1 Etienne BALIBAR

Civic Universalism and Its Internal Exclusions: the Issue of Anthropological Difference The initial idea of this lecture is that modernity has brought about a transformation both in the representation of the universal and the understanding of subjectivity and subjectformation, which strictly combines the political and metaphysical aspects of these two notions. I call the new figure of universality civic universality, or even better civicbourgeois universality, by using as a subtext the full range of meanings involved traditionally in the name burgher, Brger in German, and I suggest that its main character, which precisely accounts for the universality that it performatively enunciates, especially in such emblematic texts as the Declarations of Rights, is a rigorous adequacy between the capacities of the human and the powers of the citizen. This means first that every human is entitled to accessing citizenship (in the broadest possible sense, not exclusively statist and juridical, and not exclusively national, even if it is in the national framework that citizenship historically becomes an institution). And conversely the rights of the citizen indicate capacities which are deemed to express the powers and requisites of human nature in general. Let us observe here that this entails a revolution in the representation of the subject, which annihilates the figures of its subjection to various pre-established authorities, legal and extralegal, immanent and transcendent, picturing them as so many forms of inequality and servitude build in the individuals belonging to communities and social relations. But the story cannot end with these great emancipatory gestures: it must also include a new process, a new regime of the becoming subject of the citizen, or if you like his (her?) subjectivation, which are intimately linked with the realization of the universal within institutions, in the form of processes of socialization conferring upon the subject its capacities to relate to others in performing universal actions (such as exchanging, owning, learning, working,

2 loving, etc.), and processes of community-building, which transfer the function of enunciating and implementing universal values upon the communities to which the subject belongs, such as precisely the nation, of which it forms an indivisible part as Rousseau would say. But then we may observe that where the claim of the universal is equality and liberty, plus other subsequent values, the reality of the civic-bourgeois world is more than ever, and perhaps more than before in some sensitive areas, that of discriminations and hierarchies: subjectivation keeps involving subjection, albeit in different forms and in different spaces. I submit that such a contradiction is not to be considered only as a gap between the ideal and the real, but as arising from the universal itself, or affecting its concept from the inside, because old and new forms of discrimination and oppression have to be not only reiterated or preserved, but reformulated (and, in a sense, generalized) in the bourgeois-civic world, in order to emerge as implications of the universal itself, or as requisites of its very institution. This means that they have to be located at the level of what I will call anthropological differences, i.e. differences perceptible among the humans that are also immediately constitutive of the idea of the human. This involves an extreme violence, latent or manifest, because it means that the only consistent way to deny citizenship to individuals in a regime of civic-bourgeois universality is to deny them full humanness, full membership in the human species. It becomes thus necessary to invent concepts, and representations of the human which will imply more or less radical exclusions from the political membership, and to express these exclusions in terms of the very universality of the human differences, such as the difference of the masculine and the feminine, the normal and the pathological, the adult and the infantile, the intellectual and the manual, the ethnic differences, etc. I also suggest that this typical antinomy accounts at least formally for a double bind to which claims of rights are exposed in the bourgeois-civic world, namely the necessity of reclaiming the universal,

3 expressing themselves in the very language of liberty and equality which discriminations and hierarchies contradict, and the antithetic necessity of opposing the universal, looking critically into its definition, to identify the roots of certain forms of oppression and subjection, or at least the roots of their legitimation. I propose therefore a program of dialectical investigation of the antinomies of the universal, inasmuch at they affect the reciprocal relationship between the civic-bourgeois institutions and the subject created by these institutions, also called man in the modern Euro-American tradition. From this general statement of purposes, I want now to proceed to the examination of some typical forms of the construction of the anthropological difference within the realm of civic-bourgeois universalism, or better said I want to summarize some of the lessons that could be drawn from such an examination, however partial and provisory it is bound to remain, not only within the material limits of a lecture, but more generally because of the insufficiency of the concepts that I have at hand. While doing this I remain at a rather abstract and formal level, which authorizes the search for analogies, and I rely as I always did in my past work on a bricolage of materials and questions arising from contemporary politics and the social sciences, on the one hand, and the reading of philosophical and literary texts on the other hand.

