Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination 0522868193, 9780522868197

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Ghassan Hage's provocative new book urges us to rethink positions within disciplinary debates and to seek inspiration for a politics of transformation in projects of critical anthropology. It compels us to consider, with renewed seriousness, the utopian maxim, 'another world is possible'. Angela Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

With passion, clarity and, above all, utter relevance, Ghassan Hage offers here an illustration of an anthropology that transforms radical cultural alterity into a source of political insight and an opening towards possible futures. It is an anthropology that moves beyond opposition to the actual in order to become an internal capability of 'otherwiseness'. Permanent decolonisation of thought begins at home. And home is wherever thought becomes action. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Professor of Anthropology at the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Alter-Politics Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination

Ghassan Hage

g

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

MELBOURNEUNIVERSITYPRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited ll-15Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2015 Text © Ghassan Hage, 2015 Cover art© Maissa Alameddine, 2011 Design and typography© Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2015 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Every attempt has been made to locale the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher. Cover design by Philip Campbell Design Typeset by J&MTypesetting Printed in Australia by OPUS Group National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Hage, Ghassan, author. Alter-politics: critical anthropology and the radical imagination/Gha%an Hage. 9780522868197(hardback) 9780522867381 (paperback) 9780522867398(ebookJ Includes bibliographical references and index. Political sociology. Political science-Anthropological aspects. Political science-Psychological aspects. Anthropology. 306.2

To Caroline, with whom life is permanently alter-political

Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

Part I 2

The globalisation of the late colonial settler condition

13

On stuckedness: The critique of crisis and the crisis of critique

33

Part II

3

Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today

4 The Arab social sciences and the two critical traditions

49 79

Part III 5

On ethnography and political emotions: Hating Israel in the field

6 Alter-political rationality and anti-political emotions: The case of Fanon

91 120

Part IV

7

On narcissistic victimhood

145

Appendix to chapter 7: I don't write poems but, in any case, poems are not poems.

164

8 The unoccupied 9

165

Recalling anti-racism: Towards a critical anthropology of exterminability

173

Appendix to chapter 9: Against colonial rubbishing

193

10 Dwelling in the reality of utopian thought

200

11 Other belongings

211

Notes

221

Bibliography

227

Inde

n5

vii

Acknowledgements The various chapters that make up this book are variations, sometimes considerable ones, on pieces that have been published elsewhere. A very early version of chapter 1 appeared in Arena magazine in 2005. Chapter 2 began as a piece in my edited collection Waiting (MUP, 2009). This more developed piece was presented in French as a keynote to the Francophone Association of Sociology and Anthropology in Montreal. Chapter 3 was published in Critique of Anthropology in 2012. Chapter 4 began as a keynote to the inaugural conference of the Arab Council of Social Sciences, Beirut, in March 2013. Chapter 5 appeared in Anthropological Theory in 2009, and chapter 6 in Theory, Culture and Society in 2010. Chapter 7 was presented as a public lecture for a seminar organised by Raimond Gaita, who later published it in the book Gaza: Morality, Law and Politics (UWA, 2010). The appendix to chapter 7 appeared on Facebook before going viral, and was subsequently translated into more languages than I can remember. It was published in 2011 in the Irish Journal of Anthropology. Chapter 8 was delivered as a keynote at a 2013 conference organised by the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies at Birzeit University in Palestine. Chapter 9 is a lecture presented at the Steve Biko Centre at Ginsberg, South Africa, in 2014. The appendix to chapter 9 was a blog entry that appeared on the Birkbeck College website, Critical Legal Thinking, in August 2013. Chapter 10 was published in the journal Traditional Dwellings and Settlement Review in 2011. Finally, a short version of chapter 11 has appeared in a number of places, including The Words that Made Australia, edited by Robert Manne and Chris Fieke (Penguin Books, 2012). I have always been blessed with many enriching academic friendships that have influenced this work both directly and indirectly, but I am particularly grateful to Samir Khalaf and Michael Jackson for their continuous critical receptivity to my work and ideas, both as friends and as colleagues. I also want to thank another friend and colleague, Stephen Muecke, whose sharing of his journey into Latourian anthropology was particularly important to me. I don't know whether it is common for people to thank their Facebook friends, but I am very grateful to all of mine. Writing, as we all know, is

ix

a solitary affair. Writing with a Facebook window open and interacting with such a rich diversity of friends makes things so much less lonely and an important source of strength. As always, my partner Caroline Alcorso has read everything I have written, and her critical input has been crucial in giving all the chapters of this book their final shape. I want to particularly thank Geoffrey Mead, who has been an immense help in putting the book together by reviewing its content, proofreading, eliminating repetition and finding sources. I also want to thank Alison Strumberger for the copy-editing and Cathryn Game for a final round of modifications. All the texts have grown either directly or indirectly out of the various ARC grants I have obtained over the years. I want to thank the Australian Research Council for these successful grants, which have been crucial in enabling me to research and to think about my research. Last but not least, I want to thank Maissa Alameddine for offering the artwork that features on the cover. The Arabic writing that makes up the pattern is a poem from the work of the well-known Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: 0 those who pass between fleeting words Carry your names, and be gone Rid our time of your hours, and be gone.

Ghassan Hage October 2014

x

Acknowledgements

Introduction

This book is a contribution to a long history of critical writing against the dominance of the capitalist-colonialist-domesticating world order. Like most such critiques, it emanates from seeing in the latter an increasingly destructive global order marked by excessive instrumentalisation, exploitation and degradation of the human and non-human environments. It is an order riddled with unacceptable but also, importantly, avoidable forms of inequality, injustice and marginalisation. This book is concerned with the way critical writing aims to weave oppositional concerns (anti-politics) with a search for alternatives (alter-politics): alternative economies, alternative modes of inhabiting and relating to the earth, alternative modes of thinking and experiencing otherness. If the book privileges alter-politics over oppositional politics, it is not because the 'alter' moment is more important than the 'anti'. It is because, as will be argued, critical anthropological thought has a specific affinity with the alter moment, and because a concern for and an emotional investment in an alterpolitics has been less prevalent. Since the 1960s there has been a gradual realisation in radical and critical thought that the oppositional spirit and politics that marked anti-capitalist, anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles

throughout the world suffered from a fundamental weakness. While sometimes successfully overturning the political orders they were 'anti' about, they have been less successful in structurally integrating into their anti-politics an alternative to the realities they have overturned. Whether in the experience of 'really existing communism' or that of the societies borne out of anti-colonial struggles, there was an increased realisation that an 'anti-politics' concerned with the overthrow of existing orders needed to be supplemented with an equally vibrant and passionately 'alter-political' thought capable of capturing the possibilities and laying the grounds for new modes of existence. The question of 'political passion' is crucial in this conception of the alter-political. Part of the argument that emerges from the pieces that make up this book is that the historical dominance of anti-politics over alter-politics has partly come to be because the former is where radical political passion has been mostly directed. This does not simply mean that political passion needs to be equally directed towards alter-politics. It also means that this passion itself needs to be a radically different kind of political passion once so directed. It is this 'alter-political passion' for which I strive to create a space throughout the work. Again, the question is not to oppose antipolitical and alter-political passion but to make room for the coexistence of both. The book aims less to reflect on what such an alter-political passion ought to be-although it does so in Part IIIthan to present texts that exemplify the way anti- and alter-political passion are woven into critical concerns. This is done particularly in Part rv. Perhaps this is more the case for social scientists than for academics in the humanities, but it is easy to forget or ignore how productive political passion is. It could be that such a bracketing is more symptomatic of the social sciences because it is impossible to talk about political passion without talking about oneself and one's own emotions. This might also explain why feminism has been so much more successful than other forms of critical thought in this way. Likewise feminist critique was the first at articulating passion to an alter-politics. 6 'The personal is political' always meant that the 'personal is alter-political' just as much as that the 'personal is anti-political'.

2

Alter-Politics

I was asked some time ago to write a short piece celebrating the 100th volume of the academic journal Thesis Eleven. 1 The journal's title refers, of course, to Karl Marx's famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, which succinctly declares that 'philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it'. No sooner had I received the journal's invitation than I surprised myself by remembering my first encounter with its first issue. It was in 1981, and I was in my Honours year at Macquarie University in Sydney, writing a thesis on the 1970s' wave of left-wing European terrorism (mainly the Italian Brigate Rosse and the German Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction). It was the period when I considered myself a 'hardcore Marxist'. I'll leave it to the reader to imagine what this actually meant. In my thesis, I argued that European terrorism was the direct child of the European wave of left-wing voluntarism of the 1960s as it was manifested in theory. I did so by opposing lots of quotations from Sartre and Marcuse with lots of quotations from Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. The 'Left', I argued-and I am no longer sure who I had in mind when I said 'Left' -has failed to internalise Marx's historical materialism and transform it from a theory that remains external to us into what I called a 'genuinely historico-materialist consciousness' that grounds us in the historical flow of the real movement of life, and governs the very way we think and formulate questions of theory and politics. If only this could happen, I opined, all the problems would be solved and the rise of a genuine revolutionary movement would take place. All thanks to me and my Honours thesis. I am dwelling on all this to say how much Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach was part of my everyday common sense. If I laugh at my sense of self-importance at the time, I am nonetheless full of admiration at how I imagined that myself and my writing were always connected to the real political processes that I felt were shaping the world. The fusion of the intellectual and the political went without saying for me and for many others around me. What intellectual position one took was perceived to have a serious impact on the fate of the universe. I don't think I will surprise anyone who evolved intellectually in the shadow of Marxist thought during that

Introduction

3

time ifl say that, in such milieus, friendships were made and unmade according to whether one believed in the primacy of the relations of production or the primacy of the productive forces. And as far as I was concerned, I was writing and making revolution. The fact that I was just writing an Honours thesis never stopped me from fantasising that millions of people were going to read my work and that the world before and after my thesis would not be the same. Over the years, and again like many others, I gradually began distancing myself from what I came to see as a naïve over-politicisation of academic thought. I came to see this, with Bourdieu-ian/ Weberian eyes, as a 'proletaroid' tendency. 2 As Bourdieu would have it, the logic of friend/enemy that pervades politics is not so easily compatible with the logic of academic inquiry. What's more, as he puts it: 'Good politics does not necessarily produce good sociology.' I recently re-read a famous little piece that made the radical Marxist philosophical rounds in the early 1980s, Lucio Colletti's 'Marxism: Science or revolution?' 3 The piece argued so beautifully how Marxism can be and indeed simply is at the same time a science of society and a revolutionary theory. When I first read it, Colletti's piece was poetry to my ears. Today when I read it, it sounds like just that: poetry ... of the bad kind. It operates in the very way Marx defines one of the functions of ideology to be. It reconciles at the level of thought what cannot be anywhere near so easily reconciled in practice. Over time I have come to relate to this unproblematised fusion of the academic and the political as a form of academic infantile omnipotence: serious self-delusion is needed to believe that one's thinking is capable of so much. Besides, how academically arrogant is it to believe that it is up to philosophers to change the world? It would be already quite an achievement if they managed to do a good job interpreting it. Yet, for all that, I would be lying if I said that the political did not continue to lure me, attract me and breathe life into my writing. Likewise, I continuously notice among university students that it is reasonably impossible for a young person to get excited about an arts degree without being political. One can go as far as saying that, except for a small minority, a passion for the political constitutes the very ground on which enthusiasm for the humanities and social science can take place.

4

Alter-Politics

This leads me to think that perhaps one needs to see the political in social theory in the way Freud saw sexuality. For Freud, as is well known, sexuality is everywhere. Our mature behaviour is shaped not by the fact that it is not permeated by sexuality, but rather by the various degrees of subtlety and intensity with which we repress it, express it, structure it and negotiate its presence within our subjectivity. It seems to me that we can equally make the case of saying that in the humanities and the social sciences the political is the stuff of passion and desire, and like sexuality it permeates critical social thought. It is what constitutes the very libidinality of our academic engagement with social life. Consequently, the aim of writing cannot be to negate this passion. Repressing it and making it invisible-a kind of passion for 'passionless- ness' -is actually what distinguishes conservative, 'scientistic' rather than scientific, social science. The passion for the political might need to be repressed at times, but this is neither the only strategy available to deal with it, nor is it a recommendable strategy for all times and places. Dealing with it is an art of finding productive ways of expressing, channelling and weaving it into one's writing. Throughout the book, I juxtapose my academic writing, in the form of appendixes, with some of my more public/ interventionist writings. In doing so I am hoping to exemplify the variety of ways political passion is externalised, directed and negotiated. The texts that make up the work concern two geographic regions and fields of inquiry that have continuously occupied me, and in which I have invested a lot of my intellectual and political passion: Australia, both in its specificity and as a case of the more general tendencies that exist throughout the Western world; and the Middle East, particularly Israel/Palestine. The themes I have analysed in all these spaces have largely been the same: nationalism, colonialism, intercultural relations and modes of belonging. However, since the late twentieth century, it has also become apparent that both regions are animated by similar social processes. Besides the question of the alter-political and the negotiation of political passion, this is another more substantive line of inquiry and set of questions that also animates the whole book: why has it become increasingly the case that certain social, cultural and political tendencies in one region -be it Australia, Europe, the United States or Israel/Palestine-seem

Introduction

5

to be relevant in the other? What structural similarities exist between the two areas that allow for this almost effortless transfer of insights? In answering such questions I am also trying to define what it is that one needs to direct one's anti- and alter-political passion towards today. The most explicit answer is given in Part I. I call it the globalisation of the late colonial settler condition. This concept began to come to the fore in early 2006 while I was interviewing a Lebanese Australian man, Marwan, not long after the infamous Cronulla riots of mid-December 2005. Images of the racist white crowd violently encircling those lone Third World-looking/ Lebanese bodies was still fresh in both my and my informant's memories and were infused with the emotional intensity of a battlefield. We were discussing the 'revenge' counter-attacks in which Marwan and some of his Lebanese friends engaged following the events and the way they were portrayed by the media. In the process we came to talk about the role of the populist right-wing journalists in propagating anti-Muslim/Lebanese sentiments. We began to talk in particular about Alan Jones (a radio broadcaster, and what is known in Australia as a radio shock jock) and Piers Akerman (a commentator and columnist for Sydney tabloid the Daily Telegraph). This is when Marwan began talking about Zionist conspiracies. I kept a straight face and nodded when he said, 'Mate, Alan Jones is a Zionist. Akerman is a Zionist ... they all go on special visits to Israel. The Israelis look after them and they pay back by working hard on making everyone hate us .. .' But I couldn't help revealing a smile when he continued, 'You're naiïve if you think that the Zionists miss a chance of turning people against Arabs. And so, if you ask me, the mob in Cronulla, they were all influenced by Zionists or Zionists themselves .. .' The thought of all those surfie boys on an Australian beach as Zionists was hilarious to me. I managed with some difficulty to stop myself from laughing, but I was smiling what clearly revealed itself to be a condescending smile. It was unprofessional of me, and Marwan was rightly offended. He prides himself on being well informed and an avid reader, and he is way beyond being intimated by anybody or anything that threatens his firm beliefs. It also helps that he is a very solidly built bricklayer twice my size. 'Yes, go ahead and laugh, Mr

6

Alter-Politics

Professor, you're a fucking idiot like the rest of them,' he said, looking me straight in the eyes. As an anthropologist I should have treated my informant with more respect, and I felt guilty. Perhaps what happened afterwards was spurred on by this guilt, but following the encounter-and despite my dismissive behaviour-the thought of a relation between the Cronulla event and Zionism lingered in my head, and the more I thought about it, the more I started to think that this had inadvertently become an invitation to think through more clearly the relation between my interest in Western nationalism, multiculturalism and racism, and my interest in the Israeli-Palestinian question. Was it not also the case that Western countries made a particularly spectacular effort at ignoring, if not at actively repressing, the obvious effect their support for Israel had on the Muslims' truncated sense of belonging to the various Western countries to which they emigrated? Thus, the Cronulla events became the nodal point around which I crystallised my reflections on the nature of this relationship. Needless to say, I did not take the relationship seriously in the sense of Marwan's 'Zionist conspiracy in Cronulla'. My thoughts were pointing in the direction of the two sharing some common features or structures. Yet, on the face of it, this sounded almost as ludicrous as any Zionist conspiracy thesis. After all, what could the crowd in Cronulla share in common with Zionism? The latter is a European Jewish nationalist movement that is today embodied by a Middle Eastern settler state acting in its name. Cronulla was a fleeting event on a beach in Australia in which a primarily white Anglo-Celtic crowd came into being, acted out a certain politics, then dissipated. Perhaps what initially made the thought further linger in my mind was the vague sense of an analogy at the level of my own subjective imaginary between the way I think of the Israeli state 'encircling' and 'destroying' Palestinians and the image of the Cronulla crowd encircling that lone Lebanese guy and going for him. This was very thin indeed as far as social scientific evidence goes. But, as I said, it is what made the thought linger in the back of my mind, not what sustained it as a serious analytic proposition. What did sustain it analytically was an idea that slowly solidified itself in my mind: despite their radical differences, Zionist politics since the

Introduction

7

creation of the Israeli state and the Cronulla crowd are/were both manifestations of assertive mono-culturalism. Zionism has been so for a long time, while assertive white colonial or post-colonial politics in the West re-emerged, after an absence, towards the end of the twentieth century. Interestingly, in terms of skin colour and the cultural provenance of its Jewish population, Israel is, as much as Australia, Canada or Britain, a multicultural society. But it is also a white society in the sense I have used whiteness to denote the dominance of a white colonial fantasy in White Nation, involving a spatially empowered white modern First World self facing a Third World-looking other. 4 Zionism remains very much grounded in this fantasy. It encourages all of the Jewish population of Israel and beyond, despite its 'multiculturality', to face the Palestinian 'Third World-looking other' with this shared fantasy of white colonial supremacy. It is noticeable that, at the height of the liberal multicultural era of the 1970s and 1980s, when Western states were all becoming committed to various forms of cultural pluralism, Israel was always perceived as the acceptable state of exception. At that time, for the United Kingdom to perceive itself as an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic or white European state, or for France to conceive of itself as such or as a Catholic state, would have been unthinkable. And if either of them did so, it would have put them outside what was acceptable in a cosmopolitan and cultural pluralism-oriented late modernity. Israel's conception of itself as a 'Jewish state' was not seen in the same light. It was and still is considered to be neither archaic nor unacceptable. But something quite fundamental happened in the late twentieth century with the globalisation of a new wave of paranoid white nationalism, 5 when the anti-multicultural tide started to take hold and the politics of white restoration grew, along with the need to affirm 'American', 'Australian' or 'European' values. Rather than being seen as the state of exception, Israel started to look as if it was the model of what certain dominant forces in the West, at least subliminally, aspired to be. The Israeli ethos of a besieged white colonial settler society-'We need to assert ourselves politically, militarily and culturally because we are surrounded by barbarians and they are out to get us .. .'-started to take serious hold in the generalisation of the

B

Alter-Politics

Western conception of the self. It is in this sense that we can begin to speak about the globalisation of a white colonial settler condition. Note that this is not about Australia, Canada or the United States being themselves colonial settler societies forged around the decimation of an indigenous other. The globalisation of the colonial settler condition involves a different colonial settler formation that intersects with and might feed on the first, but is nonetheless distinct. It is one constructed around the now well-known global figure of otherness: 'the Muslim'. Indeed, since 9/11, Bali and the Madrid and London bombings, Israel and the rest of the West were increasingly portrayed to be sharing the same enemy. It was suddenly as if there was now something in common in the global Western imaginary between the 'Muslim' Palestinians struggling to regain their homeland, the 'Muslim' who destroyed the World Trade Center and assassinated its occupants, and the 'Muslim' Lebanese boys being a nuisance on Cronulla Beach. Part I of the book expands on the nature of this globalisation of the colonial settler condition. While chapter 1 delves further into the paranoid and authoritarian structures that permeate this social formation as they wed the various features of the neo-liberal tide, chapter 2 is more concerned with the way the experience of crisis is transformed in such an environment, from an opening heralding the possibility of social change to a closure intimating the very opposite: a permanent state of impasse. The chapter finishes by arguing that such conditions contribute to extinguishing the everyday 'Hegelian spirit' that animates oppositional politics and reinforcing the imperative of weaving an alter-politics into oppositional thinking. Part II develops the way critical thinking, and critical anthropology in particular, can contribute to think the alter-political moment. Chapter 3 examines the importance of 'the 'ontological turn' in anthropology in re-centring the radical and critical alterpolitical ethos that has been part of the discipline since its inception, and which can be summarised in the formula: we can be other than what we are. Chapter 4 develops the way this anthropological ethos needs to be woven into the Marxist and neo-Marxist oppositional tradition in refiguring a critical social science, particularly within the context of the social upheavals of the Arab world.

Introduction

9

Part III, as already mentioned, highlights the importance of the question of political emotions and passion in conceiving of the alterpolitical moment. Chapter 5 shows the complexity entailed by an anthropology of political passion when taking into account the political passions of the anthropologist him- or herself. Chapter 6 is a critique of Negri and Hardt's positing of Fanon's politics as an example of alter-political strategising. The chapter argues that Fanon's example highlights a situation where alter-politics is argued for intellectually while political passion remains firmly located in an oppositional political fantasy. Part IV offers a series of pieces exemplifying the way the alterpolitical can be written into critical theorising. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the difficulty of keeping the possibility of 'another relationality' alive in thinking resistance to Israeli colonialism. Chapter 9 also highlights the importance of thinking of 'other relationalities' -other modes of existence-when engaging in the critique of racism. Chapter 10 develops a conception of 'realist utopia' in relation to ecological politics with the help of an ontologically oriented anthropology. In conclusion, Chapter 11 begins by reflecting on a personal experience of negotiating my own belonging to both the Middle East and Australia, to offer a general alter-politics of belonging to the poisonous colonial settler form of territorialism that saturates today's world.

10

Alter-Politics

Part I

1

The globalisation of the late colonial settler condition

I think it was Zygmunt Bauman who once observed that if in modernity the First World showed the Third World an image of its future, in post-modernity the opposite is occurring. This observation often comes to mind as I find myself increasingly noting the emergence of new social, cultural and political phenomena not only in Australia but also elsewhere in the West that remind me of Lebanese society as it evolved before and during the Lebanese civil war (1975-91). It is good to recall that most Marxist analysts of pre-war capitalist Lebanon used to argue that the country's economy was warped and underdeveloped because of the relative weakness of its industrial sector relative to the 'tertiary sector', which referred to commerce, banking, services and tourism. Today most Western countries have undergone a severe process of de-industrialisation and their economies are characterised precisely by this imbalance. I don't want to take this analogy too far (it clearly has no place for the role of the mining sector in the Australian economy, for instance), and I am aware that it is very limited and can even be considered superficial. But at the same time I think the basis for such an analogy is real and that it can account for some important similarities.

Take the rise in flashy consumption and the display of wealth that Australia has witnessed in the last thirty years or so. This used to be a far more salient characteristic of the local bourgeoisie in Lebanon than in Australia in the mid-1970s when I first arrived. But this is no longer the case. The fact that exhibitionist bourgeois culture is historically associated with mercantilist and speculative rather than industrialist capitalism goes a long way towards explaining this. To begin with, merchants, bankers and speculators don't need to reinvest their profits in their enterprise to the same degree that industrialists do, so they usually have a lot more money ('surplus profit') left for personal consumption. Furthermore, having their houses, their offices, their cars and themselves looking 'shiny' is part of the way merchants, bankers and speculators do business: their facade is part of their assets, or, in Bourdieu-ian terms, their investment in cultural capital is part of the process of maximising their economic capital. It is less so in the case of industrial capitalists. There is another burgeoning resemblance in this domain, at least as far as Australia is concerned. It is a well-established feature of mercantile/speculative capitalist societies that merchants, bankers, land developers and so on-more so than industrialists-often aim to have themselves or their direct representatives, usually lawyers, elected to parliament to control legislation that is of concern to them. More generally, the state as a legislating body is perceived to be itself less an arbiter between different capitalist interests and more a part of the 'means of production' that investors vie to control. This leads to a parliamentary culture in which corruption is more prevalent. And so, in this domain as well, it can be said that the Lebanese parliament of the 1960s was already showing Australian state and federal parliaments an image of their future. One could make many other comparisons in this domain. There is, however, one broad resemblance that I consider particularly significant and that I want to examine in this chapter. It is the way the dominant political culture of the Lebanese Christians in their attitudes and later in their war against 'the Muslims' in Lebanon in the twentieth century offers the West an image of the increasingly dominant political culture that prevails within it today. The likeness between the two struck me in early 2004. At the time, I was on leave at the American University of Beirut and I was reworking parts of my

14

Alter-Politics

PhD thesis for publication purposes. I had finished writing my thesis in 1987. It was about Lebanese Christians and how they evolved into a warring community from the rise of Lebanese capitalism in the eighteenth century until and during the early part of the Lebanese civil war. Curiously, I began noting that parts of my analysis of this Christian warring culture were actually pertinent to understanding the transformations of the Western culture of national 'worrying' that I started examining in my work Against Paranoid Nationalism. 1 In my thesis, I had pointed to the similarity between the warring ethos of the Lebanese Christians and that of white South Africans during the Apartheid years, as well as that of the Zionists in Israel. All three, I argued, shared a perception of themselves as a kind of advanced post of Western civilisation in the Third World. All were animated by variations on the sense of a civilising mission, and all felt that the centrifugal/ expansionary/ colonial (ideological or territorial) propelling motor that stirred them had come to a halt. It is this sense of a stalled expansionist force that allows us to characterise them as late colonial settler social formations. They were animated by a culturally defensive ethos. They felt themselves surrounded by uncivilised hordes of people with whom they had to 'deal' in the best way they could, often in a violent and 'uncivilised' manner. Yet they always did so while continuing to conceive of themselves as guided, with a kind of noblesse oblige, by what they perceived as the superior values of 'Western civilisation'. The Christians believed that the Muslims were hell-bent on destroying Western (here portrayed as Christian/Democratic) civilisation in Lebanon; the white South Africans felt the same way about the blacks (here Western civilisation was perceived as white); and the Israelis thought and still think of the Arabs/Palestinians along similar lines (here Western civilisation is perceived as Judea-Christian in both its religious and its secular manifestations). Interestingly, at the time I was writing my PhD all three groups had ideologues that portrayed them as abandoned by a West that no longer knew how to fight for what it valued most and that no longer had a sense of how, in difficult circumstances, 'one has to do what one has to do' to survive. It was while reading this comparative analysis that Bauman's argument resurfaced in my head. I felt that those very features that constituted the specificity of Zionist Israel, white South Africa and

The globalisation of the late colonial settler condition

15

Christian Lebanon as 'besieged civilised cultures' were increasingly becoming part of what defines all Western cultures today, These nationalist warrior cultures of the twentieth century were already showing the West an image of its future, as it has come to be today. Indeed, as is increasingly the case, the dominant forms of imagining 'the West' today portray it as if it is one big global, late colonial settler formation, on the defensive despite its expansionary mode of existence; under duress despite its overwhelming power and dominance; confronted, as it imagines itself to be, with an equally global sea of uncivilised others made out of terrorists and asylum seekers. It is in this sense that I want to speak here about a globalisation of the late colonial settler condition.

The globalisation of the Islamic threat The globalisation of the Islamic other around the world, of which both terrorists and asylum seekers are seen as a manifestation, is one of the key components in generalising this colonial settler condition. Like all processes of cultural globalisation, it involves contradictory processes of cultural homogenisation and heterogenisation. 2 Thus while Islam was becoming homogenised as the global threatening other, the category that embodied the Islamic threat differed from one country to another: Asians in Britain (there meaning Indians and Pakistanis), Turks in Germany and North Africans in France. In Australia it was the Lebanese category that came initially to embody this threat, although this perceived ethnicity of Muslims became more diverse in the twenty-first century, expanding to include South Asian and African communities. One element that contributed to a conception of'the Muslim' as lying outside the multicultural realm of the tolerated other was the existence among them of a substantial and increasing number of 'seriously religious' people. To be seriously religious here does not simply mean going frequently to the mosque or holding intense religious beliefs. It does not even denote a high degree of enthusiasm. More importantly, it means considering all aspects of one's everyday life as ruled by the Laws of one's God. 3 It is this kind of religiositygiven, in particular, that it is the religiosity of an other-that constitutes a serious negation of the logic of multicultural acceptability. Multiculturalism has always found a way (indeed it can be

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defined by an ability) to find room for minor elements of the law of the other to exist within the dominant national law-here I don't necessarily mean law in a formal sense, although it could be, but I mean more an anthropological conception of law as 'the other's order of things' or 'the other's way of life'. In this sense, we can say that multiculturalism is primarily defined by this relation of encompassment. The dominant national law opens a space-a state of exception if you will-where the law of the other can exist as long as it is encompassed by the national law. The space where the law of the other exists can vary in content and in magnitude, but what cannot possibly change is that the dominant culture has to be the encompassing culture and the law of the other the encompassed culture. The problem that arises with seriously religious Muslims is that what they see as their laws are nothing short of the Laws of God. These are not equivalent to minor laws such as the rules of a specific national cuisine or even the ethno-specific laws of marriage and kinship. The idea that you can have a space where you can speak your language, eat your food and follow your rituals-as long as you understand that this is a space offered to you, so to speak, by the dominant language, the dominant mode of eating and so on-is relatively unproblematic. But the idea of having the laws of the nation offer a space for the Laws of God is sacrilegious. Indeed, for people who take their religion seriously, the situation is reversed. It is the Laws of God that are the all-encompassing ones and the national laws of the host nation-or any other nation for that matter-that are the minor ones. For a seriously religious Muslim migrant integrating into the host nation, it becomes a matter of finding a space for these national laws within the all-encompassing Laws of God. The very relation of encompassing-encompassed cultures, on which multiculturalism is based, is here inverted, and threatening intimations of ungovernability arise. But this is not where they end. That some Muslims think of themselves as belonging to a politicised transnational community or Umma has given a further earthly flavour to this mode of living under the Law of God, transforming it into a kind of metaphysical transnationalism. What also made many non-Muslim Westerners experience this religiosity as a threat were the international political developments that articulated themselves to Islamic transnationalism. The starting

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point of these developments, and what perhaps remains the main important one, is the rise of Iran as an Islamic nation. This has since led to the development of various forms of global Islamic politicsSunni as well as Shi'a. This has also come to include varieties of Islamic terrorism. The Iranian revolution, particularly under Khomeini, instituted a rule of law that openly portrayed itself as a kind of transcendent Muslim anti-colonial political will. Subsequently, this political will was perceived for the first time to exercise itself transnationally with the Salman Rushdie affair. It was as if Muslims were suddenly in a position to openly sentence a person living in and subject to the protection of the law of a Western nation-state. Even more threatening to the Western national will, numerous Muslims who were supposed to be docile Western subjects showed themselves to be agents of the transnational Muslim will by calling for the carrying out of, or even volunteering to carry out, the sentence themselves. Since that time, there have been many occasions when Muslims have shown themselves to be the subjects of a transnational will, laced with anti-colonialism, that is other to that of the West. This has taken a particularly important turn with the 9/11 attacks and the London bombings, which led to the perception of the Islamic will not just as the will of 'the other' but also as the will of the enemy. The current worries about Muslim-background Western nationals being affiliated with ISIS, and indeed about ISIS itself, have accentuated this tendency of non-Muslim Westerners to perceive themselves as endangered by a hostile transnational Islamic other. This was central in legitimating the reimagining of Western nations as warring societies, which in turn is a crucial component in the making of the global late colonial settler ethos.

The structure and culture of warring societies What is a warring society? The first point to make is that warring societies are not societies that are necessarily at war, but of societies that are permanently geared towards war. There is usually a tension between the notion of war and the notion of society, in that war is often seen as a transitional state between two more stable social states whereas society is precisely that stable social state. To talk of warring societies is to talk of social states where war is no longer a

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transitional state but a permanent feature of the social situation. The whole of society from its economy to its culture becomes part of the reproduction of this permanent state of war. Perhaps most importantly, what makes societies permanently geared towards war is a reversal of the relation between two of their key constitutive mechanisms. All societies have mechanisms for the production and distribution of the good life, whichever way the good life is culturally defined-materially, emotionally or spiritually. And all societies also have to defend whatever they consider to be the 'good' life. It would be idealistic to think that a society could produce a goodness specific to it without engaging in the defence of this particular goodness. Consequently in all societies, defending the 'good' interior involves doing 'bad' things. To defend democracy, societies engage in non-democratic practices. To defend the rule of law societies have to suspend the rule of law in certain places. To defend a loving society one has to hate those who try to undermine it, and so on. These situations have been increasingly theorised in recent times, following Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, as 'states of exception'. 4 Again, it would be idealistic to think that a democracy could prevail without such states of exception. The issue is not whether a society does or does not engage in such 'bad' and 'exceptional' defensive practices. All societies do. What differs between societies is the relation between these 'bad' practices and the 'good' practices they are protecting. It is also this relation that differentiates between a warring and a non-warring society. In a non-warring society, the 'bad' defensive practices are subordinated to the enjoyment of the good life. Those in control of such practices try to ensure that they don't encroach on the quality of the good life they are there to defend and protect. If they need to act somewhat 'nastily' to protect the good life, they ensure that it is done somewhere with minimal visibility, like on the margins of society, in an embassy, on the border, or by a 'secret service' somewhere in a dark corner. They work hard on disallowing the 'bad' act to disturb the goodness of the 'good life' they are protecting. For example, if they are to torture, they do so 'in the dark'. They don't let torture infringe on the goodness of the interior. What defines warring cultures is that the suppressed, exceptional and 'bad' mechanisms and practices of defence start surfacing

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in the 'good' interior they are protecting. They become acceptable as part of the internal culture and thus they taint and affect it. The defensive mechanisms gradually start encroaching on the mechanisms of production and distribution of the good life they are supposedly protecting, such that they are no longer subordinated to them. They are mainstreamed into the everyday culture of a society. This can reach such extremes that the defence of the good life makes people forget the good life they are defending, and defensiveness becomes the core constitutive element of a society's public culture. Thus, it becomes 'legitimate' to discuss, in the open, whether torture is necessary to save the public good. Let me stress this point here: the difference between a warring and non-warring society is not that one engages in torture and the other doesn't. It is that one does it in the dark, and the other starts discussing the legality of torture in the open. That is, it integrates the discussion of the suspension of society's goodness within the culture of the good interior itself rather than leaving it hidden in its dark alleys. Thus, in warring societies we have a slow institutionalisation of what in non-warring societies were perceived as states of exception. In making war-a state often perceived as exceptional and transitional-into a self-reproducing and enduring reality, warring societies become prototypical of what has been increasingly referred to as 'permanent states of exception'. Such societies often speak to themselves and to others this way: 'We have to engage in torture, all the time; we have to stop these journalists and academics from saying certain things, all the time, we have to imprison children, all the time. Still, even though we are doing it all the time, it is important to realise that, given our good and virtuous culture, this is not what we usually/essentially do. Usually, we don't torture, we don't stop people from saying what is on their mind, and we love kids. This is what we are really like.' In much the same way as the permanent state of exception is legitimised by differentiating between the essential goodness of society and the contingent badness it has to engage with, citizens of warring societies splits themselves into two, into a contingent citizen and an essential citizen. This is an important component of the colonial settler ethos. Lebanese Christians used to argue during the civil war that the very fact that they worried about engaging in uncivilised

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acts towards the Muslims was itself proof of their degree of civilisation, even as they engaged in quite horrific sectarian massacres. Essential to the above construction is the portrayal of the warring other, the enemy. Warring societies are often structured around such a significant 'bad other' -someone who embodies absolute evil, and whose very evil is forcing the good society to be bad and to act in ways to which it is not otherwise predisposed. The Israelis have wonderful national cliches about how the Palestinians have challenged their sense of civilisation by forcing them to commit atrocities, which otherwise they are not inclined to do. Despite this, they also argue that they are always heroically trying against all odds to uphold civilised standards of behaviour. Such an ethos has become a generalised Western ethos, at least since the Bush administration made it appear as if the very fact of recognising and dealing with the consequences of the torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib showed how civilised Americans were, compared to the Iraqi prisoners they were holding and torturing. Indeed, increasingly, Western nations at war, especially in the Middle East, are engaging in the worst kind of atrocities: usage of depleted uranium and other toxic weaponry, mass destruction, killing of innocent people, and so on. But they always end up holding 'inquiries' into these. The inquiry, as with the innumerable Israeli inquiries into the interminable massacres in Gaza or the inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacre during the Lebanese civil war, always works to project a sense of 'distinction' from the barbarians whose worst sin is not that they behead people but that they do so without having inquiries afterwards. On a milder scale but with a similar logic, in the colonial metropolis intolerance towards Muslims is often justified on the grounds that they are the ones who are really intolerant and who cause people to be intolerant of them in return. This characteristic splitting of the self allows for the same process that protects the 'essentially good society' from the 'contingently bad society' to apply to warring subjects themselves. It allows the colonial settler to support the inhuman practices being meted out on the 'evil other' without actually feeling that their own humanity and good essence is being destroyed. 'I agree that accepting the torture of Palestinians is not a nice thing to do, but let's be realistic. This is how it is,' says the Israeli. 'You don't understand

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because you do not have a sense of what it is like dealing with people like this. If you did, you would realise that it is not that I am a bad person who supports violence. I just have to do what I have to do ... here ... at this point ... ' and so on. Again, the white South African used to do the same to the blacks, the Lebanese Christian to the Muslim, and likewise today we Western subjects are increasingly developing this colonial settler attitude to justify our complicity in the inhuman treatments meted out to the Muslim others that supposedly surround us. The unsavoury practices towards asylum seekers and potential 'terrorists', which we now accept, in the past were totally and non-negotiably unacceptable to us. As we have seen above and as Agarnben taught us, 5 the law can legislate its own suspension. But in so doing, in common circumstances, it continues to at least encompass the illegal space and keep it under its watchful eye. A government can allow its secret service to act outside the law, but it keeps its eye on it doing so. The situation is different in colonial settler environments. There, we see the creation of 'dark spaces' where the law doesn't even want to know what is happening. It trusts those 'securitarian forces' that rule within them to do what is right. Colonial settler societies are full of those latter spaces that simply escape the rule of law rather than find themselves legitimised as lawless by the law itself. It is particularly in such spaces that a culture of impunity towards the evil other emerges: a culture where the warriors can do whatever they want to the evil, dehumanised people, with a feeling that there is no one to stop them. In the past, the concrete manifestations of this logic of impunity were reserved for Third World examples, like the actions of the Israeli army in the occupied territories or the South African police towards ANC suspects. Now this logic has globally seeped into the whole Western democratic body„from Abu Ghraib, to Guantanamo Bay, to Australia's infamous detention centres. If this violence towards the evil other is exemplary of all colonial settler warring communities, there is something else that typifies them as late colonial settler societies. It is the viciousness and cruelty that characterise the way they dispense their violence towards the other. It is a kind of violence specific to those who experience a sense of decline while retaining the power to hurt. Nietzsche's 'sense of power' conveys this very well. 6 As opposed to an objectivist

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conception of power as a certain 'amount of power', a 'sense of power' is one's relation to whatever 'amount of power' one has. This relation is shaped by what Bourdieu later calls 'trajectory'. 7 If I have x amount of power and feel my power is declining, I deploy power differently from when I have the same x amount of power but feel my power is on the rise. If I feel that my power is on the rise I might find myself able to afford to be magnanimous and say, as Nietzsche did: 'What are my parasites to me ... may they live and prosper.' 8 But if I sense that my power is in decline I find myself deploying my power meanly and with resentment, even against those who are much weaker than me. This is precisely why late colonial settler societies are characterised by a particular meanness and viciousness towards the other. Even though they are still vastly superior in power to the racialised/ colonised other, the combination of actual power with a sense of decline produces a lethally vindictive and cruel colonial culture. This cruelty is helped by the proliferation of a particular form of 'toughness' that always comes to dominate late colonial settler social formations, which we can refer to as masculine toughness. The difference between masculine and feminine toughness can be easily captured by this familiar everyday occurrence: a six- or seven-year-old child falls in the playground. She stoically appears unperturbed by her fall even though she is visibly hurt. Hours later, when her parent comes to pick her up, when her hand is safely tucked into theirs, she 'disintegrates' and starts sobbing, expressing how hurt she is. Here we are faced with the two forms of toughness. First, the playground toughness: I will close in on myself and will not express my true feelings because I am not going to show others how hurt and vulnerable I am. This is masculine toughness: I am tough enough to hide my vulnerability from others and not let them exploit it and get me. We can see already how this embodies a vision of the other as an enemy who is out to 'get me'. The second toughness is precisely the opposite. It is the ability to be tough enough to show how vulnerable one is without fearing that others will exploit your vulnerability. This is feminine toughness. While we all have a mixed capacity for both kinds of toughness, warring societies favour masculine forms of toughness. They invite their citizens to think of themselves in situations where any vulnerability can be exploited by the other: cool, calculating Muslim asylum

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J

seekers acting outside the law exploit our soft-heartedness and our respect for the rule of law, intolerant authoritarian Muslims in our midst exploit our tolerance and freedom of speech, and undemocratic terrorists exploit our democracy. Thus, citizens are encouraged to be tough, intolerant, undemocratic and harsh in the face of the Muslim other. They can do so to the point of forgetting what being soft-hearted, tolerant and democratic means. Yet, as we have seen again and again, they can maintain the belief that in fact they are. This is how democracy is slowly gutted of its content and becomes increasingly deployed as a phallic democracy.

