(Two shorter versions of this
chapter appeared as: 1- “Posnacionalismo y biopolítica: Para una crítica
multiculturalista del estado y su soberanía en Europa y el País Vasco (notas
sobre Habermas y Agamben).” Inguruak:
Revista de la federación vasca de sociología 37 (2003) 1-23. 2- “A
Multicultural Atlantic Critique of European Universalism: Neonationalism from Derrida to Agamben.” Tropos 31
(2005): 8-53).
Touraine’s ‘disappearance of historical agent’ and Habermas’s ‘legitimation crisis’…. convey… the deep-down realization that the ambitions which grounded the validity of the intellectual mode of life have failed. There is no would-be enlightened despot seeking the counsel of philosophers. There are only philosophers desperately trying to create communities, and sustain them with the power of their arguments alone. The only communities so far which were created in such a fashion and effectively sustained were their own.
Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters.
Language does not take place in front of a correlation from which the I would derive its identity and the Other his alterity…. In accomplishing its essence as discourse, in becoming a discourse universally coherent, language would at the same time realize the universal State, in which multiplicity is reabsorbed and discourse comes to and end, for lack of interlocutors.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity.
In order to emphasize the importance of the crisis of the state and the serious repercussions of not thinking such a crisis in its historical complexity, I will comment on three geopolitical paradoxes that affect respectively the work of three of the most important European intellectuals today: Jürgen Habermas (and his proposal of postnationalism and constitutional patriotism), Giorgio Agamben (and his theorization of biopolitics) and Jacques Derrida (and his deconstructive thought on the heading of Europe and monolingualism). I will also make more contextualizing remarks on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva. Once these three geopolitical paradoxes reveal themselves as political and theoretical dead-ends, then I will proceed to advance some tentative remarks about the necessary conditions for a geopolitically situated poststate theory that is grounded on a historical and materialist basis and, at the same time, also contributes to a multicultural theory of politics and institutions, in short, to a geobiopolitical theory.
The three paradoxes that deadlock the work of these intellectuals are basically derived from the following geopolitical problem. The modern state, which precedes nationalism and even modern imperialism (Fernández Albadalejo, Clavero), is experiencing for the first time a general crisis in the new twenty-first century that we just inaugurated after leaving the tumultuous yet “short” twentieth century, as Hobsbawn has labeled it (Age of Extremes). If the infamous postmodern/postcolonial break takes place after World War Two (Jameson, Postmodernism; Mignolo, Local Knowledge) and therefore we are not just witnessing a new century but also a historical shift for which we only have a neoliberal name, “globalization,” then to rethink the crisis of the state, and more specifically state sovereignty, is one of the most important intellectual tasks ahead. Although the word that Carl Schmitt uses in order to characterize the change in modern state sovereignty is “secularization” (“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” 37), I would like to use a more contemporary terminology in order to think this new “secularization” of the sovereignty of the nation-state in globalization: ghostly. I would like to propose that the principle of nation-state sovereignty is destined to represent the ghostly (secularized) concept of the new poststate sovereignty that globalization imposes over supra- or macro-state formations such as the European Community or NAFTA. The above intellectuals are not able to think this ghostly presence of the nation-state in globalization and thus fail to understand the geopolitical complexity that this ghostly shift brings about: multiculturalism, migration, new nationalisms, fundamentalism, terrorism, etc. In short, they cannot shift from state thinking to border (or divide) theory. As long as progressive thinking does not address the geopolitical repercussions of a ghostly nation-state in globalization and, accordingly, continues to be incapable of developing a geopolitically-situated multiculturalist theory—a poststate theory aware of the barbarian divide—neoliberalism and neonationalism will reign hegemonically over the European divide that keeps “barbarians” at the global gate.
Postnationalism and Neonationalism (Habermas)
Probably these days, Habermas and his theory of postnationalism are respectively the intellectual and the political paradigm that have gained the widest acceptance in Europe. Although Habermas’s proposal is not genealogically liberal, it can nevertheless be considered neoliberal, since the latter ideology is making the best use of it (Leguina). In this sense, it is relevant the success that the theory of constitutional patriotism, which is the political materialization of Habermas’s proposal of postnationalism, has gained in Spain. It has served the parties in power since the early 1990s. As Luis R. Aizpeolea retells, the genealogy of the concept can be traced back to the left as well as to the right in Spain, and it originates in a visit Habermas made to Madrid in 1991.[1]
El entorno de Aznar … retoma la tesis de Habermas y señala que existe
ahora en España una necesidad de recuperar la idea del ‘patriotismo
constitucional’ porque ‘hay una conciencia de los valores cívicos, de libertad,
convivencia y pluralidad que se ha ido forjando en la lucha contra el
terrorismo’, que ‘ha llevado este debate a la sociedad’. También adelanta de la
ponencia del PP que ‘hay una identidad nacional renovada con el desarrollo de
la Constitución’ y que ‘no se trata de oponer un nacionalismo español al
periférico.’
Pero la bandera desplegada ahora por Aznar en el PP y
Zapatero en el PSOE ya la izó en España por vez primera hace 10 años, en enero
de 1992, otro militante socialista: el entonces presidente del Senado, Juan
José Laborda, que pronunció una conferencia en el Club Siglo XXI de Madrid,
bajo el título Patriotismo constitucional y Estado democrático. Laborda
recuerda que sólo dos meses antes, en noviembre de 1991, Habermas pronunció una
conferencia en Madrid que influyó en su introducción en España.
Laborda defendió la apertura de un debate en España,
paralelo al de Alemania, donde un pasado impresentable, el holocausto,
necesitaba de nuevos mimbres sobre los que asentar la idea de patriotismo
moderno. En España, el nacionalcatolicismo de Franco, que empalma con el
absolutismo fernandino, del siglo XIX, lo había arrasado.
The possibility that this doctrine might expand to other European countries requires that it be examined in detail.
Following his idea that modernity is a non-ended Western project, Habermas proposes that the political future of Europe (and by extension the rest of the World) brings about an expansion of the political institution of the state towards a larger scale: “I would like to test the conditions for a democratic politics beyond the nation-state through the exemplary case of the European union“ (88). Furthermore, according to Habermas, a political structure of European scale dissolves the nationalist problem by turning it into an anachronism:
It is neither possible nor desirable to level out the national identities of member nations, nor melt them down into a “Nation of Europe….” If this form of collective identity was due to a highly abstractive leap from the local and dynastic to national and then to democratic consciousness, why shouldn’t this learning process be able to continue? … These experiences of successful forms of social integration have shaped the normative self-understanding of European modernity into an egalitarian universalism that can ease the transition to postnational democracy’s demanding contexts of mutual recognition for all of us—we, the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of a barbaric nationalism. (99,102-3)
For Habermas, then, the future lies in the Constitution and its respect, as encoded in his new postnational proposal: constitutional patriotism. Such patriotism, according to Habermas, would secure a postnational state whereby democratic mutual recognition would make (barbaric) nationalism obsolete.
In any event, Habermas and his proposal constitute a good example of the contradictions that the state institution suffers in globalization. Habermas accepts the new political challenges brought about by globalization in terms of both a organization of network and connectivity and changes from space to time (66-7). After having acknowledged that the process of globalization is propelled by capitalism, Habermas brings forth new political strategies to control and incorporate it, within a postnational state framework (104-112). However, the most relevant feature of Habermas’s new proposal is that the modern state, perfected to meet the challenges of globalization, continues to be his political reference point.
After dismissing the Basque and North-Irish cases as irregularities, that is, as product of non-ended processes of unification (71)—Habermas faces the problem of nationalism and the homogeneous culture developed by the nation-state in modernity. He admits that the state has undergone a crisis as a result of globalization and multiculturalism, the latter being a result of the migrational processes triggered by the former. In principle, Habermas appears to be open to multiculturalism and its incorporation to the project of the postnational state. As he remarks:
it is also true that the national basis for civic solidarity has become second nature, and this national foundation is shaken by the policies and regulations that are required for the construction of a ‘multicultural civil society.’ Multicultural societies require a ‘politics of recognition’ because the identity of each individual citizen is woven together with collective identities, and must be stabilized in a network of mutual recognition. (74)
Habermas understands that, in order for a politics of recognition to have success, nation-states need to renounce their homogeneous hegemonic culture, and in a sense, to empty the state of any cultural content, so that multiculturalism can develop as politics of recognition. Habermas calls this “cultural emptying of the state” constitutional patriotism:
The majority culture, supposing itself to be identical with the national culture as such, has to free itself from its historical identification with a general political culture, if all citizens are to be able to identify on equal terms with the political culture of their own country. To the degree that this decoupling of political culture from majority culture succeeds, the solidarity of citizens is shifted onto the more abstract foundation of a “constitutional patriotism.” (74)
Nevertheless, the disidentification between the majority’s national culture and the state’s (multicultural) political culture is not as simple as Habermas supposes. The nationalist emptying of the multicultural state means, in last instance, that the legitimation of the state becomes political (the constitution) and not cultural or historical (the nation). Thus, the state can now be questioned in political terms that spring from multiculturalism and the former’s unity cannot be legitimized in cultural o historical terms, since the postnational state has been emptied of such contents. That is, if the Turkish population in a given area of Germany or the Basque Country in France, in a given moment, would like to reconsider their political future through independence, the annexation to another state, etc. the German or French states would no longer have any national or historical legitimacy to object to these political reorganizations. In times of globalization, the state’s sovereignty, which emanates from “the people,” cannot be established in nationalist terms: “the multicultural people” of the postnational state, unlike the national people of the nation-state, migrate, reorganize themselves, find new political identities, etc. Thus, the sovereignty of the postnational state cannot be justified in national terms, against what Habermas proclaims. Therefore there is no reason why a multicultural Germany might not fragment into four states, except that Germany is a state with a national history. This logic could be brought to its last postnational and multicultural consequences: there is no reason why a township o region where the majority is gay might not declare its independence or might declare itself officially gay but inclusive of other cultures (non-gay French or Turkish, etc.). Craig Calhoun is correct when he criticizes Habermas’s postnational approach: “The problem with which Habermas rightly wrestles remains insoluble as long as culture is treated as inheritance and placed in sharp opposition to reason, conceived in terms of voluntary activity” (156). Calhoun clearly underscores that the inherent contradiction at the core of Habermas’s proposal is “the impossibility of fully disembedding reason from culture” (156).