Who shall be Judge? The first difference that I will examine, borrowing from a series of analyses carried on by Michel Foucault in the early and mid 70s, concerns processes of definition of normality through a simultaneous negation of its opposites: mental pathologies and criminal behaviours in particular. In his lectures at the Collge de France from 1974-75 Les anormaux, as well as a subsequent lecture from 1978 for the Law and Psychiatry Symposium in Toronto, called The dangerous Individual, which taken together I consider to be one of

4 Foucaults most illuminating genealogical investigations of the institutions of Modernity, he would study technologies of power which articulate a new field of scientific knowledge with the governmentality of the emerging industrial society. Indeed, these technologies never entirely eliminate open violence, but they mainly rely on disciplines which do not so much state interdictions or try to terrorize the subjects, as Hobbes would recommend, than they try to select, prescribe and shape then individuals conducts. This is a strategy which involves setting up models of normality, but also having them accepted and recognized by the subjects. Historically, it will become the objective of typically modern institutions such as scientific medicine and the penal system, but also the school, in short the great apparatuses or equipment of bourgeois society. All these institutions operate through the broad antithesis of normality and abnormality, they formulate discriminations or judgments which distinguish among individuals, classify them socially but also morally (judging their characters), distinguishing different modalities of contradicting the norm, i.e. of destroying normality or deviating from it. To the age-old question always closely associated to the category of sovereignty: quis judicabit?, or who shall be judge?, which Hobbes inscribed in the heart of his Leviathan, they now give the democratic answer: judge shall be who is normal, or it is the normal majority either directly or through its capable representatives, the maior et sanior pars of old contractualist theories, who in turn through their rulings ascertain the normalcy of the majority. However this is where things become more complicated, and the notion of normality logically constituted as negation of its own negations proves terribly ambiguous. This is not only because normality can become negated in different ways and to different degrees: mental pathologies are divided into idiocy, neuroses, perversions, psychoses, etc., and criminal law distinguishes different crimes or felonies in order to adapt their punishments. Rather, what will destabilize the norm while practically enforcing it, is the fact that incompatible

5 abnormalities are inscribed in a continuity and may even ultimately become fused. This is a long story, ending with the institutional alliance of psychiatry and criminal law, which produces a paradoxical merging of the mad and the criminal as social and psychological types. What especially interested Foucault was a convergence of two correlative processes, taking place in the early XIXth century and continuing well into the XXth century, on the plane of institutions and power relations as well as the plane of knowledge and anthropological discourse. On one side, we can follow a developing competition between judges and doctors (progressively becoming psychiatrists): at stake here is the power struggle between two corporations or faculties (in the very sense in which Kant spoke of the conflict of faculties), to decide which of them must control the survey and isolation of great criminals who committed atrocious acts, such as parricides and infanticides, which evoke the spectre of madness and monstrosity. Eventually the struggle leads to a tight collaboration of the two faculties, in the framework of the penal procedure. The psychiatrist becomes a judiciary expert, whose scientific knowledge is necessary both to decide which criminals can be brought to court, and whether they can be punished. The expert, in a sense, is a judge judging before the judge, who provides a pre-judgment. Foucault would show that this cooperation is crucial to transform the crime from a simple objective breaking of the law and an assault on the authority of the sovereign, into the expression of a deviant personality: therefore installing before the crime, and as its source, a psychological and social figure, the criminal, defined as a subject capable of crime, because he harbours (and hides from others, but above all from himself) criminal instincts or impulses. On the correlative side of the theory or the scientific disciplines, we observe the invention and the epistemological foundation of new negative categories, particularly that of perversion and perversity, (an interesting doublet), extracted from moral discourse to become the other side of normality, that permanently threatens it and could overthrow it. The notion of the perverse individual

6 increasingly substitutes old notions of monstrosity, dementia and monomania, and it leads to a typology of dangerous individuals dangerous both for society and for themselves, which calls for an institutional system of defenses. On such bases it becomes thus possible to envisage a continuity of criminality and pathology. A psychological science transformed into an auxiliary of police and justice will seek the causes of pathologies and disorders, particularly sexual, which lead to commit crimes, and should be traceable to the childhood of the subjects (often considered themselves as victims of perverse assaults who have become perverse in turn) - hence the importance of establishing a preventive discipline within the family (whose typical example was the rigid interdiction of infantile masturbation). Finally, in what Foucault calls a process of meta-somatization, it becomes the function of a speculative biology to relate these perversions to processes of degeneracy of the species, which call for biopolitical defences, both medical and racial, eugenic and pedagogic. The notion of a danger for the species indicates that what is at stake is a return of the inhuman into the human, or the construction of a human figure of the inhuman. If it can become an obsession, it is also because a question is crystallized here which personally concerns the subject as a citizen, particularly when the citizen is potentially a juror in the democratic institution of the tribunal. For Foucault, the modern criminal trial is a kind of truth procedure, where the citizens forming the sovereign people (or some of them, with the help of experts), not only defend their security, but also try to understand who they are, qua humans living in a public and a private sphere, what they are capable of doing, in other terms how fragile are the barriers which sometimes protect us from criminal pathology, sometimes dont. It seems to me that this confers also a reflexive function upon the anthropological difference seen as a deviation from normality which typically bars access to property, responsibility and citizenship for certain individuals. It belongs to a sort of