Phallic democracy Phallic democracy is the democracy that one has, rather than the democracy one lives. It's the democracy of those who say 'we have got democracy', rather than those who say 'we live democratically'. It's the democracy to show the other that 'I've got a big one'. The phallic democrat says to his other: 'My democracy is really big! As opposed to you, who have very little democracy! Likewise my tolerance and my freedom of speech-look at them!' The Israelis do it all the time to the Palestinians, the Christian Lebanese used to do it all the time to the Muslim Lebanese, the white South Africans used to do it all the time to the black South Africans, and now the West is doing it all the time to all these poor deprived Muslim others who don't seem to have even a little one. The phallus, as psychoanalysis has shown so well, is an empty signifier. It can manage to be the symbol of the most important things in our lives only because it has no inherent significance. This is why the phallic 'we have democracy' discourse becomes more and more possible the more democracy is vacated of any real practical meaning; that is, the more the spaces where democracy is lived and practised in everyday life are actually shrinking. The logic of phallic democracy is often replicated with regard to many symbols of 'advanced civilisation', exhibiting even things like homosexuality and feminism. It is a variation on what is now referred to as gay- and gender-washing. I have come to know quite a few homophobic Lebanese people who nevertheless proudly declare to foreigners, 'Look, we've got gay bars in Beirut.' 'Having gay bars' is here presented as a phallic symbol of civilisation that backward

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others don't have. Interestingly, many of the 'we've got gay bars' people support the suppression of homosexuality as an open lifestyle. They are happy to have little safe ghettos that they can show off without the homosexual lifestyle impinging on their own daily lives. Phallic feminism obeys the same logic and is re-emerging as a tendency in the West. The phallic feminists say, 'Look at us, how liberated our women are compared to those medieval Muslim others.' This is done at the very moment where there is increased support for the return of highly regressive patriarchal laws regarding abortion and the family. As I have explained, the phallicisation of democracy or any other feature of the social is relative to its emptying of real practical significance. In colonial settler society this emptying of democracy is also a direct result of the radical exclusion of the colonised from the democratic process through their relegation to, and compartmentalisation in, a quasi-completely separate sphere of life. Here again the Western-dominated global world is increasingly structured in a colonial settler fashion.

Apartheid One of the historical characteristics of the nation-state is its capacity to transform enmity into adversariality. The key difference between enemies and adversaries is that the latter, no matter how antagonistic to each other they may be-and no matter how much their interests diverge-remain committed to the reproduction of the social or at least the spatial-environmental common grounds where such divergence and antagonism are played out. What characterises the warring ethos of the colonial settlers is that they have no such commitment to a shared ground or a sense of a common community and society with the colonised. They see them as enemies, not as adversaries. This lack of commitment to a single society is part and parcel of the 'separateness' that is created at the heart of the colonial settler world between the reality of the coloniser and that of the colonised, and which manifests itself in a number of variations on the apartheid theme. Indeed, all colonial settler societies produce apartheid-like tendencies, creating divisions between two different worlds within a single national space rather than a division within a single national

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world. There are always dominant and dominated groups within each of those worlds. But those differences are secondary in their experiential significance compared to the salience of the division between the world of the colonists and the world of the colonised. The latter is a division between two experiential realities rather than a division within a single reality. In apartheid South Africa, and increasingly in Israel today, these two separate worlds were/ are constructed out of an increasingly formal and legal spatialisation of a mixture of class and racial differentiation, and boundary creation. Still, differentiated worlds can come to exist in a more casual manner, as with the divide between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds in Australia. In the Lebanon of the twentieth century there were no formal boundaries that separated the underdeveloped world of the under and working classes from the world of the middle and upper classes. In the absence of a state that governed and maintained the totality of the city, Beirut was made of differentiated patches: a middle-class building-with a concierge and a gardener working hard at making the building and its surroundings look as clean and neat as possiblewould be surrounded by underclass spaces with no governmental or private maintenance and full of rubbish. By moving from one middle-class patch to another, the middle class still managed to experience the city as if it was in its totality a developed cosmopolitan space, learning to be totally oblivious of and blind to the dirty underdeveloped spaces they had to cross between their various patches. It was a dotted form of spatiality that allowed one to experience the spaces of one's apartment, one's building, one's school or university, one's work, one's club and one's cinema as a spatial totality. The quality of one's car as one moves between the various spots plays a significant role in suturing this totality. If I am dwelling on this it is because this duality of worlds is increasingly becoming a feature of the entire globe and is an important dimension of the globalisation of the colonial settler ethos. This is particularly true in the radically different way in which an upperand middle-class elite and a racialised lower, working and underclass population inhabit what we have come to call globalisation. In fact, two types of borders divide the global world. There are the national borders separating different countries, and then there

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are the class borders separating two different experiences of the world, each a world of its own. On the one hand, we have a world where a transnational working class and a transnational underclass of people are living and made to feel that national borders are exceptionally important and difficult to cross. On the other hand, we have a world experienced as open and almost borderless and largely enjoyed by the upper classes who are truly at home in the world. This explains the paradoxical experience, referred to by Wendy Brown, in her Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, of increased spatial openness and fusion accompanied by a proliferation of protective walls. It is not only the fact that the capacity to move is unequally distributed, as scholars of 'mobility' have shown. Just as important is the class difference in the way people move. Some roam the globe like masters, others like slaves. Some are the subjects of the global order, the others are its objects, often circulating strictly according to the needs of capital. Some, like the asylum seekers, try to muster a bit of agency in the face of the global/national forces that aim to reduce them to a state of 'things'. They are like escaping slaves attempting to free themselves from the global/national order of the border by travelling in its shadows and through its cracks. And they are caged and treated like escaped slaves when caught. When asylum seekers are stopped from crossing a border we think that they are merely stopped from crossing a national border. They are. But at the same time they are also being stopped from crossing the border between the world of national borders in which they are enslaved and forced to remain, and the borderless world that remains the reserve of the economic and cultural (artistic, academic, etc.) upper classes. I was often made aware of this uneven experience of globalisation during my fieldwork, while interviewing members of the Lebanese diaspora across the world. For instance, the Lebanese in Australia who, at least for most of the twentieth century, often came from rural and underdeveloped parts of Lebanon, and are themselves poor in economic and cultural capital, always speak of the fact that they have 'migrated' or are 'migrating' to Australia. The middleclass Lebanese in Europe, New York or Montreal, on the other hand, who are rich in both economic and cultural capital, rarely use the term 'migration'. They often ask each other, 'Where are you living?'

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They very clearly exhibit a sense that the world is their turf and that they can opt to 'live' anywhere they wish. This highlights the extent to which the notion of 'globalisation' posits a unified experience of the world, mystifying the fact that such an experience is at best minimal. In reality, what we have is a global, apartheid-like, uneven and separate experience of globalisation that is 'intersectionally' structured by race as well as class and, particularly in the case of the transnational circulation of domestic labour, gender. Such an experience is an extension of a long history of 'two global orders' that differentiated the world of the slave-owners from that of the slaves, the world of the colonial masters from that of the colonised labourers, and-as importantly, although not often noted-the sovereign worlds of the colonial settlers from the a-sovereign ethnic suburbs, enclaves and ghettos borne out of modern working-class migration. The late colonial settler specificity of this division consists once again of the intensity with which the latter reality is experienced as a threat by the former and in the lengths to which the middle classes will go to erect borders to protect their borderless experience. This ontological split that characterises colonial settler spaces, and makes for the impossibility of a unified social reality, is exacerbated today by the fact that neo-liberal capitalism, while in need of national states, seems to have a minimal need for national societies. This has radically transformed the relation of the state to sociological knowledge, or rather it has abolished that relation altogether. Increasingly the state has less and less need for social knowledge as such, since the construction and reproduction of the social is no longer the priority of governmental practice. It is to this transformation of the status of social knowledge, particularly critical social knowledge, that I want to turn to now in conclusion.

Critical thought in late colonial settler societies As has been argued and demonstrated by many researchers today, those parts of the state that used to be directed at understanding and enhancing the social relations constitutive of national society (the welfare state) and who had an interest in sociological knowledge, are being increasingly supplanted by those devoted to the creation of social and symbolic borders (the security state and the security

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complex), designed lo protect lhe micro-societies of the upper and middle classes from the social problems that might emanate from increasingly impoverished and 'other' spaces. 9 In the era of the dominance of the welfare state, a crime was more likely to be not only understood in terms of the motivations of the person who has committed it but also positioned statistically with other similar crimes, and thought of in a Durkheimian fashion as a 'social fact' -as part of a wider social problem that needs to be addressed in its totality by the state. Today, the attempt to deal with this social dimension has decreased (the way equal opportunity programs that also address inequality among broad social categories have also decreased). Instead, today it is more likely that a crime is seen in purely individualist terms, its cause understood as located entirely in the individual who committed it, and requiring nothing more than the punishing and constraining of the freedom of such an individual. Thus, the technical knowledge of how to contain, control and limit the symptoms of social crisis in the world of the working and under classes to stop it from spilling into the world of the ruling classes has become far more important than the knowledge aiming at analysing the causes of social crisis, which is more of interest to a welfare state committed to the production and reproduction of national social relations. As the welfare state shrinks we increasingly have a state interested in governing the effects of social crisis rather than in the search for its causes. The first leaves social relations broken and deals with their consequences, the second continues to aim at repairing or reanimating national social relations. Agamben has recently located this 'securitarian' turn at the heart of modernity, and it is worth quoting him at length here: Starting with the Westphalia treaty, the great absolutist European states begin to introduce in their political discourse the idea that the sovereign has to take care of his subjects' security. But Quesnay is the first to establish security (sureté) as the central notion in the theory of government-and this in a very peculiar way. One of the main problems governments had to cope with at the time, was the problem of famines. Before

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Quesnay, the usual methodology was trying to prevent famines by the creation of public granaries and forbidding the exportation of cereals. Both these measures had negative effects on production. Quesnay's idea was to reverse the process: instead of trying to prevent famines, he decided to let them happen and to be able to govern them once they occurred, liberalising both internal and foreign exchanges. We should not neglect the philosophical implications of this reversal. It means an epoch-making transformation in the very idea of government, which overturns the traditional hierarchical relation between causes and effects. Since governing the causes is difficult and expensive, it is more safe and useful to try to govern the effects. I would suggest that this theorem by Quesnay is the axiom of modern governmentality. The ancien regime aimed to rule the causes, modernity pretends to control the effects. And this axiom applies to every domain: from economy to ecology, from foreign and military politics to the internal measures of police. 10 Indeed the pertinence of this to the way current governments are handling not only the social question but also-even more so-the ecological question is obvious. I would, however, want to argue that this government of effects does not by itself encapsulate modern governmentality. The latter has historically been more of a continuous struggle between the government of effects and the government of causes, a part of what Bourdieu calls the right and the left hands of the state. 11 It is the advent of the globalised colonial settler condition, fed by the neo-liberal lack of commitment to the social, that leads the 'government of effects' to become the predominant preoccupation. This disinterest in structural social knowledge translates into actual attacks on the individuals (academics) and the institutions (universities) that produce it. Today, this governmental/ capitalist disdain for sociological knowledge has been augmented by a growing attack on the natural sciences. Indeed, it can be said that for the first time in the history of capitalism, the divergence of interests between

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r certain sections of the capitalist class and those producing scientific knowledge (here concerning anthropogenic climate change) has Jed to a serious decoupling of capitalism and science, opening the space for capitalist-financed forms of obscurantism and denialism regarding the ecological question. Irrationalist social scientific and natural scientific voices have become a permanent feature ofWestern parliaments. They work by augmenting the growing cultures of irrationalism which, according to some, have characterised neoliberalism more generally. 12 This attitude is facilitated by a shift, witnessed in all warring societies, whereby citizenship is increasingly transformed into a form of conscription. This is a corollary of the masculine toughness analysed above. Conscription means one important thing: there is no questioning of orders, one only executes them-'either you're with us or you're against us'. The conscript is not someone who is allowed or who wants to reflect on their position and the orders they receive. It is not their job to say, 'Why am I doing what I'm doing?' The culture of intellectual reflexivity that was an essential component of liberal capitalism becomes undermined. Indeed, people who engage in reflexivity are seen as traitors because they are wasting their time 'thinking about doing' and 'navel-gazing' rather than simply 'doing'. Those who actually try to engage reflexively and critically within the world become perceived as chatterers, 'academics'-used here to denote an inferior state of being-who are not connected to 'real life'. They are people who distance themselves from the urgency of the situation and therefore do not understand the need for unquestioning solidarity. To distance oneself from the urgency of action and engage in idle chatter is perceived as a luxury in which only those with time to spare and with no sense of the gravity of the situation can engage. Hence critical intellectuals are increasingly portrayed by conservative commentators as an elite class who look down on, and mock the concerns of, ordinary people. Even international institutions that have such a reflexive, distant-from-action, super-ego function, such as the United Nations or the International Court of Justice, become increasingly loathed. The conscript claims, 'Don't hover over me and moralise. You don't understand what it's like from up there where you are-you have to be here, on the ground, fighting

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this war for survival to know what is going on. You can chatter as long as you want but you are living in a world of your own. I deal with the real world.' But from the perspective of the tough masculine warrior the 'real world' is increasingly devoid of its potentiality, of its 'what can be'. In general, as varieties of philosophers have theorised it in varieties of ways, reality is always made up of what has been, what is and what can be. But the 'what can be' is the ultimate domain of uncertainty and risk. It could become a temporal variation on the spatial threat, represented by the Muslim other, that is 'increasingly' surrounding us. Consequently, the conscript citizen withdraws completely from such a domain and lives in the conservative domains of the 'what is' and the 'what has been'. This is what is often called the 'real world'. Critical anthropological work, which by definition is connected to the 'what can be', is dismissed as 'unrealistic'. This is in addition to it being already perceived as useless for dealing with sociological questions pertaining to the nature of the social. It is this useless and unrealistic world that this book explores.

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r 2

On stuckedness The critique of crisis and the crisis of critique

For a long time, the notion of crisis was a central component of the language of social critique. One could even say that, from the midnineteenth century until the 1970s-with the Marxist domination of the critical intellectual field-a certain merger was completed between social critique and the notion of crisis as an economic, social and political phenomenon. Within this political and intellectual framework, the role of critique was precisely to show that under the guise of being a system capable of reproducing itself indefinitely, capitalism was indeed a generator of crises. This was so in the strictly economic field (crises of capital accumulation), in the sociohistorical domain (crises produced by tension between the development of the forces of production and relations of production), and finally in the political sphere (crises generated by class antagonisms). The critical dimension of this 'archaeology of crisis' -in the sense that one had to do some digging to unearth the roots of crises in a milieu that was bent on showing itself to be crisis-free-was based on a conceptual association that was more or less implied rather than theorised. This was the association between crisis and hope for social change. A crisis was supposed to do two things: make manifest the structural cracks in the machinery of social reproduction through which social

this war for survival to know what is going on. You can chatter as long as you want but you are living in a world of your own. I deal with the real world.' But from the perspective of the tough masculine warrior the 'real world' is increasingly devoid of its potentiality, of its 'what can be'. In general, as varieties of philosophers have theorised it in varieties of ways, reality is always made up of what has been, what is and what can be. But the 'what can be' is the ultimate domain of uncertainty and risk. It could become a temporal variation on the spatial threat, represented by the Muslim other, that is 'increasingly' surrounding us. Consequently, the conscript citizen withdraws completely from such a domain and lives in the conservative domains of the 'what is' and the 'what has been'. This is what is often called the 'real world'. Critical anthropological work, which by definition is connected to the 'what can be', is dismissed as 'unrealistic'. This is in addition to it being already perceived as useless for dealing with sociological questions pertaining to the nature of the social. It is this useless and unrealistic world that this book explores.

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2

On stuckedness The critique of crisis and the crisis of critique

For a long time, the notion of crisis was a central component of the language of social critique. One could even say that, from the midnineteenth century until the 1970s-with the Marxist domination of the critical intellectual field-a certain merger was completed between social critique and the notion of crisis as an economic, social and political phenomenon. Within this political and intellectual framework, the role of critique was precisely to show that under the guise of being a system capable of reproducing itself indefinitely, capitalism was indeed a generator of crises. This was so in the strictly economic field (crises of capital accumulation), in the sociohistorical domain (crises produced by tension between the development of the forces of production and relations of production). and finally in the political sphere (crises generated by class antagonisms). The critical dimension of this 'archaeology of crisis'-in the sense that one had to do some digging to unearth the roots of crises in a milieu that was bent on showing itself to be crisis-free-was based on a conceptual association that was more or less implied rather than theorised. This was the association between crisis and hope for social change. A crisis was supposed to do two things: make manifest the structural cracks in the machinery of social reproduction through which social

r change could emerge, and bring forth political subjects whose practices were no longer invested in the reproduction of the existing social structure, but who would engage in transformative practices instead. The function of the critical thinking of the crisis was to find or clarify the presence of these cracks and these revolutionary subjects. Such a critique was therefore an intrinsically hopeful one, reflecting the radical belief in the possibility of transformative social ruptures that characterised the radical thinking of the period. However, beginning in the middle of the twentieth century and becoming particularly generalised towards the end, a significant change occurred as capitalist societies, economies and institutions endlessly moved from one crisis to another. Slowly, beginning with the rise of fascism, there was a growing awareness that rather than necessarily being an opportunity for social transformation, a state of permanent crisis seemed to have become the very way in which capitalist economies and societies ensured their reproduction. Likewise, rather than leading to the emergence of a political subject committed to social change, the subject of the crisis seemed to be as, if not more, likely to be conservative rather than revolutionary. It is in this way that the radical critique of capitalist crisis gave way to a crisis of this critique. Nothing illustrates this situation as well as the intellectual reaction to the global financial crisis of 2008. While the crisis led to a 'revival of Marxism', celebrating once again the relevance of Marx's analysis of capitalist crises, in most cases this celebration was not accompanied by an equal celebration of the possibility of social transformation or of the existence of a political subject capable of bringing about such a transformation. The hopeful twentiethcentury Marxist critique of crisis gave way to a depressed and depressing critique, which in fact reproduced a sentiment of a general paralysis of the radical imagination and the will for social change. The impetus for social change that ended up manifesting itself in the Occupy movement came almost entirely from outside that tradition of 'crisis critique'. I don't want to imply with these introductory remarks that it is not possible to formulate a relationship between capitalist crisis, critique and hope for social change today. Rather, I want to use this 'crisis of critique' as an invitation to see the crisis not simply as a

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r given but as a political field in the Bourdieu-ian sense of the word: as a space ofrivalry between different forces with different interests and investments in the crisis, struggling among each other to enforce particular ways of living the crisis rather than others. It should be made clear here that saying there are different interests in the crisis is not the same as saying that the crisis is the product of different conflicting interests. It is to emphasise that once a crisis occurs people have different interests and investments in its existence, intensity, duration and manifestation. For example, a crisis in a factory may well be the product of different contradictory class interests between workers and their bosses. But at the same time, these interests that play a role in generating the crisis also become differently invested in the crisis itself once it has occurred. In the simple case of a crisis in a factory, for example, the union may have an interest in the crisis to accelerate the unionisation of workers. On the other hand, the owner of the factory may also have an interest, although a different one, in the same crisis. Far from necessarily wanting to end the situation of crisis, he or she may even have an interest in suggesting to the workers that the crisis is even worse than it actually is. The owner may indeed engage in what might be called 'strategies of intensification of the crisis', to force its workers to accept, for example, a reduction in wages. It is crucial to see that this struggle is not simply a struggle between two different ways of 'interpreting' the crisis, but between attempts at highlighting and privileging a way of living the crisis over another. The union is fighting for workers to relate to their identities and their conditions of life as workers, and to make them live the crisis as a struggle against the owner of the factory, who is to be seen as an exploiter and an opponent. The owner is fighting to make the workers identify with the plant as the source of their collective well-being. He or she is thus struggling to make them see the crisis as requiring solidarity between both workers and bosses against 'the 'economic downturn'. To emphasise that this is a struggle over ways of living the crisis is to ensure that it is not reduced to a subjectively conceived struggle over the interpretation or construction of the crisis. The latter would imply that what the crisis is 'in reality', is always already there independent of the way people live it. Then comes a struggle over how to interpret it. The former implies that the crisis, as it is lived by the

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workers, is 'in reality' both what the union wants to make of it and what the owner wants to make of it. The struggle between the union and the owner becomes a struggle between two realities; it is an ontological struggle, or as Bourdieu would put it, it is a struggle over the making and unmaking of the social world.' This equation of the reality of the crisis to dominant forms of living the crisis, rather than to some prior reality requiring an a posteriori subjective interpretation, is crucial, I believe, ifwe are to understand the recent neo-liberal successes at making of the situation of permanent crisis a conservative technique of government. This is because one of the most important characteristics that defines this form of govemmentality is of the order of the practico-affective. This has to do with the intimate relationship that this form of government can establish between the crisis and the exacerbation, as well as the routinisation, of a sentiment that has often marked social crises. This is what I call 'stuckedness': the sentiment and the state of being of experiencing oneself as existentially 'stuck'. That a viable life presupposes a form of imaginary mobility-a sense that one is 'going somewhere', which I have called existential mobility-is something that has strongly emerged in both my research on transnational Lebanese migration as well as in my work on white racists in the West. In a sense, both the migrants and the racists seek existential mobility and aim to avoid its opposite: a sense of existential immobility or what I will be referring to here as 'stuckedness'. Although one can find evidence of people experiencing various forms of stuckedness at all times and in all places, I will argue below that the social and historical conditions of the permanent crisis we live in have led to a proliferation and intensification of this sense of stuckedness. What's more, there is an increasing sense that stuckedness has been normalised. Rather than being perceived as something one needs to get out of at any cost, it is now also experienced, ambivalently, as an inevitable pathological state that has to be endured. In this chapter, I am looking at this process whereby 'stuckedness in crisis' is transformed into an endurance test. As I will argue, such a mode of confronting the crisis by a celebration of one's capacity to stick it out rather than calling for change contains a specific experience of waiting that is referred to in common language

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r '.

as 'waiting it out'. As such, it is this waiting out of the crisis that I am examining. In my work on migration, I have taken seriously the equation of well-being with a sense of mobility that is present in such common everyday statements as 'how are you going?' This equation is present in many other languages. In Lebanese dialect one asks 'Keef el haal?', which literally means 'How is the state of your being?' The common reply is 'Mehsheh'l haal', which literally means 'The state of my being is walking'. 2 I have tried to work with an understanding that such language of movement is not simply metaphoric but also conveys a sense in which when a person feels well, they actually imagine and feel that they are moving well. Existential mobility is this type of imagined/felt movement. As far as migration is concerned, I have shown that people engage in the physical form of mobility that we call migration because they are in search of existential mobility. This differs from the physical movement of tourists, for instance, whose physical mobility (travel) is part of their accumulation of existential mobility. In a sense, we can say that people migrate because they are looking for a space that constitutes a suitable launching pad for their social and existential self. They are looking for a space and a life where they feel they are going somewhere as opposed to nowhere, or at least a space where the quality of their 'going-ness' is better than in the space they are leaving behind. More often than not, what is referred to as 'voluntary' migration is either an inability or an unwillingness to endure and 'wait out' a crisis of existential mobility. As I have pointed out above, this kind of comparative existential mobility has also come out as an issue in my work on certain specific forms of white racism that are marked by resentment and envy towards immigrants as well as ethnic and racial minorities. 3 While analysing this form of racism it became clear that it was shaped far more by a comparative sense of mobility than by simple class location. For instance, there is a common belief, especially among cosmopolitan small-L liberals, that the racism towards immigrants of the followers of Pauline Hanson in Australia, like that of the followers of Le Pen in France, is a 'working-class' form of racism. This is not the case. Hansonite and Le Pennist racism was primarily derived from a sense of 'mobility envy' by people from all classes who felt they

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weren't moving 'well enough'. This was sometimes voiced explicitly in terms of social mobility envy, such as white Australians resenting the presence of so many Indian-background doctors in their hospitals. But ultimately, it was existential mobility that was the issue. Thus, in interviews I conducted, some white racists exhibited racial resentment towards minorities even when they themselves were located in a 'higher' socioeconomic group than those minorities they were racialising. Mobility envy followed a pattern similar to the following paradigmatic story. The story begins with the 'white/established' person owning a nice car and the immigrant 'outsider', who has just moved to the neighbourhood, buying themselves a motorbike. Some time after settling in, however, the immigrant neighbour buys a car while the established person still owns the same car. One begins to notice that racial resentment starts kicking into the discourse of the white/ established person even though the car they own is much better than the car the immigrant just bought. What the racist becomes envious of, then, is not the ownership of the car itself (since they already own a better one) but the mobility implied in the move from a motorbike to a car at a time when they feel that they have remained stuck where they are. It is in this sense that I am arguing that just as there is an imaginary existential mobility, there is an imagined existential stuckedness. This form of stuckedness is existential in that it does not necessarily coincide with lack of social mobility. One can be in a job and climbing the social ladder within that job yet still feel stuck in it. This highlights the fact that social and existential mobility are not the same thing, even though they tend to coincide in a number of social situations. It is on the basis of observing patterns of behaviour similar to the above that I have argued that, in Australia, there was a link between the racism towards Indigenous people and immigrants exhibited by the white racist Hansonites and the latter's sense of stuckedness, which was generated not only by neo-liberal globalisation but also in particular by the insecurity in job tenure that has increased the sense of 'being stuck in one's job' everywhere around the world. 4 The precariousness of their tenure made them feel constantly worried about losing their jobs, and they felt as if someone was constantly watching them and waiting for them to make a

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mistake so they could have a reason to sack them. This made their working culture increasingly claustrophobic. Interestingly for me, my research on Hansonism at the time of its emergence also coincided with what became known in Australia as the Thredbo disaster, a landslide at Australia's most famed ski resort in which a number of people were killed, buried under earth, rubble and snow, in July 1997. One person, Stuart Diver, survived under the rubble, in freezing temperatures, stuck under a slab of cement. All of Australia celebrated his endurance and survival. But what attracted my attention was the particular resonance this story of survival had in the white cultural milieus I was researching. To me, it seemed clear that this resonance was the product of a form of imagined affinity between the sense of being both socially and existentially stuck-as expressed by many Hansonites-and the stuckedness of Stuart Diver under the landslide. The celebration of his survival was a celebration of a 'heroism of the stuck'. With this form of heroism, it is not what you actively or creatively achieve that makes you a hero but your capacity to stick it out and 'get stuck well', so to speak. To be a hero under such circumstances is to be resilient enough to endure stuckedness, or, to put it in a way relevant to us here, it is to be able to wait out your stuckedness. It is also to be able to wait for deliverance so as to come out as a survivor and start 'moving' again. This heroic endurance spoke to many Hansonites who, in the absence of social alternatives, celebrated the heroism of ordinary people who simply endured a life where a sense of stuckedness prevailed as their social world was crumbling around them under the effect of globalisation, the rising precariousness of their hold over their jobs and the intensified migration that changed the shape of the cultural world they inhabit. This sat ambivalently with a continued desire to see themselves move existentially. It is important to note carefully what it is about stuckedness that allows heroism. At first glance, being stuck presumes a lack of agency. Indeed it is lack of agency that defines stuckedness, whether physically or existentially understood. As such, stuckedness is by definition a situation where a person suffers from both the absence of choices or alternatives to the situation one is in and an inability to grab such alternatives even if they present themselves. So, how can one be a hero when by definition one is in a situation where one does

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!

not do much? I think the heroism of stuckedness lies in this ability to snatch agency in the very midst of its lack. This is what the notion of endurance implies: asserting some agency over the very fact that one has no agency by not succumbing and becoming a mere victim and an object in circumstances that are conspiring to make a total agentless victim and object out of you. In this way, a certain nobility of spirit and an assertion of one's 'freedom as a human' oozes out of the very notion of'endurance' that comes to negate the dehumanisation implied by a situation of'stuckedness'. More than a decade has passed since the Thredbo disaster, but it is notable how this 'heroism of the stuck' has become a pervasive generalised cultural form not just in Australia but also all over the world. With every earthquake, flood and other natural or warinduced disaster involving the crumbling of buildings and the burying of people alive comes a celebration of survival: an almost competitive account of finding people who have survived being buried alive, stuck, for two, three, four and five days under the rubble. One can note a shift of sensibility that accompanies this redefinition of heroism in people's reactions towards a well-reported incident that occurred in the Himalayas. A climber who was successfully achieving his ascent of the mountain met with another climber who had encountered difficulties and was basically 'stuck' midway through his climb. It was an encounter between the hero as a 'climber' and an 'achiever' and the hero as 'stuck'. That people's sympathy went overwhelmingly toward a person who was stuck reflected more than a common sympathy with 'victims' and the 'underdog'. It reflected a transformation in what Raymond Williams would call the structure of feeling built around collective notions of heroism. 5 But this also means that there is a sense of community among those who 'wait out' the crisis. In the paradigmatic example of white racist resentment that I gave above I argued that the established white person experiences a form of mobility envy in the face of the immigrant who has purchased a car. But there is another, more communal sense in which resentment is experienced: the migrant who is achieving mobility is like any 'petty bourgeois' achiever. She is standing out as different from the 'community'. She is exhibiting an unwillingness to be part of the community of the stuck. The ethnic difference of the immigrant becomes coupled with a social/cultural

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r difference based precisely on their perceived unwillingness to wait out the crisis 'like the rest of us'. The fascination with stuckedness is increasingly permeating popular culture. It is noteworthy, for instance, how, of all the possible angles from which one can approach the 9 / 11 terrorist attack on New York's twin towers, Oliver Stone's film based on the event was in large part about the heroism of people stuck in the towers' rubble waiting for deliverance. There is clearly something timeless and universal about this celebration of the human spirit to endure. This universality exists even when each celebration also takes a cultural form specific to where it is occurring. In this chapter, however, I am neither interested in the universal nor the culturally specific aspect of this heroism of the stuck. Rather, I want to examine the historical specificity of its significance today, particularly as it becomes articulated to a celebration of a form of waiting or, more specifically, a 'waiting out' or weathering of a crisis situation where the self is experiencing existential immobility. 'Waiting out' is a specific form of waiting where one is not waiting for something but rather waiting for something undesirable that has come, like a spell of cold weather or a disliked guest, to end or to go. Unlike waiting, which can be passive or active, 'waiting out' is always passive, yet its passivity is, as I have pointed out, an ambivalent one. For it involves both a subjection to the elements or to certain social conditions and at the same time a braving of these conditions. It is this ambivalence that allows it to take the heroic forms discussed above. It is also this ambivalence that, as I want to now argue, makes it a governmental tool that encourages a mode of restraint, self-control and self-government in times of crisis. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre famously aims for an 'existential' reconceptualisation of the Marxist notion of the revolutionary class or masses. He rethinks Marx's well-known differentiation between class-in-itself and class-for-itself in terms of what he calls the difference between the 'série' and the 'fused group'. The série is a collective that appears together only from the outside. In fact, it is what Sartre terms 'a plurality of isolations'. Interestingly for us, the example that Sartre gives of a série is that of people queuing at a bus stop. 7 The série unites and separates at the same time. The degree of isolation of the people waiting (together

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nonetheless) reflects what Sartre wonderfully calls their 'degree of massification'. Sartre argues that this is the Jaw that governs most social organisations at work. We can see in this a hint of the self-disciplining in what Foucault will later call 'governmentality' in so far as it is a technique of individualisation and the internalisation of a mode of governing the self. The queue where one governs oneself into waiting in an orderly fashion is one form of such 'serial govern mentality'. What interested Sartre, however, is not so much this analysis of the alienation that is inherent to this serial governmentality-in this he was reconceptualising an old problematic that was already notably dealt with by Rousseau and Hegel among many others. Rather, Sartre wanted above all to examine and detail the process that led people to move from this individualised passive state to become active agents of history: how the 'série' is transformed into 'fused group'. Interestingly for us, Alain Badiou, commenting on this piece, portrays this coming together of the fused group as a disruption of orderly waiting in the queue. 8 Suppose the bus we are waiting for together does not come, he invites us to think. People start to feel agitated. People start talking to each other not about the banal things they usually do to fill up time while waiting but about the unbearability and inhumanity of being subjected to such conditions external to themselves. And suddenly our communication with the other is made on the basis that they, like me, find waiting unbearable. From the formula 'everyone is the same as the other in so far as they are other to themselves' we move to the formula 'the other is the same as I since I am no longer my other'. As Badiou puts it: 'In the série the Other is everywhere. In the fused group the same is everywhere.' 9 For Badiou (and for Sartre), like for many sociologists who have worked on queuing, the queue symbolises social order. But what Sartre reminds us is that the queue encourages self-government in so far as it is moving, in so far as it is working as a mode of regulating access to resources, and so on. Once it stops working Badiou sees both a social crisis and a crisis of governmentality. Let us examine the Sartrian/Badiou-ian example from our perspective. Queuing for the bus involves at one level an orderly form of mobility. In so far as the buses keep coming, the queue moves and people feel they are moving: physically and existentially. When the bus does not come

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r this initiates a 'crisis'. Not only a social crisis that perturbs the flow of buses and flow of people queuing but also a crisis felt by each individual queuing in the sense that, when the queue stalls, the people queuing experience a sense of immobility, they are no longer going somewhere, they are now 'stuck' in the queue. In this sense, to reinterpret Sartre and Badiou from our perspective, it is this state of stuckedness that triggers the questioning of the existing social arrangement and leads to the social upheaval that transforms the série into a fused group. We see here the revolutionary optimism in formulation. It is an optimism characteristic of Sartre's time and still shared by Badiou: crisis is an unusual state of affairs that brings about upheaval, a rethinking of the social order (that is, the modality of waiting) and the formation of a revolutionary force (no more waiting!). One can recall here the way Herbert Marcuse addressed the students in the early 1970s: 'We should not wait. We cannot wait and what's more we do not have to wait.' I want to argue that the reflections on stuckedness I have developed in this chapter emphasise that the perspective of our time on crisis and order is different from the way it is perceived in the Sartrian-Badiouian arguments above. Crisis today is no longer felt as an unusual state of affairs that invites the citizen to question the given order. Rather, it is perceived more as a normalcy, or, to use what is becoming perhaps an over-used concept, crisis is a kind of permanent state of exception. In this sense, enduring the crisis becomes the normal mode of being a good citizen, and the more one is capable of enduring a crisis, the more of a good citizen one is. As usual this takes on a racial, civilisational and class dimension: the ones who do not know how to wait are the 'lower classes', the uncivilised and racialised others. The civilised, approximating the image of the hero, are those who get stuck in a classy way. They know how to endure. It is here that the heroism of the stuck seems to me to signal a deeper form of governmentality, a governmentality that is reproduced even in times of crisis. Even when the bus does not come, even when people are feeling stuck in a queue that is not moving, they heroically keep on queuing. And this is self-reproducing: the more one waits and invests in waiting, the more reluctant one is to stop waiting.

