounters with the ‘traumatic kernel’ of the ‘real’, that is, with what exceeds and troubles signification. The most paradoxical consequence of such a psychoanalytic redefinition of the dislocating character of antagonism is that it reveals not only the traumatic impact of racial terror and sexual violence, but also the traumatic effects of liberation itself. For, on the one hand, the encounter with the real reveals the traumatic consequences of racial and sexual violence, which, at their most extreme, shatter the symbolic position of the subject. If unacknowledged and untreated, such traumatic violence can destroy the very possibility of becoming. As bell hooks powerfully argues, ‘until African Americans, and everybody else in the United States, are able to acknowledge the psychic trauma inflicted upon black folk by racist aggression and assault, there will be no collective cultural understanding of the reality that these wrongs cannot be redressed simply by programs for economic reparation, equal opportunity . . . or attempts to create social equality between the races’ (1995: 137–8). On the other hand, however, a traumatic encounter with the real can also open a possibility of transformation insofar as it dislocates hegemonic structures of domination and their hold on the subject. According to Alenka Zupancˇicˇ, ‘the Real . . . turns our symbolic universe upside down and leads to the reconfiguration of this universe’ (2000: 235). For a powerful political analysis of such a ‘real’ event that ‘turns our symbolic universe upside down and leads to the reconfiguration of this universe’, we can refer to Frantz

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Fanon’s discussion of the Algerian revolution. Fanon confronts the ambiguous relation between the real and revolutionary struggle in his diagnosis of the bodily effects of racial oppression and liberation. In Fanon’s theory of revolutionary violence, the rupture of antagonism that shatters imaginary, bodily coherence is not only a traumatic effect of domination – which he famously diagnosed as the ‘epidermalization’ of the colonial oppression on the surface of the black skin – but an equally traumatic condition of contestation and freedom. Thus, if, in White Masks, Black Skin, he focuses primarily on the traumatic effects of racial oppression, in The Wretched of the Earth, he analyses the traumatic aspect of the struggle for liberation (1963; 1967). What is most difficult and controversial in Fanon’s work is his claim that liberation depends on a confrontation with ‘real hell’ of the body, ‘where the categories of sense and non-sense are not yet invoked’ (1967: 9). Fanon’s rethinking of the rupture of antagonism reveals the extimacy of the ‘violence just under the skin’ (1963: 71), which suggests a traumatic confrontation with the real. Enabling a symbolic resignification of the colonized black body, which Fanon associates with the creation of the new skin, the rupture of the antagonism in the body confronts the revolutionary subject with ‘a zone of nonbeing . . . where an authentic upheaval can be born’ (1967: 8). Yet, under what conditions does the traumatic rupture of antagonism merely intensify destructive injury inflicted by white domination, and under what conditions does it enable revolutionary struggle? This difficult question leads Fanon to conceptualize the struggle for decolonization in a new way, by confronting the traumatic impact of revolutionary struggle and its relation to embodiment. As Fanon’s analysis of the mental disorders created by revolution suggests, the separation between liberation and the traumatic shattering of identity is always uncertain. Nonetheless, if the traumatic rupture of the real antagonism is to have a liberating effect, it has to be accompanied by political organization. Consequently, Fanon’s emphasis on the insufficiency of spontaneous revolutionary violence and his focus on the organization of revolutionary movement point not only to the traumatic exposure to the real, but also to hegemonic articulation as a necessary element of freedom. It is the

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symbolic, institutional aspect of revolutionary practice that redirects the negativity of ‘that violence which is just under the skin’ (1963, 71) from the shattering of the oppressive colonial world to the creation of the new forms of life. By exposing both the traumatic and the liberating effects of the revolutionary restructuring of the world, Fanon presents a heteronomous notion of embodied freedom, one which goes beyond any simple notion of the agency of the subject. Irreducible to voluntarism, such a heteronomous freedom emerges from an uncertain and often unpredictable negotiation between the rupture of revolutionary antagonism and the organization of revolutionary movement. Fanon’s revolutionary practice neither represses the traumatic event nor repeats it in the form of acting out, but emerges from the gap between the rupture of event and the subsequent (re-)symbolization and organization of revolutionary coalitions. Thus, what Fanon contributes to the theory of heteronomous freedom is the fact that freedom emerges from the collective, organized response to traumatizing bodily effects of the revolutionary event. In order to contest the binary opposition between freedom and responsibility, I have redefined both concepts in relation to traumatizing encounters with alterity and have stressed their heteronomous character, irreducible to the voluntarism of the subject. The remaining question, however, is how to distinguish and negotiate between different notions of alterity – in particular, between the ethical signification of the other person and the impersonal alterity of the event of the real. In response to this question, let us turn to a vacillating distinction in Levinas’s texts between the face of the Other and the anonymous alterity of il y a (there is), which is precisely what signifies the horrifying indeterminateness of the event without an agent – the ‘it happens’. Exceeding the categories of interiority and exteriority, ‘there is’, like the real, can be experienced only retrospectively as a threat of depersonalization, as the ‘mute menace’ of the anonymous foreignness of existence without a subject. Although both forms of alterity – the Other and the event – interrupt individual and collective identifications, Levinas nonetheless stresses two differences between them. First, unlike the pure rupture of the anonymous event, the faceto-face encounter involves a minimal linguistic element of

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ethical saying. Because of this linguistic element, some commentators on Levinas suggest that the face of the Other is already a sublimation of the real (see, for instance, Assoun, 1998: 97). Thanks to this relation to language, ethical alterity is not an impersonal event but a call to responsibility. Second, the event of ‘there is’ (the real) and ‘face to face’ represent interrelated but different modalities of trauma. Unlike the depersonalizing threat of the real, the traumatic relation to the Other constitutes the singularity of the subject – not in the sense of identity but in the sense of the irreplaceability of responsibility, which no one can assume in ‘my’ place. Despite these differences, Levinas suggests that the threatening anonymity of ‘there is’ is a precondition of ethical experience. Levinas posits a double ‘relation’ between the rupture of ‘there is’ and the ethical encounter with the Other: the interruption of the ego by the real opens the possibility of an ethical relation, while the ethical encounter ‘rescues’ the subject from the vacillation between sense and nonsense into which the event of ‘there is’ deteriorates. In Otherwise than being, Levinas argues that the recurrence of ‘there is’ shakes the ego from its ‘imperialism’, ex-posing the subject to the Other (1981: 162–5). Thus, the relation to ‘there is’ (the real) might be described as the ‘original traumatism’, which, as Simon Critchley argues, constitutes a precondition of ethical relation (1999: 183–97). Indeed, it is the traumatic threat of the real that prevents responsibility from collapsing into voluntarism. Although I agree with Levinas that the exposure to the rupture of event is a precondition of responsibility, I do not share his existentialist anguish about senselessness and the suffocating void. On the contrary, the event character of ‘there is’ and its relation to dislocating antagonism, I argue, are also conditions of heteronomous freedom. Consequently, the relation between the ‘there is’ and ‘the face’ of the Other is not about ‘saving’ the subject from the suffocating absurdity of the real, but about the necessary co-implication of freedom and obligation. What are the implications of this intersection between freedom and obligation for politics? As we have seen, what turns the encounter with the real into a possibility of freedom is the necessity of hegemonic articulation of

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antagonism and the creation of new forms of life. Yet, since democratic praxis is necessarily intersubjective, implicated in multiple relations to others, we can say that hegemonic praxis is always already marked by the ethical saying, by the exposure of political agents to the traumatic accusation and obligation coming from the Other. Thus, if the event of ‘there is’ (or the rupture of the real) is an ontological precondition of both obligation and heteronomous freedom, on the political level, the intersection between freedom and responsibility occurs at the moment of democratic practice. Consider, for instance, the growing opposition in the US against the war in Iraq. Emerging in response to the shameful events of escalating violence in Iraq, destruction, torture in American prisons and the violations of human rights by the American government, and strengthened by each new occurrence of anti-war protest and rally, this coalition of divergent, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, liberal or simply anti-Republican forces is arguably a belated manifestation of heteronomous freedom. Yet, the forming of this democratic coalition is not merely a collective expression of will but also a taking of responsibility for the freedom of others, a response to the mute call of the tortured or dead bodies of the victims of this war. Such an intersection between freedom and responsibility emphasizes, on the one hand, the political inflection of obligation by making it inseparable from action and the accountability for social wrongs and, on the other hand, the ethical inflection of heteronomous freedom by showing that the engagement in political struggles against racism, sexual discrimination or economic inequalities is motivated by responsibility. Furthermore, the intersection between obligation and freedom complicates the very form of hegemonic articulation by introducing to the aporia of equivalence and difference the anarchic trace of ethical saying, or the call to responsibility, as the source of the ethical aspiration for a just society. By situating the conflicting relations between difference and equivalence, the particular and universal, within the ethical disturbance of the Other, such a revision of hegemonic articulation shifts the basis of political coalitions from identification with others to ethical accountability and the response to alterity. That is to say, what holds the political coalition together is not primarily

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an identification with the agent claiming for itself the task of universal emancipation, as Laclau argues, but a shared accountability for the multiple forms of the exploitations of others. Consequently, the articulation of the partial equivalence on which the tenuous coherence of the coalition is based – such as the opposition to the war in Iraq – emerges not from the negotiations between incompatible, narcissistic demands of various groups, but from the negotiation between incompatible responsibilities. Because coalitions and ethical aspirations are both motivated by accountability for the suffering and exploitation of others, democratic politics draws its ethical ‘dignity’ not merely from the ideals of equality and freedom for all, but from infinite responsibility. In this way, the ethical limits of articulation do not bear solely a negative signification of disruption; on the contrary, it is precisely these limits that link democratic politics to anarchic responsibility, to the discourse of desire and to the antagonistic negotiations of justice.