In this way, what in a first moment appears to be a rational adaptation, based on human rights, of the states that till now were national (that is, a rational emptying of “barbarian” nationalism), in a second moment appears as a radical change in the foundation and legitimation of state sovereignty: multiculturalism makes problematic the concept of “sovereign people” in both its limits (who is and is not “people”) and its formation (what defines the citizen as a constitutive part of “the people” if national history and culture no longer count; how to justify a citizen who does not share national history and culture). To put in a different way, republicanism no longer can legitimize its sovereignty principle as a response to the crisis of the nation-state in times of globalization. Republicanism only responds to prenationalist societies with a relatively stable body of people, as in the case of the classical Greek states. Another more recent republican example, the Unites States of America, is indicative in this sense: globalization has forced its hegemonic classes to develop a new neonationalist ideology of closed borders and to reinvent a new national culture of “only English,” The goal of this ideology is to negate its immigrational origins (as well as its imperialist attitudes towards the native populations) and then turn both migration to the USA and labor-outsourcing to other countries into an foreign problem that still has a national solution. Thus, this ideology disavows the fact that national economies and cultures, including the American, no longer exist as such).
Retaking Carl Schmitt’s formulation, it could be said that sovereignty is always a ghostly formation that justifies itself as the present reincarnation of an older principle. Political sovereignty is legitimized through a ghostly representation of a past sovereign subject in the present, which, nevertheless, makes itself present as absence:
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries. (37)
In this sense, one could argue that multiculturalism, as new legitimation of a globalized postnational state, is the “secularization” of nationalism. That is, the multicultural subject responds to a “secularized” form of the older national one in the sense that the former is the deterritorialized version of the latter. The multicultural subject is a denationalized version of a subject that continues to be defined by its cultural, ethnic, religious, sexual, gender or economic markings. These markings no longer are unitary (national) but multiple (global) and therefore do not respond to nationalist scenarios such as the French Republic, Nazism or World War One.
By the same reason that the democratic popular state represents the weakened version of the absolutist state (since its sovereignty is extended to all its constituting subjects so that every citizen becomes a “monarch”), multiculturalism represents an ulterior weakening: the multicultural subject is no longer defined nationally but by political terms of citizenship. Thus choosing citizenship becomes a political act similar to that of consumption and labor: now one chooses to be French o German in a way that before it was impossible, since one had to be born German or French (either by jus sanguinis or jus solis).
Precisely the postcolonial subject opts for different first-world states in order to emigrate, following a choice of consumption and labor. This subject chooses in accordance to the state in which, later on, might want to become a citizen: the Indian or Chinese populations of Canada, for example, do not have other sense of citizenship than that of a consumerist or economist choice for the most convenient political option; this choice does not respond to an Indo-Canadian or Sino-Canadian history. In the same way, postcolonial subjects do not emigrate to the metropolis that colonized them in the past because of a cultural identification, but rather because of greater economic and political possibilities. The Indian programmers do not migrate to the United Kingdom but to the United States, since the computer market in the latter country is more convenient and profitable at all levels. Postcolonial emigration is not cultural but socio-economic.
Multiculturalism derives its legitimation not from the state but from universal human rights. Therefore, when the globalized state secularizes its national legitimation and goes on to becoming a purely political state void of sovereignty, it is also easily absorbed by larger entities, such as the European Community or other economic consortiums such as NAFTA or MERCOSUR. It is not the case that these new macro-political entities are going to create new macro-national cultures; rather the opposite, these entities represent the new globalized transformation of the secularized or de-nationalized nation-state. The latter is not legitimized by a nationalist or multiculturalist reason; on the contrary, it is legitimized by giving access to its citizens to these larger macro-political entities. In last instance, citizenship becomes the right to access larger political-economic networks, such as the European Community. There is no state in Eastern Europe that does not want to join the European Community (except Russia and its satellite countries, which they want to organize their own macro-political entity). The entrance of other ten Eastern European countries in the Community in 2004 ratifies this point.
The other element that demonstrates the crisis of the state and its belonging to larger political-economic networks is Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (5). Although Habermas defends that the state still maintains its prerogatives over private property and the death penalty, in reality the European state has lost its sovereignty. Today no European state possesses sovereignty understood as the power to decide over the exception. Since the end of Southern-European dictatorships in the 1970s, there has not been a case in which a state had to decide on the exception and thus had to assert its sovereignty in either internal or war-related issues (the flow of capital originated by multinationals and migrants also defies state sovereignty). These days any situation of exception takes places at the European level and is solved at that level. Spanish President Aznar’s attempt to defy European hegemony and back the USA’s war on Iraq, which was another way to realign Spanish sovereignty along a new Atlantic axis, eventually resulted in a political catastrophe (the events of 3-11-2003) as a result of which his party lost its eight-year long hegemony in Spain. Either way, Spanish sovereignty is always linked to a larger formation such as the USA or Europe. Symbolic situations such as the war between the United Kingdom and Argentina over the Falkland Islands or the diplomatic tensions between Spain and Morocco over the Rock of Perejil prove this loss of sovereignty.
When Habermas presents the globalized European state as the result of a rational communicative consensus between the different multicultural communities that constitute it, he forgets the exception and its importance in the definition and legitimation of state sovereignty. In Schmitt’s words: “[T]he rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: It confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition” (15). At the present, the exception is only applied to the subject who cannot access the state, which, in turn, gives access to political-economic networks such as the European Community. These days, the exception is given as exclusion and affects basically the immigrant subject, specially the immigrant woman, and certain subaltern minorities (women and children murdered by the domestic violence of the husband, political prisoners who die in prison as a result of state torture, gypsies victim of racism, etc.). This exclusion is sign of sovereignty, which renders global terrorism such a disquieting and central phenomenon in the definition of global sovereignty. Global terrorism is the other instance that can decide the counter-state exception and exert a temporary sovereignty through violence, as in the case of the United States (9-11-2001).
The last big intellectual scandal in Germany erupted between Peter Sloterdijk and Habermas and revolved precisely around the issue of postnationalism and sovereignty. On the one hand, Sloterdijk poses the end of humanism in the German context, departing from a new reconsideration of Heidegger’s elaborations of the “opening in the wood” and “the appearance of being.” Although the end of humanism is an old debate already settled in the context of French poststructuralism in the 1970s and 1980s, in the German context such claim implicates directly Habermas and his elaboration of modernity and politics, which is based on rational communication and, thus, on humanism too. Although at first, it appears that the opinions of the two philosophers are diametrically opposed, both positions reveal an interest in legitimizing the state and, thus, in reestablishing national German sovereignty in the context of a globalized Europe—which ultimately implies German centrality and hegemony in Europe.
Sloterdijk argues that the new informational and biological technologies pose new situations in which the state must, once again, affirm its sovereignty by deciding on the biotechnological exception and its rule (abortion, euthanasia, cloning, etc.). Taking Plato’s dialogue on the republic as departure point, Sloterdijk poses a new anti-humanist and post-democratic political scenario, whereby a technocratic elite becomes the sovereign subject who decides on the rule of law and its exception. Following Plato, Sloterdijk refers to society by the label of “human park:”
Bis as diesen Punkt hat Plato es verstanden, seine Lehre von der Kunst des Staatsmanns gans in Hirten- und Herdenbildern unterzubringen.... Nun aber, da die Definition vollendet scheint, springt mit einemmal de Dialog in eine andere Metaphorik über – dies geschieht jedoch, wie wir sehen werden, nicht, um das Erreichte preiszugeben, sondern um das schwierigste Stück der Mineschenhute-Kunts, die züchterische Steuerung der Reproduktion, aus einem verschobenen Blickwinkel um so energischer aufzugreifen. Hier hat das berühmte Weber-Gelichnis vom Staatsman seinen Platz. Der wirkliche und wahre Grund der königlichen Kunts läSStsich nach Plato nänlich nicht im Votum der Mitbürger finden, die dem Plitiker nach Belieben ihr Vertauten zuwenden oder entizehen; er lieght auch nicht in erebten Privilegien oder neuen AnmaSSungen. Der platnoshce Herr findet dieRasion seines Herrsseins alleain in einem züchterischen Köningswissen, also einme Expertenwissen de seltensten und besonnesten Art.... Die königliche Anthropotehcnik verlangt nänlic von dem Staatsmann, daSS er de für das Gemeinswesen günstigsten Eigenschaften freiwillig lenkbarer menschen auf die winkungsvollste Weise ineinanderzuflechten versteht, so daSS unter seiner Hand der Menschenpark zur optimatel Homoostase gelangt. (52-3)
Sloterdijk is very conscious of the scandal he can create with his anti-humanist and post-democratic position, and thus he rushes to make explicit the ghosts that the reader might invoke, such as fascism or eugenics, but without renouncing his defense of a elite sovereignty:
Fur den modernen Leser - der zurückbilickt auf die humanistichen
Gymnasien der Bürgerzeit und auf die faschistische Eugenik, zugleich auch schon
vorausschaut ins biotechnologische Zeitalter – ist die ExplosivitÄt dieser
Überlegungen unmöglich zu verkennen. Was Plato durch den Mund seines Frmden
vortragen läSSt, ist das Programm einer humanistischen Gesellschaft, die sich
in einem inzigen Voll-Humanisten, dem Herrn der königlichen Hirtenkust,
verkörpert. Die Aufgabe dieses Über-Humanisten wäre keine andere als die Eigensschaftsplaung
bei einer Elite, die eigens um des Ganzen villen gezüchtet werden muSS. (54)
As Sloterdijk himself expresses in this Nietzschean formulation, at the end, he is still aiming at a new type of humanism, superior and elitist, a super-humanism, whereby sovereign power is still understood in a humanist way: the enlightened subject that legitimizes itself (himself) because of its (his) anthropo-technical knowledge. That is, Sloterdijk continues to define the state as a super-humanist sovereign institution. Similarly to Habermas, Sloterdijk continues to believe in the state as a sovereign political institution.