7 collective or institutional introspection, always receiving indeed too many simultaneous answers for each of them to be really convincing. I may be permitted here to refer to an essay that I had published in 1990 on the occasion of interdisciplinary debates provoked by a draft reform of the 1810 French Penal Code, part of the great system of bourgeois law created after the Revolution by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the subsequent law dating 1838 which still governed the irresponsibility of mad criminals and their subjection to administrative rules of mandatory confinement in lunatic asylums. I was already using those of Foucaults texts available at the time, and I reflected on discursive strategies of bourgeois politics for making penal responsibility and social deviancy intelligible, not only in order to protect the society but also to inculcate norms to the social subjects. I attached these strategies to the three typical ideologies of modernity (in the sense proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein) by using a simple logical typology. To the strategies of liberal politics, I attached the idea that a subject can be either mad or criminal, but certainly not both (thus a logical disjunction). To the strategies of conservative politics, I attached the idea that a subject can be both mad and criminal, thus a logical conjunction, which is periodically reactivated by discourses of social defence invoking biological and sociological determinisms. Finally to the strategies of a utopian politics, which can be either anarchist or socialist, I attached the idea that dangerous subjects are ultimately neither mad nor criminal, thus a logical simultaneous rejection, because deviancy results from pathogenic and criminogenic social conditions: they would evade the alternative of the normal and the pathological, or rather it would be society itself which can be measured according to this distinction, and which becomes dangerous for itself (i.e. for its own members). Intellectually, of course, it is the liberal position, pivotal in the system, which is the most fragile, and the most ambivalent: to stretch apart the mad and the criminal is to open the possibility of a collective discrimination, which seems essential for a

8 democratic order whose participants are both fallible and autonomous, meaning that as much as possible they must protect their own normality rather than having it imposed by discretionary institutions. But it also means that normality works inside the liberal society as an instrument of exclusion, to provide the subjects with the conviction that they are not abnormal, or they recognizably differ from those others who are designated as abnormal by some stigma. This, it seems to me, dovetails with the implicit lesson drawn by Foucault: power-knowledge instituted by justice and psychiatry brings about a fundamental uncertainty with respect to the exact nature of the danger threatening the subjects autonomy. We could also present it as a double bind affecting anthropological differences in general. They are not only impossible to dismiss (which means that it is absurd to imagine humans outside of such differences), they are also impossible to define in a univocal manner, in the form of lines of demarcation simply separating classes or groups of humans who are essentially heterogeneous or possess different characters. In this case what remains forever problematic is to absolutely define what distinguishes a normal or healthy subject from a subject who is mentally ill, or an honest subject from a delinquent or a criminal. A fortiori it is impossible to simply distribute abnormals between the categories of madness and criminality, which could explain why a liberal politics in this matter retains a utopian character and remains permanently subject to the pressure of a notion of a society to be defended and collective obsessions of perversity looming below its appearances of civility.

Hoc est corpus tuum? Having sketched this first model, I can embark on other analyses and discussions, concerning in particular the ethnic difference and the sexual difference. My idea is to examine whether analogous patterns of inevitability and indefinition (or essential indeterminacy) can be found here, and in which terms they should be expressed. It is also to examine how

9 anthropological differences overlap, how they presuppose each other, which means that they are never reducible to a single model. Each of them has a specific history, but these histories concur in setting the horizon of the inhuman human in the framework of civic-bourgeois universality. The ethnic difference was often projected into the non-European realm as an object of ethnographic scholarly study and administrative colonial management. But it also essentially aimed at reflecting the indigenous foundations of domestic western communities. It has an essential link to the institution of the nation, itself a crystallization of the universal and its restriction, therefore to the constitution of the citizen as national subject, or the emergence of what I called in another place homo nationalis. This subject is not so much the result of processes of normalization (albeit they are still there, even in a subordinated function) than of processes of identification. Marks of belonging to a given national community, or a people (ethnos), are retrieved in the individual, and, again, interiorized by him/her as conditions of living together, sharing the burdens and enjoying the benefits of speaking a certain common language, belonging to a certain tradition with its symbolic and imaginary references, accepting the duties and sacrifices that it requests, etc. It is clearly the case that the objective and subjective dimensions of identity-formation and identityreproduction are involved in the anthropological representation of humankind as a single species which consists of a diversity of ethnic communities. But what particularly interests me here is also the counter-effect of such a representation, namely the emergence of the figure of the stranger as other (or the distinction of the us and the them in ethnic terms), and above all it is the return of the stranger from within, in the figure of an intruder, out of place as it were: this internal other who is both inevitable and subject to the ambivalent affects of repulsion and fascination, and is likely to be considered either as symptom of an irreducible particularity of the national communities or the uncanny bearer of a projected universality, or the promises of cosmopolitanism.