And sexual difference? The final claim I want to make in this proposal of a feminist ethics of democracy is that the multiple intersections between antagonism, freedom and alterity are inseparable from sexuality and sexual difference. However, given the justifiable and often devastating criticisms of white solipsism, the disregard of race, and the ‘hetero-pathos’ that implicitly or explicitly characterize most theories of sexual difference, is it still possible to maintain that feminist ethics depends on a category of sexual difference? And, if so, in what way? I have argued elsewhere that these important criticisms should not compel us to abandon the concept of sexual difference but, on the contrary, should motivate us to reformulate it, so that it becomes more dynamic, more ethical and more democratic (2001: 152). In other words, feminist ethics needs a theory of sexual difference that can underscore a possibility of social change and ethical respect for alterity, while at the same time accounting for the differences and antagonisms among women. Perhaps such a theory is incomplete, but let me try to suggest some of its parameters.5 As Lacan’s emphasis on the antinomies of

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sexuation (see Copjec, 1994: 201–36) and Irigaray’s stress on the ‘impossible labor of the negative’ (see Deutscher, 2002: 107–20) suggest, sexual difference reveals the internal division and limitation of the sexed subject – that is, it points to the limits of the symbolic positions rather than to an identification with a positive identity. What blocks the full constitution of individual or collective identities is the ‘disappropriating’ character of sexuation. As Irigaray puts it, ‘The mine of the subject is always already marked by disappropriation . . . Being a man or a woman means not being the whole of the subject or of the community or of spirit, as well as not being entirely one’s self’ (1996: 106). In the psychoanalytic context, this formulation of sexual difference as the impossible suggests once again a relation to the register of the real, but this time what precipitates such an encounter is not the traumatic effect of sexist or racist violence, but the ontological disappropriation of sexuate being. As Zˇizˇek similarly writes, ‘the claim that sexual difference is “real” equals the claim that it is “impossible” – impossible to symbolize, to formulate as a symbolic norm’ (1999: 273). To develop the implications of the limit of symbolization disclosed through sexual difference we have to consider, nonetheless, its dislocating effects in the context of the historical determinations of gender and racial identities. We have reached an impasse in the discussions of sexual difference because it is always reduced to only one side of the dislocation/determination divide: if we emphasize only dislocation or the limit of meaning, as psychoanalytic theories tend to do, we end up with a certain overvaluation of failure. If, on the contrary, we stress only the historical determination of sexuality, we tend to collapse sexual difference with gender and thus to foreclose its eccentric aspect. Therefore, just as I stress the dual aspect of political antagonism – rupture and symbolization – so too do I argue for a reconsideration of sexual difference in the context of both dislocation and the determination of power/knowledge. By exposing the contradictions and incompletion of historically constituted identities, this approach to sexual difference prevents the reification of existing gender and racial stereotypes as political or ‘natural’ norms. Furthermore, it emphasizes the transformative effects of sexual

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dislocation, by interpreting the ‘disappropriating’ character of sexual difference in temporal terms as a possibility of becoming, desire, indeed, as the opening of freedom. However, such a dynamic interpretation of sexual difference is inextricably linked to antagonism, since the transformation of sedimented gender and racial norms is intertwined with a struggle against the multiple forms of exploitation that constitute these norms. The labour of the negative in this context cannot be just an abstract acknowledgement of racial and class differences among women, as is the case in Irigaray’s work but, first of all, a contestation of the hegemonic universality of whiteness, class privilege and other types of domination. Only then can sexual difference be seen as a condition of social transformation of the sedimented power structures shaping differences and inequalities among women and, thus, a condition of heteronomous freedom. Consequently, even though the limit disclosed through sexual difference is not an effect of political struggle, when it is considered in the context of racialized, gendered determination of power/knowledge, it becomes intertwined with antagonism. This is the political dimension of sexual difference that neither Irigaray nor Lacan sufficiently address. The last point I want to make is that, contra Levinas, sexual difference is not only intertwined with antagonism, heteronomous freedom and the possibility of becoming, but also with the ethical respect for alterity in erotic relations.6 To articulate an ethical encounter with alterity, the impossible and negative aspect of sexual difference has to be considered specifically in the context of eroticism, which obviously cannot be reduced to normative heterosexuality. Again, feminist and psychoanalytic theories have reached an impasse in this respect by confusing sexual difference, that is, an internal limitation and disappropriation of the subject’s position, with erotic relations, which in turn have been all too often conceptualized on the model of a heterosexual couple. Responding to this confusion of sexual difference and heteronormativity in Irigaray’s work, Butler argues that an ethics of sexual difference makes ‘heterosexuality into the privileged locus of ethics, as if heterosexual relations, because they putatively crossed this alterity, which is the alterity of sexual difference, were somehow more

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ethical, more other-directed’ (1998: 28). To avoid such heteronormativity, I stress the distinction between sexual difference, which foregrounds the disappropriation, limitation and incompleteness of any sexual identity, and sexual relation, which refers to multiple forms of eroticism beyond homosexual/heterosexual binary (see Ziarek, 2001: 152–72). Insofar as the labour of the negative accomplished through sexual difference negates either projections of the negative on the Other or the reduction of the Other to the complement of the subject, it enables the respect for the alterity of the Other in erotic relations. In other words, the singularity of the Other in sexual relation cannot be equated with the other sex. As Elizabeth Grosz and Pheng Cheah claim, ‘neither respect for the other sex nor fidelity to one’s sex necessarily implies an obligatory desire for the other sex’ (1998: 13). The impossibility of sexual difference reveals the fact that it is not only the hostile other, not only the irruption of antagonism, which blocks the full constitution of identities, but the very condition of sexuate being. This impossibility enables an erotic relation to the Other that is irreducible to the political structures of domination or to the narcissistic relations of complementarity. In this context, taking the negative upon oneself implies acknowledging the limitation and disappropriation of the sexed subject for the sake of the Other’s becoming. The consideration of sexual difference in the context of a feminist ethics of democracy not only enables us to contest the binary opposition of freedom and responsibility by exposing their disembodied, desexualized character. More importantly, the disappropriating character of sexual difference poses the question of whether the investment in unified society without antagonism is not in fact a compensation for the loss of being and the lack of complementarity in sexual relations. By dramatizing, in Irigaray’s words, ‘not being the whole of the subject or of the community’, the disappropriating character of sexual difference undercuts the fantasmatic, imaginary constructions of ‘all’ at the basis of the compensatory function of the social bond. Consequently, the disappropriation of sexual difference, like the disturbing withdrawal of alterity from political identifications, is what widens the gap between political praxis and the imaginary unity of a reconciled society. By keeping this gap open, by

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insisting on the impossibility of wholeness in collective life, we can cultivate a necessary sobriety in politics and ethics in order to disengage the ethical aspiration to freedom of all from the recuperation of the loss of enjoyment. Only then can ethical motivation of political praxis remain ethical and prevent a deterioration of postmodern politics into an ethical indifference to the injustices and suffering of others. Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

For diverse mediations between ethics and politics, see for example, Rey Chow (1998), Drucilla Cornell (1991), Simon Critchley (1999), Jacques Derrida (1997), Janet R. Jacobsen (1998), Rosalyn Diprose (2002), Iris Marion Young (1997) and Mark Dooley (ed.) (1999). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak stresses the ‘gap between the historicalpolitical’ and the impossibility of the ethical experience (2001: 215–36). For different examples of feminist reformulations of freedom, see Drucilla Cornell (1998) and Wendy Brown (1995: 3–30). Judith Butler’s notion of performative reinscription (1993: 15) can be read as another instance of a contextualized freedom beyond subjective voluntarism. For the diverse approaches to trauma, history and psychoanalysis, see, for instance, Dominick LaCapra (1994), Cathy Caruth (1996), Linda Belau and Petar Ramadanovic (eds) (2002) and Kelly Oliver (2001). For the analysis of trauma in the context of Levinas’s work, see Critchley (1999: 183–98). I develop such a theory elsewhere through critical engagements with Irigaray, Lacan and Levinas (2001: 151–82). For a feminist critique of Levinas in the context of eroticism and reproduction, see Guenther (2006).

References Assoun, Paul-Laurent (1998), ‘The subject and the other in Levinas and Lacan’ (translated by D. Jackson), in S. Harasym (ed.), Levinas and Lacan: the missed encounter (Albany: SUNY Press). Belau, Linda and Ramadanovic, Petar (eds) (2002), Topologies of trauma: essays on the limit of knowledge and memory (New York: Other Press). Brown, Wendy (1995), States of injury: power and freedom in late modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex (New York: Routledge). Butler, Judith (1998), ‘The future of sexual difference: an interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell’. Diacritics: Special Issue, Irigaray and the Political Future of Sexual Difference, 28: 19–42. Caruth, Cathy (1996), Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, history (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Chow, Rey (1998), Ethics after idealism: theory, culture, ethnicity, reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

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Copjec, Joan (1994), Read my desire: Lacan against historicists (Cambridge: The MIT Press). Cornell, Drucilla (1991), Beyond accommodation: ethical feminism, deconstruction, and the law (New York: Routledge). Cornell, Drucilla (1998), At the heart of freedom: feminism, sex, equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Critchley, Simon (1999), Ethics, politics, subjectivity (London: Verso). Derrida, Jacques (1997), Politics of friendship (translated by R. Kearney and G. Collins) (London: Verso). Deutscher, Penelope (2002), A politics of impossible difference: the later work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Diprose, Rosalyn (2002), Corporeal generosity (Albany: SUNY Press). Dooley, Mark (ed.) (1999), Questioning ethics: contemporary debates in philosophy (New York: Routledge). Fanon, Frantz (1963), The wretched of the Earth (translated by C. Farrington) (New York: Grove Press). Fanon, Frantz (1967), White masks, black skin (translated by C.L. Markmann) (New York: Grove Press). Grosz, Elizabeth and Cheah, Pheng (1998), ‘Of being-two’. Diacritics: Special Issue, Irigaray and the Political Future of Sexual Difference, 28: 3–18. Guenther, Lisa (2006), The gift of the other: Levinas and the politics of reproduction (Albany: SUNY Press). hooks, bell (1990), Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics (Boston: South End Press). hooks, bell (1995), Killing rage, ending racism (New York: Henry Holt and Company). Irigaray, Luce (1996), I love to you: sketch of a possible felicity in history (translated by A. Martin) (New York and London: Routledge). Jacobsen, Janet R. (1998), Working alliances and the politics of difference: diversity and feminist ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). LaCapra, Dominick (1994), Representing the Holocaust: history, theory, trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Laclau, Ernesto (1990), New reflections on the revolution of our time (London: Verso). Laclau, Ernesto (2000), ‘Identity and hegemony: the role of universality in the constitution of political logics’, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Contingency, hegemony, universality: contemporary dialogues on the left (London: Verso). Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal (1985), Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics (New York: Verso). Levinas, Emmanuel (1981), Otherwise than being or beyond essence (translated by A. Lingis) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff). Levinas, Emmanuel (1986), ‘The trace of the other’ (translated by A. Lingis), in M.C. Taylor (ed.), Deconstruction in context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Levinas, Emmanuel (1996), Basic philosophical writings, A. Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

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Mouffe, Chantal (2000), ‘Which ethics for democracy?’ in M. Garber, B. Hansen and R.L. Walkowitz (eds), The turn to ethics (New York: Routledge): 85–94. Oliver, Kelly (2001), Witnessing: beyond recognition (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press). Scott, Joan W. (2001), ‘Deconstructing equality-versus-difference or the uses of poststructuralist theory for feminism’, in A.C. Hermann and A.J. Stewart (eds), Theorizing feminism: parallel trends in the humanities and social sciences (Boulder: Westview). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2001), ‘A moral dilemma’, in H. Marchitello (ed.), What happens to history: the renewal of ethics in contemporary thought (New York: Routledge). Young, Iris Marion (1997), Intersecting voices: dilemmas of gender, political philosophy, and policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska (2001), An ethics of dissensus: postmodernity, feminism, and the politics of radical democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Zˇizˇek, Slavoj (1999), The ticklish subject: the absent center of political ontology (London: Verso). Zupancˇicˇ, Alenka (2000), Ethics of the real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso).