Moreover, Sloterdijk also
chooses a very specific topic—biotechnology—in order to develop his apparently
anti-humanist but, at the end, humanist defense of the institution of the
state. The choice of biotechnology and its regulation permits him to recenter
the debate around the state, since he focuses on the techno-reproductive aspect
of biotechnology. On the one hand, Sloterdijk makes no reference to any issues
concerning the incorporation of a feminist point of view to the problem of
reproduction. For Sloterdijk, reproduction is a biotechnology without gender,
whereby women as well as men have the same rights to participate in the
technocratic elite. In this way, by eliminating gender difference and by
ignoring feminist discourse, Sloterdijk privileges by default a historically
hegemonic masculine position as the sole one to represent the elite class of
his super-humanist proposal. On the other hand, Sloterdijk does not cite the
other great techno-reproductive problem: the regulation of immigrant
individuals who do not posses the status of citizen but who, because of ethnic
and cultural differences, become the main subject responsible for a good
percentage of the human reproduction in the first world. The reason for
Sloterdijk’s ignorance of these two key aspects of biotechnical reproduction
lies once again in the ghostly idea of the sovereign people whom need to be
reorganized now under a new elite sovereignty in order to continue to represent
“the people.” Therefore, the ghostly subject of the human
In this sense, Habermas’s democratic humanism and Sloterdijk’s post-democratic super-humanism respond to the same logic to justify and legitimize the state through either a multicultural democracy or a new Neo-platonic technocratic elite. In both cases, the invoked sovereign subject contradicts and puts into crisis the state as sovereign institution. If Habermas as much as Sloterdijk tries to rescue, in a politically unconscious way, the modern state against new global political realities, it is because both discourses aim at defining and legitimizing a single state, the reunified German state, which is becoming the most important axis of access to and control of the new political network constituted by the European Community. In short the German state is the central node of a globalized European sovereignty, which Habermas’s and Sloterdijk’s discourses ultimately aim at legitimizing.
In more traditional terms, it
could be said that both philosophers—and the German public opinion in so far as
it follows and sanctions the mentioned philosophical debate—want to articulate
a new ideology that legitimizes the new German state. But this legitimation is
far from being nationalist in the traditional sense; it is rather neonationalist.
It is not postnationalist for it does not transcend traditional German
nationalism; it is rather neonationalist because it is a sovereignist
state-ideology that relies on the “secularization” of nationalism and the
presentation of the latter as the ghostly instance of a new reunified German
state that is also the central node of
In this sense, the first geopolitical paradox that I wanted to underscore is that constitutional patriotism is a new form of nationalism or, to be more precise, of neonationalism, which attempts to negate its nationalist nature under the appearance of multicultural universalism. Thus constitutional patriotism runs the peril of repeating the errors of state-nationalism, precisely the historical referent from which it attempts to distance itself.
At this point, Slavoj Zizek’s commentary on the Spanish case is pertinent, since this author possesses a very clear historical memory of communism and therefore it is not surprising that he traces the origins of the neonationalist ideology of constitutional patriotism back to Leninism:
No wonder, then, that in January 2002, at the congress of Spain’s ruling centre-right People’s party, the Prime Minister, Jose María Aznar, praised Jürgen Habermas’s concept of “constitution-patriotism” [Verfassungspatriotismus]’, a patriotic attachment not to one’s ethnic roots, but to the state’s democratic constitution, which covers all its citizens equally. Aznar elevated this concept to the model for Spain, with its separatist troubles—mockingly, perhaps, he even proposed that the People’s Party should declare Habermas Spain’s official state philosopher… Instead of dismissing this reference to the last great figure of the Frankfurt School as a ridiculous misunderstanding, we should, rather, identify the grain of truth in it: no wonder Basque ‘separatists’ reacted with mistrust, and even called Habermas a “German nationalist’—they got the old ‘Leninist’ point that, in a state of ethnic tension, the apparently ‘neutral’ stance of indifference towards ethnic identity, of reducing all members of a state to mere abstract citizens, in fact favours the largest ethnic group. (122-23)
A coherent postnationalism has to depart from the assumption that nationalism is not a rational human structure and can persist in a displaced and ghostly fashion beyond the institution of the modern state in globalization. Nationalism’s persistence can be ghostly and secularized as in the case of the state that gives access to global political networks. Its persistence can also be regional as in the case of Basque nationalism, which Habermas rushes to dismiss as a modern anachronism. Postnations, such as the Basque, can survive the institution of the state and consequently operate in unsuspected and global ways.
It is not a coincidence that Habermas ends up his rationalist and neonationalist argument with the following naïf doubt, which his previous discourse does not help to resolve: “But if the self-understanding of governments only changes under the pressure of an altered domestic climate, then the crucial question is whether, in the civil societies and political public spheres of increasingly interconnected regimes, whether here, in Europe and in the Federal Republic of Germany, a cosmopolitan solidarity, so to speak—will raise” (112). Precisely a humanist theorization of a neonationalist state, as it is articulated by Habermas, will block and undo global solidarity. If there is cosmopolitan or global solidarity in the future, it will only come from political structures and institutions that are neither neonationalist nor neoliberal, but rather postnational, i.e., capable of transcending the modern state and its structure of exceptional sovereignty. These institutions or structures will also have to account, at the same time, for the persistence of both non-state nationalism and multiculturalism.
The second geopolitical paradox refers to the emergent theorization of biopolitics, which departs, on the one hand, from Foucault, and on the other, from postmarxism (the Deleuze of Anti-Eodipus or the newer interpretations of Antonio Gramsci). Authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hart retake the Foucaultian concept of biopolitics and reconnect it with the postmarxist problematic of imperialism and sovereignty. Works such as Homo Sacer by Agamben or Empire by Hart and Antonio Negri, advance a political theory that attempts to go beyond any classical theorization of the state and, instead, try to rethink the problems of sovereignty and imperialism in an era when every power is biopolitical. For these authors, biopolitical power legitimizes itself through the regulation of the body and desire of the subject, not only through its political identity. Since I have dedicated a separate reflection to the theory of empire by Hart and Negri, as well as Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s postmarxism elsewhere (“Global Hegemony”), here I would like to concentrate on the work of Agamben in order to continue a postnational and multiculturalist reflection on his Heideggerian and Schmittian thought on sovereignty. Although the former trend of thought is the most widely read and discussed worldwide among intellectuals concerned with globalization, Agamben’s work has received more interest and attention in Europe, and therefore merits separate analysis as “the European intellectual of biopolitics.” Furthermore, his recent refusal to travel to the United States, because of an American finger-printing requirement for Europeans entering the country, situates him within an European framework in which his work is most read and discussed. Also, the difference between neoliberal Italian intellectuals such as Gianni Vattimo, whose theorization of postmodernity reigns hegemonically in that country and Europe, and the exceptionality and uniqueness of Agamben’s work, begs that the latter’s work is underscored—even if both philosophers have the same hermeneutic and Heideggerian extraction.
Departing from Carl Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty, and following Hegel, Heidegger and Badiou, Agamben re-elaborates Foucault’s idea of biopolitics and concludes that the inclusion of “nude” or non-political life in politics is the foundational moment of modernity. Citing Foucault, Agamben clarifies in the introduction to his Homo Sacer this foundational moment: “Foucault’s death kept him from showing how he would have developed the concept and study of biopolitics. In any case, however, the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis—the politization of bare life as such—constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought” (4). Moreover, Agamben further claims that the foundational act of political sovereignty is this inclusion of nude life in political life, that is, the constitution of biopolitics: “It can be even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power “ (6). In turn, Agamben retakes Schmitt’s thought to introduce the modern state as the sovereign subject that regulates biopolitics.
After elaborating theoretically the concepts of biopolitics and sovereignty, Agamben goes on to historizing this intersection through the figure of the homo sacer, a figure of archaic Roman law. The homo sacer is the legal figure wherein biopolitics are defined as such for the first time. It is the citizen of the state who, because of the types of crimes committed (parricide, incest…), loses all his[2] legal rights and is condemned to turn into nude life. The result is that any individual of the legal community can kill the homo sacer without committing homicide; the death of the latter is not ritualized. This is how the homo sacer marks simultaneously the interiority and exteriority of the community that legitimizes the sovereignty of the state. In turn, this biopolitical excess of life approaches the homo sacer to the sovereign, so that both figures delimit the state’s sovereignty from within and without. In Agamben’s words:
Here the structural analogy between the sovereign exception and sacratio [to kill the homo sacer] shows its full sense. At the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.