10 On account of objective historical tendencies which generalize the circulation of populations, of post-colonial migrations and constitutions of diasporas, which destabilize established procedures of reproduction of the identity of nations, and of more than a century of debates about the primacy of the biological and linguistic factors of human diversity, with their alternate valorisations of purity and hybridity, what strikes me here is a dramatic indeterminacy of the languages of race and culture. Leaving aside all the necessary and careful discussions of their definitions (which are always both scientific and institutional, not to say administrative), I would submit that a genealogy of these categories used to identify the external, and above all the internal other, shows that the racial and the cultural could never become absolutely separated, inasmuch as they command, precisely, affiliations. As postcolonial theorists particularly have shown, a cultural element was always involved in the alleged biological classification of races, inasmuch particularly as it was indiscernible from a representation of hierarchies, relationships of inferiority and superiority among pure and hybrid races, based on the antithesis of barbarity and civilization. But a racial element was also (and remains) involved in the classification of cultures, in all the debates about culturalism and multi-culturalism, at least in a metaphorical sense - but what is not metaphoric in the representation of race? Or, to follow the indications of Paul Gilroy, in the substitution of the colour line by the culture lines. Over the years I tried to investigate the symbolic structure of this racial element, and the reasons for its permanent reiteration, through the tentative definition of what, after Derrida, I called a genealogical scheme, which is dominant as soon as a heritage or a transmission of properties from one generation to another generation (and over the succession of generations) is invoked to account for the reproduction of identities. The genealogical scheme is at stake in the semantic derivations and displacements from descent to degeneracy, from ancestry to genetics, inheritance to heredity, translation to

11 tradition, etc. Clearly it is profoundly destabilized by the contemporary phenomena of transnationalisation, but it appears also as the recourse against what is perceived as a threat to collective identities and individual rootedness produced by globalization. However, I maintain that in their very substitutability, which produces such disturbing ideological formations asracism without races, orecology of cultural diversity, and in spite of the fact that both of them involve a tension of the universal and the particular, the categories of race and culture remain profoundly dissymmetric. Drawing inspiration in particular from Fanons incisive and tragic essay, Black skin, white masks (1952), I submit that there is a residue of unexchangeable difference, which is in particular the empirical body, or the inscription of identities in the materiality and the plasticity of a bodily object of desire and repulsion, both highly sexualized and accompanied by various ways of instituting the distinction of the somatic and the spiritual, e.g. the colour, which for that reason forms a last refuge for the inexplicability of the human. It also provides, as we know, powerful resources for the performative reversals of the name race, which combine a political and an aesthetic dimension. It is around the spectral character of this body at the same time highly visual and made invisible (Ralph Ellison), that Fanon had organized his phenomenology of internal exclusion of the racial other, particularly the ex-slave, but also (retrieving a key category from Du Bois), his analysis of colonial and postcolonial double consciousness, and his dialectical understanding of the powerful enunciation of the universal from within the extremities of its negation. We seem to find here something which is at least analogous to the pattern of uncertainty of the definition of the norm, albeit in the realm of identification. The metaphoric designation of the internal stranger as a foreign body or an intruder within the community, if it is a metaphor at all, appears therefore as one that crystallizes the combination of self and other at the heart of any subjective identity, but also allegorizes its permanent potential of racial violence and political creativity.

12

One is Two, and Two is One As for sexual difference, it is the most obvious (and most obviously universalistic) candidate to the status of a constitutive anthropological difference, but also in a sense the most enigmatic of all (and the one which, in the framework of philosophical, legal, moral and religious debates, intensified by the feminist critique of male domination and the not identical critique of heterosexist norms, has been undergoing the most radical metamorphoses in the last period). Because I want to keep a direct link with the general problem of the becoming subject of the citizen and the antinomies of civic universalism, I notice here that the various aspects of oppression against women and queer sexualities that we criticize and combat ranging from domestic exploitation of womens services and reproductive function to their massive exclusion from the dominant positions in science and politics, to the relegation of feminine sexuality to the passive side, and the localisation of sexualities which are not straight in the domain of perversions certainly trace back to an immemorial past, in particular a combination of patriarchic structures and religious regulations of legitimate sex. In Modern Times however their understanding should undergo a revolution in order to resist the revolutionary claim of equality (particularly the equality of genders) that was involved in the declaration of civic universalism, and manifested itself immediately in the emergence of feminism. Lets not forget here that modern feminism is typically a universalistic movement, if there is one, but also that, as civic universalism itself, it is increasingly riddled without any predictable end with internal contradictions which are like differences within the enunciation of the difference itself. This revolution against the revolution relies, it seems to me, on the typically bourgeois introduction of a supplement of naturality in the representation of the feminine, from which its contradictory relationship to the universal should derive, or