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What we have, therefore, is a new form of governmentality that invites and indeed valorises self-control in times of crisis. Today, I board a plane and I am told that there is always a possibility of a 'crisis' and I need to be prepared-to know about oxygen masks, exits and so on-so that if a crisis comes I am prepared to self-govern myself even in such demanding times. Even when possibly facing death I should learn to act in an orderly fashion. Here, queuing, even in the midst of disaster, is understood as something one has to do. And far from being perceived as cowardly, to remain 'inactive' and non-revolutionary in the face of crisis, to 'wait out' the crisis is perceived as something that one is proud to do. It is a mark of a deepening of the civilisation process. It is civilised to know how to endure a crisis and act in an orderly, self-governed, restrained fashion. It is the uncivilised 'Third World-looking masses' who are imagined to be running amok in the face of crisis. One can see the two faces of this racialised civilisational gap during the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005. One can also see it in Australia in the latter-day vilification of the refugee as a 'queue jumper': someone unable to wait for their turn. Likewise, the Parisian boys who revolt in the suburbs are not seen as ushering a revolution. They are seen as 'trash', as they were famously referred to by the French president Nicolas Sarkozy when he was interior minister. 10 They are so partly because, within this racialised civilisational discourse, they, and not their social situation, are perceived to be the problem. Indeed they are not seen by many of their detractors as living in especially difficult conditions. Everyone is living in especially difficult conditions in the eyes of such people. For the latter, what marks such boys is not the social condition of crisis but the fact that they do not know how to wait out and endure the crisis 'like everyone else'. Perhaps this is one of the more important problematics that the radical imaginary of the past has to face as the desire for existential mobility sits ambivalently with this celebration of heroic stasis. How can one reimagine 'being revolutionary' at a time when to be revolutionary in the old Marxist or Sartrian sense is to be 'vulgar', 'impatient', uncivilised and unable to 'wait properly'? Should we conclude from what has been discussed above that it is no longer possible to analyse a crisis critically in a way that focuses on the possibility of social change? I will conclude this chapter with a

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r brief reflection on this question. A few years ago, some students at the American University of Beirut set up a tent in the middle of the campus with a sign saying: 'This is a crisis-free space.' Another sign explained: 'You are welcome to enter. There is no crisis in here.' That such a form of student activism makes sense in Lebanon is instructive because the country offers an extreme example of the state of permanent crisis that we have discussed above. Moreover, this state is so extreme that we can really speak of Lebanon as being in a permanent critical condition rather than in a state of crisis. The concept of critical condition must be understood here in its medical sense so that its political ramifications are well captured. Patients are considered to be in critical condition when they are perceived to be on the borderline between life and death. We do not sit on the bedside of such patients in hopes of collaborative future projects with them. Quite simply, our hopes are limited to finding them still alive the next day. Indeed, this is exactly the way that Lebanese politics as a permanent critical state is experienced. It is a politics of people continuously staring at the abyss. As with the critical patients, in such circumstances there is not much room for 'thinking big' politically. One just hopes the country survives from one day to another. And indeed this is what most Lebanese wake up every morning thinking: 'Incredible! The country has not totally disintegrated yet!' Thus Lebanon offers an admittedly extreme, yet instructive, example of the shrunken political imagination and the inability to think of social alternatives that prevails when one is inserted in such intense permanent state of crisis. Indeed, this absence of an alternative political path is integral to the very definition of the state of being stuck we have been examining here. Here is why the 'no crisis' tent mentioned above is also an invitation to think differently about what constitutes a critical intellectual politics vis-avis the crisis. Rather than thinking politics within a Hegelian lineage as an internal opposition to the crisis leading to its dialectical overcoming, the tent offers a metaphor of a thought that escapes the crisis by positioning itself outside its grip, especially outside the socio-affective stranglehold it can have on us-a thought that is 'alter' rather than just 'anti' crisis.

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r Part II

3

Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today

What kind of imaginary inspires radical politics today, and what role can critical anthropological thought have in the formation of this imaginary? Only a few years ago, this question might have come across as very '1960s' and dated. Today it seems to be of increasing pertinence. It is so thanks to the growth in radical politics that has marked world events in recent times, and which has included the various forms of anti-globalisation and ecological protests, the Spanish 'indignados', the spate of Arab revolutionary upheavals and, most recently, the various Occupy movements that have mushroomed internationally. But, as I will argue, it is also so thanks to an increasing reaffirmation of the critical anthropological tradition that we have been witnessing since the turn of the century. 1 In their work, Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri mobilise the work of anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in their search for a way to conceive the struggle for what they call alter-modernity. I want to contend that this rapprochement between radical political theorists and the anthropology of Viveiros de Castro is more than a mere isolated event. Rather, it points to a more pronounced opening in the radical political imaginary to the offerings of the critical

anthropological tradition. The anthropology ofViveiros de Castro is not, of course, the only way this critical tradition expresses itself. Nonetheless, particularly because of the way it proactively weds the critical and the radical, I want to consider it here as an avant-gardist ideal type of how critical anthropological thought can generate new problematics that are pertinent to radical politics. Critical anthropological thought, as I will define it below, has not often had a prominent role to play in the conception of radical politics. The imaginary that propelled radical politics in the modem era and until the 1970s has raised issues and questions that called on a critical sociological tradition more than a critical anthropological one. However, as I will argue below, the historical circumstances that gave rise to this quasi-symbiotic relation between critical sociological thought and radical politics have themselves been waning. While critical sociological thought remains an important and necessary anchorage of any radical politics, we are witnessing a transformation whereby some of the new key issues confronting radical politics have an increased affinity with critical anthropological thought. I will start by explaining what I mean by 'critical thought' and the way in which the 'critical anthropological tradition' is different from other critical traditions. I will then examine some of the key features that mark the transformation of the current radical political imaginary and its relation to critical intellectual production. After that, I will analyse aspects of the critical anthropological tradition as represented in the work of Viveiros de Castro and the way it articulates itself to the radical imaginary. Finally, I will reflect on other ways in which critical anthropology can participate in the on-going transformation of the radical political imaginary.

On the nature of the critical anthropological tradition Whatever discipline in the humanities and the social sciences one studies at university today, this discipline is bound to provide the student with a number of domains of knowledge that express its particularity. Among other things, it will provide an account of its own history, of the debates aiming to define the specificity of its object, of the positive knowledge it has accumulated, and of the research methods and the theories that are specific to it.

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Of course, a student might find that certain aspects of one discipline and another have a lot in common, and that indeed some units are taught as multidisciplinary units. It might even be hard to work out in some instances what is the difference between a sociological, a historical, a political science or an anthropological approach to a particular sociocultural formation. Indeed it can be said that this is increasingly the case, and I am keen to say-so as not to let someone misinterpret my purpose here-that I think that this multidisciplinarity or even trans-disciplinarity is both inevitable and good. Nonetheless, there are certain specific problematics and particularities that emerge in the history of a discipline's development, and what interests me here is one specific domain where disciplines develop such particularities: the domain of critical thought. There are many ways in which 'critical thought' can be defined, but it is important right from the start to make clear that critical thought is not 'radical' thought. 'Critical' is an intellectual property of thought, not a political one, even if there is a clear affinity between critical thought and radical politics. Sociologists and anthropologists might or might not define themselves explicitly in political terms. They also might or might not give their politics primacy in orienting their research. But when they engage in critical thinking they are inevitably associating themselves with a politics that breaks routinised adhesion to a given social order. Nonetheless, it remains important to stress the primarily intellectual nature of the critical. Critical thinking is most generally associated with the way it enables us to reflexively move outside ourselves such that we can start seeing ourselves in ways we could not have possibly seen ourselves, our culture or our society before. It is in this sense that disciplines have particular ways of being critical: they have particular ways of taking us outside ourselves. One critical dimension of historical knowledge, for example, is that it can take us outside ourselves in time. Depending on which historical tradition one is working from, historical critical thought can allow us to reflect on the way our history has shaped us, or it can help us look at ourselves differently by allowing us to compare ourselves with past versions of ourselves as it were. Foucault's 'history of the present' is a well-known example of a critical history. A critical sociology also takes us outside

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ourselves. It allows us not only to capture the existence of social relations, structures and forces that are a sui generis reality and as such exist 'outside us' (such as the classical Durkheimian idea that there are such things as 'social facts') but also to examine the causal power of these social structures and social forces and to ascertain the way they work to help make us into what we are. Most importantly, critical sociology has helped us see these relations as relations of power and domination that reproduce a certain given order of things and, as such, invites us to think the possibility of resisting or even undermining such dominant order of things. A critical sociology produces what Bourdieu has called processes of denaturalisation and defatalisation. 3 That is, by helping us see ourselves and the social spaces that we inhabit as 'social constructs' and/or as 'objects of struggle', it makes us see our lives as less to be taken for granted and unchanging than they might, at first sight, appear to be. In doing so, critical sociology induces a hope in the possibility of social change. Likewise, we can look at psychoanalysis as a kind of critical psychology, in that it takes us outside where our ego dwells such that we start seeing that our ego is far from being a 'master in its own house', 4 as it safely likes to imagine itself to be. Psychoanalysis as a body of critical thought gives us a far more complex and dynamic image of what we are as a form of subjectivity, and of how we come to be what we are. These are obviously very broad examples, and it would be interesting to do a wider study of the ways various kinds of thought take us outside ourselves. In the process of its historical emergence, the anthropological tradition has also provided us with various modes of critical thinking. Some are very similar to sociology, in so far as every anthropology necessarily involves a sociology, but there is also a specific critical function that has emerged from the anthropological tradition that is quite unique to it. It is well known that anthropology as a project began as a study of human cultures that are situated outside the dynamic of our capitalist modernity. This was so even if, paradoxically, it was that dynamic itself that was behind the very possibility of the anthropological encounter between modern and non-modern peoples. And even if that very process was part of making what was outside modernity inside modernity. It is in this sense, as many have argued, that

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we can say that early anthropology captures what was outside modernity in the very process of it becoming inside modernity, with anthropology itself being part of that very assemblage of capture. Nonetheless, capture is not domestication, and even domestication itself can never be a total process. The people outside modernity whom the early anthropologists studied were people who at least partially remained radically different from us not just in modes ofliving or technological capacity but also in terms of their cosmology, their conception and their sense of reality, as well as the way they dwell in and relate to their immediate surroundings. This is what we have come to call, sometimes self-critically, 'the 'savage slot'; 5 that is, the study of radical cultural alterity: a mode of difference that is so seriously different from us that we cannot simply think it and make sense of it just by relying on our socially and historically constrained imagination. Such difference disorients us to begin with, and in the process of helping us reorient ourselves within it and in relation to it, anthropology widens our sphere of what is socially and culturally possible. This anthropology was given a multiplicity of names such as 'primitivist anthropology', 'anthropology of pre-literate people', 'pre-state people' and so on. The category one chooses today is dependent on one's intellectual sophistication and desire to be 'politically correct'. Yet, regardless of which category is deployed, this anthropological project rested on the assumptions that: (1) there is such a thing as radical cultural alterity; (2) it is nonetheless knowable by those ofus who are variously grounded in the processes of modernity; and (3) knowing such radically different cultures involves a specific kind of labour (ethnography), for to say as we did above that 'to be captured does not make you domesticated' also means that to be captured by modernity does not immediately make you easily knowable. In the conclusion to a lecture given in Japan around the topic of 'Anthropology in the face of the problems of the modern world', and which succinctly summarises the ethos behind all his work, Claude Levi-Strauss argues that: Anthropologists are here to witness that the manner in which we live, the values that we believe in, are not the only possible ones; that other modes of life, other value

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systems have permitted, and continue to permit other human communities of finding happiness. Anthropology, thus invites us to temper our beliefs in our own importance to respect other ways of living, and to put ourselves in question through the knowledge of other customs that astonish us, shock us or even make us repulsed. 6 It is in such a project that we can see the prototypical moment of critical anthropological thought-the specific mode in which anthropology takes us outside ourselves-come to life. It does so by telling us that, regardless of what and who we are, we, as individuals and as a society, can dwell in the world in a completely different way from the way we dwell in it at any given moment. Therefore this critical anthropological thought not only challenges us by telling us that there are people who live differently from the way we live; it also challenges us by telling us that they are relevant to us. The other has, but we can have, different ways of conceiving sexual relations; kinship; our relation to plants, animals and the landscape; causality; sickness and so on. It can therefore be summarised by the very simple but also paradoxically powerful formulation: we can be radically other than what we are. It is paradoxical because in the very idea of 'we can be' other than what we are lies the idea that 'we already are' other than ourselves. Our otherness is always dwelling within us; there is always more to us than we think, so to speak. One should immediately note here how this critical anthropological knowledge differs from other disciplinary critical thought. It differs not just in the fact that it takes us outside ourselves culturally rather than temporally, socially or psychologically, but also in the way it posits a relation between the outside-of-ourselves space it takes us to and the space in which we are dwelling. Here is the crucial difference that I want to emphasise: one can note that for certain standard forms of critical history, critical sociology and critical psychology, we are taken outside ourselves (or outside our ego in the case of psychoanalysis) into domains that are seen to have a causal role in making us what we are. Our history, the social structures and the governmental processes in which we are embedded, and the unconscious are all forces that are both outside and inside ourselves; they contribute to making us what we are. In

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r

the case of critical anthropology, however, we are taken outside ourselves without there being such a direct causal nexus between this outside and ourselves. Learning about the cosmology of the Australian Indigenous Arrernte people might tell us that there are ways of relating to the surrounding universe and to the flora and fauna that are radically different from the way we moderns relate to them, but in no way are we invited to see a causal relation between the cosmology of the Arrernte people and the constitution of our own. Yet we are still invited to think that the Arrernte's way of life does have a bearing on our lives, that there is always something in us that allows us to become Arrernte. Consequently, we can say that critical sociology, history and psychoanalysis work critically through giving us access to forces that are outside us but that are acting on us causally, continuously constituting us into what we are (the social structures, the past, the unconscious). Anthropology, on the other hand, works critically through a comparative act that constantly exposes us to the possibility of being other than what we are. It makes that possibility of being other act as a force in the midst of our lives. Critical sociology invites or initiates a reflexive analytical act that induces an understanding; it invites us to see how our social world is constituted and the way it can be unmade and remade by us. Critical anthropology, appropriately enough, is more akin to the shamanic act of inducing a haunting; indeed it encourages us to feel haunted at every moment of our lives by what we are/ could be that we are not. In this sense critical sociology uncovers social forces and social relations that are believed to be already having a causal effect on us regardless of whether we are aware of them or not (class relations, gender relations and so on), while critical anthropology invites us to become aware of and to animate certain social forces and potentials that are lying dormant in our midst. In so doing it incites what was not causal to become so. This critical impulse is more implicit but nonetheless present even in early politically conservative works such as that of Malinowski. But it becomes increasingly explicit as the discipline developed, taking many forms, from the Marxist orientation of Stanley Diamonds 'search for the primitive' to Elizabeth Povinelli's 'anthropology of the otherwise' via Marcus and Fisher's 'anthropology as cultural critique'.7

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As it should be clear by now, what I refer to as 'critical anthropological thought' means 'this mode of being critical that has emerged within the discipline of anthropology'. Likewise, 'critical sociological thought' is 'that mode of being critical that has emerged within the discipline of sociology'. They are not referents to what sociologists and anthropologists necessarily do but to historical points of emergence. Anthropologists, sociologists and others can engage in both or either critical anthropological or critical sociological thought wherever there is an inclination to do so. Historically speaking, however, it is critical sociological thought that has dominated the imaginary of radical thinkers whatever discipline they belong to. Throughout the twentieth century, and while there was no shortage of anthropologists emphasising the critical side of the discipline, radical anthropology was nonetheless predominantly concerned with sociological questions largely grounded within a mainly Marxist paradigm, such as uncovering relations of colonial domination, struggling against and deconstructing racist ideologies, fighting essentialist conceptions of culture and so on. This dominance occurred because radical politics itself in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries centred its political quest on such critical sociological rather than critical anthropological questions.

On the radical political imaginary Throughout capitalist modernity there has been a politics that saw institutional and conventional political practices as unable to deal with certain social problems proclaimed to be fundamental by those who espouse such politics. These problems are perceived to be generated also by the very nature of society of which conventional politics is considered an integral part. Poverty, inequality, exploitation, colonialism/imperialism, racism, sexism, alienation, rampant materialism and individualism, the deterioration in the quality of social bonds and, more recently, the ecological crisis are all issues that have generated a radical politics that sees a solution to such problems as impossible within existing social, economic and political frameworks. Instead, a total transformation of society is seen as the answer. What I am calling the radical political imaginary here is a general cognitive and affective structure that, rather than being an empirically minute description of the various features of a politics of

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radical change, portrays and arranges such features according to the strategic and emotional investment in them. For example, the radical political imaginary always contains images of the perceived enemies: the state, the capitalists, 'America', the media and so on. The importance that one or the other of those enemies acquires within a particular radical imaginary does not necessarily have to do with any empirical evaluation of the importance of such an enemy; that is, whether the state is imagined as all-powerful and all-intrusive 'substance', whether 'America' is imagined as omnipresent everywhere working at subverting everybody else's will for freedom, or whether the media is seen as a pervasive network capable of capturing and shaping all the minds-or 'brainwashing' them, as some less intellectually sophisticated radicals would have it-is more than a mere observation of facts. They derive their particular importance from a specific politico-affective conception of the sources of society's ills that a radical subjectivity has invested itself in struggling against. A particular radical imaginary is therefore the product of what Bourdieu would call a specific radical illusio: not just a conception of the world but an investment in it.8 The same goes for other imagined components of the radical imaginary such as the forces perceived as having an interest in bringing about change (the masses, the working class, the colonised, the poor, the multitude) or the forces imagined as capable of leading a radical uprising (the party, the intellectuals, neighbourhood organisations). And, of course, no radical imaginary is complete without fantasies of what a post-revolutionary society should be like: lots of freedom, lots of equality, lots of sex and so on. A radical political imaginary can be specific to an individual, although at least certain key features of it are more often than not collective and shared. In much the same way, the dimensions of life deemed important and requiring radical change can be a reflection of personal choice, but they can also reflect broader historical changes. A clear example of the latter is the way ecological questions have become more important features of the radical political imaginary than they were in the nineteenth century. Similarly, a new dimension was added to the radical political imaginary when the feminist declaration that 'the personal is political' caught radical people's imagination.

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Which components make up the structure of the radical political imaginary and how much importance is assigned to each of these components are always subject to change and depend on ongoing struggles within radical politics. The debates between Marxists and anarchists over the question of the state and the need for a revolutionary party reflected itself in a more general struggle over the place of radical political organisations in the imaginary conception of the unfolding of revolutionary change. Likewise, the debates between Marxist communists and the followers of what they dubbed as 'idealist' or 'utopian communists', such as Fourier and Saint-Simon, was a struggle over the relative importance that should be given in the radical political imaginary to the labour of detailing and living the communist fantasy before revolutionary change. Marxists were clearly moved by an alter-capitalist communist fantasy. But their politics was guided by a political imaginary that highlighted the anti-capitalist analytic moment over the imaginative labour of conceiving what a communist society would entail. The analysis of the present socioeconomic tendencies and contradictions in the development of capitalism, and the political organisation of the proletarian forces of anti-capitalism, were always supposed to take precedence. This was how Marxists famously imagined themselves to be engaging in the hard work of fusing both social science and revolution. More generally, and in relation to the above, we can say that the structure of the radical political imaginary at any given time is characterised by a certain balance between 'anti' politics and 'alter' politics: oppositional politics aimed at resisting and defeating the existing order, and a politics aimed at providing an alternative to the political order. It is here that one can see the different affinity that critical sociological and historical thought and critical anthropological thought have with those two dimensions of the radical political imaginary. Critical sociological and historical thought has often been mobilised in conjunction with the oppositional 'anti' dimension of politics, since the latter is always concerned with the social and historical conditions of radical practice. It is critical sociology that allows oppositional politics to move outside itself and outside an existing social order, both to understand it and to find within it the spaces where it can maximise its oppositional impact to it. The 'alter'

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dimension of politics, on the other hand, finds a more useful resource in an anthropological critical thought that aims, as we have argued above, at taking us outside ourselves precisely to continuously remind us of the actual possibilities of being other to ourselves. This alter/anti opposition is not absolute, of course, and never an either/or question, but it is clear that at various phases during the historical transformation of the radical imaginary, one side has had the upper hand over the other. It is equally clear that the rise and dominance of Marxism at the expense of the 'anarchists' and the 'utopian socialists', and its hegemony over the radical political imaginary from the late nineteenth century until the late twentieth century has reflected and reinforced a sociohistorical situation where it is the 'anti' side of the equation that has dominated radical politics. 'What are the social and historical conditions of possibility of change?', 'What form does social subjugation take within a given social formation?', 'How to critique relations of power and domination?' and 'What are the social forces capable of producing change?' are all so many questions that emanate from the profound dominance-and also the necessity, mind you-of an 'anti' politics. It is these imperatives that explain the dominance of critical sociological thought within the radical political imaginary, since the latter is equipped precisely to answer such crucial questions. To most observers of radical politics, however, it is very clear that today we are increasingly moving into an era where the radical imaginary is starting to be as dominated by the problematic of the 'alternative' as it is with the problematic of the opposition-as 'alter' as it is 'anti'. Whether such a move proves to be a fertile ground for a more effective politics of change remains to be seen. What is nonetheless certain is that this has given radical politics a qualitative difference easily perceived in movements such as the 'indignados' of Spain, the Egyptian and Tunisian popular uprisings, and the Occupy collectives around the globe. Whether in the importance of occupying and dwelling in central spaces (in contrast to the 'passing' demonstrations of the past), or in the plural internal politics that govern those spaces, or in the emphasis on peaceful confrontation with the authorities, what we see is higher awareness of an intimate relation between means and ends where the first is not as easily sacrificed on the altar of the second as it has been in the radical Critical ·

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politics of the past. It is this emphasis on laying the grounds for alternative realities that has opened the way for a relative rise in the importance of critical anthropological thought-not, let it be clear, as an alternative, but as a complement to critical sociological thought's search for efficient oppositional politics.

The new radical imaginary From the rise of the Soviet Union to the Iranian revolution via the various anti-colonial revolutions of the twentieth century, a history of 'anti-capitalist' and 'anti-colonial' revolutions ending up producing societies that had very little in the way of the revolutionary and adopting too many features in common with the societies they toppled has discredited a politics that is dominated by an 'anti' ethos without worrying about what comes after the oppositional moment. Furthermore, since the gradual decline in 'working-class' centred politics, it is more an anarchist 1968 spirit rather than the search for an avant-garde political party that dominates the radical imaginary of the new social movements that became the main driving force of radical politics in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Michel Foucault gave what is perhaps the most important theoretical understanding of this politics in his theorisation of the specific forms taken by that resistance to the rise of pastoral governmentality and its historical offshoots. 9 He showed the necessarily fragmentary nature of such an oppositional politics, which no longer aimed at either the appropriation or the destruction of the power of the sovereign but at an endless destabilisation by 'life' of the very mechanisms of power that are constantly aiming at capturing, controlling and bio-politicising it. It is a similar understanding of power and resistance that gave rise to the Deleuzian notion of the 'multitude', further developed by Negri and Hardt. As importantly, the ecological crisis has increasingly necessitated a 'green' political imaginary that rose above the left-right political spectrum. For example, in industrial politics, rather than simply restricting itself to a politics of taking sides with labour against capital, radical green politics required an anti-economic growth stand that could not easily accommodate either labour's or capital's interests. It required a shift towards a politics that put in question the general direction of industrial production itself and,

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even more fundamentally, the way human beings' relation to nature has been imagined and lived. Likewise anti-globalisation activism, and despite the 'anti' that is part of its very definition, it has increasingly defined itself less in terms of its opposition to globalisation and more in relation to its search for an 'alter-globalisation'. One can say that the radical imaginary today is the product of both a social imperative-emerging social spaces that lie outside the existing order of governmentality and intelligibility and requiring an imaginative politics that can think them in their difference-and a political imperative: existing struggles that have generated an endless stalemate are increasingly requiring a new politics that comes from outside the existing space of conventional political possibilities. The social imperative points to new realities that have begun to emerge as the capitalist modern assemblage that has been expanding, governing and colonising the planet for the last centuries has started to shrink. The social spaces that we have come to occupy and dwell in are losing their apparent homogeneity and internal coherence and generating new alter-modern spaces lying outside existing governmentalities, outside the dominant instrumental/ rational logics of modernity and even outside existing symbolic systems altogether. Such spaces can sometimes be reintegrated into capitalist rationality, such as the rise in New Age belief systems and alternative medicine, but they can also be spaces that are much more difficult to integrate in any of the contemporary governmental assemblages of modernity. To be clear, even when they are captured by the capitalist process in the forms of what Beth Povinelli has aptly called 'Popontology', 10 these forms of spirituality and irrationalism remain cracks in the logic of modernity. Importantly, however, Popontology is not the only mode of conceiving life in such alternative spaces. Deep ecology has certainly generated pop-animism, but that is not all it has generated. In my own work, particularly in relation to the impasse in which the Western governance of immigrants from Islamic backgrounds has found itself, I have argued that this encounter is generating 'ungovernable' spaces that cannot be easily understood or governed either by the logic of multiculturalism or the logic of assimilation. It invites us to think outside the existing governmental parameters of conceiving of intercultural relations. I I

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The ungovernable, by its very nature, is that which becomes immune to the possibility of capture by any existing political assemblage and as such requires a radical rethinking of the very nature of politics itself within it. The ungovernable exhausts the conventional political imagination that is part of a particular form of governmentality and as such demands a radical politics that comes from nowhere, as it were. It can make the search for an alter-politics not only a mere possibility but also an imperative. Such imperatives are most commonly emerging in relation to pressing global issues that demand solutions, such as global warming, but they can also emerge in the face of particular situations such as the endless and murderous political dead-ends generated around and by the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. 12 Such self-perpetuating antagonisms have punctured the 'dialectical' imaginary of social struggles that always saw contradictions as a mere step on the way to a 'higher' resolution. Instead, as we saw in chapter 2, there is a routinisation of notions of crisis where conflict and war situations are increasingly perceived as states in their own right rather than as transitional towards something else. As such they necessitate an alter-politics that comes from a space outside the existing unproductive and endless oppositions. It is all of the above that has created the opening whereby the critical anthropological tradition I have defined above and the critical anthropological ethos associated with it are of renewed significance to radical politics. One can see, for example, in the domain of the politics of anti-globalisation, how close Seattle's battle cry-'another world is possible'-is to the general driving idea behind critical anthropological thought: 'we can be radically other to what we are'. One can also note how anthropological works, capturing the plurality of the ways in which such relations are lived, have become important resources for a radical ecology in search for alternative forms of human-nature relations. And perhaps, in the most recent and clearest example of all, the influence that David Graeber's anthropology of Madagascar had on the form of political organisation that has marked the Occupy Wall Street movement has been widely reported in the international media. 13 In light of all of the above, it is not surprising to see radical social theoretical literature increasingly opening itself to integrate

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critical anthropological thought. This began in the work of Deleuze and Guattari and has continued in the more recent work of Philippe pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, La Sorcellerie Capitaliste: Pratiques de Désenvoûtement, 14 where the rapprochement to critical anthropology is present not only in the thematic of sorcery and spells that propels the work and which speaks to Seattle's political catch cry 'another world is possible' but also in the way the work is dominated by a search for ways of opening up a space for radical otherness in our midst. It is in the configuration of the above encounters that one can understand Hardt and Negri's struggle to conceptualise what they call the struggle for an 'alter-modernity'. As they explain-and very much in line with what has been argued above-the term aims 'to indicate a decisive break with modernity and the power relation that defines it since altermodernity in our conception emerges from the traditions of anti-modernity but it also departs from modernity since it extends beyond opposition and resistance'. 15 What has been argued above should help to explain the attraction of the critical anthropological tradition to alter-modern theorising such as that of Negri and Hardt. But, if radical thought is opening itself up to critical anthropology, it is also true that the encounter is most pronounced where critical anthropology is itself reciprocating the move. The fact that Negri and Hardt's work linked with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's work and not any other critical anthropology has as much to do with the latter's work as with the general nature of the encounter. Viveiros de Castro's work has increasingly aimed at articulating itself to radical thinking; his critical anthropological thought comes with a clear sense of its place within the radical political imaginary, and as such it is both critical and radical. It explicitly aims both to take us outside ourselves to see how we can be radically other to ourselves, and to articulate itself to a radical alter-politics that always aims at finding a possibility of a different life outside a given order of things.

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The radical and critical anthropology of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Viveiros de Castro's radical/political dispositions are very clear in his writings. His thought continuously and, I would say, increasingly, has a conception of itself as part of a critical anthropology associated with a radical political rejection of the existing order of things: 'We live in an era in which prurient Puritanism, guilty hypocrisy and intellectual impotence converge to foreclose whatever possibility of seriously imagining (rather than merely fantasising) an alternative to our own cultural inferno, or even of recognising it as such.' 16 He places his work in the lineage of an anthropology that notably includes Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Clastres, Roy Wagner, Marshall Sahlins and Marilyn Strathern. He is also in continuous dialogue with the work of Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. 17 Most importantly perhaps, his work is particularly grounded in the work of Deleuze and the Deleuzian tradition. Deleuze is important to mark Viveiros de Castro's disposition to radical political thought not just in terms of philosophical affinity but also as a gesture of reciprocity in the face of what he sees as 'the embarrassed and embarrassing silence with which anthropology as a discipline received the two books of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in which take place one of the most exciting and disconcerting dialogues that philosophy and anthropology have ever had'. 18 This disposition towards a political investment in an anthropology of radical alterity is already present in the work From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society,19 based on his doctoral ethnography among the Arawete, a Tupi-Guarani people of eastern Amazonia. Central to that work is a calling to question of the very notion of society, normalised in our culture, as a network of social relations that attempt to remain 'identical with themselves' and that consequently aim to 'introject and domesticate' difference, as well as contrasting this societal ideal-type to Arawete society as a society that is continuously open to, its own otherness and 'with a dynamic that dissolves those spatial metaphors so common in sociological discourse: interior, exterior, center, margins, boundaries, limen, etc'. 20 As I have argued above, critical anthropology works not only through an exploration of radical alterity. This radical alterity has to

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be other enough such that it cannot be reduced to sameness, yet same enough so as to be an otherness that can still speak to us and haunt us. It is this haunting that Viveiros de Castro tries to produce, not just with the above conception of an other society but also a conception of personhood that is radically other to our own but that nonetheless seems to speak to us, even if it does so with a Deleuzian language: 'The Tupi-Guarani construct the person through a process of continuous topological deformation, where ego and enemy, living and dead, man and god, are interwoven, before or beyond representation, metaphorical substitution, and complementary opposition. We move into a horizon where Becoming is prior to Being and unsubmissive to it.' 21 Critical anthropology, for Viveiros de Castro, does its work by being positioned in that space where otherness is both radically other yet has something to say to us. Two metaphors are deployed to explain the work anthropologists have to do in this domain. The first is that of 'translation'. Although a common enough trope, the concept is given a radical edge by grounding it in Michael Herzfeld's point that 'the anthropologist and the native are engaged in directly comparable intellectual operations', 22 and in Talal Asad's view that, in anthropology, comparison is in the service of translation and not the opposite. The conception of translation we end up with is conveyed through a paraphrasing of Walter Benjamin's idea that to translate is to betray the destination language, not the source language. Consequently, for Viveiros de Castro, anthropological translation 'allows the alien concepts to deform and subvert the translator's conceptual toolbox so that the intention of the original language can be expressed within the new one'. 23 We end up both more and less than what we originally were: to be precise, less the same as what we were and more other than what we were. In this sense, anthropology is a practice that never allows our thought to rest, capture reality and be same with itself. As he provocatively puts it in a recent book, Metaphysiques Cannibales, anthropology is 'the theory-practice of the permanent decolonisation ofthought'. 24 A similar idea is conveyed by the second metaphor, which is that of the non-reflexive mirror. In his introduction to Clastres' Archaeology of Violence, Viveiros de Castro explains:

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Anthropology incarnates, for Clastres, a consideration of the human phenomenon as defined by a maximum intensive alterity, an internal dispersion whose limits are a priori indeterminable. '[W]hen the mirror does not reflect our own likeness, it does not prove there is nothing to perceive,' writes [Clastres] in 'Copernicus and the savages.' This characteristically curt remark finds an echo in a recent formulation of Patrice Maniglier concerning what this philosopher calls the 'highest promise' of anthropology, namely that of 'Returning us an image (of ourselves) in which we do not recognise ourselves'. The purpose of such a consideration, the spirit of this promise, is not then to reduce alterity, for this is the stuff humanity is made of, but, on the contrary to multiply its images. Alterity and multiplicity both define how anthropology constitutes itself. 'Primitive society' is the name that Clastres gave to that object, and to his own encounter with multiplicity. 25 And in a typical turn that highlights his mode of mixing the critical and the radical, Viveiros de Castro continues: And if the State has always existed, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in their insightful commentary of Clastres, then primitive society also will always exist: as the immanent exterior of the State, as the force of anti-production permanently haunting the productive forces, and as a multiplicity that is non-interiorisable by the planetary mega-machines. 'Primitive Society,' in short, is one of the conceptual embodiments of the thesis that another world is possible: that there is life beyond capitalism, as there is society outside of the State. There always was, and-for this we struggle-there always will be. 26 It is this struggle for a society outside the state, outside capitalism and outside modernity that is at stake in his translation/mirroring of Amerindian perspectivism and the conception of 'multinaturalism' he has come to share with Bruno Latour. 27

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Multinaturalism The notion of multinaturalism emerges in Viveiros de Castro's work as a logical complement to his conception of Amerindian perspectivism. The latter, he argues, challenges not only the varieties of perspectives that we have 'on reality' but also the very idea that we have of perspective as being a subjective/cultural perspective on a natural reality. This idea of a perspective as a multiplicity of cultural ways of apprehending a unified 'nature' is subverted by Amerindian perspectivism, which posits a unified subjectivity producing a multiplicity of natures or realities. Before seeking, as a cliched anthropological formula would have it, to understand reality 'from the natives' point of view', we need to work out first what the natives think 'a point of view' is; we need their point of view on the point of view as it were. Building on a long tradition of Amerindian ethnographies and anthropologies in which Levi-Strauss has pride of place, Viveiros de Castro presents us with a world where the animals and humans share the same soul: a kind of Kantian pre-social and pre-perspectival subjectivity. Consequently, in such a world, while humans and animals have different perspectives, this difference is not primarily a difference between the soul/mind of the animals and the humans, since this is what they share. Rather, the different points of view emerge from the ways in which different bodies constitute different modes of relating to, inhabiting and being enmeshed in their environments. If, generally speaking, shamanism involves the capacity to move between the perspectives of humans, animals and things, Amerindian shamanism highlights the fact that such a move is not a move between different subjective interests but is 'defined as the ability shown by certain individuals to cross the corporeal barriers between the species'. 28 Consequently, in Amerindian perspectivism, he tells us, 'a perspective is not a representation, for representations are properties of the spirit, while the point of view is in the body'. 29 As such, perspectivism should not be confused with relativism: 'Far from the subjectivist essentialism of relativism, perspectivism is a corporeal mannerism.' 30 Here, the body is not just flesh or socialised body but, Viveiros de Castro stresses, a 'body with its affection'. Affection here is used in Spinoza's sense: the body's 'capacities to affect and be affected by Critical Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today

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other bodies'. 31 As Katherine Swancutt has explained: 'Bodily affects, in Viveiros de Castro's sense of the term, are not just physical characteristics, such as comportment, mannerisms or tastes consistently ascribed to a given subject, they are also "forces", "energies" or "talents" which are taught, acquired and refined over time.' 32 In being the site of a multiplicity of forces and energies, each body constitutes a multiplicity of bodily modes of engagement with its surroundings. It is this multiplicity of bodily engagements that in tum produces a multiplicity of realities or 'natures' to which the notion of multinaturalism alludes. The term stands in opposition to the discourses of multiculturalism that presuppose one nature or 'objective reality' and a multiplicity of cultures/subjectivities. Highlighting this distinction is important, yet I prefer to speak of multiple realities rather than 'multinaturalism' and its allusion to multiple natures. This is because the very idea of 'nature' emerges out of the very specific reality that requires of us humans to delineate a world of 'nature'. It is therefore preferable not to reintroduce it in a multiplicity of other realities where it has no referent. After all, the idea that there are realities where the nature/culture divide is unthinkable, and that it is a challenge for us to experience and conceptualise this unthinkable-given that our conceptual world is straitjacketed with binary oppositions-is precisely at the core of both Viveiros de Castro and Latour's argument.