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9/11 23n.4, 93, 94, 103, 124, 129, 174, 192, 217n.7, 243 abandonment 116, 118–29, 225, 227, 230–2, 235, 238n.11, n.14 aggressive 18, 112–13 economies of 113, 116, 118, 129 see also indigeneity abjection 84, 101, 108n.6, 141, 142 aboriginal freehold 127, 131n.4 Aboriginal Land Rights Act 131n.4 Aboriginal(s) 118, 121, 127, 231, 235, 238n.6, n.7, n.13 culture 120, 121 law 120 sexual abuse 121 absorption 62–3, 70, 130, 218n.14, 269 abstract(ion) 4, 40, 45, 55, 73, 81, 100, 125, 140, 158, 163, 175n.11, 231, 266, 268, 281 Abu Ghraib 17, 72, 97, 101, 103, 104, 105, 108n.5, 135, 151n.3 abuse 8, 38, 44, 85, 97, 101, 103, 105, 118, 120, 135, 203 drug 122 sexual 118, 120, 121 accommodation 67, 74, 123, 160, 242, 245 accountability 6, 8, 34, 38, 241–58, 278–9 account(s) 21, 33, 45, 87n.8, 117, 193, 220, 241–58 aesthetics 141, 152n.9, 166, 217n.13

affect(s) 59, 112, 114, 199, 202, 217n.5, n.13, 222–4, 228, 232, 236 affections 38 auto-affection 193 affective aporias 211–14 affective bonds 2, 233 affective melee 216 affective paradox 20, 205 affective politics 20, 199–218, 232 conflicting 20, 199–218 political 199–218, 232 see also compassion; fear; love; passion(s) Afghanistan 72, 74, 79 Africa 3, 8, 9, 74, 142, 143, 148 South Africa 236 sub-Saharan 143, 147 African-Americans 9, 23n.4, 29, 274 Agamben, Giorgio 69, 73, 85, 108n.5, 140, 164, 165, 175n.8 agape 208 agency 56, 57, 142, 158, 160, 171, 172, 245, 255, 264, 266, 271–4, 276, 278 agonism 15, 59, 168, 216 agonistic accumulation 55 agonistic democracy 14, 214 agonistic pluralism 204–5, 216 agonistic politics 6, 217 Al-Jazeera 152n.7 Al-Qaeda 9, 75, 81, 82, 100, 113 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act 131n.2 Algeria 193 Algerian revolution 275 alienation 7, 9, 35, 101

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aliens 72, 73, 166 alterity 1, 13, 15–22, 33, 40, 49, 51, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64, 111, 113, 116, 157–74, 174n.3, 175n.11, 188, 212–15, 221, 223–4, 227, 233, 235, 239n.15, 250, 264–8, 271–4, 276–9, 281–2 distortion of 45 representation of 133–51 Althusser, Louis 158 ambiguity 18, 35, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108n.6, 134, 150, 175n.11,192, 212, 218n.13, 273, 275 American Indian(s) 122, 123, 131n.2 American Indian Religious Freedom Restoration Act (AIRFRA) 122 anarchism 22, 168, 264, 265, 266–9, 278–9 anarchy 14, 122 ancestors 127, 148 Anderson, Patricia 120 animal(s) 56, 63, 84, 92, 107, 108n.8, 113, 140 life 84 phobia 212 state 142 animosity 203, 216 antagonism 2, 6, 8, 17, 57, 59, 203, 215, 216, 262, 263, 265, 268, 269, 270, 271–9, 280, 281, 281 anthropology 110, 112, 179, 180, 183, 184, 185, 192, 204 anthropos 179, 182, 184, 185, 186, 192 antiphonic structure 228, 229, 233, 235 anti-representation 138, 144, 150 anti-Semitism 20, 71, 200–2, 216n.3, 264 anxiety 171, 205, 207 Anzaldúa, Gloria 259 apathy 6, 17, 72, 145 aporia 139–40, 144, 150, 159, 180, 192, 211, 213, 270, 271, 278 Appiah, K.A. 12 Arar, Maher 9, 23n.5 Arendt, Hannah 81, 161, 168–72, 186–7 Argo, Nichole 82

Aristotle 181, 182, 188–9, 204 Arneil, Barbara 175n.6 Asia 74, 142 South Asia 9 Assoun, Paul-Laurent 277 Attorney General (American) 97, 123–5 Austin, John L. 81 Australia 10, 18, 98, 118, 121, 124, 126, 127, 243 Austria 12 authoritarianism 4 authority 1, 7, 15, 23n.5, 69, 91, 98, 163, 164, 165, 166, 172, 243–6, 254–5 auto-immunity 183, 192–4, 196 autological subject 113, 116–18, 121, 124, 126, 128 autonomy 2, 5, 7, 8, 21, 31, 54, 61, 65n.3, 124, 151, 157–60, 162, 172, 236, 258 avowal 71, 230, 231, 233 disavowal 18, 90, 104, 105, 226, 231, 233 unavowable silence 196 ayahuasca tea 122, 124–5 Badiou, Alain 140 Balkans 3, 218n.14 ballot(s) 16, 34, 38, 43 private 16, 30 secret 3, 29–32, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 43 Bannerji, Himani 4–5, 259n.3 bare life 85, 95, 108n.5, 140 Barry, Brian 175n.6 Bataille, Georges 68, 83, 84 Baudrillard, Jean 151n.2 Bauman, Zygmunt 203, 205–12, 215–16 Liquid Love 206 ‘liquid world’ 205–6 Baumeister, Andrea 175n.6 BBC 3, 152n.7 Beacroft, Laura 120 Beamish, Susan 227 Beaudoin, Pati 227–35, 238n.9 beginning 169–70, 186 being-in-common 201, 210, 216n.2 being-together 164, 185, 199 Belau, Linda 158, 283n.4 belonging 18, 52, 59, 63, 73, 110–13, 116–18, 120–1, 124–8, 164, 241, 246 Belyuen 127–8

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Benhabib, Seyla 13, 22n.1, n.2, 254 Bennett, Jill 223, 224, 229, 233–36, 239n.2 Bentham, Jeremy 38 Benwell, Leanne 237n.4 Bergen, Peter 81–2 Berlin, Isaiah 167 Bernasconi, Robert 16–17, 32–3, 36, 44 Bernstein, Viv 79 binding 222, 230, 232 bin Laden, Osama 75 Bindman, David 35 biopolitics 86 biopower 262 Black feminist thought 248 Blanchot, Maurice 189, 197n.2 le pas au-delà 189 Bloom, Mia 82, 83 body, the/bodies 57, 60, 63, 65n.3, 78–80, 86, 90, 92, 93, 95–6, 99–103, 106, 114, 128, 140, 167, 170, 172–3, 206, 210, 213–14, 224–5, 227, 230, 235, 236, 243, 245, 254, 275, 276, 278 ambiguity of 100 bare 99–100 bodily existence 55 bodily identification 229 body-bombers 96, 100 count 71, 72 politic 100 public 31 social 40 virtual 100 Boltanski, Luc 151n.5 Boulder Court of Appeals 122–3 boundaries 2, 5, 58, 67, 73, 101, 159, 212 Bourdieu, Pierre 105 Bradford riots 8 Britain 7, 29, 30, 32, 34–6, 43 brother, the 180, 181, 189 brotherhood 189, 203 Brough, Mal 119 Browne, Craig 4, 6, 14 Brown, Wendy 2–3, 5, 11, 22n.1, 159–61, 166, 174, 174n.1, 175n.5, 283n.3 Bulkeley, James 30, 37 Bush, George W. 67, 69, 75–8, 86n.5, 93, 94, 97, 107n.1 Administration 69, 86n.5, 97 Butler, Judith 90–2, 104–6, 108n.5, 166, 175n.10, 220, 221–2,

227, 229, 231–2, 234–5, 242, 251–4, 272, 281, 283n.3 Cain and Abel 189 Cameron, Stevie 226 camouflage 18, 110–13, 121–30 campaign funding 31, 44 Canada 7, 9, 10, 20, 157, 164, 220, 226, 230, 242–3 Canadian Press 225 capital 4, 13, 99 global 148, 157, 174 capitalism 4, 135, 147, 149, 172, 196, 246, 247, 252, 255, 256, 259n.4 Caputo, John 189, 197n.2 Carens, Joseph 175n.6, 243 Carter, April and Geoffrey Stokes 4, 7, 10 Caruth, Cathy 158, 283n.4 Casanova, Jean-Claude 7 Cavarero, Adriana 94, 95, 96, 99–101 Chacón, Oscar A. 8 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 111 Chandler, Mielle 17–18, 65n.4 Cheah, Pheng 282 Cheney, Dick 97 child(ren) 3, 9, 35, 80, 103, 118–20, 144, 146, 211, 213 Aboriginal 118–21, 127 black African 143–44, 146 childhood 103 sexual abuse 118–21 grandchildren 9, 68 China 148 Chinese mandarins 34 choice(s) 17, 44, 60, 74, 75, 81, 119, 204, 220, 266, 267, 270 lack of 103 Chow, Rey 265, 283n.1 citizen(s) 3, 9, 13, 16, 17, 21, 31, 35, 42, 44, 48, 53, 68, 72, 73, 86, 124, 133, 135, 137, 140, 145, 150, 158, 166, 172, 181, 201, 205, 215, 241–3, 245, 258, 258n.2 citizenry 85, 174n.1 citizenship 3, 11–12, 13, 80, 159, 200, 214, 241, 244, 245, 258 non-citizen 13, 242 city(ies) 33, 40, 73, 119, 224 civilians 71–2, 81, 86n.2, n.3, 98, 102–3, 108n.7, 196 civility 19, 35, 97

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1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 10111 11 12 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 42111

civilization 10, 12, 17, 75, 93–4, 96, 99, 114, 148, 191 civil rights 10, 13, 136, 159 civil society 11, 13, 136, 138, 145, 147, 148 civil war 143, 164 class 4, 21, 39, 40, 229, 241, 247–8, 259n.4, 263, 269, 272, 281 classism 92 Clegg, Nick 113, 116 climate 143 change 30 Clinton, Hilary 77–8 CNN 152n.7 Coady, Tony 108n.4 cognition 53–61, 62 Cohen, Stan 138 coherence 81, 118, 171, 243, 275, 279 Collins, Patricia Hill 247–9, 259n.3 colonialism 17, 41, 48, 57, 98, 105, 139, 183, 231, 235, 275, 276 anti-colonialism 112 colonial imaginary 3, 53 see also post-colonialism colonies 118 colonization 48, 52–3, 57, 102, 151n.4, 175n.8, 236, 265, 275 colonizers 102 decolonization 275 ontological 52–3 settler- 102, 112 comfort 6, 7, 44, 102, 111, 128, 205 communication 100, 119, 129, 139, 206, 214, 216, 218n.14, 224, 247, 251, 253, 264 communicative reason 115, 204, 241 communism 200–1, 217n.4, 270, 273 communitarianism 12–13, 14, 21, 243 community(ies) 1, 2, 9–19, 20, 22, 37, 44, 113, 116, 131n.2, n.4, 135, 149, 152n.13, 157, 160, 174, 181, 186, 189, 200, 202–4, 209–11, 214–16, 216n.2, 217n.5, n.8, 220, 224, 231–2, 234, 243, 246, 271, 280, 282 without community 189 rural 119