13 a tendency to represent the feminine as the bearer (and the residue) of nature within universality, qua conventional or institutional construction of the political. But, on the background of innumerable and pervasive power structures (not only the domestic structure, but the structure of unequal access to public speech in a language whose semantic and rhetoric are so to speak appropriated by the masculine), it also relies on a symbolic double inscription of the masculine, which allows it to function at the same time as generic (or neutral) and specific (or marked), or as the part and the whole. I call it therefore the synecdoche of the masculine, which structures the discourse of civic-bourgeois universality until today. That this supplement of naturalism is resisted in every possible manner by women (but also frequently appropriated and sublimated by them) is no objection to this, on the contrary. One of the clearest testimonies of the intimate violence of the struggle, the antithetic tendencies of subjectivation, and the creative resources that it contains, was illustrated by feminine Victorian novel, as proclaimed by Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas), showing that the dividing line of the public and the private sphere, or the political and the domestic, on which the sexual contract is based, is in fact never fully tenable, but always reiterated by the power institutions of bourgeois society. It being obviously impossible to discuss all the aspects of this structure, I want to concentrate now for a minute on a particular aspect which is also, I believe, extremely revelatory, namely the discussion around the issue of binarism in the understanding of the sexual relation as it was developed in the psychoanalytical tradition and its critiques. A return to the reading of Freuds theory of bisexuality and the metamorphoses of the Oedipus complex, intimately interdependent, cannot be avoided here, although it would require a very detailed discussion to remain immune of simplistic evaluations, because it displays the logical constraints of what is ultimately a political structure affecting the very construction of subjectivities. Clearly Freuds theory of the sexual difference and the relation of the sexes as a

14 libidinal relation, essentially structured in the unconscious, but not confined to the realm of sexuality in the narrow sense, was always already political in its implications and references. It plainly displays the paradoxes of parity, as certain French feminist discourse would call it (whatever its shortcomings), in other terms the constitution of a Human essence where, in permanence, one is two, and two is one. Freuds discourse was certainly imbued with numerous prejudices concerning the difference of the masculine and the feminine which he strives to explain along the lines of the Oedipal scenario. And we know that this led him to continuously return to the issue of the feminine sexuality, which in a strangely colonial metaphor he would call a dark continent, struggling with the idea that feminine desire is entirely dissymmetric from masculine desire, while at the same time maintaining that there is only one libido, or one structure of the constitution of the desiring subject, which could only become alternatively realized in a direct or inverted manner. Interestingly, Freud continuously and uneasily resisted both the temptation of essential binarism, and that of radical pluralism, to which many of his followers, either male or female, oriented themselves. This is not without analogy with what, a moment ago, I called the liberal position on the issue if the normal and the abnormal. But it is also striking that Freud repudiated equally biological and sociological determinisms, and presented the structural combination of choices which confront the subject in the course of his/her acquisition of a definite personality, in terms of a superposition of two completely open alternatives: a choice of identity between masculine and feminine identifications equally possible for boys and girls, and a choice of object or modality of love between the homosexual and the heterosexual, none of which is more natural than the other. This structure, both coercive and indeterminate, is precisely the unconscious. Freud does certainly not deny that there is a normative element here, he does not even want to challenge it as an element of socialization and civilization, but he certainly paves the

15 way for a discussion of the transformations of this element. I find it illuminating to call the redoubled binarisms, involving both identity and normality, whereby the antithesis of masculinity and femininity is supported or collected by the antithesis of heterosexuality and homosexuality and conversely, a symbolic order in the structuralist jargon. But it has to be observed right away that the psychic constraint to which this order subjects the subject is correlated to and, as it were, caught between two elements of radical contingency: one is the historical contingency of the type of family and family norms where the positions of parents imagined as incarnations of the sexes and providing models of identification are instituted, but also permanently challenged. Families are battlefields. The other element is the contingency of the correspondence and the non-correspondence between the sexual difference as an anatomy and the sexual difference as a psychic structure of desiring subjects. This would show, in my opinion, that the Freudian discourse is not so much a way of reiterating and imposing a norm attributing unequal capacities to subjects for them to become the bearers of the universal, than a way of problematizing, theoretically and clinically, the structures which make universal norms efficient in the form of constructions of singular identities. From there it becomes possible to throw a renewed light on the debate once launched by Lacan with his theorization of the impossibility of the sexual relation, and especially the last version that he gave in a suggestive but also cryptic manner in the 1972-1973 seminar Encore (let us note in passing, practically the same year as Foucaults course on the abnormals: these are all after-effects of the 68 cultural revolution), in the form of an algebraic table called the formulas of sexuation. I admit that in my understanding of this theory I am influenced by the interpretation proposed by Joan Copjec, even if my conclusions are not exactly the same as hers. She pushes to the extreme two striking characteristics of the Lacanian scheme: its staunch defence of the binary form of the sexual difference, but also its totally formal character, which makes it a representation of the ultimate determination of