The critical and political ramifications of multiple realities Clearly, the multinatural argument is a critical anthropological argument. That is, it is more than an argument that 'the Amazonians have their reality and we have our reality'. It does mean the latter, but it also means that their reality speaks to ours. It haunts us with the possibility that we, as well, live in multiple realities. Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism highlights the Amazonian's sense of a multiplicity of natures structured around the multiplicity of bodies and bodily perspectives: the body of the human, the body of the]aguar and so on. In speaking to us, however, it also-and it is crucial not to think in either/or terms here-highlights the multiplicities that are within each and every body. If a reality is an encounter between the affective, postural, libidinal and physical potentiality of the body and the potentiality of the Real, to think of ourselves as inhabiting a

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multiplicity of realities is to recognise the multiplicity of the potentialities of the human body. That is, it is also to recognise the multiplicity of modes in which the body is enmeshed in its environment. Perhaps more so than the dominance of binary oppositions a la 'nature/culture' and instrumental reason, Western modernity's greatest 'achievement' has been to make us mono-realists, minimising our awareness of the multiplicity of realities in which we exist. But minimising is not obliterating, and it can easily be argued that other such realities continuously make an incursion into our modern world, giving us a hint-and sometimes more than a hint-of their presence. It is not surprising therefore that minor strands of Western thought have always been in touch with such multiplicity. Peter Otto has shown in a recent book, Multiplying Worlds, that a version of this multiple conception of the real was familiar to the Romantic imagination and was later influential in forming the thought of both Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. In Metaphysiques Cannibales, Viveiros de Castro argues that Amerindian perspectivism and the notion of multinaturalism speak to certain contemporary 'philosophical programmes such as those that are developing around "possible worlds" theory', but also around 'speculative materialism' and 'transcendental realism', all of which are seen as aiming to direct thought away from 'the infernal dichotomies of modernity'. 33 Bruno Latour has also linked it to William James's notion of 'pluriverse'. 31 Latour himself has been inspired by the works of the French philosophers Etienne Souriau and Gilbert Simondon on the plurality of 'modes of existence', 35 a concept that has become central for him as he refines his conception of multinaturalism. A new edition of Etienne Souriau's book Les Differents Modes d'Existence has been prefaced by both Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Although most works on multinaturalism have dwelled on its supposed 'post-humanism' and the ontological questions this raises, it seems to me that the notion of humans as living continuously and concurrently in a multiplicity of realities provides an important meta-ethnographic consolidation of the critical anthropological ethos of'we can be other than what we are'. What does it mean to speak of the 'existence of otherness'-of other cultural forms, of other modes of being-within and among us? This is perhaps one of the most productive problematics that anthropology has generated

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through the works of its many critical practitioners. Does this otherness exist in a virtual or potential state within social reality? And do anthropologists, like the shamans they study, bring that virtuality into being, allowing it to disrupt and haunt our dominant modes of dwelling in the world? Or does this otherness exist in the form of a psychological disposition or a mental structure that can be linked to the presumed 'unity of human kind'? The multinaturalism and radical perspectivism of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Bruno Latour is therefore hardly the first anthropological work to think through this question. Its originality is that it opens up a way of thinking differently about this otherness that is within us. Rather than seeing it, as it has often been seen, as based on the unity of the human mind, it invites grounding it in the multiplicity of the human body's enmeshment in the Real: the fact that at least some of this multiplicity is everywhere the same and the fact that it produces everywhere a similar array of realities. This allows us to think of the otherness-within-us as articulated not to virtual but to actual realities, albeit minor ones-realities that are continuously present, even if they are overshadowed by more dominant ones. This is how it goes: if all humans share a multiplicity of realities, and if the sociohistorical path of our own society and culture has made us dwell in one reality more so than in others, this does not mean that we have simply stopped dwelling in those other realities, in which people from other cultures are more clearly dwelling. As such, we are continuously shadowed by realities in which we are dwelling, of which we are not fully aware, but which often induce in us a vague feeling, or a sense of their presence. It is here that critical anthropology transforms into a critical politics. 'Being other than what we are' is not just conceptually possible. It is materially possible since one is already dwelling in that very otherness. Such a conception of multiple modes of being, dwelling and thinking has one of its earliest theorisations in Levy-Bruhl's-differentiation between logical and mystical mentalities. Frederic Keck recently explained that, for Levy-Bruh), 'The difference between "primitive mentality" and "civilised mentality" does not separate two historically and geographically separated modes of thinking as an evolutionist philosophy of history would have it-one whose

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presuppositions Levy-Bruhl has always criticised-but two logical principles that direct the human mind in every society and in every individual.' 35 As Levy-BruhI himself points out, 'There is a mystical mentality that is more easily demarcated and therefore more easily observable among the "primitives" than in our societies, but it is present in every human mind.' 37 For Levy-Bruhl therefore, which mentality comes to dominate is not at all linked to a belief that the primitives are inherently more mystical than us, as some crude interpreters still like to read him. Rather, especially as his later writing becomes less about 'mentalities' and more about experience, the difference becomes about which experience, or, as we have put it, which modality of enmeshment in the Real, comes to dominate over others. That is, if we are to make him speak in the language of multiple realities, the reality that mystical mentality is part of is not unique to the primitives. Likewise, logical mentality is not unique to us. We and Levy-Bruhl's primitives are bodily enmeshed in a multiplicity ofrealities and among them are both the realities alluded to above. Which reality comes to dominate can perhaps later be analysed sociologically and historically in the form of asking analytical questions, such as: what are the historical conditions which lead us to over-dwell in a reality that highlights instrumental reason more than other forms of thinking? The crucial point here is that being enmeshed and dwelling in one reality that becomes dominant never stops us from being enmeshed and dwelling in a multiplicity of other realities, even if we lose a sense of these. There are many important political ramifications to thinking of our own modern spaces in terms of multiple realities. The most immediate one stems directly from the opposition proposed by both Viveiros de Castro and Latour between multiculturalism and multinaturalism. Here, the opposition is an invitation not to think of 'cultural difference' in the facile 'cosmopolitan' way multiculturalism-especially in its American variant-invites us to think of culture and cultural difference; that is, as a difference that can be easily understood, reconciled or transcended with a little bit of respect and tolerance here, and a little bit of valorisation and understanding of the other there. Multinaturalism here invites us to give some cultural differences a stronger ontological consistency,

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highlighting the fact that there are certain differences that simply cannot be encompassed and captured by one's own symbolic, cultural or political apparatus. Some differences are the product of different realities rather than different subjective takes on reality. As such, they are either destined to enter into conflict or coexist without either side coming to understand the other. The latter possibility is often precluded in cosmopolitan thought, as Latour has argued in his critique of Ulrich Beck's cosmopolitanism. The latter assumes that the 'cosmo' part of the cosmopolitan is not an object of politics and as such forecloses the very possibility of a cosmo-politics. 38 In this sense there is definitely an element of truth in Matei Candea's argument that: Ontologies usually come in when anthropologists feel that culture ... does not take difference seriously. The need for the word ontology comes from the suspicion that cultural difference is not different enough, or alternatively that cultural difference has been reduced by cultural critics to a mere effect of political instrumentality. By contrast, ontology is an attempt to take others and their real difference seriously. 39 More importantly perhaps, a conception of multiple realities opens up the possibility to perceive domination not only as the product of a struggle within a reality but also the struggle between realities. This idea that dominant groups do not just dominate an already given reality but also impose their reality is already present in social theory, most explicitly in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Although Bourdieu's concerns are far more grounded in what we have called critical sociology rather than a critical anthropology, it is nonetheless interesting to note that he, more so than any other theorist, gets very close to a multi-realist conception of the world. For Bourdieu derives from Spinoza, but also particularly from an adaptation of Husserl's notion of Umwelt, a conception of the bodily habitus as always being part and parcel of a social reality to which it helps give rise. 40 In this regard, Viveiros de Castro and Latour sometimes exaggerate the extent to which the notion of perspective as non-subjectivist bodily enmeshment is absent from Western thought. Indeed, behind

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Viveiros de Castro's multinaturalism lies a conception of the body that is strikingly similar to that of Bourdieu. At one point, in explaining the conception of the body that he is deploying, he writes: 'What we are calling her "body", therefore, is not a distinctive physiology or a characteristic anatomy; it is an ensemble of manners and modes of being that constitute a habitus, an ethos, an ethogram.' 41 It is true that Bourdieu's different worlds are produced by different competing interests and orientations within an always modern conception of reality. As such, they are far from encompassing the possibility of radical alterity in the way it is present in Viveiros de Castro's work. Nonetheless, Bourdieu's conception of power and domination-particularly his theory of symbolic violence-can complement multinaturalism by providing it with a politics conceived as a struggle between different realities. Indeed, symbolic violence is primarily a form of ontological violence; certain realities come to dominate over others, so much so that they become simply 'reality'. They foreclose their history as a process of domination and equally foreclose the very possibility of thinking reality as multiple. From an analytic- political perspective, and in relation to the alter/anti components of the radical imaginary referred to earlier, such a conception of realist multiplicity undermines the core Marxist-inspired political division between materialism and idealism that dominated radical politics for so long. The latter division presupposes the existence of one reality: either your thought speaks to 'reality' and to the forces that emanate from it and you are a materialist, or it doesn't and you are a utopian and an idealist. With a conception of multiple realities emerges the possibility that thought, even when not speaking to the dominant reality. is still speaking to a reality, even if a minor one. Old-fashioned materialism becomes complicit in reproducing the belief in the existence of one and only one reality. This has an important ramification for critical anthropology. From a multiple realities perspective, when critical anthropology delineates the possibility of us being 'other than what we are', it is always materialist. It is always speaking to a world, a reality, that is not necessarily dominating our consciousness, but which anthropology-in speaking to it-helps bring to the fore and haunt us with its very possibility.

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In his most recent work, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber does precisely this in relation to 'communism'. Communism is often conceived of, even by communists, as a totally unrealistic utopia that can begin to realise itself only in the very distant future, or that existed in the remote past. In opposition to this 'epic communism', Graeber shows how an important dimension of our sociality rests on a really existing everyday form of communism that forms an important dimension of our collective practical reality.42

Conclusion: towards an anthropology of new 'new worlds' Through its foregrounding of the 'we can be other than what we are' trope, this chapter has explicitly argued that any anthropology, whether concerned with the modern world or with non-modern tribal formations, needs to allow for the flourishing of the ethos of critical primitivist anthropology if it is to remain critical. Implicit in this argument is a rapprochement between modern and nonmodern anthropology centred around this critical ethos. In this sense, the work of Viveiros de Castro and the multiple realities approach in general is exemplary. By inviting us to consider the worlds analysed by primitivist anthropology as present in our very own modern world in the form of 'minor realities', this approach does more than create a rapprochement between these two traditions-it moves towards dissolving them. And it does so precisely by a re-centring of the primitivist/alterist ethos as a critical foundation for the discipline. This is by no means an easy feat, for there are certain dominant trends within anthropology that conspire against such an ethos. Chief among those trends is a view of the discipline as grounded in a kind of anthropological original sin, this being, of course, anthropology's relation to colonialism. Within this quasi-Catholic construct, the future of anthropology simply depends on the way it seeks forgiveness for this original sin and its variants: primitivism, exoticism and so on. In the name of anti-colonialism, what became known as the 'reflexive turn' has brought with it an anti-primitivism that has in many places banished the founding notion of 'radical alterity' from the imagination of many undergraduate anthropology students. It is often forgotten that the post-colonial critique of anthropology was fundamentally, and legitimately, a sociological/political critique. That is, it questioned such

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things as whether 'indigenous holistic bounded cultures' existed given their transformation by and continual entanglement with the structures of colonial domination, or whether indigenous cultural forms were useful variables in accounting for indigenous cultures, and to what extent. 43 Such a critique has left aside the question of whether indigenous cultures were useful to think, as it were, for all of us indigenous and non-indigenous people. I personally cannot count the number of 'introduction to anthropology' texts in books, or given to students on university open days, where the story line begins precisely with some kind of gentle repudiation of primitivist anthropology: 'This is how anthropology started but now anthropologists study all kinds of things,' declares the anthropologist-cum-PR specialist to prospective students with a sense of relief, hoping this proves music to their ears. Within this disciplinary configuration a divide has been created between primitivist anthropology and the anthropology 'that 'studies all kinds of things'. It is in this process that the distinctive critical side of the discipline has ended up being minoritised from within. While there are still many anthropologists working on nonmodern cultural forms within relatively remote tribal cultural formations, only a minority are interested in seeing in their findings something that speaks to the societies and the modernities they come from. On the other hand, the number of anthropologists working on modern 'aJI kinds of things' is rapidly increasing, but not many see a critical continuity between their work and the early anthropological tradition. They mainly see the relation as one of method, ethnography and a general interest in 'culture'. Just to be clear, it is certainly not being suggested here that anthropologists who are attracted to articulating their work to the radical political imaginary should necessarily go back and find a primitive tribe somewhere in the galaxy to generate radically alternative cultural food for the radical imagination. It is being suggested that the ethos of primitivist anthropology is necessary wherever one is doing ethnography if one is to produce this kind of critical anthropology. The critical anthropologist is someone who is always on the lookout for minor and invisible spaces or realities that are lurking in the world around us. And, as this chapter has suggested, these realities are increasingly showing up in the cracks of Western modernity

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and are the fertile ground on which a critical anthropological ethos can deploy itself. One can best describe this ethos as a search for an encounter with spaces where we are faced with what Husserl calls 'the accessibility of the inaccessible'-spaces that give enough of themselves to tell us that they exist but are nonetheless impervious to easy capture and to being assimilated to our dominant realities. To further develop this, let us go back to the original encounter with primitive tribes in the history of anthropology. Capitalist modernity takes us to the new world and makes accessible obscure and inaccessible realities. Anthropology becomes the willingness to move into this accessible and yet inaccessible domain: accessible in the sense that one can perceive it and move into it physically; inaccessible in the sense of it being symbolically inaccessible, opaque, and one does not know what one will find there. In this sense, as many have noted, radical alterity can only be found to begin disappearing as radical alterity. This, however, does not mean that it does not offer us a glimpse of its radical alterity if we persist in wanting to know it. If I am an anthropologist working on a racist social formation, I should take it for granted that part of my work is to elucidate the working of racist relations of power, their history and the various ways they lodge themselves in all kinds of subtle and not so subtle ways within a given culture. But, if I am to be a critical anthropologist in the sense defined above, I must also think outside such racist relations to see what exists outside them as a radically other form of sociality that might initially exist only in symptomatic form. I have to train my ethnographic gaze to see certain social forms that hint metonymically at the existence of minor, less obvious realities in which people are equally enmeshed, without fully giving a cultural expression to this enmeshment. Likewise, if I am an anthropologist of Israeli colonialism in Palestine, it remains important to look sociologically at the various modes in which colonial subjugation has exercised itself and the subtle ways Israeli culture has convinced itself that it is not being colonial at the very moment so many aspects of its relation to Palestinians speak of colonial domination. But if 1 am to be a critical anthropologist in the sense defined above, I might use Clastres' 'primitive society' and a society outside and against the state to direct my ethnographic gaze towards other realities, which might

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contain the possibility of forms of sociality between Palestinians and Israelis that are not encompassed by and contained in the state form and its reality, and that the proponents of 'the 'Jewish State' and the •pa)estinian State' continuously reinforce as the only 'realist' solution to the conflict. It is this pursuit of those spaces of an encounter where inaccessible forms of life are nonetheless accessible that marks the critical anthropology I am referring to here. Sniffing the presence of such inaccessible spaces is part and parcel of this critical anthropological labour no matter where one is doing ethnography. Radical alterity is present everywhere. There is always an outside a system of intelligibility, of governmentality, of domestication, of instrumental reason and so on. There is also always an excess to how one defines a social relation: it is always more than a 'relation of power', a 'relation of domination', a 'relation of exploitation', an 'ethnic or a racial relation' and so on. In an interview with George Steinmetz recorded in 2007 but published at the end of 2010 in Actes de la Recherches en Sciences Socia/es, Georges Balandier has provided a good concept to think with in relation to what I am trying to define here. He talks about the need for anthropology to move to study what he calls les nouveaux nouveaux mondes-'the new new worlds': I am certain that in a period of long-term instability, a historical situation such as that of the present time, anthropology will be increasingly necessary. We have entered a period of large immaterial configurations, of hyper-systems open to all and to everything. It is no longer open society, it is open systems, something of the sort, and in the plural as well. We cannot accept being identified as an expert who is studying one's own area of competence, one's own problem. We must study these large configurations, otherwise we cannot understand anything at all. How does one characterise the internet? It is not easy, despite its globalisation as a shared practice. I have proposed a book to PUF, Le grand dérangement [20051, I suggest calling these new territories 'the new new worlds'. The geographic worlds have been recently mapped. We

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know them, except for a few territories that are hard to access. But we don't know, we don't realise that we are creating ourselves 'worlds' that are not geographic worlds, we are creating universes of existence that are techno-worlds. I say that anthropology here regains its full legitimacy for we are as disoriented in these new worlds as we could have been when arriving in New Guinea, as Malinowski did. 11 Balandier had in mind worlds such as web-based social spaces, Facebook, etc. That moving into analysing such 'new new worlds' is important both analytically and politically was well exemplified by the importance of Facebook during the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. But it seems to me that behind Balandier's idea is not a desire to essentialise such 'techno-worlds' as new worlds. That they are so in Egypt does not necessarily mean that they are so in China, for example, or that they will remain so forever. Rather, I think that the power of Balandier's view is more general: the idea that the New World once was and we're finished with it is refreshingly replaced with the idea that, for anthropology, each era and each world has its own New Worlds that ought to be discovered and analysed. And it is precisely because of this that, as this chapter has argued, the anthropologies that deal with the modern world can lose their anthropological critical edge only if they are to abandon the ethos of primitivist anthropology and distance themselves from it.

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4

The Arab social sciences and the two critical traditions

What does being a critical social scientist mean in the Arab world today? Or, to ask the question differently, how can social scientists think critically of Arab societies following or amidst the upheavals of the last few years? Such questions do not demand prescriptive answers, nor are such prescriptive answers possible. Rather, they work to open up a space of reflection that allows various social scientists to be critical in their own way in relation to the particular situations they are analysing. And it is to this space of reflection that I want to contribute here. 1 Perhaps it is useful to begin by making clear that 'critical' is not the same as 'radical'. Critical is an intellectual quality of thought whereas radical is a political quality. There can be-and indeed historically there is-a certain affinity between critical thought and radical politics. Nonetheless the two should not be confused. It is important to stress this in the highly politicised environment created by the Arab upheavals where it is not only one side of politics or another but also 'politics in general' that work like a huge allconsuming, colonising machine. To be a critical social scientist does not mean being non-political, but it involves the capacity to

articulate a specifically academic politics; that is, the ability to carve a space that is free from what the French call 'la politique politicienne', the politics of those for whom politics is a vocation. The politics of social scientists is not 'against' this politics, but it refuses to be enslaved by it, refusing for instance to obey the narrow friend/ enemy logic of such a politics. A critical social scientist has to ask herself: in what way is social science making a difference, offering something new, something that makes politicians hesitate and feel uncomfortable in the kind of truths they uphold, be they left or right, be they professional politicians or activists. This is where critical and radical can part. For a radical social scientist can easily provide tools and justifications for a radical politics without making such politics hesitate and reflect on itself. In what follows, I want to explore two intellectual traditions that have provided important tools for thinking such a critical social scientific stand. I will call them sociological and anthropological. But this is not so much to differentiate between disciplines as between critical analytical moments. Indeed, both the thinkers I associate respectively with the anthropological and the sociological moment, Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu, are each known as both a sociologist and an anthropologist. Bourdieu's sociology is today the cornerstone of an important critical tradition that takes relations of power and domination in society as its object. For Bourdieu, modes of domination always aim to reach a state of what he calls 'symbolic violence'. This is the point where those who are in power manage to make their interest appear as if it is everybody's interest. This is when this interest becomes the doxa; that is, when it becomes what is taken for granted and goes without saying-akin to what Gramsci called 'common sense'-such as when people state that it is natural to be competitive and seek one's own advantage, or that it is natural for men to dominate women, or that heterosexuality is natural compared to homosexuality, or that 'Arabs like to be dominated by strong dictators'. Critical sociology comes to the scene aiming to show how what appears as 'natural' or as 'fatality' is borne from within a process of domination. This is what Bourdieu calls the 'de-naturalising' and 'de-fatalising' function of the social sciences.

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Because making their interest appear as 'natural' is part of the way the dominants dominate, a critical sociology that uncovers these processes is by its very nature on the side of the dominated. However, society is not made of one group of dominant people and a group of dominated ones. Among both those who are, in one specific relation, dominant and dominated, there are also dominant and dominated. There are dominant and dominated, ad infinitum, so to speak, and social scientists should be prepared to keep on uncovering processes of domination, ad infinitum. Unlike those who want to end domination in the name of one group or another and therefore suspend their critique of domination when it concerns the domination of their own group, the critical social scientist never suspends her critique of domination. In order to be able to be such an endless 'critical machine' it is crucial for social scientists to establish their autonomy not just from the politics of a particular dominant group but also their autonomy from politics in general, from the media, from the state and, of course, from various economic interests as well. This is why, for Bourdieu, such a critical sociology is itself dependent on a reflexive sociology of social scientists themselves as a social group, and their position within the power structures. Precisely to avoid homogenising the dominant social forces in society, Bourdieu slowly moved from a usage of the category 'dominant' to talk about the 'field of power' within particular societies. A field of power is a description but also an invitation to see those in power as divided according to how much, and also what kind, of capital they possess (economic, social, cultural, and so on), and accordingly engaging in varieties of struggles among themselves for the dominant position in the field of power. To see domination from this perspective is to avoid using easy and homogenising concepts as a substitute for empirical research-one cannot avoid noting that · neo-liberalism' is used in this fashion today, operating as a facile explanatory principle of so many phenomena. Bourdieu positions academics, and social scientists specifically, in the dominated space of the field of power; that is, by virtue of their possession of relatively high social and cultural capital, social scientists are part of the field of power of most societies. But the fact that they possess very little economic capital, and the fact that economic

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capital is a more valorised capital in the field of power, they end up being in a dominated position in this field. This, he argues, has meant that while social scientists can unreflexively produce knowledge that is complicit in the processes of social domination, critical social scientists can also unreflexively develop an empathy with dominated groups through a process of structural homology; that is, they transpose their dominated status in the field of power into sympathy with those who are dominated by the field of power. The problem, for Bourdieu, is not so much the sympathy but the belief among what he calls, after Weber, 'proletaroid intellectuals', that the sympathy is a criterion of social scientific professionalism. As he states on a number of occasions, good politics does not necessarily produce good social science. Indeed, in a paradoxical way, social scientists can optimise the political impact of their writings by seeking autonomy from the political field. Autonomy involves above all giving primacy to a social scientific interest that is distinct from political, mediatic or economic interests. Given the dependency of social sciences on funding from the state or from private sources, this involves a struggle to ensure that such funding respects social scientific autonomy. A mark of democratic institutions is their capacity to fund their own critique, and social scientists have an interest in struggling to maintain such democratic ethos against the political and financial forces that see funding as a means of forcing social scientists to prioritise certain research over others and, needless to say, against those who use funding to affect the result of social scientific inquiry. But autonomy is not only structural. It is also a cultural autonomy involving a struggle to protect social scientific reason from political and mediatic reason. It is, for example, to avoid modes of parliamentary political argumentation that Jeremy Bentham describes in his little- known Handbook of Political Fallacies. First among those for Bentham are 'fallacies of authority (including laudatory personalities;) the subject matter of which is authority in various shapes-and the immediate object, to repress, on the ground of the weight of such authority, all exercise of the reasoning faculty'. The second are 'fallacies of danger (including vituperative personalities); the subject matter of which is the suggestion of danger in various shapes-and the object, to repress altogether, on the

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ground of such danger, the discussion proposed to be entered on'. 2 Bringing such modes of debating into social science is in Bourdieu's terms a weakening of the autonomy and specificity of social scientific reason. Autonomy also involves an autonomy of style. I have also often noted among Arab social scientists a particularly male style of projecting intellectual authority that involves a certain way of 'being serious' that rather belongs more to a puritan religious field than to the academic field. Terry Eagleton's critique of this form of seriousness in his book After Theory is of particular relevance here. As he put it, 'The puritan mistakes pleasure for frivolity because he mistakes seriousness for solemnity.' 3 Let me now move to the second critical tradition that I want to highlight and which has Bruno Latour's latest work on multiple modes of existence as its most recent and important manifestation. 4 It is also developed in the important work of the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 5 Finally, one should note that it is also inspired by the philosophical lineages that lead to Gilles Deleuze. This tradition begins with a sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, critique of the 'sociological' tradition delineated above. It argues that by being so centred-and even obsessed-with the demystifying and unveiling of hidden relations of domination and exploitation, the critical sociological tradition ends up giving ontological primacy to these relations and the resistance they generate. It can even go so far as considering such relations to be the only social reality there is with everything else being secondary, superstructural, ideological or ephemeral. Without questioning the importance of such relations of domination, this second critical tradition emphasises the importance of uncovering those other spaces that escape them, spaces that lie outside power, outside governmentality, outside resistance and even outside modernity. Along with the domain of institutionalised power marked by the social scientific quest for causality-and therefore for repetition, for the foreseen, the existent and the actual-it also aims to uncover other realities marked by the unstructured and the contingent, the unexpected and the unforeseen, as well as the possible and potential. It sees those as marking existing realities that are nonetheless eclipsed by the domination of the realities marked by power relations. That is, along with seeing processes of domination in

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a particular reality, it also perceives processes of domination whereby one reality dominates over other realities. If radical political thought is grounded in both an 'anti' and an 'alter' moment-that is, a desire to oppose existing oppression, domination and exploitation and an equal desire to create something better-it can be said that the first sociological tradition is more relevant to an 'anti' politics whereas the second tradition provides ammunition for an 'alter' politics. It is in this sense that I feel that both traditions are of importance in speaking to Arab social scientists as they find themselves confronted with old colonial modes of domination in Palestine, new regimes of capitalist exploitation expanding throughout the region and new spaces of possibility opened up by the popular upheavals and transformations of the last few years. The two traditions offer an invitation for Arab social scientists where the struggle for autonomy is an important cornerstone of critical knowledge, and where speaking to the political involves not only an attention to the spaces of domination and resistance but also an equally important search for spaces that are outside such cycles of power and where the possibility of alternative social orders can be grounded. Let me first give a quick example of how a social science committed to uncovering power relations and one committed to uncovering other realities meet, the analytical tensions that this can produce, and the possibilities that open up when working with both of them together. I will then move to another more political example to exemplify the way they speak to the anti/alter imaginaries of radical politics. Let us go to northern Lebanon and explore a routine social interaction that one still encounters in some villages. In these villages class division is delineated by family belonging. That is, there are rich families and poor families, and the families that are rich and those that are poor have been the same since Ottoman times. Members of the poor families work for members of the rich families as servants, as agricultural labourers, as cattle minders or drivers etc., and usually would have done so also since Ottoman times. Despite this lifelong division, if you visit the village, you can still see mem hers of the rich family sitting having a coffee with members of the poorer families working for them. I have seen this in one of the villages where I've

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done fieldwork. For example, I remember walking around the village and seeing a man to whom I had been introduced earlier in the week-Michel, from the ruling family. He was sitting on the balcony in front of his house having a coffee with another man whom I identified as his chauffeur but whom I had not met before. When I said hello Michel got up and introduced me to his chauffeur, a man called Jeryes, by saying, 'This is Jeryes. He works here. He's also from here [the village]; his family lives down the road from here.' And then he said, 'Jeryes and I grew up together. We are like brothers and our families have been like one since anyone can remember.' This might sound odd, or artificial, or even hypocritical to someone not versed in village culture, especially when you get to know that Jeryes was more than just a chauffeur. He was in fact largely Michel's servant, doing everything and anything Michel wanted him to do, whether around the house, the field or anywhere else. This is a very interesting situation that to me puts in tension the aforementioned critical sociological and the critical anthropological dispositions of a social scientist. This is because, from a critical sociological point of view, what is happening here might appear as quite obvious: this person is using kinship categories to hide relations of domination. The critical sociologist's desire to demystify power relations surfaced immediately and he or she might say: 'Sure, "like brothers" indeed. Ha ha! Who does he think he is kidding? I can see through this language of brotherhood and recognise that underneath it is a relation of domination. Nobody is going to fool me with any mumbo jumbo about brothers.' A Marxist might even say: 'Here we have a situation where kinship terminology operates as an ideology that mystifies the relations of exploitation that exist between the master and his servant.' What's more, I learned that in fact Jeryes' grandfather was also the servant of Michel's grandfather. So one can cynically say: 'So much for "our families are like one family"' ... more mystification of relations of power.' The critical anthropological side of me, however, while agreeing with the sociological critique at one level, wanted to also understand the significance of the designation 'we are like brothers' from the point of view of Jeryes, and here something else emerges. The first thing I noted after some time of knowing Jeryes is that he is not at all mystified by the language of brotherhood. He knows all too well that

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... he is the servant of a rich man and that his family is and has always been dominated by Michel's family. Nonetheless, Jeryes also genuinely appreciated that he and his rich master were 'like brothers'. He enjoyed it when Michel said so, and he said it on one occasion as well. Here I started realising that, notwithstanding the fact that Michel might well use kinship metaphors to reproduce the relation of exploitation that he has with Jeryes, still, kinship metaphors did more than that; they carved a space enjoyed by both Michael and Jeryes, in which they related to each other precisely as brothers. It was a space outside the relation of domination. Often, the critical sociological gaze, because it invests so much in uncovering relations of power, seems to be unable to see or even think the possibility of other forms of relationality, or to think that what is a relation of power can be nothing but a relation of power. But a relation between two people is far too complex and multi-dimensional for it to be captured by a single definitional mode, no matter how important that is. So perhaps the relation of power is the most important dimension of the relation between Michel and Jeryes, but it is nonetheless not the only dimension. The language of kinship points to this other form of relationality. In the language of the Lebanese village, the space carved by the language of metaphoric kinship is often the space of honourability. So, a critical sociological gaze will only see this space in terms of how it functions to reproduce power relations. To be sure, the space can and does function to reproduce power relations. But if this is all of what a social scientist sees, she will be missing an important resource that people, and especially subjugated people, have in order to constitute themselves as viable human beings outside the relations of dominations in which they are grounded. Saying that this space actually helps reproduce relations of domination could be true, but that does not mean that it is the only reason for it to exist. If one is writing a history of class relations, especially relations of patronage, in Lebanese villages and sees nothing but relations of domination and instrumental forms of exploitation, one misses another important history: the history of the decline of a space that was free from such instrumental relations and where people really did relate to each other like brothers and sisters. The critical sociological gaze that captures relations of exploitation is important, but

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the critical anthropological gaze that captures the existence of other spaces or realities is equally important. Let me conclude by raising another important dimension of the •anthropological' or 'cultural' critique of the social sciences. It has to do with questions of mode of writing as opposed to what one writes about. This critique has its philosophical inspiration in the work of Derrida, but it is also inspired from a long tradition of feminist social sciences. 6 The issue here is the social sciences' modes of detailing and classifying reality, and their emphasis on what their language refers to as the 'capturing of reality'. This kind of language makes them complicit with the dominant patriarchal forms of domination associated with taming, domesticating, controlling and exploiting otherness. The search for other realities where such relation does not prevail also invites us to think of a mode of writing that is not about capture, a writing with people rather than writing about people. Once again, this is not a question of either/or. It is difficult to imagine a mode of scientific knowledge that is not complicit with the logic of domestication. Yet such knowledge can be at least tempered with a desire not to reveal and unveil, which often makes something open for governmental capture even when it isn't already so. A 'writing with' is a writing that is 'with' people in the same way one wishes someone, 'may God be with you'. It is a with-ness that acts as a propelling force in people's' lives, something that even the best critical social science-whether sociologically or anthropologically inspired -fails to do.

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Part III

5

On ethnography and political emotions Hating Israel in the field

In January 2006 I began researching the 'political emotions' generated by the Arab/Israeli conflict and the particular way these were experienced by Muslim immigrants in the West. From my previous fieldwork I have come to see that these emotions, particularly as they were intensified by what was often perceived as Western bias in favour of Israel, played a central role in limiting the way Muslim immigrants to the West identified with the countries to which they had migrated. Following 9/ ll there has been a growing awareness among at least some political leaders, as reflected in their political speeches, of the importance of this question among not just Arab but also all Muslim immigrants in the West and indeed all Muslims. While none of the politicians formulated it this way, the implication of this reality was nevertheless clear: how a Western nation's foreign policy towards Israel is evaluated by its Muslim immigrants is important in shaping their sense of belonging or lack of belonging to it; that is, their social integration. This was brought home to me even more starkly at an earlier stage when I was examining how to conduct this research in a manageable way. I carried out a preliminary survey with, I hasten to

say, no scientific pretensions whatsoever, but it yielded a revealing outcome nonetheless. I made a point of asking between twenty and thirty Lebanese-born Muslims in France, England, Australia and the USA one face-to-face question. It went something like this: You are often complaining that your government doesn't do enough to counter anti-Muslim stereotypes and discrimination, and that your government is too pro-Israeli. If, hypothetically, the government says to you, "OK, look, I can't do both things at the same time. You have to choose one or the other: either I stop anti-Muslim racism or I stop being pro-Israeli. Which one would you choose?'" From the hundred or so people I asked, only a handful (eight, exactly, as they were unusual enough to remember) said that stopping local anti-Muslim racism is more important to them. Chatting to some of them, it was also clear that they saw Western bias towards Israel as a global extension of anti-Muslim racism rather than a separate issue. This brought home to me the affective centrality and primacy of the Palestinian question to what must be a substantial proportion of Lebanese Muslim immigrants, and highlighted the larger question of the transnational dimension of political self-constitution among them. It is this phenomenon in particular, which I am linking directly to what I call political emotions, that I am currently examining ethnographically. By the first couple of months, I began working on Arab/Muslim modes of imagining the Euro-Zionist settlement of Palestine and the ensuing conflicts, as expressed in political statements, songs, films, art and poetry. I also examined how the emotions expressed in these media have changed historically. Finally, I began reading theoretical literature on emotions to reflect on key questions related to my research such as: what are political emotions? Are there such things as emotions that are sui generis political, or are there merely emotions in general that we end up investing in various spheres of social life, the sphere of politics being one among many? The core diasporic population I was working with were Shi'a Muslims from South Lebanon living in France, the USA and Australia. As with my previous transnational work, 1 I began from the villages in Lebanon and moved outward towards the global migratory locations. My first visit to Lebanon in relation to this project was in March 2006. It was at that time that, through a mutual friend, I was introduced to

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Ali. He invited me to his house in a village near Nabatiyyeh where I met his wife and his two children and a couple of neighbours. We talked about the possibility of my living for a few months nearby in a house that belonged to one of his relatives who was now in Canada. I also made plans to visit Ali's village again in August. What happened after my return to Australia was totally unexpected. In July, just as I had begun my work with the South Lebanese diaspora in Sydney, the Hezbollah fighters infiltrated the LebaneseIsraeli border, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and killing others. From the information that is now available to us, it is clear that Israel used this incident to launch a strike not only on its own behalf but also on behalf of other Western and conservative Arab nations. This strike was obviously a long time in preparation, and was clearly a response to what was perceived, by Israel, the USA, a number of Arab regimes and some Lebanese factions, as the growing Islamic-radicalIranian threat in the region. Thus began Israel's now infamously ferocious (I am still emotional enough about it to say barbarian) bombardment of Lebanon that destroyed its only just rebuilt infrastructure, flattened many Shi'a residential areas, killed more than a thousand civilians and left behind in agricultural areas and villages thousands of unexploded cluster bombs that continued to explode and kill and maim civilians well after a ceasefire was agreed. Very quickly during and following the bombardment my 'research landscape' disappeared. It did so physically. The village where I was preparing to do my fieldwork was destroyed. Ali died along with his two children when an Israeli missile hit his car. I was told that only his wife survived, although she had lost an arm and a leg, but I never got to meet her again. The scene among the South Lebanese Shi'a in Sydney became one of generalised mourning as one family after the other began 'losing' members in Lebanon. There was, needless to say, an overwhelming feeling of anger and hatred towards Israel-and I wholeheartedly shared this anger and hatred. In the first part of this chapter, I will reflect on the nature of my anti-Israeli hatred and anger in an auto-ethnographic mode. I want to scrutinise it in so far as it represents a 'political emotion' that I shared with my informants. I will show how by reflecting on my own political emotions I began refining my analytical conception of what these emotions entail.

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In the second part, I will reflect on the emotional dimension of participant observation. Although it was clear that by sharing certain emotions with my informants I was getting closer to them, it was equally clear that the very nature of participant observation required me to distance myself from those emotions. I want to examine the nature of the emotional ambivalence generated by this posture, and will argue that this ambivalence generates its very own set of emotions that are specific to ethnographic practice. Borrowing from Spinoza, 2 I will call this ethnography-specific emotion 'ethnographic vacillation' and will argue that a degree of awareness of it is a crucial part of ethnographic research. However, before proceeding, some preliminary reflections on the whole endeavour of talking about emotions in the field seems to me necessary.