Community Development Employment Programme (CDEP) 119 compassion 97, 202–4, 206, 216 compassion fatigue 141, 143 complementarity 68, 264, 282 comportment 221–4, 229–30, 233–7, 239n.15 Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 8 Congress (US) 122, 123 conscience 30, 32, 37, 43, 146, 158, 216 consciousness 158, 171, 196, 264 self-consciousness 57 conscription 80 Constant, Benjamin 34 continentalists 14, 15, 158, 170 Controlled Substances Act (CSA) 122–3, 124, 125 Cooke, Jacob E. 33 Copjec, Joan 280 Cornell, Drucilla 283n.1, n.3 corporation(s) 60 multi-national 180 cosmopolitanism 13, 15, 135–40, 144, 147, 150, 174n.4, 180, 183 cosmopolitan visuality 136, 139, 142, 150 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 158 Crignon, Philippe 147 criminals 34, 98, 101, 125 criminalization 8 crisis 1, 2, 5, 7, 11–15, 19–22, 22n.2, 23n.3, 32, 40, 44–5, 91, 133, 140, 143–5, 148–51, 179–80, 184–5, 191, 196, 196n.1, 203–5, 215–16, 220, 223, 236, 242–5, 250, 254–5 Critchley, Simon 277, 283n.1, n.4 Crozier, Michel 7 Cruikshank, Barbara 244–6, 258, 258n.2 Cuba 72, 97 culture 2–3, 22n.1, 96, 99–101, 103, 123, 134, 143, 204, 228 Aboriginal 119, 120–3, 131n.2 American 103 of fear 203 Jewish 201 of liberalism 2 political 13 visual 95, 227 warrior 84, 92 cynicism 7, 69, 76, 77

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Dalton, John 161, 174n.1 Darfur 138, 148 Darwin, Charles 74, 127 Dean, Amber 238n.6, n.8 dead, the 86n.2, 96, 187, 201, 277 violently 20, 219–35, 238n.15 death(s) 8, 67, 70, 77, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 86n.2, n.3, 102, 107, 108n.7, n.8, 129, 149, 170, 189, 193, 194, 207, 214, 222, 223, 225–6, 230–31, 234, 235, 237n.2, 238n.12 camps 202 drive 196 instinct 182 lifedeath 224 of others 70–4 violent 20, 78, 81, 220, 223–5, 228, 233, 237 de Beauvoir, Simone 145 Debord, Guy 141 Declaration of Independence 166 deconstruction 15, 108n.3, 159, 161, 170, 173, 185, 186, 192, 193, 196, 251–4, 258, 258n.2 Deleuze, Gilles 262 deliberative sense 114–15, 128 De Man, Paul 158 De Mel, Neloufer 83 demos 2, 3, 5, 163, 167, 181, 192 de Rato, Rodrigo 152n.13 deregulation 149 global 8 Derrida, Jacques 19, 42, 108n.3, 158, 162, 173, 175n.4, n.12, 179, 183–7, 197n.2, 262, 283n.1 ‘The ends of man’ 179–80 The politics of friendship 181, 188–90 Rogues 181–2, 192–5, 197 desire 17, 35, 68, 74–5, 78, 80–1, 83, 85–6, 106, 110, 160, 168, 171, 193, 206, 228, 259n.5, 263, 279, 281–2 destruction 20, 70, 72, 85, 94, 96, 213, 223, 278 Deutscher, Penelope 280 Deveaux, Monique 175 Dhamoon, Rita Kaur 20–1, 175n.6 dialectic(s) 14, 40, 45, 51, 63, 117, 167, 185, 203, 209–10, 217n.10, 249, 252, 269 Dietz, Mary 11, 12

difference 11, 13–14, 17–18, 21–2, 48–9, 53, 70, 72–3, 115, 124, 140, 150–1, 158, 161–2, 166, 171–3, 175n.11, 190, 194, 203, 210, 218n.14, 230–1, 236, 243–8, 250, 251, 254–6, 258, 258n.2, 259n.4, 263, 265–72 class 281 cultural 5, 130, 140, 200, 265–8 equality-difference debate 159, 270, 271, 278 identity-difference 14, 15, 17, 255 national 179, 192 racial 4, 281 radical 1, 14, 115, 170, 173 religious 67, 200 sexual 262–2, 279–81 social 13, 111, 121, 140, 172, 244, 248–8, 251, 252, 255, 259n.4, 265 dignity 141, 142, 152n.9, 184, 200, 236, 279 Dill, Bonnie Thornton 248, 259n.4 Diprose, Rosalyn 283n.1 disappropriation 280–2 disaster(s) 19, 43, 138, 140–3, 145, 147 disavowal 18, 90, 104–5, 226, 230–1, 233 discourse 17, 21, 32, 34, 86n.11, 110, 113, 158, 175n.11, 179, 193, 196, 204, 217n.3, 226, 232, 234, 235, 237n.1, 254, 263, 266, 268–70, 272 of aesthetics 217n.13 of autology and geneaology 113, 117 of desire 279 discursive structuring ethics/ethical 13, 21, 134 of fear 199 of human rights 136 of love 199, 203, 208, 211, 217n.11 of sacrifice 67, 68 of the same 265 of social belonging 18, 118, 120, 124, 128 war 76, 79 disequilibrium 18, 92, 264, 266 disjunction 218n.14, 262, 271 dislocation 186, 194, 265, 272–4, 277, 280–2 dispossession 59

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disruption 16, 21, 62, 102, 172, 242, 254–6, 264–5, 267, 271–3, 279 dissensus 21 ethics of 263, 269 politics of 21, 23n.6 diversity 11–12, 15, 113, 160, 241–2, 245, 250 cultural 11, 241, 250 domination 58, 71, 147, 161, 183, 244–5, 247–9, 252–3, 256, 258, 263, 265, 274–5, 281–2 colonial 98 economic 130 matrix of 247–50 non-domination 241 white 275 Dooley, Mark 283n.1 Drogin, Bob 77 Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) 124, 126, 131n.3 drugs 120, 122, 127, 226, 231 war on drugs 9, 23n.4 economy(ies) 6, 8, 11, 48–50, 78, 112–14, 151, 152n.13 economics 53, 56–7, 60–2, 67–9, 74–5, 78, 102, 107, 114, 130, 138, 149, 141, 146, 148–9, 151, 165–6, 190, 201, 274 conditions 7 exchange 172 globalization 4 inequalities 246, 278 macroeconomics 152n.13 market 4 Edmonton 20, 225–36, 237n.4, 238n.11, n.12, 238–9n.14 education 9, 79, 119, 120, 127, 152n.13, 222, 228, 235, 242 ego 2, 51, 54–6, 59–64, 65n.2, n.5, 214, 277 pre-social 65 sensorial egoism 64 Eichmann, Adolf 81 Eisenberg, Avagail 13, 175n.6 Elder, Bryant 79 Elections Canada 7 electoral politics 5, 15, 29, 35 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 224, 228–9, 232, 234 ‘pedagogical hinge’ 228–9, 232 Elster, Jon 74, 83

embodiment 21–2, 104, 112, 128, 238n.10, 241, 262, 271, 272, 275, 276 disembodiment 282 emotions 74, 199, 259n.5 empathy 138, 141–2, 145–6, 231, 259n.5 Employment Division v. Smith 122–23 enemy(ies) 68–73, 79, 86n.3, 95, 97–8, 106, 108n.8, 166, 181, 190–1, 193–5, 201, 203, 212, 126n.6 Engelhardt, Tom 91 England 8, 9, 35, 37, 43 Enlightenment 74, 161 196 epistemology 49, 106, 108n.8, 114, 254 equality 4, 5, 10, 19, 20, 92, 126, 135, 137, 140, 144, 160, 180–3, 187, 189, 192, 194, 204, 243, 267–8, 270, 274, 279 equality-difference debates 159, 270–1, 278 inequality 4, 10, 105, 146–7, 150–1, 265, 267, 278, 281 equivalence 267, 269–71, 278–9 aporia of 278 links of 269–70 Eros 208 erotic(ism) 262, 281–2, 283n.6 love 209 relations 281, 282 see also sexuality espionage 18, 110–13, 121–2, 124–5, 128–30 essence 51, 174, 184–5, 196, 209–12, 216, 265 essentialism 137, 140, 259n.4 ethno-racial 143 visual 135 ethics 5, 13, 15, 17, 21, 32, 34, 45, 50, 53, 55, 58–60, 97, 106, 108n.8, 111, 114, 146–7, 151 152n.10, 158 171, 174n2, 205, 213, 215, 217n.5, 234, 251, 262–83, 283n.1, n.2 discourse 13, 21, 134–5, 137, 141, 146–7 of dissensus 263–82 ethical alterity 15–16, 264, 266–8, 273, 277–8 ethical responsibility 22 ethical ‘saying’ 266–7, 277

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ethical sensibility 50, 58–62 feminist 265, 267, 271, 279, 282 Levinasian 49–51, 53, 58–65, 147, 174n.2, 263–82 of love 211, 213, 217n.5 pre-ethical self 63 and subjectivity 50, 53, 59 European Union (EU) 201 event(s) 110, 169, 224–5, 264, 271–4, 277 traumatic 276–7 exceptionalism 97–8, 110, 165, 191 logic of exception 97, 108n.5 state of exception 72, 73, 85–6, 164–5, 175n.8 see also Agamben, Giorgio existentialism 70, 183, 184, 206, 277 exteriority 264, 268, 276 Fabian, Johannes 110 face(s) 146, 222, 228–31, 235, 238n.10 face-to-face 50, 51, 58, 61, 93, 147, 276, 277 facelessness 60, 61, 227, 231 face of the Other 147, 276–7 failure 53, 86n.5, 130, 147, 169, 200, 220, 280 famine 136, 142–4, 148–9, 151n.5, 152n.9, n.13 fanaticism 69, 95 Fanon, Frantz 272, 275–6 fantasy 90, 95, 106, 282 fascism 5, 6 Fattah, Hassan 100 fear 20, 44, 60, 81, 84–5, 91, 93, 106, 199, 201–16, 216n.1, n.3, 217n.7, n.8, n.9, n.12, 228 Fellows, Mary Louise 248, 258–9n.3 feminism 21, 203, 265, 267, 269–71, 283n.3, n.6 of difference 270 of equality 270 feminist(s) 159, 222, 225–7, 229–31, 258–9n.3, 263 Black feminist thought 248 ethics 265, 269, 271, 279, 282 politics 264, 270 theorist(s) 203, 208, 211, 247, 267–8, 281 Festenstein, Matthew 175n.6 Fest, Joachim 67, 69–71 Ficino, Marsilio 199

figuration 93, 96, 107, 110, 117, 124, 137, 140, 182, 189, 207, 209–12, 215, 221, 223 Finkel, David 77 flesh 54, 56, 59, 100–1, 145, 214 forgiveness 91, 92, 234 Foucault, Michel 114, 117, 129, 158, 184, 262, 272 France 8, 9, 10, 35, 39, 40, 152, 157, 192, 208 Fraser’s Magazine 30–1 fraternity 20, 92, 151n.3, 189, 194, 268 freedom 5, 10, 20–2, 48, 54–5, 57–8, 62, 82–3, 107, 117, 135, 159–61, 167–72, 180–4, 187, 192–4, 196, 204, 206, 255, 258, 262–3, 270–82, 283n.3 absence of 245 fighters 98 heteronomous 263 negative 167 positive 167 religious 124 of speech 4 unfreedom 4, 251 French Revolution 35 Freud, Sigmund 2, 158, 171, 182, 189, 191, 207, 212–13, 217n.12 ‘death instinct’182 Friedman, Susan Stanford 250 friend(s) 68, 69–70, 73, 101, 106, 108n.8, 180–2, 186–94, 212, 217n.6 friend-as-brother 189 friendship 20, 135, 166, 181–2, 188–91, 209, 211 Fukuyama, Francis 8 fundamentalism 4, 205 Hindu fundamentalists 22n.3 market 147 Fuss, Diana 249 Gaber, Zev 216 Galeano, Eduardo 145–6 Galileo 162 Galisou, Alassa 144–5, 149 Gaon, Stella 19, 173, 185, 254 Gay, Sheryl 76 genealogical society 113, 116–18, 121, 123, 125–6 Geneva Conventions 97 genocide 22n.3, 67, 71, 136, 138, 143, 148, 151n.5