16 identification not by psychological or social experiences, but by the pure power of the signifier, or the law, under which the experiences must become subsumed, because unconsciously they must be thought, and there is no other thought that the one structured by discourse. According to Lacan a discourse is always also an institution, therefore it is always already political. Along these lines, one may remark that the two halves of the Lacanian algebraic scheme the one that formalizes the dilemma of masculinity, and the one that formalizes the dilemma of femininity, being torn between the universal impossibility not to be subjected to masculine phallic jouissance, and the impossibility for everything (all or whole, depending on the translation) in feminine jouissance to become subsumed under this law, are logically completely identical. There is nothing substantial that distinguishes the masculine from the feminine, it is a pure and completely indifferent choice between the all and the not-all, i.e. completeness and incompleteness, or finitude and infinity), albeit situated within the limits of a coercive order, which is open for any x, i.e. any of us, would be sexual subjects, and which resides only in the possibility of defining contradictory attitudes with respect to the phallic function (equally deceptive, in fact): one which pretends to be its owner, and one which underlines its incompleteness. As a consequence, Lacans universalism, strongly emphasized by Copjec who associates it with a typically modern (I will dare to say, civic) understanding of the formation of the subject as located at the same level as the law, or obeying its own (unconscious) law, embodies very contradictory predicates. One might say that it destroys or deconstructs the obscure notion of bisexuality only to transfer it onto a symbolic plane. It is even more strongly committed than any other postFreudian variety of psychoanalytic discourse to the idea (should we say the ideology?) that there is only one sexuality, even if one with two doors of entry, and this single sexuality (which we may also call the human relation, named sex) is defined primarily in terms of the masculine phallic function. But to be One is not to be The Same (as immediately

17 illustrated by the contradiction of tout and pas tout). And since he defines this function as a pure signifier, he would deprive the individual men, the males, of any ownership, any right of possession over the function itself that is not a fiction, except for the ridiculous fact that they are the physical bearers of an organ imaginarily compared to a sword or a sceptre which can be erected, at least for some time, and for the even more ridiculous fantasies of power that are built around that bearing. This is indeed Lacans anarchist side. If we now move to Butler (and I am thinking in particular of the more recent essays collected in her book Undoing Gender in 2004), we will notice a reversal of this description which destroys the privileges of binarism ad completely as possible, in the wake of a lesbian and queer discourse which sees the representation of a gender limited to two possibilities and only two as a sign of the fact that the normative structure of heterosexism has retroacted on the determination of the genders themselves, or if you like the possibilities of sexed identification. It is widely supposed (especially in France) that Butler belongs to a relativist and culturalist epistemology of sex (or sex constructed as gender), which is constantly attacked by universalists, even compared to a consumers ethics of sex, whereby the subject is one who is free to choose among an infinite multiplicity of sexual practices, object choices, and identifications, and seek their social recognition as equal opportunities. This claim is apparently supported by the fact that, together with others representatives of the transgender movement, Butler has gone as far as insisting that the body is not immune of the effects of multiple sexual choices and orientations. On the contrary the bodys visibility and sensitivity become shaped and constructed historically and socially by the consequences of ones choices. However I would submit that Butler is a universalist herself, both in her elaboration of a politics of differences based on the hypothetic combination of liberty and equality (or a non-normative universalism, or a universalism without coercive norms whence to derive injunctions and violence against the deviant bodies and behaviours), and in her absolute

18 awareness of the fact that vindications of rights for the minorities cannot not refer to the language of civic universalism. And I would submit that Butler is in an important sense a Lacanian herself, albeit in a heretic manner, turning Lacan against Lacan as it were. This comes from the fact that she pushes to the extreme the idea (itself deriving from Freud) that there is no pleasure that is better or more normal than any other, and that desire relates to any object (objet petit a in the Lacanian jargon) provided it becomes a support for phantasies. And she completely appropriates the trope that desire is the desire of the Other, or that it is from the other, in a relation of address and lack, that I receive my subject-identity: which means that I unconsciously conform my conduct and my own body in dependency on the way I construct the identity of the Other whom I love, and to whom, in her language, I am passionately attached. Again, this is a figure of absolute multiplicity, of there being always more than one or two sexes. But this is not Butlers last word. In a sense binarism or the Law of Twoness re-enters inevitably the pattern, from both angles: on one side, with the fact that anatomy, if not a fate as Freud had written once, is a matter of the experience with which we endlessly struggle in a melancholic way, albeit not a divide after which we should become politically and socially classified; on the other side, through her description of the desire for the feminine that even in the form of parody inhabits the self-identification of one subject in the butch-femme lesbian couple. It would seem thus that the distinction of the masculine and the feminine is returning, neither as norm or law, but much more joyously, as an open pattern of fantasy and imagination. This allows her to write in a touching manner, propos butches, that they/we are fatally attracted to the feminine (Undoing Gender, page 197). Taken together, Lacan and Butler, after Freud, seem to testify, once again, that the anthropological difference (here, the binary difference), albeit never substantial, and therefore never localized in the form of a distribution of individuals among classes with no overlapping or residue, is also not something that a subject can avoid, especially when it comes to