The sovereign and homo sacer are joined in the figure of an action that, excepting itself from both human and divine law, from both nomos and physis, nevertheless delimits what is, in a certain sense, the first properly political space of the West distinct from both the religious and the profane sphere, from both the natural order and the regular judicial order. (84)
This historical theorization is carried out by Agamben from the Roman era through the European Middle Ages (91-103), where the work of Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study of Mediaeval Political Theology (1957), helps the former clarify the relationship between homo sacer and sovereign monarch (100). After a discussion of Hobbes’s theories of the state and the subsequent fascination of the Enlightenment with children and savage men (105-111), Agamben explains the importance of the habeas corpus (123) and ends in the twentieth century where he focuses specially on the Nazi concentration camp (119-88). As a result of this analysis, the concentration camp becomes, for Agamben, the technological and political paradigm of modern biopolitics: “the camp—as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space (insofar as it is founded solely on the state of exception)—will appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize” (123). Once Agamben defines the extermination camp as the central biopolitical experience of modernity, he moves to generalize the experience of the Holocaust to modernity, so that he concludes with a teleology of biopolitical sovereignty that spans from the Roman city to the contemporary modern state:
In the city, the banishment of sacred life is more internal than every interiority and more external than every extraneousness. The banishment of sacred life is the sovereign nomos that conditions every rule, the originary spatialization that governs and makes possible every localization and every territorialization. And if in modernity life is more and more clearly placed at the center of state politics (which now becomes, in Foucault’s terms, biopolitics), if in our age all citizens can be said, in a specific but extremely real sense, to appear virtually as homines sacri, this is possible only because the relation of ban has constituted the essential structure of sovereign power from the beginning. (111)
After generalizing the biopolitical condition of homines sacri to all postmodern citizens, Agamben concludes with a note about the repercussions of biopolitics for sovereignty in globalization. He demonstrates in a direct way that the internalization of the structure of the homo sacer exteriorizes the Third World:
in a different yet analogous way, today’s democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only reproduces within itself the people that is excluded but also transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life. Only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West into account will be able to stop this oscillation and to put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and the cities of the earth. (180)
In sharp contrast with Habermas and Sloterdijk, Agamben explains that the West constitutes itself in relation to the Third World in a way that is not exterior to the relationship of sovereignty through biopolitics. This relation is neither a rational and democratic communication that aspires to cosmopolitan sovereignty, as Habermas has it, nor super-humanist in the sense that an enlightened elite exerts its control over the “human park” of the state, as Sloterdijk argues. In this sense, Agamben’s elaboration is not humanist or enlightened; it departs from the anti-humanist elaboration of Heidegger and Foucault, and explains in a clear and convincing way that the structure of sovereign power is irrational and exceptional. In consequence, Agamben’s proposal represents a coherent and responsible elaboration of Schmitt’s proposals, which opens up a new and productive way to rethink power in globalization.
At the same time, it is important to emphasize that biopolitics require the indispensable complement of a geopolitical reflection, since the biopolitization of nude life supposes a progressive spatial movement of inclusion and exclusion that corresponds to the expansionist imperialist logic of the West. However, geopolitics is a vector or dimension that is absent in Agamben’s analysis. This absence affects, in a radical way, his analysis and historization of biopolitics, for it ends up legitimizing the modern state and its biopolitical sovereignty within the European macro-state.
The lack of conjunction between biopolitics and geopolitics goes back to Foucault. All the institutions that this philosopher analyzes (prison, asylum, confessionary…) become universal institutions that legitimize themselves as such and, thus, transcend the specific geographic location that determines them politically. Moreover, the absence of a geopolitical analysis becomes more problematic in the case of Foucault because of his repetitive historization of modernity. His archaeologies always begin in the Renaissance and end with the crisis of modernity in the twentieth century, so that modernity itself becomes the universal subject of his discourse (with the exception of the subsequent volumes of his History of Sexuality, which are placed in antiquity). Departing from both a Europe that synecdoquically represents the world and a modernity that is coextensive with world history, Foucault is capable of speaking about institutions such as the prison house or the asylum without considering that, since the latter are technologies of the modern European state, they do not affect the non-European world in the same way. Moreover, these institutions cannot define non-European subjects and histories, since the latter have their own non-modern technologies of power and thus they suffer the effects of the West and its technologies only as a result of imperialism, in what could be defined as a new hybridity of local and imperialist (bio)technologies.
In an interview with the editors of Hérodote, they suggest Foucault he could analyze the nation-state as yet another institution. They propose to Foucault that one could add "to the figures of interment you have indicated—that of the madman, the criminal, the patient, the proletarian—the national interment of the citizen-soldier" (Power 73). Then, they ask him: "Wouldn't we have here a space of confinement which is both infinitely vaster and less hermetic?" (Power 73). Foucault simply responds "That's a very appealing notion" (Power 73). At the end of the interview he acknowledges that "Now I can see that the problems you put to me about geography are crucial ones for me. Geography acted as the support, the condition of possibility for the passage between a series of factors I tried to relate. Where geography itself was concerned, I either left the question hanging or established a series of arbitrary connections" (77, my emphasis). The geopolitical problem continues through his late work.
Foucault’s lack of geopolitical awareness has the discursive effect, in its work, of legitimizing the modern European state as the universal subject of power, politics and sovereignty. That which escapes the reach of the modern European state’s biopolitics has no place in Foucault’s discourse; it is repressed. Sometimes it becomes literally a discursive border as when Foucault cites Hispanic literature and art (Borges, Velázquez) to open and close the chapters of his The Order of Things while ignoring the Hispanic world as subject of history. As a result, the non-European-modern subject becomes the victim of an epistemological imperialism in which Foucault becomes the great epistemic technocrat at the service of the modern European state. Foucault does not problematize the modern state in any of his works. On the contrary, the modern state is the unconscious political horizon that permits the universalization of his discourse—even when he mentions that the state is a historical subject, as in the case of the first volume of his History of Sexuality whereby the state is reinscribed as a universal institution without geopolitics. As a result, the modern European prison house, for example, becomes on Foucault’s hands the discourse of the Universal Prison House. In a sense, he ends up incarcerating epistemologically the rest of non-modern-European subjects and histories in the prison house of his discourse.
In the same way, Agamben presents a history and analysis of state biopolitics that lacks geopolitics. Retaking the philological-archaeological method of classical humanism and its ulterior Heideggerian development, Agamben begins his reflection on the homo sacer with the texts of Greco-Roman antiquity and then moves to the European Middle Ages; he makes a stop in the Enlightenment and finally lands on the twentieth century, where the Nazi concentration camp becomes the only space an teleology of his discourse. That is, Agamben’s analysis is not aware of its tendency to universalize the geopolitical European horizon and its modern sovereign institutions—the state—as the utopic locus of biopolitics. Thereby, it is not a coincidence that Agamben ends up presenting the Nazi concentration camp as the central and culminating moment of European modernity. It is important to underscore the fact that the concentration camp is an internal creation of Nazi Germany, which created an exteriority and limit that legitimized the German state, through the extermination of the Jewish (Gypsy and homosexual) subject. That is to say, the Jew represents a subject that does not question the European state in Agamben’s text; rather the opposite. The concentration camp only becomes the central moment of modern biopolitics if the latter is contemplated sub specie foucaultensis: from the point of view of the modern European state, which then retrospectively legitimizes itself as universal political horizon. In a geopolitically unconscious way, Agamben legitimates the state as the sovereign subject of a biopolitics that no longer is European and modern but universal. The singularization and teleologization of the experience of Jewish extermination is very problematic and, in last instance, ahistorical, if Agamben’s discourse is read from a des-universalizing geopolitical perspective. A similar but purely neoliberal maneuver, carried out by the French New Philosophers, illustrates the perils of this approach. The New Philosophers also concentrated their attention in two other massacres, Bosnia and Rwanda. As Lecourt comments: “You would think that the Rwandan image of horror had become the mandatory illustration of philosophical reasoning for contemporary thought” (86).
I will mention three areas in which I am not specialist, but which are necessary to re-historicize and des-universalize Agamben’s biopolitical analysis. The goal is to demonstrate that his unconscious epistemology legitimates the modern European state as the sovereign subject of biopolitics. The three areas or moments are the American conquest, slavery, and the “domestication” of women in the nineteenth century.
Agamben does not cite some of the most important historical events that help found the modern biopolitics of the European state. They have to do with the imperialist nature of the modern European state; they exemplify the way in which the latter exerts its sovereignty over other non-European territories and subjects through technologies of colonialism (conquest and slavery). The native Americans who experience the Spanish conquest of the Renaissance through a war of extermination (and later through the institutions of the “encomienda” and the mission), as well as the Africans who suffer kidnap, purchase and sale of their bodies through slavery, represent two of the most important subjects mobilized to constitute modern biopolitics.
Works such
as Angel Rama’s The Lettered City and
Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of the
Renaissance account masterfully for the deployment of biopolitical
technologies that turn the “Indian” into the homo sacer and, thus, contribute to the modern constitution of the
sovereignty of the imperialist Castilian state. This biopolitical experience
would have to be revisited departing from the foundational texts of the
colonial experience: Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s A
Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies as well as the discursive formation of the
myth of La Malinche. Yet, Agamben makes no reference to the American conquest.
In the same way, the experience of slavery, which overlaps with that of the
American conquest, constitutes the other practice that contributes to define
the biopolitical sovereignty of the imperialist European state. The conversion
of African subjects in nude life takes places when they are reduced to the
status of commodities. Slaves, as the internal commodity and exterior subject
of Western imperialist capitalism, define the sovereign limit of the
imperialist European state; they mark the border between nature and polis,
commodity and worker, savage and civilized.