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Germany 6, 71, 80 Gibb, Camilla 223–4, 230–1 gift 210, 214 Glassner, Barry 203 globalization 4, 11, 31, 133, 147, 150, 182, 196 global South 8, 19, 133–48, 150 global warming 31 see also climate change Global Women’s Memorial Society 238n.7 Glowacka, Dorota 20 God 75, 82, 182, 191, 194, 215 Gonzales, Alberto 97 Gonzales v. O Centro Esprita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal (UDV) 122, 124, 126 Goodrich, Peter 85 governance 6, 13, 49, 110, 162, 244, 258 self-governance 161 government(s) 4, 7, 8, 31, 39, 44, 69, 71, 75, 80, 102, 116, 121, 126, 135–6, 138, 144, 164, 166, 171–2, 193, 245–6, 249 Australian 119–21, 127–8, 131n1n4 British 35 Canadian 164 governmentality 130 Nigerian 149 Polish 201 US 8, 9, 23n.5, 72–3, 87n.10, 122–5, 134, 164, 278 Granzow, Kara 238n.8, n.12 Grass, Günter 80, 87n.8 Greece 1 Green, Jeffrey 6 Gregory, Derek 108n.5 Gross, Jan Tomasz 200–2, 206, 215, 216n.1, 217n.4 Grosz, Elizabeth 282 Grote, George 37 group combat 17, 67 Guantánamo Bay 8, 97, 103–5, 108n.5, 164, 196 Gudin, Paul-Phillip 35–6 Guenther, Lisa 283n.6 Gulf War (1991) 95, 134, 151n.2 gun control 223 Gutmann, Amy 13 habeas corpus 193 Habermas, Jürgen 13, 129, 134, 158, 204

Hage, Ghassan 97–8, 102, 104–7 Haggerty, Kevin 238n.12 handicapped 92 Hardt, Michael 14, 168, 203, 210–11 Hartigan, Richard 108 Harvey, David 139 hatred 4, 91, 101, 108n.8, 201, 207, 222 heart, the 213–14, 217n.12 Hegel, G.W.F. 17, 34, 49–50, 52–60, 62–3, 65n.2, 68–70, 105, 110, 129, 183, 269–70 hegemony 4, 5, 112, 168, 217n.5, 250, 253, 262, 270, 274–5, 277–8, 281 Heidegger, Martin 165, 183, 189, 197n.2, 207, 208, 216n.2 Henri, Yazir 236 Henriot, Jacques 34 Henry, Patrick 82 Hill, Peter 79–80 Hitler, Adolf 67–71, 75, 78, 80, 86n.1, 203 Hobbes, Thomas 51, 78, 85, 204 Leviathan 163, 164 Hoffman, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm The Sandman 222 Hogarth, William 35 Holocaust 145, 200, 202, 215 Honig, Bonnie 166 hooks, bell 203, 211, 258n.3, 265, 274 hope 161, 171, 174, 210, 220, 236 Horton, Scott 69 Howard, John 118–19 Howard government 120–1 Howarth, David 6 human(s) 18, 36, 44, 50, 54, 56–7, 59–60, 61, 64, 68, 82–5, 91–3, 97, 102–4, 106–7, 108n.8, 113, 115–17, 135–6, 138, 140–2, 144, 148, 152n.9, 153n.15, 158, 166, 170, 171, 182, 184, 196, 200, 204–7, 211, 227, 232, 234 dehumanization 71, 73, 142 interhuman 48, 49, 50, 51, 59–61, 63–5, 65n.1, 205, 211 non-human life-world 51, 59–60, 64 humanism 92, 135, 181, 183–4

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humanitarianism 19, 135–51 humanitarian scopic regime 19, 136–7, 139, 141, 143–4, 150–1 humanity 44, 49, 90–2, 104–7, 108n.8, 143, 148, 159, 163, 184, 189, 203, 209–10, 224 human rights 8, 131n.1, 135–6, 181–2, 204, 278 Huntington, Samuel 7, 114 Hurricane Katrina 205 Hussein, Saddam 80, 94 Husserl, Edmund 183, 193 identification 2, 19, 20, 34, 36, 59, 63, 70, 126, 128, 140, 143, 146, 158, 191, 194, 212, 214, 229, 231–3, 238n.10, 251, 259n.3, 264, 276, 278–9, 280, 282 (dis)identification 231 identity(ies) 1, 2, 11, 14, 16, 20–2, 41, 49–53, 55, 59–63, 70, 92, 108n.6, n.8, 112, 127, 158–61, 171, 174, 175n.4, 184–5, 190, 200, 210, 221, 223, 226, 229–33, 235, 237n.1, 243, 245, 247–50, 252–6, 259n.3, 264–9, 272, 275, 277, 280, 282 categories 16, 226, 231, 232, 236, 251 collective 5, 6, 243 cultural 1, 13, 15, 126 ethnic 10 group 12, 43, 69 Hegelian 62 identity-difference 14–15, 17 markers 230 national 11, 13 non-identity markers 22 politics 12, 14, 15, 243 racial 126, 280 religious 126 sexual 282 ideology 4, 52, 53, 58, 75, 99, 158, 200, 226, 227, 246 images 78–9, 93, 104, 133–50, 200–1, 228–9, 234, 236, 249 imaginary, the 3,17, 19, 90, 95, 106, 117, 123, 126, 133, 136, 137, 139, 142, 144, 151, 201 imaginary waiting room of history 111 imagination 6, 73, 135, 144, 223

immigrants 3, 9, 22n.3, 197n.1, 242–3 immortality 17, 67, 68, 70 impossibility 5, 8, 72, 73, 181, 185, 187, 210, 216, 234, 258, 259n.3, 270, 282–3, 283n.2 Incas 124 inclusion 1, 5, 12, 13, 22, 33, 158–9, 171, 175n.4, 180, 191, 217n.6, 241, 243–4 India 4 indifference 17, 138, 140, 141, 221, 284 non-indifference 265 indigeneity 18, 113, 118–22, 146, 126–7, 243 see also Aboriginal; American Indian individualism 3, 4, 160, 243 see also rights, individual individuation 116–17, 165–7, 170, 172, 251 inequality 4, 10, 105, 146, 147, 150, 151, 265, 278, 281 inequity 4, 10, 15, 24 informatics (bio) 130 injury 92, 166, 175n.11, 275 injustice 4, 18, 21, 145, 147, 283 innocence 18, 90, 99, 102–5, 108n.7, 129, 141, 226, 232, 235, 252, 259n.5 instinct 182, 203 Institute for Public Memory (IPN) 216n.1 intentionality 62, 264 interhuman, the 48–51, 59–61, 63–5, 65n.1 interiority 209, 228, 276 interiorization 41, 180 international law 97–8, 136 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 149, 152n.13 Internet 100, 134 intersectionality 247, 258–9n.3 intersubjectivity 48–50, 52, 55–6, 59, 61, 278 intersubjective space 207 see also interhuman intimacy 84, 152n.10, 211, 217n.5, 222, 237 intolerance 116, 202 Iran 93 Iraq 8, 72, 74–80, 94, 97, 108n.8, 134–5, 157, 217n.7, 278–9 Iraq Coalition Casualty Count 72, 74

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Irigaray, Luce 203, 208–9, 211, 262, 280–2, 283n.5 iron curtain 195 Isaac, Jeffrey 6, 11 Islam 82–3, 116 Islamophobia 23n.4 Israel 74–5, 82, 98, 102, 217n.7 Ivison, Duncan 13, 175n.6, 243 Jacobsen, Janet R. 283n.1 Jameson, Fredric 152n.8 Jamieson, Dale 113 Jastrun, Mieczyslaw 203 Jay, Martin 133 Jedwabne 216, 216n.1 Jews 41, 71, 75, 81, 200–3, 215–16, 216n.1 Jihad 100 justice 6, 18, 21, 22, 69, 107, 114, 116, 120, 150, 152n.6, 173, 181–3, 187, 211, 224, 263, 267, 268, 270, 271, 274, 279 see also injustice justification 33, 43, 67–8, 75–7, 80, 87n.10, 99, 104–7, 108n.8, 112, 114, 116, 123, 191, 212 Kafka, Franz 111 Kahn, Victoria 200, 217n.13 kamikaze pilots 79 Kant, Immanuel 82, 113, 125, 183, 184, 217n.13 Keenan, Alan 1–2, 157, 159–60, 171–2, 175n.5 Kellogg, Catherine 19–20, 216n.8, n.11 Kelly, P.J. 11, 12 Kenny, Mike 12, 175n.6 Kielce 200–1 King, Deborah 259n.3 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 211 Kinzer, Bruce L. 43 Kirkness, Verna 259n.3 knowledge 54, 71, 110, 139, 158, 171, 191, 204, 224, 228, 247, 251, 253, 264–8, 272–3, 280–1 truth-knowledge 115 Kosovo 22n.3, 148 Kristeva, Julia 90, 101, 103–4, 108n.6, 207–8, 212–16 La haine et le pardon 92–3 Powers of horror 217n.9 Tales of love 203