19 discussing which effects it carries for it to enter, in a passive or active manner, the realm of the universal and its realization. *

This was a long presentation albeit still very schematic - of the phenomenology of anthropological differences in their relation to the civic-bourgeois notions of universality and, conversely, the patterns of subjectivation which govern the establishment of relations (relations of power, relations of membership and reciprocity, relations as such, i.e. as relating to others), albeit still a very defective one. To conclude even more schematically I want to propose a couple of philosophical remarks, relating to the institution of the universal. As differences which can neither become ignored nor localized, neither eliminated from the representation of the human nor identified with it, anthropological differences account for an extremely odd and unstable pattern of relationships between inclusion and exclusion (in the society, in the community, ultimately in the human genre). To be sure, there are lasting and violent processes of exclusion which we can associate with anthropological differences, because they either derive (or seem to derive) from them, or become legitimated in their language. Race, sex, the pathological, but also the infantile, or manualunskilled labour, separately or taken together, account for the fact that some beings who are at the same time human and less than human, or imperfectly human, become punished, segregated, relegated, barred from access to associations, professions, exchanges, communities and recognitions, which are so many instances of the institution of bourgeois citizenship in the general sense. But already Foucault, who did so much to draw our attention to the function of segregation in modern history and its structuring crucial institutions or establishments such as the hospital, the prison, the barrack, even the school, insisted on the fact that there are different modalities of exclusion. And he tended increasingly to privilege the figure of an exclusion which works

20 as an inclusion (for instance in the modality of continuous surveillance, panoptic monitoring of individuals, which allows it to segregate them while not pushing them into a physically separated space, beyond a borderline or inside a camp). And I personally insisted in other essays on the importance and the multiple identities of a figure which, in general, but also in a literal sense, we can call the foreign body, or the body who is essentially out of place, i.e. emerges inside a space where it should not be normally, ideally. The strange neighbour or the disturbingly integrated stranger who remains a stranger, racially and culturally other(ed) within a nation-state, are the clearest examples today, and they can take many different forms. But metaphorically at least the abnormal is also a foreign body in the moral realm, and the sexual transgressor, who escapes the codes of binarism, while produced by them and reacting to them, is another example. They allow us to understand or ask how to be a foreign body in a social place involves for anybody entertaining an uneasy relationship to ones body as well as to other bodies. This leads me to suggesting, without going further, that the main form taken by exclusion within civic-bourgeois universalism is precisely inclusion. This is fully consistent with the fact that, at least in an intensive manner, civic universalism has no exterior. Nobody remains outside it. Everybody (every body) is or will become included. It is true also of other universalisms (religious universalisms for instance) and above all it is true of the universal market. But civic-bourgeois universalism builds specific institutions to define, control, and make visible the foreign body. And as a consequence the foreign body will incarnate the most contradictory situation with respect to the definition of the human: it is the non-human, against which one has to strive in order to become human; in the extremities it features the return or the intrusion of the inhuman into the human. But on the other hand, the foreign body with her otherness is the absolute human, it is the arch-human: nothing, no being, is more human, or to put it in Kantian terms, more clearly embodying the destination

21 of the human than a criminal, a madman or a madwoman, a stranger, a racial and cultural other, a jealous or hysteric woman, a gay or a transgender subject, etc. But taken together (and they certainly do not form a tout, an all or a whole), all these singularities are the majority, the quasi-totality of mankind. They push the bearers of the model of the human (or the characters of the human essence) towards the margins, the place of the exception from which it distinguished itself. This circle forms the absolute collapse of any simple, positive form of humanism, but it also marks the aporia of the question which language to substitute for that of humanism. Anti-humanism will do only if it is understood as expressing a contradiction or a resistance from inside. This takes me to my last point, even more briefly, on the side of subjection and subjectivation and their relationship to the civic-bourgeois universal. I have just evoked, in oblique terms, the Kantian notion of the transcendental subject as incarnation, and interiorization, of the universal within an individual subjectivity (which, in Kants analysis, takes the privileged form of an individual consciousness). It is clear that this philosophical figure bears a strong correspondence with the emergence and political assertion of civic universalism as an institution based on individual property, responsibility and reasoning, transforming the vertical relationship to God into an immanent relationship to the law, which individual subjects should be permanently in charge of implementing. If not the only philosophical elaboration of the modern idea of a subject who is also a citizen, it is certainly a very powerful one. Foucault in The order of things rephrased it critically in terms of the empirical-transcendental doublet, insisting that such anthropological categories as life, language, labour, form quasi-transcendentals through which the subject becomes the bearer of the universal not in a purely abstract but in a concrete (or more concrete) manner : like attributes in a Spinozistic sense, they form the sites where the anthropological differences must be located in order to become perceived, known, experienced, and regulated. However