Anthropologists' emotions in the field Talking about anthropologists' emotions in the field necessarily brings out personal dimensions specific to each anthropologist. This is so even when concentrating on emotions that are to do more with the social, political or structural location of the anthropologist in general than with his or her specific biography. As many who have worked on emotions have noted, they are always located at the intersection of the individual and the collective, the personal and the public, the psychological and the social. 3 While this is certainly no reason to stop talking about anthropologists' emotions, it is enough reason to make one reflect critically about what it means to talk about such emotions. There is a way in which such talk lives up to the joke about the post-modern anthropologist who told his informant: 'But enough about you. Let's talk about me.' Clearly, the way anthropology as a discipline has turned on itself to examine its social and historical conditions of possibility, and its weaknesses and strengths, has been an important and enlightening endeavour. But as many have already argued, the reflexive turn has generated its own problems. This is especially so where reflexivity has become a substitute rather than a complement to what is by far the discipline's most important achievement: instilling in ourselves and in our readers the desire and the capacity to know otherness seriously. Yes, Malinowski was naïve in not noticing the colonial conditions of possibility on which he built his whole enterprise. But does that do anything to

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diminish what was by far his roost important achievement, which was to lay the ground for a rigorous and systematic method by which one can act out the 'desire to know otherness seriously'? Drowning oneself in a sea of self-reflexivity is hardly rnore 'anti-colonial', for instance, than that desire to seriously reach out for otherness. Contrary to this seriousness today, both the 'hatred' as well as the 'respect' and 'tolerance' of otherness is rnade to be a frivolously facile endeavour. This is done by effectively either effacing or simplifying the very otherness of the other that is particularly difficult to comprehend, their radical alterity. In such an environment, the seriousness that is part of the anthropological desire to know otherness acquires a particular, not only intellectual but also political importance. I have often shown in my work on Australian rnulticulturalisrn how those who 'love' some category of otherness and those who 'hate' it share in cornrnon the fact of not having much to do with the others they profess to love or hate. 4 This is certainly the case in regard to the Western relationship to Muslims with which some of rny work is concerned. Knowing seriously what is particularly and radically other about Muslims is certainly important in an era where people are divided between those who 'love' and those who 'hate' Muslims, all doing their loving and hating with equal ease. How can one know anything and have such reductionist emotions towards it like 'love' or 'hate'? It was and still is the strength of anthropology to go way beyond such simplistic and often politically driven sentiments to capture the complexity and ambivalence of feelings that the encounter with otherness brings about. Talking about the emotions of the anthropologist does not necessarily go against such an analytical endeavour, although it can. This is where one needs to be critically reflexive about analysing anthropologists' emotions. Psychoanalysis has shown us that we are in many ways 'other' -or, as Julia Kristeva has put it-'strangers', to ourselves. 5 In this sense, if reflecting on our emotions is a reflection on this 'strangeness' or otherness contained within us, reflections on the emotions of the anthropologist can only enhance the general anthropological project of deepening our knowledge of cultural otherness in all its rnanifestations. 6 If this is not kept in mind, talking about emotions still carries with it the danger of making 'knowing the self' a substitute for knowing otherness. Related to this issue is the kind of emotions one

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chooses to talk about. There is obviously a limit to the kind of emotions one wants to and one finds useful to talk about. It would hardly be a revelation to say that there are certain emotions that the anthropologist experiences that he or she would find shameful to talk about. And, of course, there is nothing that says that the more an emotion is shameful the more it is good to talk about it. This goes for more than the obvious case of sexual feelings. For example, I have attended many conferences in which anthropologists make a virtue of the need to avoid projecting colonial relations of power into the fieldwork situation, such as the classical 'avoiding to racialise and inferiorise informants'. Not many anthropologists, on the other hand, like to talk about the opposite process of being inferiorised by your informants. Although there are a number of classical texts in which male anthropologists refer to being humiliated by their male informants, particularly through a questioning of their sexual prowess, not many seem to dig into this tradition these days. It makes one appear far grander, superior and nobler (and one might even add 'Western') to talk about the heroic effort one is undertaking to stop humiliating others than it does to talk about the effort in dealing with others humiliating you. My core 'problem' with the males in the Lebanese villages where I did my fieldwork was not about how they judged my sexuality, although there were definite insinuations in this direction, so much as how they judged my very profession as an anthropologist. After interacting with them long enough for them to know what I spend my days doing in the village, they all came to realise that I am a 'talker' someone who spends most of his time 'talking'. Of course, it is not that rural Lebanese men don't enjoy talking; they love talking and boasting about themselves and their achievements. 7 But there is talking and there is talking. And it was clear that I liked the wrong kind of talking, which was more about how people felt concerning this and that issue. This was the kind of talking that women indulge in. Thus to be classified a 'talker', a hakwaji, was necessarily to feminise me. The ultimate humiliation came when I went to see a relatively successful landowner whom I had been wanting people to introduce me to for some time. He politely listened to me for five or ten minutes as I was telling him what I wanted to do. But when his wife came in

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with the coffee he stood up and said to her, 'See what he wants ... he wants to talk.' I wasn't sure which was more humiliating: what he said or the plain fact that he actually trusted leaving me alone with his young wife, something no man does with a male stranger. I mention all this not because it is this kind of humiliation that I want to examine here, but because this feeling of humiliation is only the tip of that enormous iceberg of 'emotional field experiences' that are not pleasurable to talk about. I also mention it because such an experience makes one wary of the idea that talking about anything is necessarily good. It adds another dimension to the sociological analysis of'what talking means'. 8 One last preliminary critical reflection: when we decide to talk and write about our emotions, do we not, in the name of combating the dominance of a specific kind of Western rationality that neglects the role of emotions, simply work to subject and reduce emotions to rationalistic interpretations, regardless of whether the aim is to 'explain' or 'understand' them? If we are really to undermine the primacy of rationality over emotion, should we not find ways of feeling how we talk rather than talking about how we feel? Or should we not be searching for a poetic language that accompanies and carries our feelings rather than a language that aims to ossify them and represent them-in short, a language that has an intrinsic relation of capture with them? 9 The work of Michael Jackson is exemplary in this regard. 10 As I have already pointed out, I do not think that any of the foregoing negates the importance of examining and reflecting on the emotions generated in the process of fieldwork. Rather, by keeping these issues in sight, I hope it will help me, and the reader, to avoid certain pitfalls and to recognise certain limitations.

Between the personal and the political I: hating Israel in Palestine Writing to a primarily Western readership, and with an Arab name that invites specific kinds of political presumptions, stereotypes and imaginaries, requires an autobiographical clarification: hating Israel is not a 'natural' or 'primordial' sentiment that I have grown up with. Quite the contrary: in my conservative Christian Lebanese environment it was far more common to idealise Israel and Israelis as people who have managed to create a bastion of Western civilisation and

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modernity despite being surrounded by fundamentally 'agro' and backward Muslim hordes. This was a fantasy many, although by no means all, Christian Lebanese shared. I did. Although politics was only a marginal preoccupation for me, I grew up to be an unreflexively pro-Israeli person throughout my early and late teenage years in Lebanon. It was only when I left Lebanon and mid-way through my undergraduate study in Australia in the late 1970s that I slowly turned into an 'anti-Israeli'. This was part of my general transformation into a 'leftie' via a deep immersion in Marxist literature-a common enough transformation at the time. At that stage, however, mine was a very intellectual antilsraelism based on associating Israel and Zionism with Western colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East. Such anti-Israelism did not have, to me at least, the 'affective' component (smash the 'Zionist entity' type). Despite my new political leanings, I continued to associate emotional anti-Zionism with the 'backward Arab masses', from which, in a slightly racist and classist way, I was still eager to distance myself. Still, having been through the beginning of the civil war in Lebanon, and having experienced the Palestinians as 'aggressors' wanting to take over Lebanon and Israel as a 'saviour' and a 'model', to end up perceiving the latter as 'oppressors' and the Palestinians as 'oppressed' took quite a shift in my world view and the nature of my political attachments. Later, my emotions about Palestine deepened. I began a far more intensive reading of Middle Eastern literature, history and social science. I also became more aware of the nature of Palestinian lives under occupation, especially after visiting Israel and the West Bank. Furthermore, I began reading Arab literature on the Palestinian question in Arabic, a language I had grown to reject at my French school. 'Reading Palestine' in Arabic added an unquestionable layer of emotionality that the English and French language did not provide. This is probably because there is some structural complicity between my earliest and therefore deepest emotional structure and the structure of the Arabic language, both being foundational elements in the making of my subjectivity. Paradoxically this deepening of my feelings towards the Palestinian question came at the same time as I began, under the influence of Bourdieu, to reflect critically on the nature of my initial

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intellectual leftism and the facile way it invited me to fuse political and social scientific pursuits. Bourdieu, after Weber, refers to this 'leftism' as a 'proletaroid' intellectual culture. He is critical of it as an intellectual position that gives precedence to political interests over social scientific interests. Instead, he argued for the autonomy of the intellectual field and that good politics does not necessarily produce good social science. He was also critical of this leftism as an ineffective political position. He argued in Distinction that it is the structural location of 'intellectuals' as the dominated fraction of the dominant class that makes them more disposed, through a process of affective homology, to show solidarity with the dominated and oppressed peoples of the world. 11 This understanding of why anthropologists 'side with the oppressed' is quite different from the one given by Don Kulick and his emphasis on a libidinally grounded masochism. 12 I am sure Kulick's explanation is a valid analysis of the identification of many anthropologists with their communities, but I feel that Bourdieu's account speaks better to my own experience. I took his reflexive critique on board, and by the time I was becoming more affectively enmeshed in the Palestinian question, I no longer simplistically believed that being pro-Palestinian gave me a better access to 'the truth'. Perhaps this detachment was facilitated by the fact that French, and even more so English, were my analytical languages, and my emotions towards the Palestinian question were, as mentioned earlier, more enmeshed in the Arabic language. From another very different biographical perspective, I have often felt that my sensitivity towards what I perceive to be situations of'quasi-total social domination' was structured by the kind of power my father exercised within the family realm. When I was growing up, my father, an army officer, wielded absolute and undisputed power in the household. He was not a physically violent person, but he was a classical case of a benevolent dictator who could not tolerate anyone challenging his power; he allowed us to do many things, but if it was not 'allowed' it was never going to happen. And when something was not allowed it was always a non-negotiable edict that descended top-down upon us. Even late in our teenage years, there was no room for autonomy over the self or for its correlate: negotiation between sovereign autonomous wills. My father did not know what negotiation meant. He made decisions, and those on the

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receiving end were left with little choice; it was either obey or secretly disobey. This is what I mean by a situation of total social domination. It did not mean that those subjected to power were totally dominated. It meant more that those in power aspired for such total domination. But what was even more objectionable in my eyes about my father's mode of wielding power was that when my two sisters and I were found to be doing something without his consent, it was my father who affected to have been 'hurt'; his assumption was always that it was we who had 'broken his trust' and behaved unjustly. This has made me particularly sensible to the subtle and unsubtle ways in which those who wield excessive power exercise it and the plethora of capricious, vacuous and self-serving sentiments of 'hurt', 'pain' and 'sense of being misunderstood' and so on, with which such power is couched. In turn, I have always clearly seen how those ultimately narcissistic sentiments couldn't even be 'felt' if it were not for the relations of power that underlie them, no matter how well hidden they are from those concerned. I have no doubt that it is this 'patriarchal' experience that has predisposed me to empathise with those subjected to similarly structured forms of power and domination. This is why, far more than some historical sense of injustice concerning the colonisation of Palestinian land, it has always been the 'power and domination aspect' of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict that activates my anger. While I am sympathetic to the 'they've stolen the land' discourse, I am nonetheless far more affected by the overwhelming power and capacity for domination that Israel vividly and daily displays when relating to the Palestinians, and which continuously aims at negating the possibility of even an inkling of Palestinian sovereignty. Good Palestinians are simply those who accept being powerless and they can achieve 'peace' by simply accepting Israel's proposals; again, there is no room for negotiations here. I am equally affected, if not more so, by the narcissistic and self-indulgent sentiments of 'hurt''we are the victims', 'they don't recognise our right to exist'-that accompany this formidable display of power, and that to me feels very much like my father's self-indulgent 'hurt'. While the elements I have just discussed were all present in the feelings of anger and hatred towards Israel that I experienced in the

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aftermath of the savage bombing of Lebanon, there was certainly another dimension that intensified both the anger and the hatred and was not present in my identification with the Palestinians as victims of domination. A short presentation ofmy embryonic theorisation of political, and particularly national, emotions will help me analyse this in a useful auto-ethnographic way.

Political and national emotions When I began thinking of 'political emotions' my ideas were, at least in part, empirically driven by what I felt was a somewhat obvious yet neglected dimension in the analysis of the Arab/Israeli conflict: for the Arabs (and to a certain degree all Muslims) and for the Israelis, Palestine and Israel are highly charged emotional entities. In my earliest fieldwork notebook where I began noting the way people spoke of Palestine, I had scribbled the convoluted, all encompassing, sentence: 'The nation as an anthropomorphically imagined affective political entity'. I was trying to capture in one sentence the analytically common conception of the nation as 'imagined community', and the equally common fact that the nation is anthropomorphised. I was also trying to capture the fact that not only is the nation 'anthropomorphically imagined' but also that there was always an emotional dimension to this imagining; if 'Israel is seething' and 'Palestine is weeping' and I am a person identifying with either of these two nations, I will feel that I am seething or weeping too. This makes the experience of national identification more than just an imagining. We can call it emotive imagining, noting, however, that this means bending the meaning of a strict conception of imagining as something of the order of the image. Nonetheless, this was good enough to convey, in ways pointed out by Vamik Volkan, 13 that the identification with such 'emotive imaginaries' was such that people felt that their whole mode of-and capacity for-self-constitution was directly related to the existence and well-being of such 'anthropomorphically imagined affective entities': how they are perceived to be 'faring' ('well', 'weak', 'fragile', 'frightened', 'angry', 'nervous' and so on) shapes how the self is faring. Sudhir Kakar, in his analysis of Hindu/Muslim conflict in India, has given a wonderfully nuanced analysis of how this 'we-feeling' fluctuates with the tempo and intensity of a confrontation. 14

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Theoretically, I opted to think 'political emotions' somewhat outside the general problematic of the anthropology of emotions and its conceptualisation of the relation of emotions and politics in particular. This is more to do with a desire to complement rather than to oppose. Being grounded in a psychoanalytic conception of human subjectivity, I, of course, was far more inclined towards anthropological works that tried to move away from the attempt to locate emotions through a binary opposition between 'culture and the body', 'emotions as culturally constructed and emotions as innate' as attempted in the early seminal works of the Rosaldos, Abu-Lughod and Lutz. 15 While still recognising the analytical gains achieved by this tradition, I was looking for a way of positing an imaginary 'emotional self '-or what is also called the space of selfconstitution-as the actual seat of emotions, since it is the space where the very viability of the self is always at stake. I saw this as the space that allows us better to conceive what Myers has called 'the relation between cultural models and psychological organisation'. 16 I constructed the basic elements of this conception of the emotional self by putting together three anthropologico-philosophical accounts of the constitution of the emotional self: Spinoza's conception of humans as 'joy' -seekers, Lacan's positing of a formative phase in human development where the self seeks to overcome a sense of fragmentation as developed in his analysis of the mirror stage, and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of illusion, which denotes a self that invests itself emotionally and libidinally in that which is likely to make life meaningful. These works allowed me to develop the concept of the emotional self further, into a conception of the emotional self as involving an intrinsic political dimension. This invites a different, but nonetheless complementary, take on the prevailing anthropological interest in the political ramifications of the expression of emotions and their cultural specificity. This has been a preoccupation of many anthropologists working from both a psychoanalytic and psychiatric perspective such as the Kleinmans, Good and Good, and Obeyesekere, 17 and from a non-psychoanalytic perspective such as Besnier, Reddy and, more recently, Maruska Svasek. 18 My interests took me in a somewhat different direction as I wanted to examine how the very constitution of the emotional self is always already shaped by relations of power.

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Thus, in reading Spinoza I have always seen him as offering the starting point for an understanding of'political emotions' or, at least, of what a political dimension in emotions constitutes. This is because his conception of 'the affects' was specifically linked to power, which is central for any useful definition of the political. Spinoza's basic emotions-joy and sadness-were affects denoting changes in one's capacity to act and think efficiently; that is, at least as I see it, one's power over one's environment, or what Spinoza also refers to as one's state of perfection. In conceiving specifically of the emotions that are derived from national identification, I found my starting point in Spinoza's Postulates Pl2 and Pl9 in the Ethics, 19 respectively that 'the mind as far as it can, strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the body's power of acting', and that 'he who imagines that what he loves is destroyed will be saddened; but he who imagines it to be preserved will rejoice'. In this sense, I was trying to examine what it means when that imagined object of love is a nation. One crucial 'function' of the imagined nation is precisely to boost our 'sense of perfection', our self-perceived conception of our capacities. 20 As I have often shown in my work on nationalism, whether in Australia or in Lebanon, nationalist identification always involves taking what are considered the 'best' capacities and qualities of individual members of the collective and making them the capacities and qualities of the collective. This allows all the individuals who identify with the collective to see 'its capacities and qualities' as theirs. The nationalist as an individual might be a technological nullity but they are still capable of saying, 'We've sent a rocket to Mars'. They might not know how to swim but they can still say 'We are better swimmers than most nations'. That is, the 'I', by imagining itself through the national 'we', can acquire powers it could not dream of having by simply imagining itself as an individual 'I'. Power here is through the acquisition of potentials: it is not that the nationalist who is uneducated becomes educated by merely identifying with a nation of educated people. Rather, the uneducated acquire power by thinking that they have the potential to be educated even if they are not so. This is part of what Nietzsche usefully calls 'sense of power', 21 a concept I found myself deploying along with Spinoza and which is not about how much power one actually has but about what power one thinks one can

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potentially muster. It is precisely this 'sense of power' that is at stake in national identification and that makes nations worthy of affective attachment: when you attack me as a national or you attack my nation, you are not simply attacking who I am but who I fantasise I can be. Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus, denoting the capacity of the body to act efficiently in a specific sociocultural milieu, is clearly inspired by Spinoza's conception of 'perfection'. Indeed, Bourdieu, in later works, argues that every habitus is endowed with a conatus, a Spinozan term denoting the tendency of things to 'persevere in their own being'. Bourdieu, however, does not explicitly locate emotions in relation to the habitus as much as in relation to what he calls the illusio, which denotes the way we invest and attach ourselves to those elements of the social world that give our lives a meaning: our job, our personal relations, our reputation, our hobbies, our ideals, or any other personal pursuit that makes our lives worth living for us. Bourdieu links illusio with a social libido because the way we invest ourselves in the social world is not only intellectual but also libidinal. 22 He emphasises that in investing ourselves in the world, our whole being is on the line, so to speak. When someone offers a heated plea in defence of their nation, in support of the environment or for the right to carry a weapon, we say that they are emotional because 'it means a lot to them'. In a sense, Bourdieu is emphasising the dialectical way in which this process of meaningfulness works: what means a lot to us is precisely what gives our life a meaning; we give it mean ingfulness and it gives our lives meaningfulness in return. The very viability of our life is at stake, which is why we get emotional about it. Looking at nationalism as a particular illusio allows us to capture the way nationalists invest their very being in their nation. Not everyone is a nationalist to the same degree, of course, but there can be no nationalism and no national emotions without an investment in the nation as something that gives our lives a meaning. Lacan's mirror stage adds an important dimension to this perspective. 23 If Bourdieu's illusio allows us to better capture the emotional nature of our social investments, and if Spinoza emphasises the relation between emotions and one's power over one's environment, Lacan allows us to think the relation between emotions and one's power of self-constitution, that is, one's power over the self.

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The two are of course related: our sense of power over ourselves is affected by our sense of power over our environment, and as we have seen with Bourdieu, by giving meaning to things outside us we give meaning to ourselves. For Lacan, the individual 'I' is structured very early in life by a feeling of fragmentation (a sense of being 'all over the place', so to speak) and by the setting of an ideal non- fragmented and wholesome image of the self that we strive to become (the mirror image). My 'self' as a subject begins to take shape in so far as it can constitute itself against this tendency towards fragmentation. An often used popular metaphor, which must denote the way this sense of fragmentation and the struggle against it are experienced in an everyday context, is the exhortation: 'Pull yourself together.' Using such a perspective, I found it useful to think of part of our emotions as deriving from the various degrees and modes with which we succeed-or do not succeed-in 'pulling ourselves together', and at least give ourselves the appearance of a certain wholeness, coherence and togetherness. These kinds of emotion are not simply about how much we 'pull ourselves together' but also the extent of anxiety with which we encounter our sense of fragmentation and struggle to overcome it. Some are more relaxed than others about feeling 'not together', so to speak. One type of shame, for example, can be conceived as a result of a public exposure of our struggling-to-keep-oneself-together at a moment we wanted to keep it private to ourselves. Or, to take another example, I have often noted that racism works in such a way that it actually aims to 'shatter' those who are subjected to it. How much it can shatter the racialised subject will depend on the social and cultural resources available to the subject in its effort to reconstitute itself, to 'pull itself together'. We can even say that the racists themselves try to 'pull themselves together' through the act of being racist. Intuitively, I find it useful to think that both the emotions experienced by racists and by those subjected to racism derive from these processes of self-constitution. Finding ways to capture this ethnographically has been one of the most interesting challenges of my research so far. The shattering effect of racism can sometimes be so extreme that the shattering of the symbolic self has an effect on the physical body. Some indigenous people subject to historical, intense racism have difficulty keeping their very body together and appear physically disjointed.

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One of the most useful aspects of this conception of emotions is that it accounts best for the way the nationalist's experience of the fragmentation of the nation, and his or her constant struggle for 'nationalist cohesion' and 'national unity', can be seen to articulate to the struggle for personal cohesion. Lacan-or rather, this fragment of Lacan that I am sure I have by now entirely reworked, deformed and reinterpreted for my own purposes-offers us a productive way of explaining how nationalist emotions emerge at the point where the struggle for personal self-constitution and sovereignty over the self becomes articulated as the struggle for national self-constitution and national sovereignty. In this sense, the power of nationalism and racism are closer to the power of sorcery and its capacity to do and undo subjectivity and the subject's relation to the world, as described by Bruce Kapferer.24 These then are the perspectives that I fused and took as my starting point in developing a working theory of political emotions that I can activate ethnographically: political emotions are those emotions related to our sense of power over ourselves and our environment as we pursue the goals, ideals and activities that give our life a meaning. Let me now go back to anti-Israeli emotions of anger and hatred that I experienced during and in the aftermath of the bombing of Lebanon.

Between the personal and the political 2: Hating Israel in Lebanon As I pointed out in concluding the section before last, besides some

similarities, my anger towards Israel when the bombing of Lebanon began was more intense than the anger I experience when Israel engages in its daily attacks on Palestinians. This clearly has to do with two things: my own national identification with Lebanon as the land of my birth, and my professional identification with South Lebanon and the South Lebanese, which made them far less abstract entities to me than Palestine and the Palestinians. The way these elements combined can be seen in this email I sent to my friend and colleague Michael Jackson, who had been to Lebanon a few years earlier when I held a visiting position at the American University of Beirut, and who emailed from Harvard to ask me 'what I thought about the war' and 'how I felt':

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I'm really too disgusted to talk about the war. The village where I do my fieldwork has been destroyed. A family I know has suffered massively, the father and two girls have died, literally disintegrated, and the mother has lost an arm and a leg ... I just find the whole experience of a technologically over-equipped brutal state rampaging with impunity the way Israel did just, well ... unspeakable. As Abbas said [Abbas el-Zein, a friend who had published an op-ed piece in the New York Times-GHJ, it has taken those of us who have experienced the civil war a good ten years to convince ourselves that the war has ended. So, to have this monstrous destruction just as we thought we have left the war behind is very painful. Here I instinctively began by first expressing the anger derived from the effect of the bombing on specific South Lebanese people whom I had come to know through fieldwork (as opposed to the abstract Palestinians to whom I usually relate in considering Palestinian events). Second, I expressed the anger that came from my national emotions, the way the ups and downs of 'Lebanon' are experienced as my own ups and downs (and this in ways that are clearly different from the way I relate to Palestine). And finally, I expressed the anger rooted in another aspect of the Palestinian situation: Israel's capacity to deploy its superior military power unchecked in what always appears as its sense of impunity-the hovering shadow of my father once again. Because I had already begun to intellectually reflect on emotions as the situation evolved, I also began to take notes about my own feelings throughout the bombing and its aftermath. Thinking about my attachment to Lebanon and my attachment to my informants helped me refine both my analytical conception of 'political emotions' and my ideas about the significance of emotions in the field. In the midst of Israel's bombing, I was in a coffee shop near the University of Sydney talking to another Lebanese Australian academic about the situation. We were both up in arms against the 'Dear Israel, please take your time' approach adopted by some Western and Arab governments. We believed then, and it has become obvious now, that they were all hoping that the Israelis would quickly

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decimate Hezbollah and reduce Iranian influence on Israel's northern border and throughout the region. During the conversation, it crossed our minds that there was something racist in the way we felt the bombing was so much more objectionable than what the Palestinians endure on a daily basis. It was as if we were saying to Israel: 'How can you do to us Lebanese what you do to Palestinians? Don't you realise we are, well, Lebanese!' I thought this simply meant that we were more affected by what was happening in Lebanon than by what happens in Palestine. Yet, as I further reflected on this, it became clear to me that the anger I was experiencing because of the Lebanese bombing was not that easily comparable to the anger triggered by the Palestinian situation, such that the two could be quantitatively compared in more-or-less terms. It was a different kind of anger. 'Nothing strange about this', I stated in my notebook. 'I am experiencing this situation more personally than politically. Every bomb is experienced as an attack on my very being.' This differentiation between personal and political was theoretically paradoxical because, as I have already explained, the emotions derived from a fusion between one's sense of well-being and the well-being of certain political entities-such as the nation-was at the core of what I was trying to theorise as 'political emotions'. Yet here I was thinking that the emotions I was experiencing relating to Lebanon were more 'personal' than the emotions I had in relating to the Palestinian situation. This made me very quickly rethink the opposition I had initially created between personal and political emotions. Later in the evening I added a further note: 'The way I am differentiating between the personal and the political is silly. Surely, all emotions are personal. The question is not whether they are personal or not but in what way they are personal.' This allowed me to think about the importance of the relations between the various elements that I had combined to define political emotions: the attachments that give our lives meaningfulness, the power we have over our environment and the power we have over ourselves. To understand how political emotions differ we need to understand the various ways in which each of these elements combines with the others in specific situations. So, our political emotions derive from the way certain collectivities we identify with operate as an illusio---something that

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gives our life a meaning and as something with which we imagine and reinforce the coherence of our personal identity. But the affective importance of each of these processes does not have to be the same for all such collectivities. One can speak of an important difference, for example, between an 'identification with' and an 'identification through'. To identify with a nation keeps the nation at a certain distance from oneself, making it more an 'object' of identification. To identify through is a far more intense kind of identification that does not allow for any separation. This, I feel, directs me towards a good explanation of the difference between my 'Lebanese' and my 'Palestinian' anger. I think that in the case of my relation to Palestine and Lebanon I can easily say that I identify through Lebanon far more than I identify with it, and the reverse can be said about Palestine. There is more of Lacan and Spinoza than of Bourdieu in this identification, so to speak. This allows me a certain affective distance form Palestine that I do not have in relation to Lebanon. Thinking through the ramifications of this differential mode of identification can give us important insights into the way immigrants end up identifying with their host nation, if they ever end up doing so: what are the conditions that lead one to identify with a nation and the conditions that transform this identification with to an identification through, or vice versa?

Political emotions, ethnography and power I have now shown some of the analytical and conceptual insights that grew out of my critical reflections on the biographical basis of my own political emotions in the field. In the remaining part of this chapter, I want to expose some further issues that emerged from a more specific reflection on my emotions as they interacted with the emotions of my informants within the context of participant observation. As I began working with the South Lebanese in Sydney, it was clear that the feeling of anger that I shared with them allowed me to get closer to people on a one-to-one basis as it created a common ground for personal interaction. It also gave me a participatory access to the mood that prevailed among them collectively. This 'emotional participation' was further deepened when I organised

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interviews with the people who lost close relatives, and began working on what I called 'transnational mourning'. The following email, written by my research assistant who was interviewing the Shi'a women to whom I had no direct access, reflects the intensity of the emotions at the time: 'Dear Ghassan, I finished the interview with X this morning. It was very sad and emotionally draining. I need to tell you this. I stopped the car and cried for quite a while on my way back home.' Initially, I thought that anything that contributed to the intensification of my emotions served a good research purpose. In my anger, I began to notice that Israel was becoming more and more abstract in my mind; I was increasingly imagining it as an 'evil person'. In a process similar to that described by Kakar,25 the Israelis whom I know and have friendly relations with receded in my mind. I did not want to think of particular Israelis. They complicated the emotional picture. I just wanted to think of 'Israel', which was easier to be angry with and to hate. Part of me was engaging in this quite consciously in a kind of 'strategic abstraction'. I had convinced myself that, given the nature of their personal loss, I could not possibly be as angry and upset as my informants. So, I believed that anything that made me 'sadder' and 'angrier' towards Israel allowed me to acquire an experience closer to theirs. Yet, in the very process of doing so, I began to gradually notice something rather strange: my informants seemed less emotional about Israel than I was. Their expressions of anger and hatred were certainly there, but they seemed always less intense than mine were. I could see that this was partly because their loss was personal before being political and that, in some ways, to think of Israel while mourning your father or mother was to demean and depersonalise the loss. Nonetheless, even when reflecting on the political dimensions of this loss they seemed less emotional about it. The following interview most explicitly shows this. Every interviewee was asked to relate what they had been doing when they heard that their relative was killed and how they reacted to the news. This interviewee had heard a rumour that his father had died and was anxiously waiting to hear more: lE

llO

My sister rang in the afternoon. She was crying ... so she didn't need to say anything. I started crying too.

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IR

I know this is difficult but can you tell me what were your thoughts as you received the call? IE ... I was thinking of my father ... what else could I have thought of? IR Yes, of course. I hope you don't mind me asking but can you tell me more ... what exactly were you thinking about your father? IE What kind of question is this!? IR Sorry. You don't have to answer, of course. But it would help if you tried. IE ... There was nothing exact ... My head was just crammed with memories of my father, his face ... when he visited here ... when I saw him in the village ... how he used to grab my arm when I was a child ... [Later in the interview.] IR What were you doing when your sister rang? IE I was watching the news. I still remember that there was an Israeli man from Haifa talking about shelters ... May God never give them shelter. IR How do you describe your feelings about what Israel has done? IE [Sarcastic smile] ... My feelings about Israel ... I have no feelings about Israel. IR Surely you must be angry ... IE I am angrier with the Australian government. It really hurts that they did not condemn Israel. Howard [the Australian prime minister] even stated that they were justified in doing this ... I am also angry with myself for not having been with my parents. IR But surely, you must feel something about Israel. They killed your father. IE If you are to be angry with someone you must think they are human beings. If a car killed your father you get angry with the driver or with the car? If a snake bit you ... do you get angry with the snake? No, you just try to kill it. The Israelis ... you know ... they kill us, that's what they have always done. We can't afford to let them make us angry. They want us to be angry. But we have stopped being angry a long time ago. It is a waste of time and energy. We just have to concentrate on making sure they can't kill us any more.

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I puzzled over this kind of reaction, not so much the link between the dehumanisation of Israel and lack of anger towards it-which was interesting but clear-but rather the idea that one 'cannot afford' to be angry, as well as the fact that there was something genuinely nonangry in this response that treated Israel as some kind of 'business' that needed to be dealt with. However, things became clearer to me when a similar point was made a few days later. The Lebanese prime minister was shown on television addressing foreign diplomats about the catastrophic consequences of the Israeli bombing, and he began to cry. I became a bit emotional myself seeing him on the news. But to my surprise, all the other people in the room started mocking the prime minister, and one person in particular recited a verse from a well-known Arab poem written about the fall of Granada. In the poem the Muslim leader who was supposed to have failed in defending Granada from the invading Christian forces went to his mother crying. It is what she said to him that this person recited before the prime minister: 'You cry like a woman for a land you did not know how to protect like a man.' This was not said from a 'macho', 'men don't cry' perspective, or, at least, not just from that perspective, for the women participated in mocking the prime minister just as much as the men. Reflecting on the Granada poem, it dawned on me that the whole discourse was structured by the opposition between passivity and activity in the face of Israel. Crying was perceived to be a result of the prime minister's inability to act, and therefore represented the historical powerlessness of the Lebanese government. Indeed, one can say that historically, the shadow of Israel's successive military victories in the 1950s and 1960s, and their overwhelming 1967 victory, looms large over the way the conflict is imagined, and the general Arab emotional experience of conflict with Israel is structured around a passive 'look what they've done to us'. While part of the success of the PLO among Arabs came from its capacity to generate a certain sense of pride in the ability of Arabs to be active rather than passive, it was really Hezbollah that made the first-ever claim of an active resistance that has produced actual results: the liberation of South Lebanon from Israeli occupation. This psychological gain was real, and there is plenty of evidence in official and non-official discourse to prove that this was experienced as a gain

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both by the Arabs who celebrated it and by the Israelis who deplored it. And there is no doubt that in striking Lebanon the way it did Israel aimed at destroying the 'ethos' that gave rise to this sense of power. This is why, despite all the destruction of the 2006 war, Hezbollah and its supporters considered the war a victory. Hezbollah showed itself capable of continuing to send missiles across the LebaneseIsraeli border and 'acting on' Israel regardless of how destructive the Israeli onslaught against it and its positions was. This symbolic idea that 'we can do things to them' and not just lament 'look what they have done to us' was crucial in understanding the aftermath of the war and the emotions generated by it. As I was thinking all this, I experienced one of those rare-and very pleasant-intellectual moments in which one's independent theoretical readings and ideas that have been just 'lying around' suddenly become alive and start to creatively interact with one's interpretations of empirical reality, each feeding off the other. This happened when, out of the blue, Greimas's reflections on angerwhich I had read some time before-suddenly came to mind. 27 Part of Greimas's exploration of anger relies on his theorisation of a rel a tion within the self between a subject of state that is acted upon and the subject of doing that acts. This attracted my attention because it brought power into the equation, and particularly the more subjective Nietzschean notion of 'sense of power', which, as seen earlier, I had posited as crucial in understanding political emotions. Our emotions are not the same when we experience ourselves as capable of acting on what affects us, as when we feel condemned to have to just passively endure it. Spinoza points to this in the Ethics: 'Apart from the joy and desire which are passions, there are other affects of joy and desire which are related to us insofar as we act.' 28 More recently, but within this Spinozean lineage, Alphonso has also shown how the hurt we experience when someone does something to us is likely to swell within us if we are not capable of reciprocating by 'doing something' in return. 29 This explains quite well why my anger and hatred towards Israel were greater than my informants'. If there is a relation between the power to act and the intensity of anger, is not the intensity of my anger a reflection of my own inability to act, or my inability to fully identify with those capable of acting? Thus, I could now see that

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there was something in the nature of my anger that was, at least partly, a reflection of my position as an intellectual: someone who, by definition, is a passive person watching events unfold with no capacity to practically bring about any change to them. This made me think of how often intellectuals unreflexively project their own emotions onto political actors they are in sympathy with, thinkingon the basis of these sympathies-that there is no difference between the two. They forget that regardless of the degree of sympathy, the emotions of political actors are precisely those of actors and are likely to be different from what have to be recognised in their sociological specificity as intellectual emotions. But this was not the only issue at hand in this particular case. My informants, although they are in Sydney, see themselves as actors not because they have a concrete capacity to act against Israel but because of their deep identification with Hezbollah, a force they see as capable of making a riposte, capable of hitting back. That is, to use terminology developed earlier in this chapter, because they not only identify with Hezbollah but also through it; they imagine themselves through it to be hitting back. This is where I realised that a key issue in the emotional differences between me and my informants was not just my position as an academic observer. It was also in the nature of my identification with Hezbollah. Despite the fact that I did experience a sense of pride in Hezbollah, in its capacity to respond to and its ability to survive the Israeli onslaught, being of Christian Lebanese background, being an agnostic person and a secular leftist, remembering that the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon was accompanied by the murder of many Shi'a-background communist intellectuals and activists during the dark history of the Lebanese civil war, all worked to limit my identification with the party. And it was this lack of identification that explains the difference between my sense of power and that of my informants, and the corresponding anger that went with it. Emotional identification with the informants, even more so than cultural identification, is not simply a matter of either/or, or a quantitative matter that the anthropologist acquires with time, but a far more complex process that requires continual critical reappraisal. In the case of political emotions, grounding emotional identification in the existing relations of power, and in one's location within and to these relations, is crucial.