Kurasawa, Fuyuki 18–19, 152n.6, 175n.9 Kymlicka, Will 13, 123, 243 LA Times 76 labour 4, 57, 58, 63, 102–3, 108n.7, 133, 138, 145, 212, 136n.1 ‘labor of the negative’ 280–2 Lacan, Jacques 158, 194, 274, 279, 281, 283n.5 the ‘real’ 274–7, 280 LaCapra, Dominick 158, 283n.4 Laclau, Ernesto 14, 262–3, 270–3, 279 and Chantal Mouffe 168, 217n.5, 262, 269–70, 272 Laertius, Diongenes 188 Land Titles Register (Australia) 131n.4 language 59, 67, 126, 131n.3, 192, 196, 266, 277 national 73 philosophers of 114, 266 Lanzmann, Claude 145 Latour, Bruno 49, 65 law 8, 10, 13, 34, 57, 73, 82, 85–6, 87n.10, 98, 111, 114, 116, 126, 128, 159, 163–7, 173, 181–3, 191–2, 241 Aboriginal 120–1 American 122–3, 131n.2, 195 Australian property 127 constitutional 126 moral 271 rule of 69, 73, 86, 183 Lawlor, Leonard 182 Lefort, Claude 157, 168 Levinas, Emmanuel 15–17, 32, 45, 49–55, 58–64, 65n.1, n.4, n.5, 146–7, 158, 174n.3, 189, 262, 263–70, 276–7, 281, 283n.4, n.5, n.6 ‘non-indifference’ 265 liberal-communitarian debate 12–15 Liberal Democratic Party (Australia) 113, 125 liberalism 2, 3, 11, 40, 115, 117, 128, 217n.6, 244 late 18, 110, 112–13, 116–18, 124, 160 liberal democracy 3, 4, 6, 9–11, 18, 49–50, 54–5, 57, 61–2, 69, 73, 112–13, 115, 133–7, 150, 140, 160, 204–5, 243

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liberal imaginaries 17, 117, 123, 139, 144 liberal pluralism 243–4 liberal regimes 6, 70, 174 liberal societies 114–15 liberal thought 167, 242–4, 246 liberal values 113, 204, 244 neo-liberalism 149, 152n.13 neo-liberal hegemony 4 liberty 82, 92–3, 159, 175n.5 lifeworld 49, 51, 64–5, 140, 142, 144 non-human 51, 59, 64 linguistics 134 ‘Little children are sacred’ report (LCAS) 118–20 love 20, 84, 115, 187–90, 199, 203–5, 208–14, 217n.5, n.10, n.11 lovelessness 211 ‘primordial self-love’ 164 Lyotard, Jean-François 199 Macdonald, Amanda 128 Machiavelli, Niccolo 204, 208 McHugh, Declan 7 Madison, James 33 Madrid 8 Maier, Charles S. 7 majority, the 8, 29, 31, 33, 36, 45, 123, 193, 199 opinion 122, 125 Mali 152n.12 Mamon, Marcin 82 Mansbridge, Jane 246 Mariuzs, Philis 82 Markell, Patchen 14–15, 161–2, 168–73, 175n.5, 255, 258n.1 market, the 121, 129, 149, 174 free 4, 149, 174 fundamentalism 147 global 130 hegemony 112 marriage 72 intermarriage 72 laws 121 records 86 martyrdom 82–3, 98, 100 Marx, Karl 139, 270 Mason, Andrew 175n.6 materiality 59 meaning 11, 92–3, 100–1, 104, 115, 129, 135, 175n.9, 194, 196, 215, 217n.11, 247, 249, 258, 280 meaning-making 21, 241–2, 245–8, 250–7, 258n.2

Mearsheimer, John 75 media 19, 23n.4, 74, 77, 93, 95, 99–100, 102, 104, 121, 129, 133–6, 139, 141–4, 148, 152n.5, n.7, 241 mass 11 Mehlman, Bruce 130, 131.n5 memorialization 20, 221, 225, 232 memory 158, 233, 236 ‘burden of memory’ 231 collective 138 Global Women’s Memorial Society 238n.7 Institute for Public Memory (IPM) 216n.1 public 238n.14 Menezes, Jean Charles de 9 metaphor 100, 101, 108n.8, 134, 193, 202, 205, 213 metaphysics 53, 136, 142–3, 183–8 Métis 235, 238n.13 Mexico 73 Michlic, Beata Joanna 200–1 Middle East 9, 74–5, 174n.1 migration 8, 11, 72, 250 military 17, 67, 72, 78–80, 91, 95–7, 101–2, 119, 148, 196 Mill, James 37 Mill, John Stuart 33–4, 38–9 minority 10, 22n3, 31, 36, 41, 45, 75, 123–4 religion 22n.3, 123 Minuteman 73 mirror 188, 227, 229–31, 233, 249 Mitchell, William J. Thomas 134 Mitropoulos, Angela 215 Möbius strip 118 modernity 158, 162–3, 215, 232 Mohanty, Chandra 249, 259n.3 mondialisation 183, 194, 196 see also globalization Mondzain, M-J. 133 Montreal massacre 222, 225–35, 238n.7, n.14, 239n.14 Monture-Angus, Patricia 258n.3 monuments 223, 228 Moore, David Cresap 33 moral sense 114–15, 128 Mouffe, Chantal 6, 14, 20, 199, 204–5, 214, 216, 217n.6, 262 and Ernesto Laclau 168, 217n.5, 262, 269–70, 272

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multiculturalism 11, 15, 21, 121, 180, 201, 243 multicultural Others 243 multicultural recognition 5 multi-national corporations 180 murder 182, 189, 200, 202–4, 215–16, 222, 225–6, 229–31, 233, 235, 237n.3, 238n.5, n.11, n.12, 238–8n.14 museums 121, 228 Muslims 4, 9, 22n.3, 23n.4, 74–5, 83, 113, 135, 243 non-Muslims 74 myth(s) 11, 73, 120–1, 161, 194, 215, 246 Naas, Michael 180, 192–3, 197n.2 Nancy, Jean-Luc 203, 208–15, 216n.2, 217n.8, n.13, 218n.14 ‘mélée’ 216, 218n.14 Narayan, Uma 259n.3 narcissism 92, 164–5, 171, 190, 212, 279, 282 narcissistic wound 92, 162 narration 52 narrated event 110 narrative 17, 67, 68, 71, 75, 78–85, 86n.5, 110, 135–6, 141, 226 configurations 111–12, 116, 120–1, 124 counter-narrative 188 metanarrative 184 ontogenetic 62 NASCAR 78, 79 Näsström, Sophia 1 nation(s) 29, 30, 32–3, 37, 44, 58, 68, 70, 75, 84–6, 86n.2, 131n.2, 180, 196, 200 building 200 democratic 44, 48 national identity 11, 13 nationalism 4, 69, 80–1, 86, 98 104, 200 ethno-nationalism 20, 201 trans-nationalism 180, 248 nationality 86, 196 philosophical 179, 192 national referendum 200 national service 80 nation-state 11, 48, 49, 53–5, 57–8, 61, 70, 94, 125, 135, 148, 157, 179–83, 197n.1 rogue nations 94, 197n.1 sub-national communities 13 national security 6, 8, 130, 206

National Socialism 69 Native Americans 122–4, 126 Native American Church (NAC) 122–6 nativeness 126, 131n.2, n.3 natives 131n.3 see also Aboriginal; Indian; Métis; Native Americans naturalization 136, 143, 148 natural body 100–3 naturalness 22n.2, 54, 84–5, 96, 142, 165, 186, 253, 255, 280 unnatural 96, 99 negation 118, 136, 140–1, 143–4, 150, 209, 253, 282 denegation 195 negative freedom 167 negativity 16, 41, 149, 185, 202, 206, 212–13, 244, 265, 270, 276, 279, 281–2 ‘impossible labor of the negative’ 280–2 Negri, Antonio 14, 168, 203, 210–11 Neilson, Brett 215 networks 135, 180, 197n.1, 206, 210, 214, 264, 266–7 Nevins, Joseph 73 New York Times 23n.4, 76–7, 91, 108n.2 Newman, Saul 175n.12 Nietzsche, Friedrich 115, 182, 187, 189, 196 ‘overman’ 182 Niger 144, 147–50, 152n.13, n.14, 153n.15 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 136, 139, 141–3, 145, 210 normalcy 97, 102, 142, 148, 150, 254, 256 abnormality 250 ‘abnormal’ violence 97 ‘normal’ fear 121 ‘normal’ violence 97 normalization 84, 97, 102, 106, 140, 141, 250–1 normativity 112–13, 116, 118, 121, 124, 128, 137, 142, 146, 191, 205, 226, 241, 248, 250, 256, 258, 263, 271, 272, 281 heteronormativity 256, 259n.4, 281–2 norms 5, 69, 105–6, 113, 135–6, 165, 191, 220–1, 223,

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226–7, 241–3, 247, 249–52, 258, 267, 280–1 Northern Ireland 8 Northern Territory Board of Inquiry 118–20 Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 119–20, 126 nuclear weapons 93–4 Nugent, Lord 37 object 17, 51–2, 54–8, 60, 64–5, 110, 142, 184, 211, 213, 221 objectified 65 ownable 50, 52, 60 subject-object structure 17, 51, 56–8, 60, 64–5 objectification 17, 21, 50, 56–8, 64–5, 142, 152n.10, 265 internal 57 obligation 34, 45, 262–7, 271, 277–8 anarchic 269 ethical 21, 263–67 obligatory desire 282 Occident 158, 171, 249 O’Keefe, Michael 108n.4 Oliver, Kelly 17–18, 91, 105, 158, 283n.4 Olson, Mancur 78 ontology 15, 40, 45, 48–53, 55, 57–8, 62–4, 72, 147, 158, 171, 174n.3, 207–16, 216n.2, 254–5, 278, 280 ontological colonization 52, 53 ontological plane 51, 60–1 ontological structure 48–9, 51–2, 55, 64, 207 oppression 19, 21, 82, 93, 116, 173, 174, 244, 247–9, 252, 256, 258, 259n.3, n.5, 263–4, 269, 272 colonial 275–6 the oppressed 57, 173, 265 the oppressor 173 racist 4, 21, 263, 275 sexist 21, 263 O’Reilly, Finnbar 144 Orient 171, 249 Orientalism 158 orientalizing desire 75 Other(s) 2, 5, 8, 10, 13, 16–22, 30–1, 34–5, 38–42, 44–5, 51–3, 57, 59–61, 63–4, 69–73, 85, 86n.2, 91–3, 96–7, 104, 106, 110–11,