Agamben does not cite either case (conquest, slavery) precisely because they do not take place within the modern imperialist European state, but rather in its external geopolitical limit and, furthermore, point to a new type of subject that threatens state sovereignty. That is, natives and slaves are subjects and homines sacri who define the exception and the legitimacy of the European imperialist sovereignty; but, at the same time, they also represent the exception, no as bodies that confirm state sovereignty, but rather as non-modern-European subjects that announce the suspension and annihilation of imperialist sovereignty. The revolt and independization of the slave population of Haiti in 1801, among others, represents precisely such a moment—one that continues in our days with insurgencies such as that of Chiapas. The rebellion and the war of the colonial homo sacer do not signify the legitimation of the imperialist European state, but rather the opposite: the possibility of its destruction under non-state powers. In this sense, the anti-modern reading that Paul Gilroy does of Hegel’s theory of the dialectics between master and slave, departing from the writing of the ex-slave Frederick Douglass, is as essential as foundational to rethink biopolitics (41-71).
There is a third case, which is internal to the European state, but which Agamben does not theorize, once again, for not having a geopolitical consciousness: women and heterosexuality. As Thomas Laqueur explains, the biopolitization of life in the nineteenth century brings about the biologization of sexuality, which in turn generates the differentiation of the female and male bodies as two different “species.” As a result, women lose the few political rights that still preserve from the ancient regime and are turned into nude reproductive life as well as husband’s property. Women are secluded in the interior geography of domesticity, which, at the same time, is external to Western societies. At the same time, domesticity becomes the space from which the women contest their biopolitization and organize themselves to gain political rights during the first decades of the twentieth century (Armstrong). This is the other main area of nude life, by which women are marginalized to the geography of domesticity and reproduction. In this position, women give birth to life but can also be killed in many instances by the husband without committing homicide. “Woman” is the other great figure of the homo sacer that modern biopolitics produces in the new interior exteriority that constitutes bourgeois domesticity.
The three cases noted above are not thinkable from Foucault’s and Agamben’s biopolitics. These examples demonstrate that biopolitics, as the organization of state sovereignty and its teleology in the concentration camp, is not central to modernity, contrary to Agamben’s thesis. The absence, in Agamben’s discourse, of references to the constitution of the Israeli state is also due to similar reasons. The three geopolitical instances mentioned above do not only pose a non-teleological history of modernity (a non-modern biopolitics), but also demonstrate that biopolitics is constituted by certain types of homines sacri that exceed the state and, thus, can question and destroy it from a geopolitical exteriority that cannot be re-inscribed as interiority.
The choice of the concentration camp by Agamben is due to the fact that such space legitimates the modern European teleology of state biopolitics. A history of modernity that incorporates a geopolitical component demonstrates that European modernity is only a part of a multiple and irreducible non-modern history, whereby the non-modern-European subject always represents the possibility of destroying or annihilating the sovereignty of the modern European state. In short, the incorporation of non-modern history renders impossible to legitimize modern state sovereignty as universal or teleological. This non-modern history might be hard to think outside modern teleology, but must be posited, in its heterogeneity, as historical.
Thus it is not a coincidence that Agamben only introduces the effects of European colonialism in the construction of the figure of homo sacer at the end of his discourse when he addresses globalization. In Agamben’s text, the globalized presence of the postcolonial migrant subject helps to legitimize the first-world state as subject of biopolitical sovereignty. The late appearance of this subject in Agamben’s text isolates modernity from any imperialist and colonial content prior to globalization and justifies, retrospectively, the figure of the homo sacer as European and modern and, thus, as originally interior (=European) in its exteriority. The postcolonial migrant subject opens up a fracture in modern European biopolitics that goes back to the American conquest, to slavery and to the domestication of women. It ultimately de-legitimizes the biopolitical genealogy that Agamben presents: the sovereign power centered on the modern (non-imperialist) European state.
Any analysis of biopolitics must de-legitimize the modern European state as the universal horizon of power and sovereignty and underscore its imperialist expansion; otherwise runs the risk of becoming the legitimizing discourse of biotechnocracies à la Sloterdijk. Once the European state is recontextualized within imperialism and colonialism, it appears that sovereignty is not defined in regards to the internal homo sacer but rather to the external barbarian (the slave, the native, the Moor, etc).
Geopolitics of Logocentrism and the Neonationalism of the Other
(Derrida)
In the aftermath of May 1968, when most countercultural and revolutionary programs to organize international politics failed in their attempts, cultural and political theorists, specially in France, turned to more local practices and discourses in order to solve the problem that any international cultural and political agenda seemed to present at that time. Among them, philosophers such as Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Kristeva, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Derrida, whose production was recognized in the USA by the term of "poststructuralism,"[3] had the most influence in the humanities (along with feminists such as Irigaray). All these theorists claimed to be local on their analysis as well as on their cultural and political aims. Yet, most of them did not survive through the 90s and thus did not deal with the new situation faced by France vis-à-vis globalization and the unification of Europe.
However two of them, Derrida and Kristeva, have written on the changes brought about by globalization. Interestingly enough, both resort to different forms of universalism and cosmopolitanism to respond to the consequences of globalization. Moreover, both authors trace genealogically universalism and cosmpolitanism back to French culture and uniqueness and, as a result, they end up reinserting, in a deferred way, the centrality of the French state and its culture at the core of universalism. In this sense, one could conclude that there is a reactionary progression in French intellectual life from international localism to French universalism, and from counter-hegemonic poststructuralist discourse to French neonationalist ideology.
Here I will concentrate on Derrida, leaving Kristeva’s analysis for another occasion, specially because of the prominence the former has gained over the last years.[4] Although one could claim that Derrida was marginal and marginalized in France throughout the 60s and 70s, by the 1990s, it is clear that, as Herman Rapaport concludes in his Later Derrida, “[H]e is easily the most important living French intellectual today” (viii). From this privileged position, Derrida has addressed the issues of state sovereignty and nationalism in the Franco-European context in an essay published in 1990 entitled The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe. A second essay written in 1996, Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, further clarifies the linguistic tenets upon which he bases his understanding of French culture as model of cosmopolitanism and universalism. Against what Spivak defends (Critique 281), a close examination of these two essays reveals that Derrida’s differential thinking and his deconstruction of logocentrism ultimately is not geopolitically located. As a result, his philosophy slips into a defense of Eurocentrism and, more specifically, French nationalism. Although this lack of geopolitical thinking predates to Derrida’s early work, it has only become explicit and addressed as such in the 1990s in what can only be understood as a very new form of cooptation of multiculturalism, which ultimately reveals its neonationalist nature—it is a reaction to globalization.
Yet, Derrida represents some of the most engaging intellectual thinking in France, one that attempts to think beyond the reactionary proposals of neoliberal intellectuals such as Bernard-Henri Lévy or Alain Finkielkraut. They represent what Dominique Lecourt has called in his work of the same title Piétres penseurs, translated as The mediocracy. Thus although Derrida’s work has not completely avoided this neoliberal neonationalist effect, it begs nevertheless close examination so as to understand the French debate on state and global sovereignty at its best.
Derrida’s first article, The Other Heading, deals with the issue of European unification and its future. In the article, Derrida begins by dismissing the two opposed views most discussed at that point in Europe "we no longer want either Eurocentrism or anti-Eurocentrism" (12-3). Then he proceeds to present his own proposal by posing the following question, "[B]eyond these all too well known programs, for what 'cultural identity' must we be responsible?" (13). By using all the meanings of "heading [‘cap’ in French]" (economic and geographic capital, directional heading, future, etc.), he proposes a different kind of direction or heading: "[A]nd what if Europe were this: the opening onto a history for which the changing of the heading, the relation to the other heading or to the other of the heading, is experienced as always possible?" (17). By finally pausing on the last option, "the other of the heading," he characterizes this option as "the beyond of this modern tradition" (29), that is, the beyond of Europe and its modern teleology.
Derrida carefully notes that this "other of the heading" is not a way to go back through the backdoor to either the political project of the Enlightenment or to its romantic nationalist counterpoint. In his own words, he is not referring neither to "the capital of a centralizing authority that, by means of trans-European cultural mechanisms… would control and standardize [culture and tradition]" (39) nor to “a myriad of provinces…a multiplicity of self-enclosed idioms or petty little nationalisms" (39). Therefore Derrida locates the "other of the heading" in a beyond that is "neither monopoly nor dispersion" (41).
More specifically, Derrida finds this beyond in universalism: "The value of universalism here capitalizes all the antinomies” (72). However, when he is about to "head" towards the "other of the heading," Derrida retraces the genealogical location of universalism to French culture and tradition. This genealogical location of universalism is linked to French culture through the latter’s exemplarity. Derrida defends that French universal exemplarism "must be linked to the value of exemplarity that inscribes the universal in the proper body of a singularity, of an idiom or a culture" (72). Furthermore, Derrida cites the referent and base for his reflection: Paul Valéry’s Notes on the Greatness and Decline of Europe. After Valéry, Derrida defends French exemplarity as location of universalism by claiming that: "our special quality (sometimes our ridicule, but often our finest claim or title) is to believe and to feel that we are universal… men of universality" (74). Referring to Husserl, Derrida is careful to note that universalism, as exemplified by French tradition and culture, is not reserved to the French but rather is the "other of the heading" of Europe; hence it is the beyond of Europe’s future. In short, French exemplarity is universal: "This paradox is even stranger than Valéry could or wanted to think: the feeling of being 'men of universality' is not reserved for the French. Not even, no doubt, for Europeans" (74-5).