22 all these formulations (even Foucaults) seem to remain indebted to an exclusively individualistic scheme of the articulation of the subject and the universal. They bracket the fact that the human (as was abundantly illustrated by our discussion) essentially qualifies the subject when he/she enters into social relations, or as Marx famously proposed in the 6th of the Theses on Feuerbach the human essence (das menschliche Wesen, which could also be translated simply as the human being) is no longer conceived as an abstraction, or an idea of the universal, inhabiting the self-consciousness of the isolated individual, but more extensively, as a complete set of social relations(das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhltnisse). Reciprocally, in spite of his rumination of the notion of alienation or estrangement (Entfremdung), Marx did not really pay attention to the anthropological differences that we have just discussed, nor, accordingly, to the problems of normality and normalization, identity and identification, sameness and otherness. What happens, we may ask, if, keeping in mind that historically man is always a relational figure, we start taking into account the anthropological differences not as contingent or empirical phenomena affecting the universal from outside or limiting the possibilities of its implementation, but as intrinsic contradictions of the universal, which at the same time relate it to itself, and open a gap sometimes an abyss of inhumanity within this transindividual relation? Even there Kant provides a useful guiding thread: in fact he did not ignore the anthropological differences, but he suppressed them, or he pushed them back into the realm of what he tellingly called the pathological. The pathological is not the empirical, simply other than pure reason, it is the empirical simulacrum which imitates reason, particularly inasmuch as its intrinsic link with freedom of choice is concerned, and therefore threatens it with intrinsic perversion. In many respects it is precisely for him the body, which is me, affects my identity, and is not purely me. But we must go one (or several) steps further. We must not only take into consideration the idea of a divided or split subject, a subject with a reverse side

23 (which is the unconscious, or the ideology, the inevitable misrecognition involved in any recognition). We must reach the idea of what this time borrowing from Locke - I would like to call the uneasy subject, or the subject affected with uneasiness concerning her own humanness. It is not enough to say that anthropological differences are constitutive of the human, with universalism permanently facing the dilemma of eliminating them or integrating them. It is necessary to say that, in their very multiplicity, they are the conditions for the emergence of a subject relating to other subjects, albeit not in the form of a simple recognition of the other, but in the form of a question about what it means to see others as humans and be seen by them as human, with the corresponding rights (or the corresponding right to have rights, Arendt would have said). But if this condition, or this site, is impossible to locate, or continuously changes place and configuration, the subject will not inhabit it in a static form, not even in the form of a classical dilemma of the kind to be or not to be, to be Man or to be Woman (homme ou femme? Cest la question), to be sane or insane, etc. it will traverse it as a stranger, in a quest to locate the differences that one has to simply assume in order to belong to the societies and communities which universally structure the human. This is uneasy. I call it the irreducible uneasiness of the subject. But we may also ask the question: isnt this uneasiness what recreates and supports a dialectics of insurrection and constitution which forms the never ending substance of universal citizenship? I must leave this question largely open. In Spinozistic terms (after Kant, Marx, and Locke, why not also borrow something from Spinoza?); it would be the question of the conatus, the endeavour that allows for a transition from passivity to activity, isolation to community, from the becoming subject of the citizen (or his constructing himself within the institutions which can never include individuals within the range of individuality without also excluding from it, as I just tried to show) to the becoming citizen of the subject. My formulations work in the direction, not only of picturing this becoming as an infinite process;

24 or task, always to start again, but also of showing that it displays the very dialectics of universality, in its civic-bourgeois form. A dialectics, to be sure, requires of contradictions which set it in motion: in this case clearly the various contradictions arising from the fact that a political institution based on universal and equal access to the freedoms and capacities called human rights, also constantly suppresses, or limits, or denies these rights for various categories. The power of this contradiction, its capacity to make history, is indeed illustrated by the development of various emancipatory movements, be they movements of majorities or minorities (and sometimes this very distinction is unclear, as in the case of feminism). But in some sense, this is also the lesson that I want to draw, such a power of the contradiction remains abstract and impotent. What empowers the power of challenging the institution of universality in its own terms is not simply the contradiction, it is the difference, more precisely it is the anthropological difference in its singular forms, because the anthropological difference is not only the site of uneasy identification and normalization, it is also the site no less uneasy of displacement, de-identification and alternative normativity (what Foucault sometimes called counter-conducts). In short, my proposition is to define the conatus of the subject-citizen in terms and anthropological differences permanently overdetermining and empowering the political conflict of inclusion and exclusion which defines the dialectics of universality.