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On ethnographic vacillation To argue, as I have done, that there are some fundamental differences between the emotional experiences of anthropologists and their informants, even when the former manage to identify and empathise with the latter, does not mean that the two cannot share similar emotional experiences. It is simply to note that there is a limit to how similar this experience can be. Indeed, and the foregoing notwithstanding, there is no doubt that I shared emotions of sadness, as well as anger and hatred, towards Israel with my informants. And there is equally no doubt that this allowed me to understand what they were going through much better than what a purely 'cultural' approach-to the extent that one can think of the cultural as differentiated from the emotional-would have allowed. However, if, as I illustrated earlier, there is a need to problematise what I did not share with my informants, this does not mean that what I shared with them is problem free. But to critically reflect on what it means for an anthropologist to share the emotions of the individuals and groups they are working with, yet maintain an analytical eye for what is being shared, takes us to the more familiar terrain of the contradictions that are part of participant observation in so far as they apply to emotions, and it is to these contradictions that I now turn in the final part of this chapter. Indeed, it seems that the classical tension that is inherent to participant observation is intensified when played out at the level of emotions. There is a good case to say that, as an ethnographer, you have not achieved good participation if you cannot participate in the collective emotional ups and downs of the culture you are studying. However, sharing in the moods of a group of people seems to be a much deeper immersion than sharing habits and culture. So, there is a case to argue that once the anthropologists start not only acting the way their informants are acting but also feeling what their informants are feeling, they are no longer manoeuvring on that imaginary cultural borderline that allows the movement between participation and observation. It could be said that they have stopped being 'observers' and have become mere 'participants'. However, a more productive way of seeing this is that the emotional borderline is deeper into the culture of the other than the cultural borderline. Once you are sharing your informants' emotions and moods, you are

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operating from a space in which what Bourdieu calls social gravitythe force that pulls you into a society-is much stronger. It does not mean that you cannot remove yourself for observational/analytical purposes from the society you are studying, but that it takes much more effort-an effort that is in itself emotional. This is especially so when we are talking about emotions such as political anger and hatred, whereby the tension between participation and observation is compounded with the tension between the political and the analytical. For one can legitimately ask the questions: is the anthropologist allowed to hate, and what are the analytical consequences of such political feelings? As I have already mentioned, for a long time now I have taken on board Bourdieu's point that there is a fundamental difference between the logic of intellectual inquiry and the logic of politics. The latter requires one, by definition, to take a political stand. Consequently, it has to stop inquiring and asking critical questions and become more consumed with a defensive posture. It reaches the point where it has to say, 'Here is where I stand. If you are not with me, you are my enemy.' Bourdieu argues that intellectual inquiry cannot operate with this friend/ enemy logic, as it simply cannot allow itself to take a stand; to take a stand would mean to stop inquiring critically. From this perspective, it is clear that the notion of hatred belongs to the discourse of enmity and politics and as such should have no place in anthropology. Consequently, at the same time as I was experiencing anger and hatred, I was constantly trying to recover some sense of emotional detachment and objectivity in examining the conditions for the generation of these emotions. Nonetheless, I was still drawn towards the political and towards taking a stand against Israel in the war. For example, I was motivated enough to work on organising a public ceremony, which would take place in Sydney Town Hall, to commemorate the dead and to highlight what Israel had done. I thought it necessary that the mourning of such Lebanese Australians, in so far as they were Australian citizens, should not remain private and ought to be shared and understood by the rest of the Australian population. It was in this sense, then, that I was constantly negotiating between not two but three modes of participating in reality: the analytical, the emotional and the political. And what was difficult

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was not the fact that the three states coexisted within me but the fact that they were often in a state of 'friction', and this state of friction generated another layer of emotions that were specific to the practice of ethnography and were grounded in the ambivalence that is a necessary part of participant observation. It is here that one can locate an important difference between the classical conception of the tensions of participant observation, and the tensions between observation and 'emotional participation'. Although there is a sense in which the 'being part of and not being part of' is the same at the level of emotions as it is often conceived by classical descriptions of culture-centred 'participant observation', there is a new dimension that emerges when this is played out in the emotional domain. Culture-centred participant observation, with the anthropologist fluctuating between their own culture and the culture of the other, does not produce a third culture unique to ethnography. Partly because of the individualistic dimension of emotions, emotion-centred participant observation produces within the anthropologist a set of emotions that is specific to ethnography. In my fieldwork, I felt that the capacity to share certain emotional states with informants and then to repress such emotions for analytical purposes did not simply mean that sometimes I was emotional and sometimes I wasn't. Nor did it mean that sometimes I allowed myself to be emotional and sometimes I didn't, as if emotions can be controlled and mastered in such a rational manner. Rather, as I have argued, it meant that I was constantly negotiating between being both emotional and analytical. This was particularly difficult given that the aim was not to reduce emotions to analytical language but to 'capture them' as emotions. Such a situation reminded me of a case of domesticating a particular type of llama, analysed by the French naturalist Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire. 30 Saint-Hilaire explains how farmers in a mountainous region of the Andes came to notice the high quality of this llama's wool and were therefore quite eager to domesticate it. The problem was that no sooner was it caught, brought in from the wild and domesticated than the quality of its wool deteriorated. Therefore the domesticators faced a rather complex question: how to maintain the llama in the wild so that the quality of its wool is maintained, and how, at the same time, to stop it from being in the wild in order to

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exploit it. This was the difficult dialectic: there was a need to bring in the llama and make it part of'civilisation', but at the same time it was only worthy of being part of civilisation in so far as it remained outside it. The technique developed by the farmers is what SaintHilaire called the sauvegarde de l'etat sauvage, or the safe-guarding of the savage state. In a very important way, this is how anthropologists have to treat the emotional states that they share with their informants if they are to analyse them. On the one hand, emotions have to be brought in and subjected to the rational analytical order, but on the other, the very process of 'bringing them in' from the emotional wilderness, so to speak, and reducing them to 'analysable' data, makes them lose their analytical value which lies in their specificity as emotions. It thus becomes imperative to find a way to subject emotions (that is, the wild) to analysis (that is, rational civilisation) without them losing their specificity as emotional 'wilderness'. Consequently, ethnographers have to continuously negotiate the terms under which emotions are subjected to 'observation', and constantly 'safeguard them in their savage state' in the very process through which they are experienced. It is this ethnography-specific negotiation, which, as I have argued, is infused with its own specific emotions, that I want to call 'ethnographic vacillation', borrowing from Spinoza's notion of a vacillating conatus. Vacillation for Spinoza is the product of contradictory striving for joy. Basically, it is because we do not always know what we want and because we often want contradictory things that vacillation occurs. Using Bourdieu's notion of illusio, we can say that vacillation is when we have contradictory illusios; when there are many incompatible things giving meaning to our lives and we find ourselves pursuing them despite their incompatibility. What is important, though, is that vacillation is not just a movement between various states of being; it is a state of being in itself. This is why it captures the state of being that is produced by the ethnographic navigation between the analytical and the participatory so well. For the anthropologist, it is fundamental to share both the anthropological illusio and the illusio of belonging to the culture they are studying. It is not a case of simply participating in one reality at one time and then another reality at another time. It is the attempt at investing oneself in both social realities with their contradictory

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demands that creates the specificity of the ethnographic modality of being. Dealing with emotional states highlights the fact that ethnographic vacillation is not a regular movement. It is not like the famous image of the swing, used by some anthropologists, to convey the idea of participant observation, for the latter symbolises a kind of predictable and rhythmic movement between the two cultures of participation and observation. Ethnographic vacillation is more like being a table-tennis ball on the beach being drawn in and out by the waves, with the sandy beach representing the informants' culture and the water the cultural world of the anthropologist. The tabletennis ball's movement is unpredictable and chaotic, yet it is certain that sometimes it will go further out to sea, and other times will move closer to the sand. Sometimes it might even stay on the sand for relatively long periods of time, only to be swept away by the waves again; other times it will be drawn deep into the sea only to be inevitably pushed back to the shore. It is probably the case that, when dealing with less emotional dimensions of cultural life, ethnographers will have a bit more agency over where on the beach or in the sea the table-tennis ball will be-and for how long-but nonetheless, a capacity to recognise and critically reflect on this vacillation is central to any ethnographic enterprise.

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6

Alter-political rationality and anti-political emotions The case of Fanon

This chapter is concerned with some of the ramifications of the affective dimension of Fanon's writing. Frantz Fanon was, of course, concerned with the affective states exhibited by racialised subjects and produced in them by the social processes of racialisation. Despite his critique of Octave Mannoni's work, he agrees with him on the necessity of marrying the subjective and the objective in the study of colonial racism: 'M. Mannoni's study is sincere in purpose, for it proposes to prove the impossibility of explaining man outside the limits of his capacity for accepting or denying a given situation. Thus the problem of colonialism includes not only the interrelations of objective historical conditions but also human attitudes toward these conditions.' 1 Furthermore, for him, in the study of racism, individual psychological states were themselves always social. 'Unless we make use of that frightening postulate-which so destroys our balance-offered by Jung, the collective unconscious, we can understand absolutely nothing,' he tells us. 2 What further distinguishes Fanon's writing in this regard is that it is itself a fusion of the analytical and the emotional in such a way that his text is often an expression of both an analysis of a given

social-psychological situation, and an affective articulation of that same situation. Analysing racists and informing his readers that he fully understood that 'these imbeciles are the product of a psychological-economic system' is typical of this fusion. 3 Taking Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's recent adoption of a Fanonian schema in conceiving their politics of alter-modernity in their latest book, Commonwealth, I want to argue that if one is to make use of Fanon's work today one cannot separate the intellectual and the affective that are so intertwined in his analytical work, as Hardt and Negri do. To do so is to abstract from the serious political ramifications that the presence of this affective dimension entails.

Hardt and Negri, Fanon and the politics of alter-modernity Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth is an important recent creative attempt at integrating, and moving beyond, the many traditions of European radical social theory that are still of some relevance today. It aims at nothing less than reformulating both a radical imaginary for the future and a politics towards achieving it. On its back cover Fredric Jameson calls it 'an exhilarating summa of the forms and possibilities of resistance today', and Naomi Klein endorses it as 'taking readers to the deepest roots of our current crises and proposing radical, and deeply human, solutions'. Hardt and Negri see their book as part of the struggle for an 'alter-modernity'. The term, they explain, aims 'to indicate a decisive break with modernity and the power relation that defines it since alter-modernity in our conception emerges from the traditions of anti-modernity but it also departs from modernity since it extends beyond opposition and resistance'. 4 It is certainly a tribute to the endurance of Fanon's thought that Hardt and Negri take his conception of the stages the colonised intellectual has to go through when fighting colonialism as exemplary of the stages that social struggles have to go through as they evolve from anti- to alter-modernity. As they explain: 'In Fanon's first stage the colonised intellectual assimilates as much as possible to European culture and thought, believing that everything modern and good and right originates in Europe, thus devaluing the colonial past and its present culture.' 5 In the second stage, some of these colonised intellectuals rebel against the Eurocentrism of thought and the

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coloniality of power by celebrating, rearming and relocating themselves symbolically in their original culture. As Fanon put it: 'In order to secure his salvation, in order to escape the supremacy of white culture, the colonised intellectual feels the need to return to his unknown roots and lose himself, come what may, among his barbaric people.' Hardt and Negri explain that Fanon was critical of the pitfalls of such a position, which he saw present in the ideologies of Third World nationalism, negritude and pan-Africanism. This is because, as they put it: 'The risk is that arming identity and tradition, whether dedicated to past suffering or past glories, creates a static position, even in its opposition to modernity's domination.' For Fanon, 'Seeking to stick to tradition or reviving neglected traditions is not only going against history, but against one's people. When a people support an armed or even a political struggle against a merciless colonialism, tradition changes meaning.' 8 This is why 'it]he intellectual has to avoid getting stuck in anti-modernity and pass through it to a third stage'. 9 Here, according to Fanon, Hardt and Negri, the aim is the creation of a new humanity, which moves beyond the static opposition between modernity and anti-modernity and emerges as a dynamic, creative process. The passage from antimodernity to alter-modernity is defined not by opposition but by rupture and transformation. 10 With the failure of so many socialist and anti-colonialist movements behind us, it is easy to note today that many forms of oppositional thinking have turned out to share far more with the colonial or the capitalist modernity they were opposing than what the radicals who adhered to them at the time wished for. Consequently, one can only agree with Hardt and Negri's call for radical thought to move away from being 'anti' to being 'alter', from mere negative opposition to a positive reimagining and pursuing of a radically other alternative. Nonetheless, as I will argue in this chapter, there are some serious difficulties in thinking such a 'rupture' with Fanon's conception of a 'new humanity' in the way Hardt and Negri do, primarily because they do not differentiate between intellectual and affective rupture. As I will demonstrate, Fanon's conception is not as straightforwardly 'alter' as it is made out to be, as it remains propelled by a very particular affective and ambivalent mode of reacting to the colonial and/ or racist dimensions of European

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rnodernity: it is both emotionally fixated on this modernity while at the same time wanting intellectually and politically to go beyond it. This ambivalence ends up restraining the liberating potential of both Fanon's analysis and his politics. The uncritical adoption by Hardt and Negri of Fanon's model reflects the limitations of their own conception of alter-modernity.

Fanon's universalism There is no doubt that the aspiration for the universal is one of the most-if not the most-important values that guides Fanon's politics and analysis. He clearly believed that the struggle for a universalist ethos was part of the very definition of a human being. It was not a mere political choice but, as Homi Bhabha rightly points out, an 'ontology'. 11 Universality is 'inherent in the human condition', Fanon tells us in Black Skin, White Masks. 12 Consequently, the aspiration for the universal has a normative value in his work. Ideologies and beliefs are good or bad depending on how well they help humans take on this universalist aspiration. The critical distance he kept from negritude was always grounded in his aversion towards its particularistic and essentialist tendencies. Likewise, for him, the main weakness of national consciousness was that it could revert at any time towards the most primal particularism. As Homi Bhabha has explained, for Fanon, 'National consciousness is nothing but a crude, empty fragile shell. The cracks in it explain how easy it is for young independent countries to switch back from nation to ethnic group and from state to tribe.' 13 Given the above, it is not surprising to see that, for Fanon, at the core of colonial racism was the attempt to rob the racialised individual of their aspiration to the universal. It did so either by particularising them-'A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man-or at least like a nigger' 14-or by objectifying them, which for Fanon was pretty much the same thing: 'I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.' 15 Racism is continually shown to be a process of 'fixing' the racialised in a negative particularity: 'Yes, the black man is supposed to be a good nigger; once this has been laid down, the rest follows of

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itself. To make him talk pidgin is to fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible.' 16 But again and again it is made clear that the 'fixing' of the black person into an essential racial particularity is in itself worse than the attributing of negative characteristics to this racial particularity: To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivising him, decivilising him, that makes him angry.17 In what follows I want to engage critically with this aspect of Fanon's work, not so much to minimise its insight but to question its prioritisation of this relation or association between racism and 'particularisation' or 'essentialisation'. This is especially important since this association has become part of the bread and butter of anti-racism today. Anti-racism and anti-essentialism particularly go hand in hand. Let me take what I consider a reasonably standard Fanonian statement concerned with exposing what he sees as a common form of French racialisation of black people through a process of fixing and essentialising black identity: 'What I am asserting is that the European has a fixed concept of the Negro, and there is nothing more exasperating than to be asked: "How long have you been in France? You speak French so well.'" 18 I have spent enough time with anti-racists of all kind to know that a statement such as Fanon's circulates today as part of an antiracist common sense. It is considered quite obvious why, if you are a racialised person, being asked 'How long have you been in !Western country of your choice]?' is 'exasperating'. I have often encountered it in my fieldwork. Many people have expressed displeasure in front of me because someone told them in what they felt was a patronising way how well they spoke English or French. I also have heard many of my own students making sarcastic comments about people who

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ask them at parties and events 'And so, where do you come from?' Indeed, among some students steeped in the culture of racism and anti-racism the question has acquired an iconic dimension. They mockingly make such statements as: 'I got the "where do you come from?" treatment last night.' I have also been personally on the receiving end of such apparently innocent inquiries and don't doubt that they can be experienced as exasperating. Nonetheless, at the risk of appearing disingenuous, I want to begin by questioning the obviousness of the 'exasperating' nature of this line of question and commentary. I trust readers will grant me that I fully understand why the question irritates people constructed as 'other' in Western society, whether in the way it centres and legitimises the person who says, 'I am from here and have the power to ask the "where do you come from?" question', or in the way it can have a marginalising effect on the person being addressed. But, although the question can be annoying, one has to state that on reflection it is not clear at all why it should be taken for granted that it has to be so. My first problem with this 'it goes without saying' attitude is in the way it is exclusively centred on the annoying nature of a denial of universality. While, as I have noted above, I have met many people who have expressed Fanonian exasperation in the face of people who ask them where they come from, I have nonetheless also met people who are exasperated precisely because people did not ask them where they have come from. One Lebanese person in London articulated this very clearly following his first after-work drinks at his new workplace: 'I spent the whole evening with them and no one bothered to ask me about Lebanon.' This seems to me something important. Racism can often be experienced as a denial of particularity just as much as it can be a denial of universality, and racists can marginalise people by emphasising their difference just as much as by ignoring their difference. Just as importantly, more often than not, the racialised person in general fluctuates between a desire for particularity and a desire for universality. It might be hard for an anti-racist activist to acknowledge this, but racialised people are not particularly easy to please: if you emphasise their difference they can tell you, 'How dare you ignore my particularity', and if you emphasise their particularity they

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can tell you, 'How dare you ignore my universality'. In my ethnographic experience, this vacillation-to use the Spinozist term -between the desire for the universal and the particular is very much the norm among most racialised people. Indeed, it could be argued that more than the aspiration for the universal, it is this vacillation that is inherent to the human condition. When people aspire to integrate in a new cultural group, or choose to continue to be part of a group they were born into, they do not just fear being particularised and having their universality denied, and they do not just fear being universalised and having their particularity denied. They fear both, and being 'fixed' in both; that is, they fear not being able to have a space where they can vacillate at will between the universal and the particular. From such a perspective, it is the denial of this need for vacillation, and the reduction of racism to a denial of universality, that is itself particular to the Fanonian experience. Indeed, for Fanon, the pursuit of universality and the pursuit of particularity is an either I or question, and it is always clear which is the better choice to make in life: In a more limited group, when students from the Antilles meet in Paris, they have the choice of two possibilities: (1) either to stand with the white world (that is to say, the real world), and, since they will speak French, to be able to confront certain problems and incline to a certain degree of universality in their conclusions; (2) or to reject Europe, 'Yo', and cling together in their dialect, making themselves quite comfortable in what we shall call the Umwelt of Martinique. 19 By making this a matter of choice, Fanon not only denies the basic vacillation that is part and parcel of identification; he also abstracts from the fact that this choice is often based on a certain amount of economic and cultural capital that would incline people to emphasise one or the other. In so doing he also abstracts from the fact that it is always cosmopolitan people with high cultural capital who seem to be far more exclusively haunted by the desire for universality at the expense of a desire for particularity. It seems that such a high

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investment in the universal, what Bourdieu would call a universalist illusio,20 comes automatically with the acquisition ofa high degree of cultural capital within modernity. Furthermore, by struggling so exclusively to stop others from 'fixing' them in their particularity, such cosmopolitan racialised people contribute to fixing themselves in the universal; that is, they end up denying their own vacillation as subjects. I don't want to reduce the Fanonian experience only to its class specificity, but recognising this specificity is nonetheless important in order not to reduce racism to a particular experience of racism, and in order to fully understand the specificity of the experience. There is a similar cosmopolitan/high cultural-capital grounding in Hardt and Negri's affirmation in the passage quoted at the beginning of the chapter, that 'arming identity and tradition ... creates static positions', and in their inability to see that one can also be static in the universal. Their position reiterates their celebration of a kind of universalising movement against what they saw as a particu !arising localism in their earlier work, Empire. This makes them see local identities as irredeemably compromised, as part and parcel of 'the capitalist imperial regime'. 21 Dipesh Chakrabarty has offered a convincing critique of this position in the foreword to the second edition of Provincializing Europe that is worth quoting at length as it speaks to the critique that I am formulating here. As he put it: I find this argument to be oblivious of history itself. It is oblivious of the distinction between the mobility of colonisers that Europeans once enjoyed and the mobility of migrant labor today, skilled or unskilled. Wherever Europeans went in search of new homes, their imperial resources and their domination of the natives made it possible for them to reproduce-with local modifications no doubt-many of the important elements of the life-worlds they had left behind. Did European colonisers in any country ever lose any [of] their own languages through migration? No. Often the natives did. Similarly, migrants in settler-colonial or European countries today live in fear of their children suffering this loss. Much of their local cultural activism is oriented to prevent this from happening.

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Only a critic blind to the question of how the unequal legacies of colonial rule actually inflect the contemporary processes of globalisation can dismiss this activism as the malady of'nostalgia'. 22 Although Hardt and Negri make a point of addressing certain critiques of Empire in Commonwealth, Chakrabarty's critique is not among them. Also, their endorsement of Fanon's universalism indicates that they uncritically share with other cosmopolitan social critics a lack of appreciation for what lies outside a celebration of such a universalism, and a lack of awareness of the specificity of their aspiration. To say that an experience is specific to cosmopolitans is in no way to devalue the importance or relevance of such an experience, but it is to recognise the analytical limitations of any theorising that is based exclusively on such an experience. But, as I will now argue, there is more than a question of cultural capital behind this exclusive desire for the universal. For it is clear from the above that the universal is not a mere choice for Fanon, it is an obsession. We can say that he exhibits not just a willingness to locate himself in the universal but a psychological fixation with that universal. Such an affective state cannot be understood simply in terms of class aspirations. As I will now explain, it is also the product of a particular subjectivity grounded in a specific form of racialisation that comes with this cosmopolitan fixation with the universal. It makes one paradoxically both fixated on, and fixated on transcending, the racialising force one is subjected to. This is the effect of what I call mis-interpellation. But before moving to examine the meaning of this mis-interpellation, it is necessary to further legitimise the move I will now make to treating Fanon's pronouncements in such a personalising and psychologising way. This takes us to the second problem one faces when encountering Fanonian statements such as the one we started with above: 'There is nothing more exasperating than to be asked, "How long have you been in France? You speak French so well."' 23

Fanon's muddled perspectivism If we are interested, as Fanon is, in a phenomenology of racial experience and not just in delineating the existence of structural racism

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through an objectivist analysis, we must ask ourselves: how do we actually know that the person asking the question 'How long have you been in France?', or 'Where do you come from?', is not simply asking a genuinely inquiring question aimed at making the addressee welcome by showing a genuine interest in their origins and/ or in how long they have lived in a particular place? How do we know it is not just the racialised person who is being over-sensitive here? I would take it that only long-term participatory research, which allows long periods of familiarity with the people concerned and where the researcher is capable of capturing the question at the time it is asked, could indicate who is being racist and who is being over-sensitive. However, my primary interest here is more in raising this question than in answering it, because it points to a tradition of anti-racist research that mixes activism and social science-to which the work of Fanon has added considerable legitimacywhereby the analysis of 'racism' dispenses with this question altogether. It is as if, when researching 'racism', there is no need for us to know whether it is the racists, their culture and their social milieu that is being researched, or the racialised, their culture and their social sensitivities. If we choose to take perspectivism seriously rather than ignoring it, then we face important but productive analytical difficulties that 'anti-racism' generally avoids altogether: if we take the racists' milieu, practices and perspectives as our object of study, do we not need to restrict ourselves to studying precisely that-the racists and their practices? The difficulty is that this does not tell us everything about 'racism' since we don't really know what effect the racism of the racists has had on the racialised-to say that a white racist tried to inferiorise a black person does not mean immediately that the black person will feel inferiorised-although it does tell us that we cannot understand them without understanding the impact this attempt has on them and how they deal with it. But even this assumes that they have noted this attempt to inferiorise them. I have on occasion seen anti-racist activists note what they deem to be a racist article in a newspaper and scream, 'The community is going to be on fire', only to then note that hardly anyone in the community noticed the article. It is also the case that often many of those who noticed it did not notice that it was racist. Anti-racist activists have a

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long history of tracking racism and becoming very sensitive to how it is expressed, such that they can sometimes capture it in the choice of a single word. Often, however, they wrongly assume that everyone in the racialised community they are concerned with has a similar sensitivity. The same is true if we are studying racism from the perspective of the racialised. We can observe and analyse what 'hurts' and 'exasperates' them. But even if we can reasonably say that racialised people have acquired a historical habitus that makes them good at 'sniffing out' racism when it comes their way, which is certainly true, it is nonetheless a difficult issue for social scientific research to assume the 'racism' of specific people simply on the basis of a study from the perspective of the racialised. Although these issues are less important in the analysis of structural racism, they come to the fore when one is interested in racist emotions and racist interaction. The problem with Fanon's work is that it invites this questioning, yet the sensitivity towards such a perspectivism is quite minimal in his work. What we get instead is a muddled perspectivism, where it is never clear whether the object of analysis is the racialised or the racist. That is, what we really get is Fanon's imaginary of the racist interaction, based on his experience of racialisation and the experience of the patients he has treated. It is this fact that legitimises treating his analytical statements biographically and in the context of his own racialisation. Now, to be clear, I am not trying to say that Fanon therefore does not offer us any knowledge of racism. This would be a ridiculous claim. Indeed, the powerful understanding that Fanon gives us of the experience of racism is, in a sense, precisely based on the specificity of this muddled perspective that takes us right to the heart of his racialised imaginary. But if it speaks to so many, it is because many share this imaginary. From an analytical perspective, however, it also means that, if we are to fully understand and evaluate what it is that Fanon is really explaining to us, we need to make sure that we situate it precisely in this imaginary. This is why, to now go back to our original inquiry, understanding the obviousness of the 'exasperation' of Fanon is to both understand why it was 'particularly' exasperating for him and why this particular experience is nonetheless shared by so many. The first thing I have pointed to is that

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fanon's exasperation is specific to racialised people with high cultural cosmopolitan capital-people who, by the very nature of their cultural capital, value universality over particularity. What I want to argue now is that such people also have a particular affective experience of racism that marks the way they end up aspiring for universality.

Mis-interpellation: Fanon between European universalism and colonial racism In an important way, the 'elementary' structure of Fanon's racial experience is already present in what he went through when he joined the French army. According to his biographers, it was because he was strongly moved by Europe's universal calling that he joined the Free French forces in fighting the Nazis. There, he experienced the racism that white French soldiers meted out to black soldiers: a denial of 'the 'brotherhood of men' by the very forces supposed to be fighting for the brotherhood of men against the Fascists. It is this more than anything else that started the process that left him disillusioned with European universality. As Ella Shohat points out: 'Not unlike African-Americans who spilled blood in the name of freedom during World War II only to find their own blood literally segregated from "white blood" in the army blood supply, Fanon discovered that he fought a war for a free France which was as racist as Vichy France.' 24 Europe instils in the black person the aspiration for universality, but it denies them this aspiration at the very moment it encourages them to aspire to it and believe that they are entitled to it; the black person has to endure both the hope and the shattering of hope that are part of this process. It is this structure that informs what remains, beyond doubt, the most powerful part of Black Skin, White Masks-the 'Look, a Negro' passage-and what I am calling mis-interpellation. 25 If, with 26 Althusser, we define racism as a racial process of 'interpellation'that is, a process of constructing racialised subjects-we can differentiate between three forms of racialisation. The first, noninterpellation, is a mode of racism linked with the experience of invisibility, where the racialised feel ignored and non-existent. While they physically exist within the social realm, they are not recognised to exist within the symbolic order. They are like those maids in early modern

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paintings whose presence in the bedroom did not seem to be reason enough to stop their masters from engaging in sexual play. The second mode of interpellation, and perhaps that most commonly associated with racism, is negative interpellation. Here the racialised is definitely noticed and made visible. The symbolic structure of society has a place for them, but it is a place defined by negative characteristics. It hails them with negative attributes: 'lazy, dirty, thief, social problem'. Rather than having to fight for visibility, the racialised subject has to fight for valorisation. Most immigrant multicultural struggles for 'recognition' take this form. The third form of racialisation, mis-interpellation, is a racism of a different order, for it is a drama in two acts: in the first instance the racialised person is interpellated as belonging to a collectivity 'like everybody else'. They are hailed by the cultural group or the nation, or even by modernity, which claims to be addressing 'everyone'. And the yet-to-be-racialised person believes that the hailing is for 'everyone' and answers the call thinking that there is a place for them waiting to be occupied. Yet no sooner do they answer the call and claim their spot than the symbolic order brutally reminds them that they are not part of everyone: 'No, I wasn't talking to you. Piss off. You are not part of us.' This is the core of the Fanonian racial drama: Fanon hears the European call of the universal, and everything in him makes him believe that the call is directed to him. He therefore answers the call, only to find out that the call was not really addressed to him. This rejection unfolds most dramatically on the train in the 'Look, a Negro' passage from Black Skin, White Masks, which Fanon relates with a force well suited to the intensity of the traumatic betrayal that the mis-interpellated racialised subject experiences in the process. Fanon hops on the train and takes his seat (on the way to universality, as it were), lured to believe for a time that he is, as he has always desired to be, like everyone else: 'All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together,' he tells us. 27 Yet he is not allowed to settle comfortably into his 'abstract universal' persona. The symbolic order, through the voice of a child, brings him back down to his racial particularity: 'Look, a Negro.' What is terrible about this particularity is its reality. This was not someone imagining the

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black person to be anything other than he was. It was not removing someone from the reality of universality and dragging them into a domain of illusion and mystification. Being black, like being a universal, was a reality. It was one reality used to batter another one: "'Look, a Negro!" says the boy. It was true,' notes Fanon with a touch of lamentation. 28 And with the return of the particularity comes the negative interpellation; that is, not only does the subject fall from being a universal to being a particular-'! discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics' -but also they fall into becoming a bad racialised particular: "'Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened." Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me.' 29 One of the earliest recorded grand moments of mis-interpellation must be the proclamation of 1802 by Louis Delgres, the military leader of the anti-slavery movement who was ruthlessly crushed by Napoleon. Delgres writes to Napoleon begging him to understand that all he has done is believe in the ideals of the Republic. He has been interpellated as a Republican. And the Republic is about to tell him: 'Piss off. You were not the one we hailed': 'First Consul of the Republic, warrior-philosopher from whom we expected the justice we deserved, why have we been abandoned to mourn how far we live from the land that produced the sublime ideas we have so often admired? Ah! Without a doubt, one day you will know of our innocence. Then it will be too late.' 30 There is something naiïve about Delgres that is true of all mis-interpellated subjects. He has been interpellated as an upholder of the sublime ideas of the Republic, and he seems truly not to understand why the First Consul is not interested in him upholding the values of the Republic. Even more tragically, he expects to be treated in a very Republican way at the very moment the Republic is betraying him. Let me use here the following narrative of an experience of misinterpellation that I recorded in my fieldwork with Lebanese immigrants in Boston. Like Fanon's account, it powerfully captures the traumatic effect that follows the mis-interpellation. The interview is with a twenty-year-old Christian Lebanese woman born in Boston: When I talk to other Lebanese girls they all say the same thing. When they were in elementary school they had no

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l

sense of their difference ... It all starts to change in middle school. I always thought of myself as white ... we never had any sense of being from some kind of very different culture ... I still don't have a sense of being from a very different culture ... I mean, yes, there is the Lebanese family, family and more family and all that ... but all Americans talk a lot about family, you know. There is the food but you know how it is ... it's not that the Lebanese don't eat anything but Lebanese food. Most families eat everything. We always ate spaghetti, hamburgers, pizza, roasts, sausages and all that at the same time as Lebanese food. In our family we didn't even listen to Arabic music. My dad, as you know [Her dad happens to be someone I knew as a teenager in Lebanon-GHI, is not into Arabic music, and I'm being kind of nice here. Anyway, this is to tell you that I was not at all kind of pre-disposed to be different. As I said, I always thought of myself as just another white American girl who happens to have Lebanese origins .. . then around the age of ten, eleven or so there were little things that made me feel different. There was no put down. Like when I talk to Mireille [her Australian cousin--GH] I never have to deal with the kind of attitudes she has to deal with. People around here didn't have a negative stereotype of the Lebanese when I grew up . . . [Then] one thing happened that was quite upsetting ... I was in Boston with some girls. We had just seen a movie and we were walking to the T station and there was this guy, a busker, drawing cartoons of people ... you know ... he was asking for something like twenty dollars for a cartoon ... and I jokingly said: I only have five dollars, would you draw me for five dollars. He said, OK sit down. So I sat down while the others were observing him drawing me, giggling and saying things like, 'Yes, that's

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good' or 'Ha ... that's funny'. And then he gave me the cartoon and I looked at it and it was just really hard to explain how I felt. Like it was nothing like what I expected. The cartoon was really like what I expected a Saudi to look like ... not me. And I was in this situation where all my friends were laughing approvingly about the cartoon and I was thinking, 'But why isn't anyone saying: that's not at all like you.' I really wanted someone to say this but no one did and at the same time I felt it would be really lame if I said it. I was just very upset while at the same time trying to appear as if 'How funny is this cartoon ... ha ha ha ... ' I got home that night and when I was alone in my room I started to cry. I was ashamed to even show it to my mum. It kind of dawned on me that maybe I was not who I thought I was ... For this person, her original imagined interpellation is as a white person (a common experience among Lebanese, particularly Christian Lebanese, immigrants) until she gets the rejection of the symbolic order delivered inadvertently-presumably without racist intent-by the cartoon drawing which makes the person suddenly face the fact that 'maybe I was not who I thought I was'. However, one notes that the mis-interpellation happens only because the person concerned shares the racism that comes with the initial interpellation that makes her think that 'Saudi' is not such a wonderful thing to be. Thus, in the very process of being rejected from the circle of 'whiteness', the subject is still adhering to the belief in the superiority of a 'white aesthetics', which makes white people beautiful and Saudis ugly. She continues to experience herself as interpellated at the very moment she isn't. The mis-interpellated subjects develop an emotionally ambivalent relation to the source of their mis-interpellation. They continue to valorise it as the source of meaning in their lives, but they also have aggressive feelings towards it as the source of their rejection. One can also capture another dimension of the trauma of mis-interpellation by recalling Judith Butler's important analysis of foreclosure in the process of interpellation. 31 Just as the process of heterosexual interpellation involves the foreclosure of homosexual

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identifications, the process of white racial identification above seems to involve a foreclosure of identification as a coloured person. In this sense, mis-interpellation forces the subjects back onto the very domain that has been foreclosed. This additional traumatic layer that accompanies the process of mis-interpellation results from the paradoxical effect of this face-off with the foreclosed otherness that is within us. This increases the ambivalent relation one has to the original object of identification, making the mis-interpellated subjects want to cling even more to the very identity location from which they have been ejected while also having further aggressive feelings for what it is making them endure. It is a love/hate relation reminiscent of the psychological state known as 'avoidance' that children have with an abusive parent: on one hand they want to get away from them because they know they are the source of their pain and suffering, but on the other hand they keep wanting to go back to them because they cannot bring themselves to believe that they are not really the source of love and hope. This generates a conflicting desire to both destroy and preserve the source of such an affective state. I believe this is the kind of affect that Fanon has towards European modernity and which he sublimates into a search for another modernity. The negative part of the affect is very similar to Guex's nevrose d'abandon that Fanon himself deploys to understand the neurosis of another black person, Jean Veneuse: Contrasting what she calls the abandonment neurosis, which is pre-Oedipal in nature, to the real post-Oedipal conflicts described by orthodox Freudians, Dr Guex analyses two types, the first of which seems to illustrate the plight of Jean Veneuse: 'It is this tripod-the anguish created by every abandonment, the aggression to which it gives rise, and the devaluation of the self that flows out of it-that supports the whole symptomatology of this neurosis.' 32

If we go back to our different forms of racist interpellations, we can say that the effect of the racist mis-interpellation on a person's selfconstitution is far more traumatic than the effect of negative interpellation or non-interpellation because it lures the subjects into

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dropping their defences vis-a-vis the dominant culture, thinking for a moment that they are not racialised, that they can self-constitute themselves into 'normal' universal subjects of modernity. In the case of the Lebanese girl I related above, this universal subject takes the form of whiteness. In Fanon's case, the subject is seduced into hoping and believing in universality as the space where they can form themselves into a subject. The effect of rejection that follows this moment of hope is inevitably a form of social and/ or psychological disintegration. As is well known, Althusser's concept of interpellation was inspired by Jacques Lacan's conception of subject formation in his work on the 'mirror stage'. In that work, Lacan details the existence of a period in life when a child begins to experience a disparity between their internal sense of themselves as fragmented, and the ideal image of a cohesive non-fragmented self that is given to them from the outside (the mirror image). Lacan's work builds on various elements of the psychoanalytic tradition to offer a concept of the subject that is constructed through the fragmented self's constant attempt to almost literally 'pull itself together' in order to live up to the nonfragmented ideal of itself. It also invites a conception of identification that sees the formation of identity as a 'trying to be' rather than as a simple process of 'being'. Althusser's interpellation showed how this process of self-constitution and pulling oneself together happens socially every time we are invited to negotiate a socially defined subject position. Racism-any kind of racism-on the other hand, and as Fanon describes so well, works as a centrifugal force. For racialised subjects who are 'trying to be', and struggling to 'pull themselves together', a more energy-consuming centripetal effort is required for them to maintain their sense of togetherness in the face of others. What's more, as Fanon also tells us, racism already invites the racialised to become more conscious of their bodies in a debilitating way. Consciousness here makes the body dysfunctional. It is like trying to be conscious about which finger ought to hit which key on the keyboard while typing: 'And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man's eyes,' writes Fanon. 'An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of

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his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negative activity. It is a third-person consciousness.' 33 But racist mis-interpellation does more. Precisely because, as argued above, before operating as a rejection it invites the racialised subject to gather themselves hopefully as they are answering the hailing call, its effect is far more traumatising: 'I shouted a greeting to the world and the world slashed away my joy.' 34 This is what happened to Fanon on the train. No sooner had he safely pulled himself together, 'trying to be' a universal subject, than the shattering rejection came: 'Look, a Negro'. The sense of disintegration that misinterpellation creates cannot be understood in isolation from this initial hopeful belief in universality that came before it, and that cannot be abandoned even as one is disintegrating, or rather precisely because one is disintegrating. With negative interpellation, racism works on a subject who does not have much expectation of being part of European modernity in any of its many guises. They are hurt, but in an important sense they are ready to be hurt. This is what the first-generation immigrants I interview say, often enough, about the racism that the local population metes out to them: 'We understand', 'We would have done the same if it was our country'. With mis-interpellation, the subject is ambushed. Just as they are Jed to believe that there is every reason to be hopeful, their hope is killed before their very eyes. The subject shatters, and the effort to pull themselves together following that moment becomes Herculean: I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart . . . assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled ... What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? ... My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day.35 It is in the midst of this traumatic experience that Fanon hangs on to the quest for universality-at the very moment where his

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disintegration happens because of his belief in universality. We get a further understanding here as to why the mis-interpellated subject is cornered into believing in the very thing that causes his or her disintegration. The cause of one's disintegration is the primary source of our capacity to constitute ourselves. The mis-interpellated subject bas to find a way of reconciling this paradox. For Farron, this reconciliation is done with the invention of a new universality that is supposed to be better than Europe's universality: 'Let us decide not to imitate Europe and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavour to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.' 36 But like the legendary 'don't think about the red dress', Europe is left haunting the very attempt to transcend Europe: Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe ... Humanity is waiting for something from us other than such an imitation . . . For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. 37 And it is precisely because of this haunting that Fanon's transcendence remains a negation. It is the contradictory desire to negate Europe while still being fixated on it that comes out as an attempt to negate European universalism with another universalism. Fanon's very 'anti' rather than 'alter' conception of violence in The Wretched of the Earth, 38 leading as it does to what Achille Mbembe has called a Fanonian cul-de-sac, 39 cannot be understood without the affective charge that is generated by this mis-interpellation and which announces that the primary aim of decolonisation is to ensure that 'the last shall be first'. 40 The affective 'anti' remains to continually haunt the intellectualised 'alter'.