Once universalism is genealogically derived from its French local exemplarity and singularity, then Derrida does indeed point to the other of the European heading, that is, universalism in its sheer radical otherness. Furthermore, Derrida isolates the ethics that come with the other of the heading: “the duty to respond to the call of European memory, to recall what has been promised under the name of Europe, to re-identify Europe” (76). He identifies this ethic duty of European memory as “without common measure with all that is generally understood by the name duty… all other duties presuppose it in silence” (76). The same duty "demands and dictates respecting differences, idioms, minorities, singularities” (78) and “opposition to racism, nationalism, and xenophobia” (78). Moreover, in a last move, very characteristic of the radical nature of his thought, Derrida acknowledges that the the other heading of Europe ultimately includes discourses beyond rationality, i.e. religion: “the same duty demands tolerating and respecting all that is not placed under the authority of reason. It may have to do with faith, with different forms of faith…. Thoughts that, while attempting to think reason and the history of reason, necessarily exceed its order, without becoming, simply because of this, irrational, and much less irrationalist” (79).
It is at this point that the geopolitical unawareness of his discourse emerges as geopolitical excess that Derrida’s discourse contains at its margins. European universalism, which is a French singularity in its historical origins, is “not reserved for the French… not even for Europeans” (74-5) according to Derrida. Yet simultaneously, this European universalism must respect “faith” and “thoughts that exceed the order of reason.” Therefore there is a double excess that emerges at the end of the Derridean discourse: an European universalism that exceeds Europe and can be extended to others, and a non-modern-European universalism that in its religious or “faith”-full convictions negates European universalism, as in the case of Christianity. Historically speaking, Christian universalism not European but global (urbi et orbe) and denies the historical centrality of any French universalism. Christian universalism hails either from Jerusalem or Rome, that is, from cities and empires rather than from (imperialist) nation-states and historicall aimed at converting all “infidels,” including the Third World. By the same token, Muslim culture claims its own universality and, historically speaking, could even claim to encompass European modernity, since the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance is unthinkable without the contribution of Muslim culture (from the translations of Greek classics to mathematics and technology). Thus Islam ultimately could claim its Mediterranean singularity as the historical origin of modernity (a supra-European modernity). Even North America could claim a non-European universality, since the revolution of 1776 takes place before that of 1789. Furthermore the USA could even defend that the other of the heading of Europe is precisely globalization and Americanization, since North American capitalism and culture have helped curve the Nazi and communist headings of Europe, in the past, and today are responsible for the promotion of “democracy” throughout the world (including the invasions of Iraq). In short, there is a final geopolitical excess in Derrida’s claim of universality which exceeds the other of the European heading and its French historical singularity. One could say that this excess of universality others Europe as the heading of the other, so that the other of the heading of Europe ultimately becomes non-European.
Finally, Derrida does not make any references to the fact that the specific European-French form of universalism he defends is responsible for European imperialism. Deconstruction itself would dictate to read colonialism as the deferred instance, the non-universal singularity, that makes Franco-European singularity precisely “universal.” In short, Derrida’s understanding of Europe and the other of its heading relies on a choice of a specific European history which ultimately allows him to privilege a specific geopolitical discourse of Europe: France. This choice becomes universal precisely because it does not acknowledge its geopolitical determination, and thus, becomes neonationalist by default. The fact that French universalism becomes the only possible form of European universalism is a neonationalist disavowal of European history and geopolitics: any other claim to European universalism is othered by Derrida as non-French, and thus, as non-European. Islam, colonialism, other European claims to universalism, etc. become non-European and non-universal in Derrida’s text. To be more precise and deconstructive, they become the necessary margins of Derrida’s text, so that his neonationalist French claim to universalism becomes centered by those same non-French margins. Even the specter of Marx, which Derrida claims later on, becomes a ghost as a result of the latter’s geopolitical unawareness: Marxism defies any French claim to universality (if anything, England would be the Marxist location for the origins of “capitalist universality”).
In order to understand Derrida’s neonationalist move, we have to consider two historical facts. On the one hand, European unification is a reaction to globalization, and not some “genuine” European dream of universalistic unification. On the other, postcolonial immigration is the most important geopolitical problem in today’s Europe. Thus, any attempt to expand French universalism as the other of the heading of Europe automatically others the postcolonial immigrant subject as both non-French and non-European. Then this subject can be approached, through the ethics of difference outlined above by Derrida, as the other to be respected. Yet it remains other. Ultimately, Derrida’s discourse lends itself to be appropriated by people such as Valéry Giscard d'Estaing who claimed that Turkey has never been Europe and its admission to the Community would amount to the end of Europe. The question is how to make Jerusalem or Turkey part of the other heading of Europe so that the postcolonial subject is not othered. Derrida does not offer an answer to this new form of universalism because he has chosen, in a neonationalist fashion, French universalism as the only possible heading of Europe. In short Derrida’s discourse does not have geopolitics and, as result, ends up legitimizing French neonationalism. French exemplarity becomes nationalist in Derrida’s discourse: it cannot be reduced to any philosophical or theoretical category without slipping into neonationalism.
Given the fact that Derrida is a Jew born in Algeria, it is important to see how he inscribes his own (post)colonial origins in his proposal of Franco-European universalism. In the other essay I mentioned above, Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin, he explains his own relationship with French language and the way in which this relationship can be universalized as the human experience of language. Here, unlike in the previous essay, Derrrida does not disavow French-Algerian history as well as Jewish culture, but rather he turns them into the very condition that explains the universality of his relationship with French language. However, Derrida explains his geopolitical condition as the difference that he defers and disseminates to the margins of his discourse in order to universalize his relationship with French culture and thus eliminate geopolitical singularity in order to assert a new form of Franco-mono-logocentrism.
Derrida begins by stating his thesis that “[W]e only ever speak one language… (yes, but) We never speak only one language” (10). It is important to emphasize that, as the second negative sentence makes clear, one-ness and its negation are at stake when dealing with the transcendence and singularity of linguistic experience. As I will discuss below, this necessity of one-ness, of monolingualism, when thinking language, is once again a very specific and ideological choice that ultimately relies on the active geopolitical disavowal of its French origins, and more specifically, of the modern French nation-state. In this sense, Derrida’s analysis of mono-lingualism is neonationalist. However, in this essay, geopolitical disavowal is carried out by inscribing specific geopolitical markers and therefore one can deconstruct Derrida’s own neonationalist monolingualist discourse from those same markers.
In a very unusual opening, Derrida engages his colleague Abdelkebir Khatibi and claims, in a semi-humorous Aristotelian fashion, that he himself is the most Franco-Maghrebi writer of the two. Derrida’s goal is to underscore his singularity and thus later on claim universality (12). Ironically enough, he begins by making a very important reference to citizenship, which then he defers to the margins of the discourse. He begins by remembering the times of Nazi occupation in France in which Jewish people lost their French citizenship and, since they did not obtain another, became subjects without citizenship, that is, stateless subjects (15). Yet, Derrida does not elaborate further the relationship between citizenship and monolingualism as state effects. Instead he underlines that his Franco-Maghrebian experience as a Jewish subject is the universal destiny, the essence, of the alienation that defines human relationship to language tout court (i.e. “we speak one language, yet we never speak only one language”):
For is the experience of language (or rather, before any discourse, the experience of the mark, the re-mark of the margin) not precisely what makes this articulation possible and necessary? Is that not what gives rise to this articulation between transcendental or ontological universality, and the exemplary of testimonial singularity of martyred existence? … In that respect, therefore, can the passion of a Franco-Maghrebian martyr testify to this universal destiny which assigns us to a single language while prohibiting us from appropriating it, given that such an interdiction is linked to the very essence of language, or rather writing, to the very essence of the mark, the fold, and the re-mark? (27)
From that point on, that is, after justifying loss of citizenship and lack of an “original” language (Arabic, Berber or Hebrew) as the defining experience of his linguistic condition, he moves to problematizing the relationship with the only language that he contemplates as his, French:
My attachment to the French language takes forms that I sometimes consider “neurotic.” I feel lost outside the French language. The other languages which, more or less clumsily, I read, decode, or sometimes speak, are languages I shall never inhabit. Where ‘Inhabiting” begins to mean something to me. And dwelling... Not only am I lost, fallen, and condemned outside the French language, I have the feeling of honoring or serving all idioms, in a word, of writing the “most” and the “best” when I sharpen the resistance of my French, the secret “purity” of my French, the one I was speaking about earlier on, hence its resistance, its relentless resistance to translation; translation into all languages, including another such French. (56)
As the above quote shows, Derrida turns any form of linguistic resistance and translation—linguistic otherness—into a monolingual phenomenon that, therefore, can only take place within French and, then from French into other languages. Furthermore, by shifting back and forth between writing and speaking, inhabiting and translating, Derrida makes French the experience of the other, so that sameness and otherness define the two sides of a monolingualism that he desires to attain but knows he cannot: “How can one say and how can one know, with a certainty that is at one with oneself, that one shall never inhabit the language of the other, the other language, when it is the only language that one speaks, and speaks in monolingual obstinacy, in a jealously and severely idiomatic way, without, however, being ever at home in it?” (57).
Yet the only fact that Derrida does not question is precisely the one-ness of what he terms the monolingualism of the other. Although this monolingualism arises originally in Derrida’s account as a historical singularity related to his Franco-Maghrebian-Jewish condition, which leads him to inhabit French as his only language and its other, ultimately Derrida does not justify the universality of monolingualism as such. This is not a discursive accident; it colors Derrida’s work throughout the 1990s as Rapaport argues (53). It has to do with the ethical and religious turn taken by Derrida, which is, to a certain extent, contradictory with his previous work from the 60s and 70s, which denounces logocentrism (Rapaport 52). Although I will come back to this issue, it is important to emphasize that Derrida does not take bilingualism, in its radical and irreducible duality, as the departure point to theorize the otherness of language, as Chicano theory does, for example (Anzaldua). The reason for the unjustified appearance of monolingualism and its otherness remains unjustified and unexplained in Derrida’s text, except for marginal references to the state, citizenship, and colonialism.