114, 116, 118, 129, 146, 158, 161, 164–5, 167, 170, 172, 180, 192, 208–10, 212–15, 221, 223–4, 228, 232, 234–5, 242–4, 247, 250–1, 253, 256, 259n.5, 262–8, 271, 276–8, 282–3 Jewish 201–2 killing of 67–8, 75, 85 non-Western 110, 135 other-determination 53 other-direction 282 othering 23n.4, 249, 250, 255, 265 other-orientation 50, 59, 63 O/otherness 15, 16, 67, 81, 136, 137, 140–3, 150, 162, 166, 174n.3, 175n.9, 203, 207, 237, 248–50, 254, 256, 265 other-than 16, 166, 173 Ousseini, Fatou 144–7, 149 Pakistan 82, 148 Palestine 74, 102, 217n.7 Palestinian Suicide Bombers 102 pandemic(s) 143, 151n.5 Pape, Robert 75 paradox(es) 14–15, 20, 57, 68, 81–2, 85, 103, 139, 158, 169, 193, 199, 204–5, 214, 216, 233, 235, 274 Parekh, Bhikhu 12, 175n.6, 243 Paris 9, 35, 179, 186 Park, Joseph 31 partisanship 31 Partridge, Eric 79 Parvin, Philip 7 passion(s) 101, 167, 199–200, 203–5, 209, 216, 217n.5, n.13 passivity 60, 142, 188 radical 50, 60 Patapan, Haig 204, 208 patriarchy 246–7, 252, 256, 259n.4, 270 Patriot Act 10, 157, 193 patriotism 13, 15, 68, 78 peace 102, 106 peace-keeping 106, 182–3 pedagogy 224, 228–31, 234, 239n.15 memorial pedagogy 229 ‘pedagogical hinge’ see under Ellsworth, Elizabeth penalty 242, 244, 248–50, 252

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performance(s) 75, 95, 105, 187, 228, 253, 263 performativity 118, 187, 251, 283n.3 perpetrators 104, 141, 232 Peru 124 peyote 122–5 pharmakon 196 Phelan, Peggy 222 phenomenology 50, 64–5, 72, 138, 144–7, 150, 158 philosophical nationalities 179 philosophy 50, 64, 92, 179, 183–6, 192, 204, 208–9, 270 photographs 104–5, 135, 142, 144–6, 148–50, 152n.9, n.11, 222, 227–31, 238n.11 Plato 151n.1, 189, 192, 204, 208–9 pluralism 5, 12, 15, 81, 137, 144, 201, 216, 241, 243–4, 271 agnostic pluralism 204, 205 plurality 17, 48–51, 61, 64–5, 171, 196, 268 Poland 20, 200–3, 206, 215, 216n.3, 264, 273 Polish Criminal Code 217n.4 political, the 5, 7, 49, 67, 69–70, 86n.1, 90, 96–7, 99–101, 103, 108, 123, 161, 184, 186, 188, 190–1, 193–4, 210–11, 215, 217n.6, 245, 265, 267–70, 283n.1 political other 72 politics 1, 4, 7, 20–2, 30–3, 36, 41–3, 50, 53, 55, 57, 59, 64, 68–70, 75, 92, 95–7, 99–103, 106–7, 112, 114, 123, 134–5, 137, 141–2, 144, 147, 158–74, 175n.9, 179–82, 188, 191, 193–4, 200, 201, 203–6, 210, 212, 214–15, 217n.5, 218, 226, 232, 244–6, 255, 263–4, 266–8, 270–2, 274, 277–9, 281, 283, 283n.1 poll(s) 13 books 36 opinion 32, 36 polling booth 39 Poole, Melanie 120 populism 3 right-wing 3 pornography 114, 119–20, 141

possession 57, 62–3, 94, 135, 182, 234 dispossession 59 possessive action 55 self-possession 213 territorial 49 post-colonialism 112–13, 158 post-structuralism 134 poverty 4, 9, 30, 58, 120, 147, 149–50, 151n.5, 152n.13, 231 Povinelli, Elizabeth 18, 113, 115, 117 power(s) 15, 16, 21, 30, 33–4, 40, 45, 58, 73, 86n.2, 97, 105, 119, 122, 129, 134, 139, 146, 150, 158, 160, 166–8, 171–2, 182–3, 191, 205–6, 214, 216, 217n.7, 221, 225, 229, 242, 244–5, 248–9, 253, 255–6, 258–9, 262, 264–7, 269, 272–3, 280, 281 discursive 244, 264–5 emergency 73, 120 nuclear 94, 98 relations of 244, 249, 263–5, 272 sovereign 161, 175n.10 state 164 196 praxis 21, 162, 166, 173–4, 251, 254–6, 258, 258n.2, 262–3, 267, 269–70, 272, 278, 282–3 privacy 17, 32, 38, 43–4, 142 private property 49, 62 private sector 149, 152n.13 privatization 8, 30, 35, 147, 152n.13, 263 privilege 37, 58, 141, 143, 165, 172, 190, 211, 242, 244, 248–50, 252, 259n.5, 281 Project Kare 225, 237n.3, 238n.11, n.12 property 45, 48–9, 55–9, 62, 135, 189, 202, 210 law 127 private 49, 62 relation(s) 54, 64 rights 4, 52, 68 prostitute 84, 225, 237n.1 see also sex work psychoanalysis 86n.2, 193, 197n.2, 207–8, 212, 216, 274, 280–1, 283n.4 see also Freud, Sigmund; Lacan, Jacques

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public(s), the 37, 42, 71, 116, 121, 128, 138, 141, 201, 217n.5, 226 action 161 authority 7 engagement 13, 50, 104, 111, 150, 171 good 16, 37, 44 interest 32, 35, 43 memory 238n.14 norms 226 opinion 38, 134–5, 144, 148 space 8, 157 sphere 111, 114–15, 134, 139, 143, 151, 170, 243 subaltern 128 voting 16, 30–7, 40, 43 publicity 38–9, 70–1, 142, 145, 148 punishment 34, 38, 107, 201, 220 Putnam, Robert 7 Qatar 82 Québec 160, 225 queer 113, 159 race 21, 31, 40, 67, 87n.10, 167, 172, 247–8, 252, 259n.4, 262–3, 269, 272, 274, 279 riots 157 segregation 9 Racial Discrimination Act 119 racism 92, 148, 247, 264, 278 Ramadanovic, Petar 158, 283n.4 Rancière, Jacques 14, 168 Rauschning, Hermann 67 Razack, Sherene 242, 248–9, 252–3, 258–9n.3 Realpolitik 147 reception 134 recitation 71, 173 recognition 13, 18, 52, 55, 58, 61–2, 64, 104–7, 108n.8, 110–17, 121–2, 124–30, 136–7, 151, 161, 188, 241, 243, 252, 255 brackets of 18, 111–12, 114, 116, 125–6 multicultural 5 mutual/reciprocal 17, 19, 48–50, 52, 59, 64, 105 political 17, 55 politics of 18, 90, 112, 119, 130, 267 trembling of 18, 113–16

reconciliation 119, 268, 270–71, 282 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 236 referendum 3, 13, 200 reform 13,15, 29, 30, 38, 152n.13 reformist movement 29 regional conflict 148 reification 265, 280 de-reification (of images) 147, 150 of images 140, 142 relationality 206, 209, 211–12, 223, 229, 246, 249–50, 252, 254–8, 272 religion 31, 68, 84–5, 122, 123–4, 248 ‘Indian Religion’ 123, 131n.2 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) 122, 131n.3 religious persecution 92 remembrance 20, 222–45, 228, 232–3, 235, 239n.15 logics of 224, 231 representation 137, 139, 141–2, 145, 147–8, 150, 208, 242, 247–50, 252, 254–6, 258, 259n.4 anti-representational strategy 138, 144, 150 crisis of 151 of Otherness 249 self-representation 11 visual 19, 134, 136–8, 143–5 republicanism 12 anti-Republican forces 278 civic 12, 13, 15, 241 responsibility17, 29, 31–5, 38, 41, 45, 50, 53, 61, 104, 125, 135, 146–7, 151, 217n.4, 220–6, 235–6, 262–4, 266–8, 271–2, 276–8, 282 anarchic 265, 269, 279 ethical 22, 265–6, 269 ‘hyperbolic’ 32, 44, 45 ‘infinite’ 17, 32, 45, 263, 279 moral 34, 37 non-responsibility 221 voters’ 29, 32–3, 45 Reuter, Christopher 95 rights 5, 73, 123, 126, 136–7, 140, 157, 159, 170, 201, 217n.4, n.5, 241 civil 10, 13, 48, 136, 159 group 3, 5 human 8, 131n.1, 135–6, 181–2, 204, 278

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individual 3–4, 9–10, 12, 48 land 131n.4, 243 legal 196 minority 31 property 4, 52, 68 religious 125 Roberts, John, Chief Justice 125–6, 129 rogue(s) 196 Rogues 181–2, 192–6 see also Derrida, Jacques states 94, 108n.3, 166, 174n.4, 183, 192, 196–7, 197n.1 Rosler, Martha 143 Ross, Daniel 159–72, 175n.8 Roudinesco, Elizabeth 186 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 35–6, 204 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) 9, 225 Royal Institution 205 rule(s) 1, 14, 19, 38, 45, 70, 72–3, 83, 108n.6, 148, 161, 167–70, 174, 191, 205–6, 258n.1 democratic 160, 193 kinship 75 of law 69, 73, 86, 183 majoritarian 33 mob 14 of the people 10, 167, 186, 241 rulers 79, 93 self-rule 158, 161, 167, 170 Rumsfeld, Donald 97 rupture 10, 14, 168, 222, 226, 235, 264, 272–3, 275–8, 280 Russia 80 Rwanda 22n.3, 148 Saccamono, Neil 200, 217n.13 sacrifice 17, 43, 67–9, 75–8, 81, 83–6, 86n.5, 96 self-sacrifice 70, 74, 82 Sahel, the 152n.9 Said, Edward 158, 249 St. Augustine 208 St. Paul 208 St. Thomas Aquinas 208 Salgado, Sebastião 145, 152n.9 sameness 49, 52, 140, 146, 188 Sangh Parivar 4–5 Sartre, Jean-Paul 32, 39–45 Being and nothingness 40, 43–4, 184 Critique of dialectical reason 40–3 ‘Elections: a trap for fools’ 39–40

Sato, Seizaburo 7 Scalia, Antonin Supreme Court Justice 122–3 Schmitt, Carl 67–70, 73–4, 78, 86n.1, 166, 190–91, 217n.6 Secomb, Linnell 217n.10 secularism 5 secularization 162 security 6–7, 9, 77, 91, 124, 164, 174, 205 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 23n.5, 73 insecurity 91, 150, 206 national 6, 8, 130, 206 state 125, 130 self, the 53–4, 57, 59–64, 65n.3, 71, 73, 85, 112, 114, 128, 146, 170–1, 181, 188–9, 193, 196, 207, 209–10, 212, 214, 220–2, 224, 229–35, 247, 251–2, 280 self-determination 1, 7, 48–9, 51, 52–5, 57–9, 63, 138, 151, 158–61, 171–2 self-identification 212–13 self-identity 179, 181, 184, 190 self-interest 17, 19, 31, 38, 62–3, 68, 84 self-legislation 5, 160, 162, 167 self-love 164, 217n.10 self-ownership 52–4, 57–8 self-preservation 60, 62, 68 self-rule 158, 161, 167, 170 self-sacrifice 70, 74, 82 sense 60–2, 115, 121, 129, 143, 209, 275, 277 ‘crisis of’ 215 deliberative 114–15, 128 ethical 15, 62–3, 115 moral 114–15, 128 sensation(s) 102, 114–15, 207, 214, 217n.12, 234 senselessness 277 sensibility 54, 58–64, 112, 115, 120, 208, 262 ethical 50, 62–3 sentiment(s) 20, 80, 111, 199, 202–4, 206, 208, 211–13, 215 Sereny, Gitta 71 serial killer 225 seriality 40–3, 45 Serres, Michel 224 sex 52, 127, 172, 262, 282 sexual abuse 118–21 sexual difference 262, 263, 279–82 sexual violence 274