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Conclusion It seems to me that Hardt and Negri are oblivious to this complexity generated by the interplay between the emotional and the intellectual/ strategic in their adoption of the Fanonian 'model' as one of the bases of their conception of alter-modernity. For Hardt and Negri, both alter and anti seem to imply a total negation of what one is being anti or alter about. Affectively speaking, however, to transcend means to be able to let go and consequently 'be able to live with' more so than to 'want to negate', which signals the affective opposite: an inability to transcend. This has to do with more than just a correct interpretation of Fanon. Today we are increasingly faced with colonial and post-colonial relations that call for an ability to live with, rather than for forms of negation. Ifwe look at the Arab/Israeli conflict, or at the encounter between the West and Muslim immigrants, one of the primary tasks of transcending these conflicts is to transcend the affective states that see solutions only in forms of negating the other. Fanon's conception of the Algerian revolution is no model for transcending the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Here the aim is not to create 'a new man' but more to create a space that allows for a multiplicity of realities to coexist together. Rather than a multiculturalism that allows for a plurality of opinions, what is needed is what Bruno Latour calls multinaturalism, a space that allows for a multiplicity of ontologies. Strangely, this in fact is also more in line with imagining a modus vivendi among Negri and Hardt's multitude-a flow of distinct and yet coexisting interests, movements and struggles-than any 'new humanity' can be. Indeed the politics of mis-interpellation lives on most dramatically today in the affective politics of the terrorists responsible for 9/ 11 and the London bombings, who on the whole represent a classic case of mis-interpellated subjects. As most studies of those terrorists have noted, far from being simply anti-West, the terrorists grew up in and were interpellated by Western modernity before experiencing a sense of rejection that turned their fascination into enmity. Kenan Malik sums up the sociological literature on the background of the terrorists thus: 'Many of the young men who flew the planes into the TWin Towers, or blew themselves up on a London Tube, were

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educated in the West, joined the jihad in the West, and expressed an anger and a nihilism nurtured in the West.' 41 Whatever one may think of this terrorism as a form of political struggle, one thing can be said for sure: it is far from the pluralist politics of the multitude advocated by Negri and Hardt that aims at transcending capitalist modernity and its contradictions, and taking us into new places. Yet it is affectively akin to the very Fanonian moves they are advocating as a kind of 'ideal type' for their political program. Their 'new commonwealth' deserves a much better thought-out affective politics.

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Part IV

7

On narcissistic victim.hood

I am ambivalent about talking publicly about the Palestinian question.' It's one of those subjects that, by definition, I don't enjoy giving a lecture on. I am being very honest here. It comes from many years of tangentially dabbling with speaking around the Arab/Israeli conflict and always ends up in places and spaces where I don't want to end up. Perhaps this kind of experience has made me prefer the safety of writing-I prefer to let those who want to get kind of 'wriggly' about what I am saying do so in the privacy of their homes as they are reading me, rather than face to face. And perhaps because of this, as I was thinking about how to structure and present this lecture, I decided that I would be more comfortable if I started by explaining why I cannot speak publicly about Gaza. This is of course a rhetorical device since I will beindeed I am already-speaking about Gaza. But it is not just a rhetorical device. 'Why I cannot speak publicly' also means 'why I always feel as if I am speaking to myself' about Gaza. I will dwell more on this issue, but it should be obvious why the two can be one and the same. Lecturing is above all about communication, and what I am saying is that I have serious doubts about the capacity to communicate on a topic like this. I think there are topics that are

non-communicable at specific times, and their non-communicability does not come from one's incapacity to communicate. Since we are going to be talking about narcissism here, let me say that I actually have a healthy narcissistic view of my capacity to communicate. But I think that there are topics that are structurally non-communicable for an intellectual and an academic. Here emerges another crucial thing: when I say that I can't speak about Gaza, it should be clear that I am not speaking to you as an Australian, or someone from an Arab background, or someone with certain political beliefs. My 'I', as it always is when I speak publicly, is principally an academic T, and as an academic my priority in the midst of any political conflict that I know something about is always to ask the question: what can I say that makes a difference? For more than thirty years I have been absorbing the political views that come from this side and that side about the Arab/Israeli conflict: about Palestine, about Israel, the history of Israel, the history of Palestine, whether Zionists this or that, whether Palestinians this or that. I know all the tired, one-sided rhetorical arguments and where they come from. So I ask myself: what is the job of an academic? Is it to provide intellectual ammunition to one political side or another, or is it to provide an other view? I take this idea of an other view very seriously; that is, a view that will come from nowhere, in the sense of outside the existing space of expected political positions; a view that is not a slave to the political; a view that will not allow immediately one side or another to say about me, 'He is oursthis guy thinks beautifully and he is ours because we can use what he is saying as ammunition in our political struggle without it changing in any way what we think and the direction of our practices.' I don't have this view of academic work. This doesn't mean, by the way, that I am not political and that I don't take sides-as you will see, I take sides. But at the same time I want to be able to offer a distinctly academic voice. And it is here that the difficulty lies: in the case of the Arab/Israeli conflict, such a distinct voice is increasingly impossible to produce. That's why I feel that I cannot speak about Gaza. Because I find that the political in this domain is such an incredible colonising machine-the political as a whole, not just one side or another. Everything that comes onto the scene is taken, adapted and made a slave to the political. Long ago, I learned from Pierre Bourdieu

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that there is something incommensurable between academic and political logic. The political imposes a logic of friend and enemy that is, or at least should be, foreign to academic logic. But I find that every time I speak about the Arab/Israeli conflict with an academic logic that is not in the logic of friend and enemy, what I say is transformed immediately by the colonising power of the political into a friend-or-enemy, 'is he with us or against us?' modality of speech. One final point about this difficulty of speaking about Gaza: speaking about something involves the joy of communicating, which for an academic is the joy of teaching someone something they don't know, or the pleasure of making them think harder than they were thinking before. As a teacher, I enjoy the moment I am looking at my students' faces and see a twinkle in somebody's eye that tells me that their brain is processing what I am saying. They're taking it and going with it somewhere new. This is a joy even when you know that the student is taking what you are saying critically. The joy comes from feeling that you are propelling someone in new directions. Now this is something that I hardly ever feel that I am achieving when speaking about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Again, this is not because of me. I have slowly acquired the certainty that there aren't very many people who come to hear someone speaking about Palestine and Israel, and come with the intention of learning something new. Most people come with the rather incredible belief that they already know all there is to know about the conflict. What's more, they more often than not come having already pigeonholed the speaker into one political side or another. Consequently, when as a speaker you face such a crowd, you can see that these are not the faces of people who are yearning to know something new. People sit and look at you, and you can see what each one is attitudinally saying with their whole body: 'OK, you come up with what you want to come up with, and let me tell you if you know what you are talking about or not.' Everybody thinks they are very smart and knowledgeable when it comes to the Arab/Israeli conflict, and one has to wonder why a conflict with so many smart people involved can go on for so long. Let's say you make a point and someone pro-Palestinian is listening to you and they like what you are saying. You can feel them nodding and saying, 'Good man. He's intelligent.' But in the eyes of the

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subject-who-always-already-knows, 'he' is never intelligent because he taught me something new or made me think in a new way; 'he' is deemed intelligent because he just said what I already know so he must be clever. There is no possibility of challenging such a person. That's what I mean when I say that in a domain like the Israeli/Palestinian conflict I cannot make people think. This happens all the time. I'm not making it up. To be fair, it is a situation common to most areas of intense communal conflict. Indeed I have developed an increased sensitivity to this situation because of my experience while studying and speaking about the Lebanese civil war. Such conflicts produce what I call confirmationist intellectuals. These are intellectuals who get their cultural capital by confirming the common sense of their mob (think Keith Windschuttle if you want an Australian reference). 2 People hear them and they tell them: 'You're so good.' 'You're so good' here doesn't mean you have made me think-'you're so good' means you have just confirmed that I am right. If there is anything different in what makes such a person 'good' it often resides in the way they say something rather than what they say: 'You're so good, because you said exactly what I thought, but you said it beautifully.' 'You said it so poetically', or 'you said it so scientifically', all becomes about form (again, think about Keith Windschuttle's deployment of 'numbers' in relation to Indigenous deaths if you want a local reference to 'scientistic confirmationism'). People actually come to you after a lecture and congratulate you by saying, 'Well said. You hit the nail on the head', or The way you said it brought tears to my eyes'. If you are a confirmationist academic, this pleases you. If you are not, you immediately notice where the problem lies. These people think they are congratulating you, but what they are really saying is: 'You are a fantastic academic because you have spent twenty years working on your topic and you have come up with the truth, which as it so happens we already know without spending even a day researching the subject. Well done!' As you can understand, such an over-politicised environment is not conducive to subtle academic judgment-which in Bourdieu-ian fashion I see primarily in opposition to 'political judgment'. Notice also that a subtle academic judgment is not the same as the 'middle ground' or a 'complex' judgment. This is the source of an

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added difficulty. Sometimes in such conflicts certain realities are very simple, and the 'middle ground' and 'complexity' are themselves political tools used to muddy what is otherwise a very clear situation. Here academics face a very difficult situation. Sometimes it is analytically good to take the middle ground. But how does one distinguish such a position from a discourse of domination replete with 'both sides should .. .'? Sometimes unsubtle things need to be said. But how can an academic say them subtly, especially with the confirmationist intellectuals waiting in the wings? No sooner do the latter hear a familiar 'sound bite' that allows them to drag things to their mediocre level than they start attacking academics for lacking 'subtlety' and for not understanding the 'complexity' of the situation. Having said as much as I can say about why I cannot speak about Gaza, let me now do what I have always intended to do, which is of course, speak about Gaza. And with what I have just pointed out in mind let me start by saying a very unsubtle thing. It is up to you to judge whether I say it subtly or unsubtly despite its unsubtleness. So here it is: to me, Gaza is in a permanent state of criminality. It is not what happens in Gaza, it is not the invasion of Gaza, it is not an event in Gaza. Gaza itself is a permanent state of criminality. I cannot be more subtle about it. Indeed, I think it is one of these situations where more subtlety, or more 'balance' or more 'fairness', is simply unethical. I am trying to emphasise that sometimes criminality is not an event. Sometimes criminality is not a happening in the sense of a product of a specific action like an invasion. We tend to think of criminality as something that happens between two states of affairs that are normal. This is why discussing whether the invasion of Gaza is criminal, and debating whether it is ethical or unethical, invites us to think that there was and will be a non-criminal and ethical reality before and after the invasion. First, it fails to highlight the otherwise very clear state of affairs in which the inhuman, unethical and criminal treatment of the people of Gaza by Israel-whether through its embargo or through many other strategies of oppression, impoverishment and humiliation-is a permanent state of affairs. But more fundamentally, it also fails to see the criminality that is inherent in the very existence of a space such as Gaza, where an occupation force manages the trick of pretending that it is no longer an

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occupying force by simply reneging on its responsibility to 'fostering life' while trying to keep everything else under its tight control. To differentiate the invasion too much from this background is to be complicit in normalising this permanent structural state of criminality. But even if we agree to discuss the ethics of the invasion itself, I also think that discussing whether it is morally justifiable or not is itself a Western form of self-indulgence that has a long colonial history: only the powerful who can afford the leisurely space of selfreflexivity over their nasty deed can engage in such a form of questioning. This is why I just cannot relate to it as something that is ethical-to sit down and discuss whether what happened in Gaza is really ethical or not. To me it is so beyond the bloody obvious. That is what I mean by not speaking subtly. It is beyond the bloody obvious that what happened in Gaza is unacceptable by any standard of our humanity. It is very simple and one-sided. Anyone who wants to talk about the need for a more complex view, or about what 'both sides' need to do, is again complicit in trying to make the obvious less obvious, if their starting point is anything other than an acknowledgment of the unacceptability of what has happened. There is another element of self-indulgence in 'discussing' the ethics of the Gaza invasion. Such a discussion follows a growing trend in the colonial West today, a trend we might call 'the colonial/ racist usage of white post-exterminatory existential angst'. By 'white' I don't mean people who are white in terms of skin colour but as I define them in White Nation: people who have accumulated certain 'modern' modes of 'civilised' cultural capital. 3 What is this post-exterminatory angst? It is the angst experienced by killers after a massacre. There was a time when white colonialists claimed-or should we say had the hide to claim-that the difference between whites and uncivilised others is that 'they' do atrocious inhumane massacres. White people don't do atrocious inhumane massacres. There is a marked shift today, especially in the wake of Abu Ghraib, which, while not a massacre, put the West face to face with its macabre capacity to dehumanise others in the most primitive of ways. White colonialists no longer say, 'We don't do atrocious inhumane massacres.' Rather, they say, 'We do them and they do them, but the "crucial difference" between us is that we suffer existential angst afterwards.'

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They don't suffer existential angst. We can bomb the shit out of Iraq and kill thousands of people just like Saddam bombed the shit out of the Kurds. The difference between him and us is that we call for an investigation afterwards and we suffer from existential angst. He and his people don't. White colonialists have become such experts in the art of having investigations after the killings and coming out feeling superior after them. It makes them forget that they've just done a killing and allows them instead to experience a redemptive celebration of their undiminished, investigative, democratic fervour. What makes Third World exterminators so inferior is that they suffer from a lack of such an investigative zeal and therefore never experience the existential angst that comes with it. Israel has been seriously affected by this trend. Or perhaps one might say it is a pioneer in the manufacturing of the post-exterminatory, existentially anxious warrior. You would no doubt have enjoyed the film Waltz with Bashir, a film dealing with the effect of the Sabra and Shatila massacre on those who were involved in it. 4 I am not diminishing the film's capacity to work critically within Israeli society and to speak to its many silences, but you look at it and you will see how the Israelis in that film are investigating their post-exterminatory angst while all the others have no angst. The Lebanese who were doing the killing in Sabra and Shatila appeared to be some kind of moronic killers, moving towards the killing and disappearing like packs of wolves in the night. I have no sympathy for the Lebanese Christian right, and I think they were lethal killers, but I do research with them and I know that they are quite capable of angst themselves. I have worked a lot since the mid-1980s with Lebanese Christian fighters. I have just come back from Lebanon where I lived for two weeks with one of the ex-fighters whom I knew long ago, and had interviewed in 1985 in the midst of the war for my PhD thesis. About five or six years ago this man mysteriously started suffering from a paralysis of his leg. He underwent all kinds of medical tests and they couldn't find anything wrong with him. Then he started experiencing a paralysis of his hand and his surgeon sent him to the psychiatric unit, which he says was of no help. Later he started seeing a psychoanalyst, who was also not helpful. Indeed, mid-way through this period he started suffering from paralysis in his other hand. It is a long story that I am trying to

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put together about him, but to cut it short: around three years after the initial paralysis in his leg began, the paralysis began to disappear. By now, however, his muscles had been seriously damaged. Along with the paralysis ending, the man suddenly confided to his psychoanalyst (and later to me) what he thought had actually triggered his inexplicable paralysis. His paralysis started when his son was around ten. At that age, his son started looking like a young Palestinian boy the man had killed during the Lebanese civil war, and who had been roughly the same age. Everything about his son started reminding him of the boy he had killed, so much so that eventually he could not bring himself to cuddle his son, because he felt as though he was about to cuddle the boy he had killed. It wasn't until his son moved on from the age he imagined the boy he had killed to have been that he started magically regaining-but now only partially-the function of his hands and feet. So, there is existential angst that silently works on people and destroys them, and there is an existential angst that is advertised everywhere one goes and is invested with a political function. I think that there is no doubt that Gaza will produce a lot of existential angst of the silent type, and this is not something that a discussion of the ethics of the Gaza war can practically deal with. This is something of the order of the social unconscious that will gnaw at our very being for as long as we are complicit in the perpetuation of the state of permanent criminality that exists today. Gaza will haunt us and will slowly paralyse us, just as the Holocaust haunts us today. And let me immediately rush to say that I am not equating Gaza with the Holocaust. I am not saying that Israelis are committing atrocities in Gaza that are equal to the atrocities that were committed in the Holocaust. I don't want to say it, and not just to be polite: I don't want to say it because I don't think it is correct to say it. But I am saying that the numb Western silence over Gaza will produce similar cultural effects in the future, even if not with the same intensity. That is, although the atrocities both of the Gaza invasion and the structural atrocities I spoke about before are not equal to those of the Holocaust, there is nonetheless a dimension in which they are comparable, a dimension where we are not talking about apples and pears. This is insofar as both contain a dimension of extreme

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nationalist narcissism that becomes blind to the humanity of its others-even if that is not the only dimension of either. And when I say it will haunt us, the 'us' means all of us around the world today. The Holocaust was a European affair at a time when the notion of a 'European affair' was possible to think. Then it became Middle Easternised, Americanised and internationalised. Those very European, American and Jewish diasporic, financial and political transnational channels and routes that were used to internationalise a European problem are now part of what globalises a Middle Eastern problem-along with the Arab diasporic, financial and political channels that have emerged in the post-war era. They are what make a Middle Eastern question thinkable as a 'global affair'. This is why we are here today talking about a Middle Eastern problem as intensely as if it were a local problem. But why then this paradoxical lack of a sense of emergency over Gaza, given its nature as a global affair? Some like to think that it is simply a Western complicity with Israel. I am sure this is at least partially true. But at the same time there are many reasons to believe that this complicity is nowhere near as absolute as some might think it is. Indeed, I cannot say this with empirical certainty, but I think that the people of goodwill who want to find a solution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict form a substantial force today. I wouldn't be surprised if we're even a clear majority. I might surprise a lot of people by saying this, but I don't believe that there are nasty people in the way political people think of their enemies as evil. I am a seriously naive person about this. Many people I know, including in my own family, see the Palestinians as plain evil. I look at Palestinians, whether they are officials of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas people, and I see them as people struggling to make sense of their environment and trying to achieve a decent future for the Palestinian people. I know about the intolerance and the corruption-I am not that naïve…but I still think that this is what, in the main, they are each trying in their own way to do. Likewise, I can't think of anyone more politically foreign to me than Netanyahu, and while I know about his bigotry and his blindness to the suffering of the Palestinians, I just can't relate to people who think of him as someone evil. As I said, I am naive. I can't explain what is happening in Gaza and in Palestine more generally by

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distributing accusations. I think that this 'politics of the will' that explains everything as the product of someone doing something bad is part of the problem, for it fails to see the depth of the impasse in which all people are operating. Such accusatory politics becomes part of the impasse rather than a solution to it, and this, to me, is really what needs to be tackled today. What is it that makes the Palestinian/Israeli conflict such an endless generator of dead ends and impasses? It is an answer to this question is that I want to try and contribute here. Let me begin by proposing that Gaza, in so far as it encapsulates in a dramatic way the wider situation in Israel/Palestine, is the product of two impossibilities or two dead ends: it is the product of the impossibility of the Zionist nation-state as a normal state-that is, the impossibility of a Zionist state of Israel ever becoming just a normal state without experiencing itself in a permanent state of 'existential threat', as so many Zionists are enamoured with putting it-and it is the product of the impossibility and the dead end of the anti-colonial politics of the Palestinians. The two politics share a yearning for a normalised unquestioned nation-state. But for both, I want to argue, it is a yearning for something whose time has passed. I want to also argue that it is the inability of either side to come to terms with the impossibility of what is being yearned for that is producing the pathological politics of nationalist narcissistic self- affirmation that we have witnessed with the invasion of Gaza and that is also manifest in the strategy of suicide bombing. I am not interested here in the arguments about who was in Palestine first or whether Zionism is colonialist, and so on. I think these are political questions of legitimisation. Indeed, for most people interested in proving or denying that Zionism is colonialism, the question is about political legitimacy. Knowing or not knowing whether Zionists are colonialists does not tell us much more about the way in which they acted towards the Palestinians. Nationalists at home have not been nicer towards their others than colonialists have been. That's why treating Zionists as nationalists is more than enough for me. I am interested in the fact that Zionists are people who are struggling to create a homely space for themselves in Israel. Like every nationalist, they have historical arguments that legitimise to themselves and to others their reasons for making

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themselves a national homely space in Palestine. Like all nationalists-colonial, non-colonial and anti-colonial, racist and antiracist-they imagine their nation as both a space of solidarity and community, and a way of existing with the world. They imagine it and idealise it as a space of self-affirmation, a space of existing in the world, a space under their control and domination where they have the right to remove anything that threatens the possibility of making the nation homely and oozing with communal feelings. So, like all nationalists, Zionists dreamt of Israel as a space that would allow them to experience an unequal sense of togetherness and self-fulfilment, which would allow them to exist with other nationals and be on equal footing. But right from the start, they also showed the aggressive impulses that are part and parcel of the nationalist desire for self-affirmation, for being in the world. Hear Herzl, for instance: lf we wish to found a State today, we shall not do it in the way which would have been the only possible one a thousand years ago. It is foolish to revert to old stages of civilisation, as many Zionists would like to do. Supposing, for example, we were obliged to clear a country of wild beasts, we should not set about the business in the fashion of Europeans of the fifth century. We should not take spear and lance and go about singly in pursuit of bears; we should organise a large and active hunting party, drive the animals together, and throw a melinite bomb in their midst. 5 Consider Herzl's words carefully, but remember that I am not interested in demonstrating to you how bad Zionists are. They are as bad and as good as any nationalist. I am saying that this is nationalism for you. This is any nationalism. Zionism is a form of nationalism operating in specific conditions, and whatever Zionists do is whatever any nationalist would do if they were in the situation of the Zionists. Somehow, trying to find some specificity for Zionism allows other nationalists to feel superior, as if what Zionists are doing is so beyond the pale for the rest of us beautiful nationalist people. I don't think this is the case at all. What is interesting about this quote, and what is interesting about this period of Zionism from the point of view of a researcher

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on nationalism, is that Zionists at this point in history were producing quite a unique genre of practical and theoretical nationalist literature; that is, they were not like other theoreticians of the nation who were interested in mere abstract theorising about what is or what makes a nation. They wanted a practical outcome. They wanted a nation. At the same time, however, during that period this was an abstract quest since they were far from having a concrete sense of where their nation would be. Herzl himself, after the above quoted passage, immediately begins meditating on whether the nation of Israel should be in the Middle East or in Latin America. What makes all of this interesting, therefore, is that since he didn't know where 'Israel' would be, he couldn't have known whether there would be bears there or not. His bears could only be metaphoric bears. And the question of course is: why would someone who is trying to imagine a concrete nation for himself think about rounding up and blowing up bears, if the rounding up of bears (here representing the undesirable, beastly, undomesticated other) was not inherent to the very idea of nationalism? This is why such a thought puts us so powerfully before the certainty that nationalism, notwithstanding all the 'nice and yummy' feelings it produces in us, is also inherently politicidal. I am using the term 'politicide' from the work of the Israeli sociologist, Baruch Kimmerling. 6 The notion of politicide is the notion of killing the political will of a people. Politicide is neither a form of genocide nor is it about ethnocide. It is simply about killing or eradicating the political will of a group of others within your nation such that they become, as a group, mere objects for you to subject to your national will. The 'bears/beasts' to which nationalists refer are not the presence of a group of others as such, but the presence of a group with a will of its own that can be hostile to the nationalist's will. Otherwise, Herzl would have talked about rounding up sheep. It is the hostile will of the other that can stop you from feeling at home in your nation-state, not the other as such. This is where the aggressive impulse of nationalism is directed. However, as mentioned above, this aggressive impulse of spatial self-affirmation is usually tempered with the desire for being with others in the national system. A healthy nationalism, so to speak, will be an attempt to balance the desire for spatial self-affirmation with the desire for being with others.

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However, historically speaking, what we have seen is that this desire for being with others-for not only experiencing community within the nation but also experiencing the community of nationsis impossible without a reasonably secure sense of self-affirmation. If I don't feel I am in control of my nation, if I don't feel that I have all the 'bears' reasonably under control, I am not going to be in a nice mood to socialise with others. This is where narcissistic nationalism sets in. Narcissistic nationalism is a nationalism where the nationalist always feels that the 'bears' are out of control and becomes totally self-obsessed with self-affirmation at the expense of being with others. This is why colonial nationalism has always been more narcissistic than metropolitan nationalism. Not because it was colonial as such but because it never managed to pacify the space under its control to the same extent as in the home country. A similar logic has contributed to making Israeli nationalism a particularly virulent form of narcissistic, self-obsessed self-affirmation. That the Palestinians also exhibit such a form of narcissistic nationalism is hardly surprising since this modality of nationalism emerged most strongly in the history of anti-colonial nationalism. It is a history of groups who say: 'We have been victims. We have been oppressed. We have been disempowered and the aim is for us to re-empower ourselves again.' The aim is 'us'. 'We were/are disempowered; we want to become empowered again. We were/ are weak; we want to become strong.' We can call this nationalism narcissistic because it loses the desire to 'be with'sometimes radically so. One can say for example that, despite all the oppression and exploitation that it entailed, colonialism is a relation; it is a form of being with. It is a bad relation but is a relation nonetheless. This is why, ideally-and I am sure many will say idealistically-if anti-colonialism is to provide an alternative to the narcissistic nationalism of the colonial powers with a genuinely different form of nationalism, it ought to aim for more than just the self-affirmation of the colonised at the expense of the coloniser. It has to also accept the existence of a relation with the ex-colonisers and aim at transforming that 'bad' relation into a 'good' relation. Only South Africa has seen something resembling such an anti-colonial politics in our times. The Palestinians are very far from it. But the logic that encourages victims to seek 'self-empowerment' rather than think about

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'relations' is not just a colonial phenomenon; it is also present in all forms of anti-racism. People who have been subjected to racism have been thumped, and the aim is to empower them. It's in the logic of sexism and anti-sexism also. Women have been thumped, and the aim is to empower them. The notion of empowering the disempowered is alive and well everywhere in these struggles. And because of this it is time to recognise that these just struggles have been unjustly fought in an inherently narcissistic way that makes the victim feel justified to avoid the relational world and think only of themselves. I see it with some racialised Lebanese kids in Sydney who feel, rightly, that they have been subjected to all kinds of racism and disempowerment. But their logic is, well: 'me', and as they so wonderfully put it, 'Fuck 'em all.' The last thinkable thing that can emerge from such a subject position is the idea, let alone the desire, to 'commit myself to a better relation with Anglo-Australia', or with whatever Australia. What is important is the thought that Tm not going to get messed with again. I'm not going to let a situation happen where I am not in control of myself.' This anti-racism, however, shares the same lineage as the colonialist and anti-colonialist nationalist narcissism. And it seems to me that they are all present today in Israel and Palestine in a unique festival of pathological modalities of self-affirmation. Palestinian anti-colonialism has suffered from a whole lineage of frustrated nationalist variations, each more narcissistic than the other. It moved from Palestinian to Arab to socialist nationalism, and has now reached the latest Islamicist form that takes narcissism to new heights. Israeli nationalism is undoubtedly much worse and far more complex in its historical components. It is an incredible hybrid of post-colonial nationalism and anti-colonial nationalism. One has to sit and marvel, like one marvels at the creatures of the oceans, at this hybrid formation that has brought together with equal strength both colonial and anti-colonial narcissism. I don't think that Zionism is equal to colonialism; I don't think that Zionism is a colonial project. It did not have fantasies of colonising people, or fantasies of supremacy over people in the way that colonial ideologies did. But the fact remains that it would have been impossible for Zionism and Zionist dreaming to come about as a reality without the mechanics of colonialism. It is an ideology that

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has come into being as a reality through a colonial mechanics, but it is not itself inherently colonialist. Zionists, as I said, want to be at home in a space they consider their own. I know empirically the history of Zionist settlements very well. I know that there were a lot of Jewish people who lived in Palestine. l know the numbers. I know the people who count them up each way to suit their purposes-I know all of this. But I still would say that it's one thing to start making yourself believe credibly that you are going to have a nation-state, or even a 'national homeland', in the same geographic location where you believe you ruled the realms two thousand years ago. It's one thing to convince yourself of this, and it's another to bring such dreaming into a reality. The mechanics of power needed to bring such dreaming into reality was a colonial mechanics. Anyone who likes to think otherwise is really into taking nationalist fantasies as reality. Without the logic and mechanics of colonialism, Zionist dreaming would not have become a reality, but Zionism itself, as l said, is not inherently colonial. The above points are very important to remember in understanding the form that Zionist nationalist narcissism ended up taking. Indeed it was precisely because it was carried by the mechanics of colonialism without itself being colonial that Zionism managed to hybridise within it both the narcissism that is present in every form of nationalism, and the narcissism present in the antiracist tradition. It is a nationalist project that involves on the one hand self-affirmation at the expense of a local population, and on the other a tragic, Holocaust-derived, anti-racist narcissism of the most acute form: 'I'm not going to be messed with again. I'm not going to be in a situation where I am made an object in the way the anti-Semites made me an object. I am going to have a space where I am going to control my destiny.' Gone was the desire for 'being with' that marked the other, redeeming, side of nationalism. It is not surprising that such powerful narcissistic dreamings became fantasies of omnipotence. The link between narcissistic fantasies and fantasies of omnipotence is a well-known psychoanalytic fact: 'l will be all-powerful; I am not going to be weak, I am going to be all-powerful.' The history of this fantasy of omnipotence in Israel has been quite crucial to our understanding of how the whole situation we are in today has developed. No people have ever come

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close to caressing their fantasy of omnipotence as much as the Israelis have. I don't think anyone comes close to thinking that omnipotence is possible-they keep thinking of it as something that can happen somewhere in the future. In this case, Israel's most euphoric moment is perhaps its most tragic: it had a taste of omnipotence in 1967. In the 1967 war, there was a sense that omnipotence was not just a fantasy but an actual possibility, and I think that this has become part of the way-one might even say the standard by which-various Israeli governments use to legitimise themselves to their population. After 1967 many Israeli people started believing that this was the very function of Israel: 'I am here because the government is going to give me omnipotence.' Taken together, omnipotence and politicide mean an inability to live with another that constitutes even a minimal danger to me. As an Australian, I might have to live with fantasies that China can constitute a danger or that Indonesia can constitute a danger. I can live with this; I adapt to these dangers. I do not say, 'I will not rest, I am not going to rest, until no danger emanates from China towards me; only then will I feel good.' I live with the danger. This danger might or might not be a real danger. The point is that I am the one who is imagining the possibility of danger, which is the uncertainty of the other; can I live with the uncertainty of the other? Narcissism in its acute Israeli form is precisely this inability to live with the uncertainty of the other. The other has to be made secure; I cannot accept even a modicum of danger emanating from it. One has only to stop and listen to the language used by the Israeli state during the invasion of Gaza to realise the nature of the problem. You might have heard it or read it before and not thought much of it, but it is important to ask what kind of imagination makes it possible for someone to say in total practical earnestness, 'Our objective is to wipe Hamas out' or 'Israel's first task is smashing Hamas'. The practical sense that emanates from these sentences and the belief that they are feasible achievable goals are the very symptoms of the problem I am talking about here. Nietzsche tells us that it is important to differentiate between what he calls 'will to power' and a 'sense of power'. For him the notion of a sense of power is very crucial because a sense of power is my

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subjective awareness of the power that I have. It is not an objective evaluation of the amount of power I have, but an evaluation of where it is heading and what I can do with it. I can have x amount of power and feel that my power is diminishing, and I will deploy my power by being mean to compensate for my sense that my power is declining. I can have the same x amount of power and feel that my power is rising. Here I might deploy my power magnanimously. It's not the amount of power that I have that makes a difference to how I deal with the things that irritate me; it's my sense of power. Do I feel my power is secure or insecure? Do I feel that it is rising or declining? I think that Israel's savage mode of deploying power during the Gaza invasion is precisely the mode of deploying force by someone who is going through a serious crisis in their sense of power. There were so many references in Israel's declarations during the invasion showing how fantasies of 1967 were being constantly replayed. A member of the Israeli National security office expressed his concern that 'there has been a nagging sense of uncertainty in the last couple of years about whether anyone is really afraid of Israel any more'. This crisis has emerged partly because of what happened in South Lebanon, and what has been experienced as Israel's double defeat at the hands of Hezbollah. There is no doubt that Israel's war on the Lebanese Shi'a militia of Hezbollah in 2006 was an attempt to make the militia fear Israel again. Hezbollah had already given itself a heroic aura after it successfully liberated Lebanon from Israeli occupation. The sight of Israeli soldiers rushing to leave Lebanon was an important psychological high point for the Lebanese and for the Palestinians. In much the same way it was a low point for Israel, denting its fantasy of omnipotence. The ferocity of its 2006 bombing of Lebanon undoubtedly had a psychological intensity associated to it. It wanted a smashing victory. That Hezbollah was not smashed, instead showing itself as capable of continuing to bomb Israel until the very last day of the war, gave them an unmistakable sense of victory despite the physical destruction. This is when we see the emergence of a far more pervasive Israeli discourse about 'regaining the deterrent capacity'. Here again it is important to see things from the lens of Nietzsche's sense of power. For it is not that Israel is objectively weak; it is that it cannot

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live with an idea of itself other than being equal to its omnipotent image of itself in 1967. The question here is of political legitimacy. Netanyahu or Barak might not truly believe that Israel can be as it was in 1967, but the fact is that there are a lot of people who believe that there is no point in having an Israel if it is not in the image of its 1967 self, and they have put their trust in Netanyahu to make sure that Israel becomes omnipotent again. So for him the question becomes: 'How am I going to pull this off? How am I going to make people think, "yes, Israel is going to be so unbelievably secure for me again"?' The idea that a country cannot exist unless it can persuade both its own people and the people surrounding it that its 'normal state of being' is to be omnipotent, is a good indicator of the magnitude of the crisis. This is why, throughout the Gaza war, the state of Israel has struggled to portray itself as fighting for normality, as if insinuating: 'Would any normal state accept having this kind of stuff on its border?' The talk of normality is constantly introduced. This is part of the pathology because when the normal-that is, what should go without saying-does not go without saying, you know that it doesn't go without saying and that it is therefore far from normal, such as when one hears Israelis arguing that 'you should recognise Israel as a Jewish state'. I mean, who seriously believes that if someone comes along and says, OK, we recognise Israel as a Jewish state, then this is it-the problem has been solved. There are many countries that have dispossessed others-we don't need a reminder of this here in Australia-and they don't go around asking those they have dispossessed to recognise them. I don't see the Australian state going round saying to the Indigenous people: 'Recognise that we exist! We are not going to do anything or solve any of your health problems until you recognise that we exist-no more Indigenous policy until you recognise that we exist.' It goes without saying that Australia exists. It goes without saying, and it seems to me that the tragedy of the Israeli state is that its existence as a Jewish state does not and can never go without saying. This is what I meant in the beginning when I talked about the impossibility of the Israeli Jewish state. It has reached its limit as a modality of becoming a nation-state and it's not anybody's fault. You can do a historical study and you can say that maybe the implementation of the project started a bit too late in the history of

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nation-states for it to become a nation -state. Or you might say it was done in a bad region, that it might have been better in a region where there are fewer Arabs. You could argue many things about why this project has reached a dead end. My point is not that just the Israelis are at a dead end; my point is that the Palestinians, just as much as the Israelis, are at the dead end of the national project. The Palestinians embody the dead end of the anti-colonial project as it has been perceived, and as it has been dreamt of as a narcissistic attempt to gain power-the idea that we need a nation-state in order to feel good again. Perhaps we need to ask a question in an Australian kind of way: 'Who bloody needs another nation-state in the Middle East? I'm not sure. Why the hell do we need another nation in the Middle East? You will need to convince me.' 'Jwo national narcissisms are not going to take us anywhere, and that's why I feel that the job of intellectuals is to think from somewhere else, from another space. But what we are talking about here is the radicalisation of thinking about the whole nation-state regime-what does it mean? Can we think outside it? I know that the nation-state has been fantastic and has done a lot of good things. I am not being ironic. I accept the argument, but I also accept the empirical reality that there are many places where it has reached its limits and we have to think beyond it. To me what is important is the relational imperative; that is, how do you make bad relations good relations? I look at Israel and Palestine, and I say there is a group of Israelis having a bad relation with a group of Palestinians. I am no longer interested in helping either the Israelis or the Palestinians feel secure or feel empowered or fight anti-colonialism. I am happy to live with the fact that they are stuck with each other, and we academics should be stuck with the important question: how can we make a bad relation a good relation? Thinking relationally, and not thinking in terms of the narcissistic self-affirmation of entities, is the way to go.

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Appendix to chapter 7 Written following the military operation on 31 May 2010 by Israel against the 'Gaza Freedom Flotilla' and the killing of nine peace activists who were on board MV Mavi Marmara. I don't write poems but, in any case, poems are not poems. Long ago, I was made to understand that Palestine was not Palestine; I was also informed that Palestinians were not Palestinians; They al.soexplained to me that ethnic cleansing was not ethnic cleansing. And when naïve old me saw freedom fighters they patiently showed me that they were not freedom fighters, and that resistance was not resistance. And when, stupidly, I noticed arrogance, oppression and humiliation they benevolently enlightened me so I could see that arrogance was not arrogance, oppression was not oppression, and humiliation was not humiliation. Tsaw misery, racism, inhumanity and a concentration camp. But they told me that they were experts in misery, racism, inhumanity and concentrations camps and I had to take their word for it: this was not misery, racism, inhumanity and a concentrations camp. Over the years they taught me so many things: invasion was not invasion, occupation was not occupation, colonialism was not colonialism and apartheid was not apartheid ... They opened my simple mind to even more complex truths that my poor brain could not on its own compute, like: 'having nuclear weapons' was 'not having nuclear weapons'; 'not having weapons of mass destruction' was 'having weapons of mass destruction'. And, democracy (in the Gaza strip) was not democracy. Having second class citizens (in Israel) was democracy. So you'll excuse me if! am not surprised to learn today that there are more things that I thought were evident that are not: peace activists are not peace activists, piracy is not piracy, the massacre of unarmed people is not the massacre of unarmed people. I have such a limited brain and my ignorance is unlimited. And they're so fucking intelligent. Really.