At one point, Derrida does acknowledge the imprint of colonialism (and thus the European imperialist state) in his experience of monolingualism: “It can only be a target or, rather, a future language, a promised sentence, a language of the other, once again, but entirely other than the language of the other as the language of the master or colonist, even though, between them, the two may sometimes show so many unsettling resemblances maintained in secret or held in reserve” (62). Even earlier he concludes that “’colonialism’ and ‘colonization’ are only high points… one traumatism over another, an increasing buildup of violence, the jealous rage of an essential coloniality and culture” (24) so that ultimately coloniality becomes a high point in the essential othering of any linguistic experience, which, once is read geopolitically, turns out to be a colonial experience. In this respect, one could claim that coloniality is the founding geopolitical act of language and therefore Derrida, ultimately, is referring specifically to the monolingual language of the imperialist European nation-state—a non-universal experience.
Only at one point does Derrida acknowledge the problematic nature of his monolingual investigation, but he does not specifically address the problem of monolingualism itself. He acknowledges that monolingualism is a conduit for metaphysics, but he still does not question the geopolitical juncture that leads to monolingual metaphysics:
All these words: truth, alienation, appropriation, habitation, one’s-home… ipseity, place of the subject, law, and so on remain, in my eyes, problematic. Without exception. They bear the stamp of the metaphysics that imposed itself through, precisely, this language of the other, this monolingualism of the other. So much so that this debate with monolingualism will have been nothing other than a piece of deconstructive writing. (59)
As a result, Derrida ends up claiming the need for a metaphysical and original language, of which French is simply the margin, the accident, the singular historical complement. As he concludes: “Since the prior-to-the-first time of pre-originary language does not exist, it must be invented. Injunctions, the summons of another writing. But, above all, it must be written within languages, so to speak. One must summon up writing inside the given language. From the cradle to the grave, that language, for me, will have been French” (64).Yet, when he theorizes difference within monolingualism and the possibility of translation, i.e. otherness itself, this otherness remains confined within French language, thus turning French into the only language that can inhabit monolingualism and its other. In this way Derrida turns the linguistic complement or margin, French, into the monolingual language par excellence, which in turn renders any other language (Basque, Arabic, Spanish, German, etc.) into an-other language that mirrors the “original” French model. At that point any language is constituted as other language by French’s monolingualism. In short, in a geopolitically disavowing move, Derrida turns French and its otherness into the universal original monolingual language, which then renders any other language into a variant and example of the originary Franco-monolingualism, while also denying any other non-monolingual experience an existence. As the following quote exemplifies, Derrida transforms French from a historically exemplary and singular language defined by monolingualism into the universal language of the radical and originary experience of language: monolingualism, which therefore one could label Franco-mono-logocentrism, in a move that claims Derrida’s original work on logocentrism while also underscoring retrospectively the geopolitical underpinnings of that work:
This translation translates itself in an internal (Franco-French) translation by playing with the non-identity with itself of all language. By playing and taking pleasure…. For the classical linguist, of course, each language is a system whose unity is always reconstituted. But this unity is not comparable to any other. It is open to the most radical grafting, open to deformations, transformations, expropriation, to a certain a-nomie and de-regulation. (65)
In a very central paragraph, Derrida summarizes the origin and destination of his Franco-mono-logocentrism: from the possible languages that his ancestors had spoken (or languages that were spoken where he was born), to French, and, then, from French to the information highway. However, the moment Derrida refers to the internet as a new geopolitical scenario of linguistic experience, he strategically disqualifies it as a possible geopolitical location for his Franco-mono-logocentrism. At that juncture, Derrida disavows both the pre-colonial Algerian past and the new imperialist Anglo-American present:
The monolingual of whom I speak speaks a language of which he is deprived. The French language is not his. Because he is therefore deprived of all language, and no longer has any other recourse—neither Arabic, nor Berber, nor Hebrew, nor any languages his ancestors would have spoken—because this monolingual is in a way aphasic (perhaps he writes because he is an aphasic), he is thrown into absolute translation, a translation without a pole of reference, without an originary language, and without a source language... For him there are only target languages… if you will, the remarkable experience being, however, that these languages just cannot manage to reach themselves because they no longer know where they are coming from, what they are speaking from and what the sense of their journey is. Languages without an itinerary and, above all, without any superhighway of goodness knows what information. (61, my emphasis)
This double denial of past and present defines and situates, from its historical and geopolitical margins, from a deferred or marginalized linguistic diversity, Derrida’s monolingualism. If one follows the new debates about French language and the internet, one knows that these debates cannot be framed within monolingualism and its otherness, since English is the language that defines the internet. Only from within an idealized and disavowed geopolitical scenario, defined by the imperialist French nation-state, does monolingualism become the singular and universal scenario of the human experience of language. To the Berber subject living in Algeria, Berber, Arab and French become part of a non-monolingual scenario that cannot be reduced to the otherness of monolingualism. In a similar way, a Basque speaker must relate to Spanish or French, and English, as a trilingual scenario that cannot be reduced to monolingualism: all these three languages become part of the new scenario of linguistic otherness. Basque speakers living under the diglosic situation created by French and Spanish languages (and their states) know that he or she will never speak his or her language for its monolingual originality has been long time ago lost to Spanish or French, the same way that France’s and Spain’s monolingual originality, still hegemonic in their respective states, remains lost to English in any non-national, global scenario. For a Basque speaker, monolingualism and its otherness becomes a very specifically situated geopolitical scenario that cannot be universalized, must not be universalized, under the risk of legitimizing the imperialist nation-state and its other European heading: France (and Spain). If my Basque experience of language had to be universalized, as Derrida does with his, I would open my reflection by saying: one always speaks three languages, yet… one never speaks three languages. This trilingualism is not reducible to monolingualism under any metaphysical or ontological pretenses; it is ontologically trilingual from its “origin.”
To the Basque speaker, just as to the Berber speaker, language is an experience of trilingualism and its other. For Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldua, whose linguistic experience is defined by the borderlands between the United State and Mexico, her geopolitical-linguistic situation cannot be reduced to the monolingualism of the imperialist nation-state. For Anzaldua linguistic experience is always, from its origin, bilingual (and trilingual if the trace of Nahuatl is rescued). Thus if we consider other universalities, defined by the experience of bilingualism or trilingualism, Derrida’s attempt to theorize monolingualism must be deconstructively resituated as endowed with a geopolitical margin or complement (Algeria, Jewish diaspora, France) that must be accounted for as geopolitically central. The monolingualism of the other is, in its original essence, French and is coextensive with the French absolutist state: Richeliu established the first academy of the language in 1635. The French revolution and its modernity came too late to the absolutist mono-logocentrism of French; French monolingualism is haunted by the ghost of the absolutist French empire. The true irreducible marking of Derrida’s monolingualism is constituted precisely by those Jewish, Berber and Arabic presences that French imperialism repressed but did not erase. Derrida’s experience of language is defined by tetralinguism and, in that respect, he remains as Franco-Maghrebi as his colleague Abdelkebir Khatibi, no more, no less: both share the same markings even from an Aristotelian point of view.
Having acknowledged the geopolitically situated Franco-mono-logocentrism of Derrida’s endeavor to endow the origin of culture (language) and the other of the heading of Europe with a French neonationalist universalism and teleology, once again, one must rethink the institution of the state (in this case the French state) and deconstruct its neonationalist effects for a future multicultural Europe. Only a geopolitically aware deconstruction will contribute to the endeavor: a geodeconstruction. My intuition is that a geopolitically situated deconstruction would become a reconstruction; but this discussion must remain for another occasion.
My analysis of the political and cultural discourse of Habermas, Agamben and Derrida responds to a need to underscore the ideological hegemony of a modern European state in their thought, while, at the same time, demonstrating the urgency of rethinking the crisis of the state from a geopolitically situated critique. If this proposal is accepted, we must first rethink the way in which poststate sovereignty is articulated in globalization and, more specifically, in macro-state networks such as the European Community. Therefore it is important to emphasize that any thinking on global sovereignty needs to be a multiculturalis poststate thought or it will not be. The state is not the departure point to think sovereignty in the times of globalization.
A poststate theory aware of its condition of “post-“ also needs to rethink the fact that the state is anterior to the nation but, in turn, the nation can survive the state even if it becomes a nation at a loss, a ghostly nation, that is, multiculturalism. Today the nation is not anchored on the state; it is not articulated by the apparatuses and institutions of a single state bur rather by those of several states. The new citizens of the poststate-nation are multicultural and migrant; they hail from “nations” that are postimperialist, postcolonial, religious, secular, etc. That is, multiculturalism is the basis of the hegemony of global macro-states or networks in so far as such multiculturalism represents the “secularized” (Schmitt) or ghostly principle of global sovereignty. Therefore, the poststate theory that I propose here ought to be postnational too; it must be conscious of multiculturalism without falling at the same time in neonationalist traps as it is the case of the discourse of Habermas, Derrida, or Agamben.