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sexism 21, 259n.4, 263, 278, 280 anti-sexism 270 sexuality 217n.5, 229, 248, 259n.4, 262–3, 279–80 bisexuality 248 heterosexuality 248, 250, 259n.4, 281,183 homosexuality 197n.1, 248, 250, 259n.4, 282 sexualization 21, 143, 241 sexual orientation 248 sexuation 280, 282 sex work 222, 225–6, 230–2, 235, 237n.4, 238n.7, n.11 see also prostitute shame 40, 143, 148 signification 53, 60–2, 115, 175n.11, 194, 215, 253, 254, 264–7, 274, 276, 279 resignification 275 Singer, Peter 113 Sissako, Abderrahmane 152n.11 Bamako 152n.11 slaughter 4, 71 slavery 57, 58, 60, 65, 129 Slobodian, Linda 225 Smith, Sydney, Rev. 34 social, the 5, 7, 114, 252 cohesion 6 contract 2, 35–36, 68 democracy 13, 15 difference 13, 111, 121, 172, 248, 249, 255, 259n.4 inequality 4, 246 justice 116 movements 11, 145 politics 4 unity 243, 245 welfare reform 13 socialism 69 sociality 50, 51, 58, 117, 223, 228 normative 226 society 11, 30, 36, 40, 43, 68, 97, 105, 112, 190, 204, 251, 263, 267–8, 270–1, 278, 282 civil 11, 13 class 4 communist 270 democratic 36 genealogical 113, 116–18, 121, 123, 125–6 political 85, 157 soldiers 41, 67–8, 71, 72, 74–6, 78–82, 84–5, 86n.5, 96, 102, 108n.7

solidarity 4, 5, 11, 20, 42, 80, 90, 105, 157, 205, 206, 211, 263 Solidarity movement 273 Soutphommasane, Tim 12 sovereignty 1, 49–53, 55, 57, 61, 64–5, 108n.3, 123, 130, 158–64, 167–8, 170–2, 174, 175n.5, 180, 182, 191–2, 196, 196n.1, 204, 215, 255 counter-sovereignty 192 Soviet Union 75, 202 Soyinka, Wole 203, 205, 215, 217n.7 space 14, 93, 97, 103, 112, 127–8, 139, 181, 189, 192, 196, 209, 245 cyberspace 141 intersubjective 207 public 8, 157 Spain 8 spectacle 139, 141, 143 spectacularization 141, 143 spectacular-state 165 Speer, Albert 71 Spinner-Halev, Jeff 175n.6 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 158, 283n.2 Srivastava, Sarita 256, 259n.5 Stalingrad 70 Stallabrass, Julian 152n.9 Starobinski, Jean 35 state(s) 6, 10, 13, 17, 38, 48, 55, 60, 63, 67–8, 70, 82, 85–6, 87n.10, 98, 116, 123, 125, 129, 130, 139, 147, 149, 160–1, 164, 166–7, 170, 175n.8, 186, 190, 205, 217n.6, 243–4, 267, 269 capitalist 4 city- 180 discipline 107 nation- 11, 48–9, 53–5, 57–8, 61, 70, 94, 125, 135, 148, 157, 179–82, 197n.1 penal 107 of recognition 116, 130 security 125, 130 ‘state of exception’ 72–3, 85–6, 164–5, 175n.8 see also Agamben, Giorgio state interest 122, 123 violence 17, 73, 157 welfare 107 see also rogue state statehood 48 Stevens, Jaqueline 17, 72, 81, 86

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Stewart, Potter, Supreme Court Justice 114 Stiegler, Bernard 164 stranger(s) 16, 19, 135, 136, 140, 147, 150, 207, 209, 212, 214 Sturcke, James 149 subaltern publics 128 subject 16, 17, 21, 49, 50–3, 56–65, 92, 115–16, 121, 136, 137, 140, 142–6, 150, 158, 161, 171–2, 194, 209–13, 215, 220, 234, 236, 241–2, 244–58, 258n.2, 259n.4, 264–9, 271–7, 280, 282 formation 59, 234, 241–2, 245–52, 254–6, 258, 258n.2 see also autological subject subjectivity 21, 50–4, 57–9, 62–4, 147, 159, 180, 245, 250, 258, 262, 264–5 ethical 50, 53 see also intersubjectivity sublimation 208, 213, 277 subordination 49–50, 84, 91, 162, 210, 252–3, 256 Sudan 138, 148 suffering 19, 55, 106, 107, 134–41, 144–6, 148, 151, 151n.5, 152n.9, 203, 236, 279, 283 suffrage 29, 33, 39, 151n.4 suicide bombing 74, 86n.4, 87n.9, 90, 95–6, 98, 100–3 suicide missions 74–5, 80, 82–3 Sunday Times 113 Supreme Court, Switzerland 3 US 114, 122, 126 surveillance 101, 122, 139, 193 Swiss People’s Party 3 Switzerland 3, 10 symbolism 78, 81, 98–9, 101, 133, 146, 241, 266, 274–6, 280 symbolization 86n.2, 211, 226, 276, 280 synchronization 266, 268, 270 Syria 9, 23n.5 Tahoua 144 Taussig, Michael 224 Taylor, Charles 13, 243 technology 32, 36, 90, 95, 99–101, 103, 130, 163, 165 telos 69, 185 Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals (Boulder, CO) 122–3

terror 61, 100–1, 200, 206, 274 war on 9, 23n.4, 93–4, 97, 107n.1, 148, 192, 243 terrorism 9–10, 93–5, 97–8, 101–3, 108n.4, 124, 130, 157, 196 anti-terrorism 10, 157 Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act 10 Australian Anti-Terrorism Act 10 terrorist attacks 8–9, 90, 92, 103 terrorists 8–9, 95, 97–8, 101, 151n.3, 166, 180, 196–5, 197n.1, 211, 243 theology 83, 113, 115, 208, 216 theological sovereignty 162, 164 tolerance 2, 10, 18, 81, 113, 130, 160, 203, 243, 244, 246 intolerance 116, 202 trade union movement 35 transgender 159 trauma 158, 174, 213, 259, 274–7, 280, 283n.4 Treaty of Guadalupe 73 tribalism 148 truth 114–15, 117, 158, 167, 172, 185–6, 209, 251, 268 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 236 Tully, James 13 Turkey 3 uncanny, the 92–3, 96, 141, 207, 212, 214 uncertainty 15, 157, 160, 190, 206, 239n.15, 275, 276 unconscious(ness) 106, 158, 171, 193, 194, 196, 207, 231 unemployment 9, 120, 122 United Nations (UN) 31, 93 United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances (UNCPS) 122, 124, 150, 157 United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index 153n.15 United Nations World Food Programme 149 United States 7–10, 17, 23n.4, 29, 41–3, 72–3, 77, 86n.2, 93–5, 98, 100, 103, 112, 122–3, 130, 131n.2, n.3, 157, 164, 179, 192, 196, 217n.7, 274, 278 see also African Americans; Native Americans

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unpredictability 96, 205, 272–3, 276 USA Patriot Act 10, 157, 193 US Army 75, 78–9, 81–2 Vasager, Jeevan 149, 152n.14 victim(s) 86n.2, 103–4, 136, 138, 140–2, 146, 150, 200, 230, 232, 235–6, 249, 265, 278 victimization 19, 91, 142–3 Vietnam 103, 179 violence 1, 5–6, 8–10, 15, 17–18, 20, 22, 22n.3, 36, 50, 67, 74–5, 80–1, 90–107, 108n.8, 120, 136–8, 140, 143, 151, 164–5, 174, 182–3, 194, 200, 202, 220–5, 236, 238n.6, n.7, 263, 268, 274–5, 278, 280 epistemic 53 group 68, 70–3 political 97 radical 16 state 17, 73 structural 140–1, 145, 151n.5 systemic 67 70 ‘unthinkable’ intra-state 157 violent death 20, 78, 81, 220–35, 239n.15 visuality 19, 133–51, 151n.1, n.3, 152n.5, 175n.9 visual aporia 139–40, 144 visual culture 95, 227 visual media 100, 135 voice(s) 42, 65, 159, 208, 216, 253 voicelessness 146 voluntarism 13, 244, 258, 276–7, 283n.3 volunteer army (American) 74, 78, 80 voting 17, 29–45 voter turnout 7 vulnerability 2–3, 18, 41, 60, 62, 65n.5, 90–107, 140, 142, 145, 147–8, 150, 161, 220–1, 230–1, 234, 272 Walt, Steven 75 War Measures Act 164 war(s) 9, 50, 67–70, 72–3, 75, 79–80, 84, 86, 90–1, 94–5, 97, 99, 103, 105–6, 108n.7, 182–3, 194, 196, 203 civil 143, 164 Cold War 135, 196, 197n.1 crimes 71

on drugs 9, 23n.4 Gulf War 95, 134, 151n.1 Iraq War 72, 75–8, 94, 134, 217n.7, 278–9 Kosovo 22n3 nuclear 43 on terror 9, 23n.4, 93–5, 97, 107n1, 148, 192, 243 Vietnam War 179 World War II 6, 67, 77, 200–3, 216n.3 Warhol, Andy 152n.8 Warner, Michael 226 warriors 67–8, 102, 217n.7 narratives 81–5 Washington Post 76–7 Watanuki, Joji 7 Weimar Republic 190 Weltanschauung 69 West of the Niger famine 148 white supremacy 252, 270 will, the 6, 36, 53–60, 98, 200–1, 209, 264, 268, 271, 273–4, 278 wisdom 208–9 withdrawal 170, 188–90, 266, 268, 282 Withey, Elizabeth 225 witnessing 108n.8, 138–9, 152n.6, 158, 222 secondary 146 Wolin, Sheldon 14, 168 women 29, 33, 100–1, 151n.4, 159, 189, 225–36, 238n.7, n.11, n.14, 265, 279, 281 Aboriginal 238n.6, 238n.13 Black 248 work 119, 242 workers 39–40, 45, 119, 255 see also sex work working class 248 World Press Photo of the Year 144, 148, 152n.11 World Trade Center 86n.2, 93, 103 see also 9/11 wound(ing) 60, 81, 91–3, 103, 106–7, 162 xenophobia 2–3, 20, 201, 208 Young, Iris Marion 13, 175n.6, 243, 283n.1 Young, James 231 Young, Robert 186 Yuval-Davis, Nira 259n.3

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Zarathustra 182, 196 Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska 21, 23n.6, 174n.2, n.3, 205, 217n.5, 263, 282

Zinn, Maxine Baca 248, 259n.4 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj 274, 280 Zournazi, Mary 224 Zupancˇicˇ, Alenka 274

305