If we retake the thesis of Agamben, one would have to say that global sovereignty is not based on the biopolitics of the first world, where the conversion of the delinquent subject into nude life and its subsequent exclusion establishes the rule and its exception. On the contrary, if we approach the political macro-state network as a development in which modernity is not central but rather part of a more complex history that includes “others” (subjects colonized by or in contact with European imperialism), global sovereignty is articulated through the exclusion of subjects and groups of the Third World. The biopolitics of the Third World are regulated through a minority that is the new global homo sacer: the subject that attempts to migrate to the first world and thus becomes a subject of transition, an abject, that defines the interiority and exteriority of the first world. This subject, which is less than 20% of the Third World, travels across an interiority that is biopolitical, the first world, and an exteriority that is neither biopolitical nor nude life: the Third World (the majority of the Third World never travels to the first, and thus remains exterior). This new global exteriority constituted by the Third World continues to live in the ghostly paradigm of the (postcolonial) nation-state and upholds a strong conception of identity—this is the reason why we identify the Third World with fundamentalism, irrational nationalism or aggressive tribalism.[5] Therefore, the denial of or the exclusion from biopolitics becomes the ultimate form of global sovereignty. The exclusion from biopolitics becomes the new form of global biopolitics; a reality that Agamben cannot think from within a modern paradigm. The exteriority that the Third-World migrant subject, the global homo sacer, defines is not nude life: it is the postcolonial world defined by strong identities (tribal, national, religious, etc.). The global divide does not take between the community and nude life, as Agamben would have it, but between the biopolitical community and the non-biopolitical community, between civilization and barbarism. The barbarian is not nude life but is not regulated by first-world biopolitics either. If anything, this is a double biopolitics; hence the need to rethink the global “barbarian divide.”
Castells points out in a very pertinent way that the new regional organization created by networks has the effect of reinscribing the global in the regional as network: “Inside each country, the networking architecture reproduces itself into regional and local centers, so that the whole system becomes interconnected at the global level.... Furthermore, globalization stimulates regionalization” (411). Therefore, as a precarious starting point, a poststate theory situated in the first world (my position), which is also conscious of global sovereignty would emphasize establishing nodes or points of connection within the network. These nodes can be strong points constituted by numerous connections of tenuous identities, where the regional, the state, and the macro-state (USA, Europe, China/Japan) are only some of the vectors of a more complex connective structure whereby everything biopolitical, cultural or identitarian, is connected to the node, including the Third World, in a way that I will explain below.[6] That is, the node does no begin with the state, but with the city and the region, with the body and its desire, and also encompasses the global and nude life, biopolitics and its exterior: the Third World. Opposite the modern state, which excludes, the node tends to include, connect, and incorporate, including the Third World.
The strength of nodes established within a macro-state network such as the European or the American would reside in their capacity to organize all the existing biopolitical identities and to connect them to the global imperialist flux. At the same time, the gravitational connective force of a given node would permit to establish new connections that would defy global sovereignty. This strong node, politically and culturally strong but with tenuous connections, can take place in sites such as the Basque Country, where the urban, the regional, the state, and the macro-state connect with the biopolitical—the body, desire, human rights and citizenship. Such a node would have enough strength to establish new connections that would defy the global sovereignty of the American and European networks and, in this way, establish new connections with the Third World and with other marginal biopolitical subjects. Nevertheless, nodes do not create “cosmopolitan solidarity” by themselves as Habermas has it. On the contrary, “cosmopolitan solidarity” would only come from the fact that nodes, in order to organize themselves as strong points within the network, would need to defy global sovereignty and create alternative connections, without which they would disappear as nodes. These alternative connections, as in the example of the Basque Country, would include economic connections between the Basque economy and other non-hegemonic ones such as Cuba or Nigeria, cultural collaborations between Basque and Chicano culture, etc. The tension between global sovereignty and nodal challenge is what would give political strength to the node while, at the same time, defining its political limitations, which ultimately would constitute its political unconscious. Donna Haraway and Chris Gray would probably add that the node subject is the cyborg, but these two authors have not elaborated yet a geopolitically situated cyborg theory, which, nevertheless, is desirable and possible. Whether node politics would ultimately be co-opted by neoliberalism and neonationalism remains to be seen. Here it is advanced as a possible alternative to any neonationalist theory that is not geopolitically situated and thus is not poststate.
The advantage of a theory of strong nodes in poststate networks relies on the fact that the nodes’ historicity and identity are reconsidered retrospectively as the basis of all their political-identitarian connections, which are then incorporated to the node: from the biopolitical to the postcolonial. At the same time, the node would continue to be flexible and capable of adopting to the changes imposed by global sovereignty thanks to the new connections that redefine position, identity, and strength/gravity. In this way the discussion about the invention of tradition and the tradition of invention, as well as any reactionary understanding of neo/nationalism, would be overcome. The node is not exclusive, differential and internally homogeneous; nor even historically nostalgic or essentialist. Its strength resides in its capacity to connect. At the same time, connectivity lies on the institutions that are incorporated to the node. Therefore, there must be a change from state politics to institutional politics. Only a strong politics of nodes and connectivity can counteract the neoliberal/neonationalist ideology that legitimizes the global sovereignty of macro-states such as the European. [7]
Intellectuals have a future as the legitimizers of macro-state networks and their biopolitics. This is the case of Habermas, Agamben, and Derrida. Furthermore, and against what most predictions establish, intellectuals might have a very healthy future as elite intellectuals who, from universities and other elite institutions, create a very elitist discourse for a minority: the discourse of global sovereignty, just the same way monks and priests did in the Middle Ages. I do not think that intellectuals will have a future as mediatic interpreters (to use Bauman’s terminology). Yet, what remains to be seen is whether there will be a more popular intellectual who leads the discourse on nodes, connectivity and counter-global-sovereignty. Once again, the figure of jester and improviser of popular verses and songs in medieval carnivals comes to mind. Such an intellectual would articulate the discourse of historical multiculturalism rather than that of neonationalism and neoliberalism. As Calhoun concludes: “For nationalism to give way to some postnational organization of social life will not simply be a matter of new formal structures of organization, but of new ways of imagining identity, interests, and solidarity. A key theme will be the importance of configurations of mutual commitment—solidarity—that are more than reinscriptions of preestablished interest or identities” (170). Nodes within networks can be a way to begin defying global sovereignty and imagining new identities, interests and solidarities.
[1] Previously in 1989, Manuel Jiménez Redondo translated an essay collection of Habermas on the subject of postnationalism: Identidades nacionales y postnacionales.
[2] Agamben does not elaborate a gender analysis of the homo sacer. However, in Roman law the citizen is always male, hence the pronoun “he/his/him.” As I will elaborate later, this represents a geopolitical shortcoming in Agamben’s analysis.
[3] Although Jean Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard are considered by many historians as part of poststructuralism, in my opinion, they have not had the same influence in the latest development of critical theory centered on subject formation. Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser, the other two poststructuralists, just like Foucault and Deleuze, did not have time to experience and react to full-blown globalization (after 1989). Therefore, they are no approached here. Furthermore, their work is referenced throughout this book. Yet in a nutshell, my criticism of both authors is the following: the existence of a single and all-encompassing "Symbolic Order" (Lacan) or system of “Apparatuses of State Interpellation” (Althusser) is epistemologically dependent on the existence of a national language enforced by a imperialist nation-state such as the French. For a full development of this criticism see my “Postnationalism.”
[4] Kristeva has taken up the task of upholding French nationalism by celebrating, ironically enough, its non-nationalist and universalistic spirit. Again here French nationalism is disguised as cosmopolitan universalism:
I … assert that there exists a French national idea that can make up the optimal rendition of the nation in the contemporary world. Quite the opposite of the "spirit of the people" (Volkgeist), whose origins have been traced back to the ambiguities of the great Herder and that is mystically rooted in the soil, the blood, and the genius of the language, the French national idea, which draws its inspiration from the Enlightenment and is embodied in the French Republic, is achieved in a legal and political pact between free and equal individuals. If it be true that it thus causes the sacred to be absorbed by the national identified with the political, it does not do so only to ensure the most rational conditions for the development of capitalism, but also and above all to put forward its dynamics toward accomplishing the rights of man. (39-40)
However, as she attempts to elaborate the universality of French nationalism, she avoids the historical issue of colonialism altogether. Furthermore, she denies other French languages—such as Arab, Briton, Occitan, or Basque—the possibility of contributing to French national culture when she carefully notes that "to write in French, to write a fiction in French . . . is at the same time an acknowledgement of the fact that a nation (the French one) is a language act and an attempt to inscribe on it other sensitivities, other experiences, and strangeness apt to extend its pursuit of universality" (44-5, my emphasis). In other words, when it comes to defining the universality of the French experience, only French language is valid, just as the Herderian nationalist tradition—so vehemently criticized by Kristeva—would have it. Once the rational and universal character of French nationalism is affirmed and any other nationalism discarded, then "the irrationality of language" is reintroduced as non-nationalist. The reason, I believe, is central to Kristeva’s cosmopolitan, universalistic discourse: if she admitted Basque, Occitan, and Arab as French languages and tools for literary creation, then she would no longer be French but a Bulgarian in denial of her own national identity who, thus, writes in French. National difference must disappear from her French universalistic discourse so that she also remains both: French and universal.
[5] Although gender/sex is located within this division, it would require a separate elaboration, which would have to reference “subalternity,” the other term to be incorporated in this elaboration. See for example Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern” and Massad.
[6] It remains to be elaborated if a biopolitical and geopolitical node still generates a public sphere that is genealogically connected to the bourgeois public sphere as studied by Habermas. Tentatively I would advance that a node would break away from a concept of public sphere.
[7] I am the first one to admit that even this proposal is not satisfactory and does not still address the Third World, the barbarians, in its full complexity. It is a departure point, which I am happy to modify or give up as more geopolitically situated theories and barbarian critiques come to the fore or I become more aware of them if they already exist.