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8

The unoccupied

It is facile to begin by expressing cynicism about the very idea of

Palestinian independence conveyed by the title of this conference. 1 For, given the totalising nature of Israeli colonial domination and the way the occupation saturates Palestinian society in its most intimate details, one can legitimately ask whether there is, anywhere in Palestine, any such thing as an 'independent' space for the formulation 'between dependence and independence' to be meaningful. Nonetheless, despite some people arguing that Palestine is close to a state of total disintegration, it remains a fact that it has not disintegrated. There is still a vital force and a will for resistance and self-affirmation that permeates Palestinian society despite the occupation. Such vital force is enough to indicate that there is a Palestinian mode of existence that remains free and autonomous from the occupation. It is an 'independent' mode of existence or what I will call here-for reasons that will become clear soon-an 'unoccupied space', or simply 'the unoccupied', since this independent, unoccupied mode of existence is not just a space but also a dimension of life. As I will argue, it is a dimension that is hard to clearly delineate, and I want to offer some preliminary remarks as

to where we need to direct our attention in order to be better able to define it and understand its significance.

Resistance and the unoccupied By saying that this independent unoccupied state exists but is hard to locate, define and delineate, we are immediately faced with the task of engaging critically with another facile tendency when it comes to discussing questions of independence: that of equating the unoccupied with the space of resistance. Indeed, some of those who consciously or unconsciously advocate this equation might feel offended by the very idea that spaces of independence are not so easy to locate in Palestine. Is that not disrespecting and dismissing the long and ongoing history of Palestinian resistance, which has continued to protect and foster various forms of Palestinian autonomous decision-making since 1948-both the organised political resistance that has happened and continues to happen through the PLO or Hamas, and the individual and communal grassroots resistance that Palestinians are continuously engaging in against the various forms of Israeli apartheid? I, of course, hope to show that this is not the case at all. Indeed, as the question above implies, it is useful to differentiate between resistance and the autonomy that one is struggling to create or preserve through resistance. Ensuring that the two are clearly demarcated has both analytical and political ramifications. In theorising his concept of illusio Pierre Bourdieu establishes a highly evocative relation between 'occupation', in the sense of occupying or assuming a position in social space, and 'pre-occupation'. 2 Society, for Bourdieu, offers those who belong to it a variety of paths or quests, certain raisons d'etre, that allow those who embark on them to make their lives meaningful. Illusio denotes this process through which humans make their lives worth living by coming to occupy such spaces of meaningfulness. They do so by becoming preoccupied by what such spaces have to offer. Although 'occupation' when speaking of Israel's colonial occupation of Palestine has a different meaning from that highlighted by Bourdieu, what interests me here is more the nature of resistance as an 'occupation'; that is, resistance as a raison d'etre that gives Palestinian life a meaning. By resisting Israeli occupation Palestinians

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give meaning and direction to their lives. But it is precisely because of this that, despite resistance exemplifying a form of agency that is independent of and antagonistic to colonial occupation, it can nonetheless hardly be described as an 'unoccupied' mode of existence. For resistance is a mode of being that is by definition entirely preoccupied by the occupation, as it were. Indeed, it is totally consumed byit. Resistance, important as it is-both for political reasons and for individual questions of self-worth-is a socially and psychologically demanding pursuit that wears people and societies down. It is an exhausting mode of existence. This is why a dominated people cannot survive simply by resisting. They do not only need a space in which to make autonomous decisions to counter occupation and domination; they also need a space or a dimension of their lives that is free from the very problematic of occupation, free from both occupation and the resistance to occupation. It is such a space that I want to refer to as 'the unoccupied'. It is, as I now wish to propose, better thought of as a space of resilience than as a space of resistance.

The unoccupied: resilience as strategic foreclosure Resilience in physics, such as when we speak of a resilient substance, is defined in an interesting way. The word has no exact equivalent in Arabic. The dictionary translates it as murunah, although murunah is a better translation of 'malleability' than resilience. Yet I particularly liked one Arabic definition of this murunah/resilience, which I found very evocative. The definition speaks of resilience as the capacity of a substance to absorb a deforming force without being deformed. This seems to me a crucial dimension of the 'practices of resilience'. With Spinoza's notion of conatus in mind, we can say that practices of resilience are conatic. Conatus for Spinoza is famously the tendency of things to persevere in their own being. 3 To speak of conatic practices is to speak of practices intimately linked to the perpetuation and endurance of a certain mode of existence without its being deformed, as it were, and what is of concern to us here is the Palestinian mode of existence. We can say that occupation is a deforming force in Palestinian society and resistance is the point where Palestinian society and Palestinian individuals try to counter this deforming force. But no matter what one thinks of the

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importance, sacredness and so on of resistance, one cannot say that the subject of resistance is not deformed by the deforming force it is resisting. Resistance, as we have already pointed out, entails durable damage to the people and the social fabric that are engaging in it. Indeed it could be said that this is the tragic dimension of resistance. It is heroic, it is indispensable, a viable life is impossible to think without it, yet it damages the viability of life. Resilience is in a sense the carving of a space that minimises this damage. Let me give an example of what resilience entails. In the household of a recently deceased Palestinian male martyr, his widow had to make some choices in terms of how much to remember him and to make her children remember him, which, of course, has changed with time. Putting his photo on the wall is an act of remembrance, but is also a celebration of his resistance and thereby an act of resistance in itself. There is a kind of shrine for him in the house ensuring that the children always remember the heroism of their father, inherit it, and participate in the culture of resistance he has been part of. Nonetheless, at night the widow always reads the children some relatively apolitical children's books and tucks them in, wishing them goodnight with a warm kiss that allows them to experience a sense of existence that is not subjectively governed by the death of their father; a sense of existence that is neither governed by colonialism, nor governed by resistance to colonialism. That is, she makes them experience a form of normality that children who are not subjected to colonialism and who do not have a martyred father also experience. This is what constitutes an act of resilience. One can call resilience a space of heroic normality. It is heroic because it is not easy to snatch a bit of normality in the midst of such an abnormal situation. It goes without saying that it has a dimension of resistance built into it, but it is different from, let us say, a family that defines its whole existence through resistance, where even at night children are told stories of heroic Palestinian anti-Zionist exploits. The space of resilience is not a space governed by a foregrounding of the colonising power that one needs to resist against. To go back to our initial terminology, it is not a space or a dimension of life 'preoccupied with the occupation'. It is as such that it helps us in defining the contours of the unoccupied.

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One can capture ethnographically a whole domain of resilient practices that partake in the making of the unoccupied. When I was being driven around the West Bank and shown the settlements, the separation wall and the checkpoints, I noted that my young colleague who was showing me around and who had only been living in Palestine for a few years was capable of pinpointing to me in great detail all the outrageous things that the Israeli colonialists were doing. Just as importantly, he was clearly very affected by it. I could not help thinking that the Palestinians who have lived all their lives under the occupation, and who unlike my colleague did not have the luxury of leaving Palestine if they wished, must be even more strongly disturbed by what they are subjected to. Yet, at the same time, when observing them, they appeared far less concerned and affected. I asked the uncle of another colleague who had invited us to his house about this. The uncle's reply was very lucid and telling. He said: 'We have families to feed and look after. We cannot spend our time thinking about nothing but the wall. We have to try and forget.' He stopped for a second, then he said: 'We have to forget and we have to never forget.' He stopped again, then quickly added: 'In any case, they [the Israelis] never let us forget' I found this very illuminating. Resilience, for it to work as a mode of absenting the occupation and any preoccupation with the occupation, has to involve a serious forgetting of this occupation. Yet this is done with the knowledge that in the midst of such an environment one cannot forget, and indeed, one must not forget. At one level, resilience is akin to what Freud calls 'foreclosure'. 4 For Freud, to actively forget a traumatic event involves a psychologically exhausting amount of affective expenditure. In a sense, forgetting is a mode of resistance. This is why the psyche does not only aim to forget but also aims to forget that it is forgetting. This is what defines foreclosure. Practices of resilience, to be efficient, can be seen from this angle as forms of foreclosure: forgetting that one is forgetting about the occupation. Yet, for a dominated colonised people, an effective foreclosure can simply mean the victory of the colonisersindeed, historically, it is the societies of the colonisers who have successfully managed to foreclose most efficiently the genocides, appropriation, exploitation and repression on which the whole colonial edifice is grounded. It is because foreclosure is both necessary

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and impossible that it takes a paradoxical form, which I want to call 'strategic foreclosure'. Strategic here is best understood in Pierre Bourdieu's sense, not so much as a kind of rational strategising that negates the very idea of 'forgetting the forgetting', but something that the body has been trained to do unconsciously, but at appropriate times and for appropriate durations. 5 This is important and needs to be fully clarified. If we analyse foreclosure with Freud, we come to understand it as a relatively permanent state of being in which the subject has successfully forgotten that it has forgotten a traumatic event in its history. If we think of foreclosure with Bourdieu as a strategy we end up with something different. A strategy for Bourdieu is the product of a habitus, a socially and historically acquired capacity to generate appropriate strategies efficient to deal with particular situations arising within the social space in which the habitus has evolved. Here, foreclosure is no longer understood as a permanent state of being but as a deployment of the body produced to meet specific circumstances. Because colonialist society is grounded in a permanent state of forgetting, the Freudian conception appears as fully adequate in explaining the process of foreclosure that occurs within it. For the colonised, the situation is different. The colonised cannot permanently forget; they have to negotiate the difficulty of both needing to forget (resilience) and needing not to forget (resistance). Here Bourdieu offers us a way of making sense of how it remains possible to engage in practices of foreclosure without this foreclosure either being conscious (which undermines its very significance as foreclosure) or permanent (which if it happens would signal the total victory of the colonised). With Bourdieu we can re-examine what we have developed above concerning resistance and resilience, and speak of the Palestinians as having, through a history of exposure to Zionist settler colonialism, acquired a resilient habitus: a capacity to produce resilient practices that are neither a permanent state of forgetting in such a way as to forget the necessity of resisting to the colonised, nor conscious in such a way as not to allow one to forget the colonisation enough to carve a much needed space of normality away from it rather than against it.

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Conclusion: between resistance and resilience In this presentation, I have highlighted the nature of the practices of resilience and their importance in pointing us to a 'conatic' unoccupied space that they manage to carve out amidst a space saturated by occupation and resistance to that occupation. As it should be clear, this is not so much an advocacy of such space as a highlighting of its existence. Practices of resilience are part and parcel of the mode of existence of the colonised. They are not waiting for someone to 'advocate' them for them to happen. Nonetheless, in highlighting them, I am also highlighting their importance and the importance of a politics of resistance oriented towards preserving and fostering them. I have noted the psychological significance of these spaces as spaces of heroic normality and their politico-existential value as a dimension of life where Palestinians strive to 'persevere in their own being'. Because resistance by its very nature is primarily oriented towards the negation of the existing colonial order of domination, one can also highlight the importance of such 'unoccupied' spaces as fertile ground for the formulation of alternative modes of existence that can supersede colonialism. These are some of the reasons why a politics of resistance has to remain focused on the defence and promotion of practices of resilience just as much as it has to remain preoccupied with the occupation. In this presentation, I have occasionally focused on the possibility of resilience forgetting its relation to the politics of resistance, losing sense of itself as resilience, and becoming a mere normality that heralds the victory of the colonial order. But it is a well-known fact that an equal, if not a more historically pervasive happening in the history of resistance is resistance itself losing touch with the core it is striving to protect and becoming an end in itself. At that point, resistance becomes itself a colonising principle, an all-consuming preoccupation that leaves nothing untouched. It paradoxically becomes a conduit for furthering the colonial occupation by furthering and saturating the social with the 'preoccupation with the occupation'. Whole social orders and forms of domination have been erected around such pervasive, all-encompassing resistance cult. To highlight the importance of the 'unoccupied' is to resist the coming

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about of such culture of resistance. For a resistance that has become its own end and does not have a space that is independent of both occupation and the resistance to occupation to protect, has already lost the battle against colonial domination.6

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9

Recalling anti-racism Towards a critical anthropology of exterminability

From the opposition to slavery, to the anti-colonial struggles, to the civil rights movement in the United States, to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, to today-where anti-racism is most notably present in the struggles in support of asylum seekers and against the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine-antiracism has been and remains a vital and important current of thought and social movement. It embodies the noblest of all human values: at the very least, a belief in the right of all human beings to be treated with dignity and respect regardless of where they come from and how they happen to be classified. Yet, despite this long history and some remarkable victories against the forces of racism in their variety of forms, it cannot be said that anti-racism has been particularly successful as a social, cultural and political force. Everywhere we look today racism is on the rise. In Australia, and also in the United States and Canada, if we look at the treatment of Indigenous people and the immigrant populations originating from the Third World, or at the rate of imprisonment of black populations, all remain marked by excessive racism. Likewise is the treatment of asylum seekers everywhere around the world. Most importantly, we are seeing a massive rise in virulently racist and

intolerant forms of ethno-religious nationalism, with Zionist nationalism in Israel being an extreme case of what is fast becoming the rule rather than the exception. The salience of racism as a cultural form was particularly brought home to me when visiting South Africa in 2014. As a guest of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, travelling from Johannesburg to Cape Town on a bus with many other academics and holding workshops, learning about local histories and meeting a variety of people, it was made clear to us that even there, the country where the forces of anti-racism have registered what is undoubtedly their greatest victory, racism remains nonetheless an enduring social force that leaves its imprint on many facets of South African life. It is with the above in mind that I want to investigate in this piece the possibility of a 'recalling' of anti-racism. 'Recalling' has been put forward by Bruno Latour as a critical way of reflecting on modernity. It combines both recalling in the sense of remembering to ensure we build on past achievements, but also recalling in the way a company recalls a product when it realises it has some defect. As Latour highlights: In no way does this recall aim to damage the product, nor, of course, to lose market share. Rather, it has quite the opposite strategy. By showing consumers the care it takes with the quality control of its goods and the safety of their users, it wants to demonstrate initiative, rebuild media confidence, and, if possible, recommence the production that was too quickly halted. 1 It is in this spirit, then, that I want to initiate a recalling of anti-racism

and begin the first analytic steps towards relaunching it in a more efficient form.

The functions of anti-racism More so than 'modernity', anti-racism is a 'product' with a welldefined function, and it is important to indeed recall, in the usual sense of the word, what these functions are. First, in order to stay in touch with its 'founding principles' and also, in order to develop a sense of the cumulative gain that-despite the shortcomings-has nonetheless been made in the history of anti-racism, I want to

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highlight six central functions. Although these clearly overlap in practice, I will list them one after the other for the purpose of exposition. 1. Reducing the incidence of racist practices This means making it difficult for racists to externalise their racism whether in society at large (everyday racism) or within institutions (structural racism). This anti-racist work has a particularly long history and has been partly done through various forms of legal activism that aim to introduce laws and legislations that prohibit and, at least in some instances, criminalise certain forms of racism. It emanates from a belief that while one needs to reach a situation where there simply are no racists, in the meantime-and as a contribution towards this goal-one needs, at the very least, to disempower those who intend to engage in racist practices or deter them from doing so. Similarly, such a struggle has involved cultural work that aims at creating a general climate where everyone understands that 'it is not OK to be racist'. This comes from acknowledging that not all forms, indeed most forms, of racism are too subtle and too numerous to be legislated against. As a minimum defence against this proliferation, anti-racist work valorises a culture of self-censorship. This struggle for valorising self-censorship has not been easy since there are conservative forces that explicitly work in the opposite direction, often disparagingly calling such self-censorship 'political correctness'. Australia's current attorney-general, for example, thought he was being a staunch supporter of freedom of speech when he stated that Australians have the 'right to be bigots'. 2 In so doing he is continuing in the lineage begun within the Australian Liberal Party under Prime Minister John Howard (19962007) in his famous exhortation for people to be 'relaxed and comfortable'. In such pronouncements conservatives want people to believe that being relaxed and comfortable and saying whatever one wishes to say is the norm. Political correctness is perceived as working against such a norm by stopping people from expressing themselves 'freely'. It is seen as the way 'the Left' controls the cultural space by making people 'watch what they say' and in the process censoring their sentiments and feelings. Consequently, conservatives often succeed in creating a climate in which the expression of racism

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is experienced by the racists as a 'heroic desire' to liberate oneself from oppression: 'I know it is not politically correct for me to say it and everyone is now going to come after me but I don't like Muslims and I think they are a threat to our way of life.' Anti-racists see this differently. From their point of view, political correctness is an invitation for people to recognise that not everything that comes to their mind and that they feel like expressing is necessarily good. It is to reaffirm the fact that far from 'expressing ourselves freely', self-censorship is what we routinely do when we interact with others. We do so to avoid hurting ourselves: we don't say what we think to our boss in order to keep our job, or to the police officer issuing us with a parking ticket so as not to end up in more serious trouble. But we also do it to avoid hurting others: most decent people engage in sensitive self-censorship as a mark of caring for others. For example, more often than not they stop themselves from telling someone they love who is very sick that he or she is looking particularly bad just because they thought it. More importantly, people know that what they 'feel' is not necessarily what is 'right'. Just because we repress ourselves from saying something does not mean that what is being repressed is a higher truth. Indeed, saying what we feel like saying is the mark of not caring about the well-being of the people we are engaging with, which is precisely one of the marks of racism. Thus, anti-racism reaffirms the importance of consolidating and diffusing a culture of self-censorship when it comes to racial stereotypes and attitudes. Such self-censorship is also considered particularly pertinent since more often than not these stereotypes and attitudes are unreflexively inherited rather than deduced from long experiences of interacting with racialised others. 2. Fostering a non-racist culture In continuity with the above, and using municipal. educational and artistic forums and institutions, anti-racists have worked hard at fostering a variety of cultural strategies directed at the general population but particularly targeting racists: educating them about the consequences of their views, creating interaction between racists and racialised communities to humanise the racialised in the former's eyes, and trying to disallow the formation of facile negative stereotypes. This differs from the cultural work needed to stop racists

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externalising their racism as it involves a more difficult work aiming at ensuring that people are not racist in the first place. A different, more structural work, but with the same aim, involves struggles in disintersecting-in reference to the insights of intersection theorists-or disarticulating racism from other configurations of power that might be feeding and reinforcing it. 3. Supporting the victims of racism This includes the various modes of protecting and offering shelter and counselling to victims of racist violence and racist abuse. Such anti-racist work includes the creation of supportive social networks and providing medical support when dealing with physical violence, and can also involve psychological support. In the academic field, the latter has required, and continues to require, an important area of research by anti- racist academics, particularly psychologists: how to provide a good understanding of the social and historical nature of the psychological fault lines that make racialised subjects particularly vulnerable to racist injury. If, for example, you are black and you are hurt by someone calling you an ape on the football field, it is important that your white manager understands that it is not the same as anyone else being called 'ape', and a response such as: 'Why are you so oversensitive? I wouldn't care so much if it was me' is not appropriate. Here anti-racist research has to be able to convey to the manager the specificity of the experience: what it is like to grow up and inherit the psychological structure of people who have been historically 'aped' since the era of slavery, and what it means when such 'aping' operates in conjunction with ongoing colonial relations of power and domination. Highlighting and understanding this colonial specificity is particularly important today against those who banalise racism and dehistoricise it such as when speaking of'reverse racism'. 4. Empowering racialised subjects The struggles to bring about anti-racist laws and to create networks of solidarity do not only have the effect of stopping racists and helping victims; they can also be directed at making the racialised more autonomous and more able to withstand and fight back against racism. Such work has a more lasting effect in the long run and, as

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such, is more important than helping victims, which can create counter-productive relations of dependency, as in the enduring French anti-racist slogan touche pas a mon pote-'don't touch my mate'. As many noted, while there was something admirably antiracist about such slogan, it nonetheless enshrined the idea that my (racialised) mate needed me (the non-racialised) to protect him or her. 5. Transforming racist relations into better relations Like feminism, anti-racism is an ambivalent struggle. lt involves by necessity a war-like sentiment of enmity towards the racists as a dominant, oppressive and sometimes violent group, but at the same time, such enmity cannot be left unchecked such as to include an ethos of extermination. Instead, anti-racists need to offer those who are racialising them, in the same way feminist women offer sexist men, modes of coexisting and relating that constitute an alternative to the dominant racist or sexist relation. This is so even when the racists themselves have an exterminatory ethos. In that sense antiracists see racism as a bad relation that needs to be transformed into a good relation (which was behind the justly celebrated anti-racist ethos championed by Nelson Mandela-a wager on transforming bad white-black relations into good relations, a struggle that is far from over).

6. Fostering an a-racist culture Finally, and perhaps ultimately, anti-racists aim to create a society in which race has no significance as a criterion of identification. As a long critical intellectual anti-racist tradition has taught us, we do not need-and it could still be described as racist-to settle for a society that naturalises racial identification (a somewhat different and more categorical variation on this argument was presented in the important work of Bob Miles3 ). We can and should aim where appropriate for a state of affairs in which racial identification is no longer a relevant or salient mode of identification. It is good, as described above, to work on transforming a bad racist relation between white people and black people into a good relation, for example. But better still from the position of this anti-racist tradition is to reach a stage where people have no investment whatsoever in racial identities, such that

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the very idea of a relation between blacks and whites becomes meaningless. The a-racial is thus an ideal of a social space characterised by a radical indifference to race.

It is when looking at these functions and objectives that the necessity of 'recalling' anti-racism in its full Latourian sense becomes clear. While anti-racism has had some notable successes at achieving its goals, it has been, as already mentioned, far from an efficient, faultfree product. It has often failed to perform and rise up to the situations it is confronting. Indeed, if we are to compare racism and anti-racism as products we can say that across history racism has been far more successfully 'recalled' and made operationally suitable for a variety of socioeconomic and cultural environments. It has morphed and shown a capacity to target a variety of people, sometimes many at the same time: blacks, Asians, Arabs, Jews, Roma and Muslims. It has been used as a tool of segregation, a tool of conditional integration and, most dramatically, a tool of extermination. It has efficiently constructed its object, successfully adapting to the dominant modes of classification of the time be they phenotypical, biological, cultural or a combination of these and more. Comparatively speaking, anti-racism has been conceptually rather ossified and is always trying to catch up with the racists' fluid modes of classification. Anti-racist academics have certainly contributed to this ossification, perhaps more so than activists. While racists have happily moved from one form of racism to another, caring little about logical contradictions, inconsistencies and discrepancies in their argumentations, too many anti- racist academics spend an inordinate amount of time trying to judge racists on precisely such grounds. In a classical case of what Pierre Bourdieu calls 'projecting into the object one's relation to the object', they criticise racists as if the racists are fellow academics with whom they are having disagreements in a tutorial room about how to interpret reality. 4 The performativity of racist statements and more obviously racist practices, which is what is most important to the racists themselves, is given far less attention than needed. Instead the racists' greatest sins are made to be interpretative/intellectual ones. They are accused of being bad thinkers: they are 'essentialists', they deviate from

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'classical' biological racism, or they are making false statements about reality that the anti-racist academics can empirically correct by highlighting a lot of statistical data that proves them incorrect: 'No, there aren't that many asylum seekers trying to get into the country' or 'No, there are no ghettoes here. Look at the demographic data' -type argumentation. Like all movements and forms of thought that aim at producing social change, anti-racism has both an 'anti' and an 'alter' content: it aims at opposing a certain order of things, and it also aims at creating a new, different and better order of things. These two dimensions are not neatly separate, but it can be said that the last two functions of anti-racism listed above are more concerned with the alter dimension than the ones that precede them. In this regard we can also say that anti-racism has had, relatively speaking, a better success at being an 'anti' rather than an 'alter' movement, but in this it is no different from all the other 'anti' struggles of modernity, be they anticapitalist or anti-colonialist.

On the global reconfiguration of racism Because of tendencies such as the above, recalling anti-racism is always a crucial task. But it is particularly so since racism today is yet again undergoing an important recalling itself, becoming intimately fused with the logic and needs ofneo-liberal capitalist accumulation. To recall anti-racism now in the midst of this transformation might allow us to develop an anti-racism that is evolving in continual response to-rather than one that is continually trying to catch up with-the racisms it is trying to oppose, and might also afford us more time to reflect on its alter dimension. Here again, for the purpose of exposition, it is useful to isolate some of the key features of these changes. I. The destructuring of the nation-state and the reassertion of ethno-national ideologies One of the most important transformations that have shaped the new 'neo-liberal racism' is the increasingly important role that ethnonationalist ideologies play in securing the relative cohesion of most nation-states. Economic globalisation has meant that very few Western nations are left with a predominantly national economic

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structure that works as a solid base for securing the togetherness of the nation regardless of what people within the nation think or believe. In this sense Western nation-states are beginning to resemble the Third World nation-states they have helped to artificially create in the process of colonisation. This has meant, among other things, a relative increase in the importance of the function of the ideological (for example, national values, national histories) as a centripetal force securing both the practical and the ideological unity of the nation-state. If you emigrate as a worker to Australia, for example, there was a time when the mere fact of being a worker inserted you structurally in the nation. The role of the ideological was as a support to this structural positioning. Today you are more likely to be inserted in a global economic structure. The role of the ideological in securing you to the nation in which you exist becomes far greater. Because of this centrality of the ideological, the social forces that take on the task of protecting ethno-national ideologies develop an increased racist intolerance towards forms of identity and lifestyle otherness that are increasingly constructed as centrifugal forces of disintegration. Consequently, anti-racist forces have been meeting a far more intense state militancy in opposition to attempts at pluralising what are aggressively proclaimed as essential 'national values'. 2. The deindustrialisation ofWestern economies and the dominance

of the racism of exterminality The second feature of neo-liberal globalisation that is shaping the dominant forms of racism in the West is deindustrialisation. Despite the plurality of forms that racism has taken throughout history, it has always fluctuated between two tendencies: the racism of exploitation and the racism of extermination. The first is deployed when the racialised are considered to be valuable, such as in the case of slavery or migrant workers. The second dominates when the racialised are considered harmful, or at least when they are evaluated to be more harmful than they are useful, such as in the case of anti-Semitism, as well as in certain instances of colonial encounters. In the first case racism works to marginalise people in society, ensuring that they have a place in it, even if it is a precarious place, in order to secure their exploitation. Slave owners do not hold placards saying 'Blacks out'. They want their blacks in. This is different from the second type

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of racism, which has no use for those it racialises and aims to margin alise them from society, ensuring that they have no social or even physical presence in it whatsoever. This is why the deindustrialised neo-liberal landscape favours a rise of a racism of exterminability, in which others are categorised as undesirable, dispensable and a burden that should be either stopped from entering the nation altogether-as with asylum seekers-or, if they are already physically within the nation, dominant forms of racism work hard at portraying them to be symbolically on its outside, dispensable and ultimately exterminable, such as the case of Arabs/Muslims. To be classified as exterminable does not mean that a process of extermination is already underway, but it does mean that if it happens people will not be necessarily up in arms about it. Etienne Balibar, discussing Foucault and Hannah Arendt, describes this very well: What is strikingly similar in Arendt and Foucault ... is the fact that neither of them believes that processes of mass extermination, or more generally elimination, ever were possible in history, especially in Modern history ... without their victims being so to speak prepared for elimination, i.e. progressively and institutionally marked as potential, future victims, and collectively pushed into a social symbolic corner where they acquired the status of 'living corpses', or masses of individuals who are neither completely 'alive' nor yet, already 'dead' ... Both Foucault and Arendt agree that this preparation for elimination is associated in Modern Europe ... with the use of the category of 'race' ... Both ... write in their own manner long genealogies 'ending' with singular events, [but] insist on the fact that a preparation, which can be explained or at least interpreted in a causal manner, is not an acting out, an actual process of elimination, or mass elimination, which requires a political supplement, a mutation of the political. Without preparation, you cannot have elimination, but with the preparation, you still don't have the elimination itself, on! y its conditions of possibility. 5

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The racial construction of people as exterminable involves the projection of layers of affective and existential angst that gives it a particularly complex multi-dimensionality. It always dramatises and intensifies something that is true of any racism: the fact that it is more than just an instrumentalist form of categorisation. It highlights the importance of taking anti-racism outside the rational kernel (the 'let's beat racism with facts' argument) in which, as noted above, it tends to dwell. 3. The rise of particularist/ racist anti- racism

Throughout history the racialised react in two different ways against their racialisation. They can oppose their racialisation by proclaiming that 'racism is wrong', whoever is doing the racialising and whoever is being racialised, and they join forces with other anti-racist forces to combat racism tout court. As such, they engage in what we can call a universalist anti-racism. However, they can also oppose their racialisation by emphasising that they belong to a culture that is 'too superior' to be racialised. What they implicitly or sometimes explicitly stress is not that 'racism is wrong' in general, but that racism against them in particular is wrong. Such racialised people don't mind racism as such; they mind being subjected to it themselves. Indeed they often racialise others even while being racialised themselves. They sometimes do so to compensate for the racism to which they are themselves being subjected, or as part of showing that they belong to the racialisers rather than the racialised. This is what I am calling particularist/racist anti-racism. Unfortunately, the climate of uncertainty generated by neo-liberal capitalism, and its fuelling of the excessively narcissistic ethno-religious nationalism mentioned above, has ensured that this form of racist anti-racism is becoming increasingly common around the world. Historically, exclamations such as, 'Don't you know how important my culture is?' and 'Don't go about racialising me. My culture is so superior I should be racialising you', have been forms of racism common to the upper- and lowermiddle classes of many immigrant cultures. Increasingly, this particularist anti-racism is invested in a defensive racism whereby racism is experienced as the mode of avoiding one's own racialisation. Even white populations in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia, with their long history of offensive colonial racism, have

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happily taken this defensive ethos on board, often arguing that they are subject to 'reverse racism', and that if they are intolerant of Muslims it is because Muslims are the ones who are intolerant of everybody in the first place. But nowhere is this particularist/racist anti-racism, with its capacity to racialise others in the name of fighting against one's own racialisation, more powerfully present and institutionalised than in the State of Israel. Indeed the State of Israel today can be seen as a prime example of a state dominated by all three of the tendencies described above. It is defined by: (a) a transnationally dominated economic structure, particularly dominated by flows from the US economy, and leaving the labour of nation-building to be done almost solely by an increasingly virulent ethno-religious nationalism propagated by the state (bl an increasing anti-Arab/Muslim racism legitimised in a classically particularistic anti-racism mode as a form of defence against local and global anti-Semitism. It can well be argued today that Zionism represents the defeat of those Jewish and non-Jewish anti-racist forces that wanted to see in the 'never again' inherited from the tragedy of the Holocaust a universalistic struggle such as 'never again' meant 'never again should this form of exterminatory racism express itself by anyone anywhere'. Instead, Zionism represents a victory of the particularistic antiracism that sees in the 'never again' a narcissistic 'never again should this happen to the Jews, even if we do it to someone else in the name of preventing it from happening to us again' (c) an increasing move away from a racism of exploitation to a racism of exterminability. While there were in the past, and to a much lesser degree today, minimal vestiges of an Israeli economy based on the exploitation of Palestinian labour, allowing for their classification as the 'useful other' that marks the racism of exploitation, the dominant form of anti-Palestinian racism today sees them as totally dispensable. There are an increasing number of analysts and political commentators who see in the spatiality of Israel's domination of Palestinians a form of apartheid. One can note, however, that unlike the South African example, where blacks were primarily perceived as a source of cheap labour, Israeli apartheid is a predominantly exclusionary one, classifying

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the Palestinians as useless and harmful, primarily concerned with how to contain them spatially and keep them marginalised from, not in, Israeli society. But at the same time the Zionist conception of the Palestinian as 'an existential threat' takes us to this 'outside-rationality' dimension of exterminability that, as I have argued, anti-racism urgently needs to confront.

It is worth reaffirming in concluding this section that if I have ended my analysis with Israel it is not to highlight its exceptionality but rather its exemplarity. What concerns me here are the tendencies that permeate the space of all Western nation-states and have given shape to new configurations of racism. That those tendencies have taken a more acute form in Israel does not make it special; rather it might mean that the forms and intensities of Israeli racism offers the Western nation-states an image of the future ofracism within them.

Understanding extenninability and injecting the a-racial into anti-racism Of the tendencies examined above, the rise of the racism of exterminability and of particularistic anti-racism represent perhaps the two important areas where anti-racism needs to be altered and fitted with new parts in the process of its recall. As I have argued, exterminability, because of its multi-dimensionality as a way of classifying otherness, strains the particularly modern space in which antiracism has always positioned itself, the one where it sees its role as that of demonstrating rationally and empirically why racists have no reason to be racists. It invites us to search for an anti-racism that can understand and counter on similar grounds some of the affective, non-rational and even irrational dimensions of racism. The rise of particularist anti-racism, on the other hand, highlights the tension between the anti- and the alter-dimensions of anti-racism. It puts us face to face with the fact that being opposed to a form of racism by itself does not entail a move towards a non-racist society. Or, to put it more morally, opposing something bad does not by itself produce something good. This is why particularistic anti-racism needs to be considered as a mere variety of racism and be opposed as such. It also means that in order to minimise its capacity to slip towards such

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racist directions anti-racism needs to always remain in touch With the alter-racial, those imaginings of an non- or a-racial society With which it needs to be continuously injected at every stage of the antiracist struggle. As with the recalling of any product, once it is brought back to be modified it has to go to different specialised sections of a firm for the alterations to be achieved. In much the same way a recalling of anti-racism would have to go to a variety of specialised sections of the anti-racist assemblage, not least to anti-racist activists themselves. As I began this chapter by arguing, I see myself here as merely initiating the process of recall, conscious of the fact that I belong to the academic part of the firm and, even more specifically, its anthropological section. I will therefore conclude this chapter by pointing to some of the ways in which a critical anthropology can help in the recalling process by offering us useful ways of thinking the question of exterminability and the alter-racial. Hopefully this in turn will provide suitable material for anti-racist activists in all their variety to further the process of alteration and modification. Perhaps one of the richest and most critical dimensions of anthropology, and which makes it, as I have argued elsewhere, so particularly suitable for thinking alter-political questions, is its long tradition of dealing with cultures that the colonial expansion of our capitalist modernity has put us in touch with, but who nonetheless remain outside it in a variety of ways. Anthropology investigates modes of thinking and existing that strike us to begin with as radically different from our own. Yet, at the same time, it invites us to note how this radical difference actually speaks to us; that is, we come to realise that there are nonetheless certain commonalities between our own lives and those seemingly exotic modes of existence that have been depicted and analysed. This is precisely when anthropology becomes critical: it invites us to see that there are whole realities or dimensions of realities that were hidden from us even though they have always been constitutive elements of our lifeworld. As such critical anthropology helps us become conscious of the fact that our reality is far more layered and differentiated than we thought and that, just as there are dominant and dominated forces within a reality, there are also dominant and dominated realities.

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The anthropological tradition has highlighted two human rnodes of existence that I want to introduce here, not only because of their intrinsic importance but also because they speak in particular to the question of racism and anti-racism before us. These are what I will refer to as the reciprocal and the mutualist modes of existence. They can be differentiated from the mode of existence that dominates our own modernity, what I will call the domesticating mode of existence. To speak of human modes of existence is to speak of a human mode of inhabiting, being enmeshed in and relating to the world that is part and parcel of constituting the world. I will define each of these modes of existence through their way of conceiving, creating and relating to otherness since this is what concerns me most here. The domesticating mode of existence, with which we are most familiar, is a world dominated-although, one must stress, far from saturated-by an instrumentalisation of one's surroundings. It creates an otherness that is mostly conceived as an object that needs to be dominated for utilitarian purposes. A logic of extraction of value, physical and symbolic, prevails throughout this world. All differences that are articulated to domestication become a form of polarisation: Human-Animal, Man-Woman, White-Black. The boundary between self and other is dominated by the problematic of how to dominate yet maintain sovereignty over the other. The reciprocal mode of existence offers a different relationality grounded in the logic of the gift. The radical difference that is inherent in gift exchange was initially and classically highlighted in the work of Marcel Mauss on the subject. What is difficult about the order of the gift is that in the first instance it is hard to see how the logic of the gift is any different from the instrumental reason that rules in the realm of domestication. For indeed, at one level, it does not take particularly sharp analytical skills to uncover a calculative logic of self-interest that is a feature of gift exchange. The brilliance of Mauss's work was to insist that if one sees in the gift only this logic of self-interest one misses a different dimension, which is precisely the space of radical difference where it takes us. In that space, things are not merely 'offered' as gifts in a strategically motivated act. Rather, the reciprocal gift relation is a relation that is always a surplus

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to the instrumental calculative relation. People, animals, plants and objects stand as gifts towards each other. Their mere presence before each other is constituted by a kind of inter-giftness. A good way to exemplify this is people's reaction to a child entering a room: people open up to the child's presence as an offering; its mere appearance is treated as a gift. This same logic of 'the 'giftness of presence' can also be seen, to give another example, in the excessively enthusiastic forms of greeting that the Lebanese express when meeting each other. 'Ahhlaaan'-roughly meaning 'welcome', although not necessarily to a house, for it could just be 'welcome into my arms'-is expressed with open arms and with such passion and gusto implying a kind of, 'Wow! It is amazing that you are here before me. It is like the sun has shone and the best thing that can ever happen to me has just happened to me.' It would not be off the mark to say critically and cynically that the Lebanese embrace of modernity and their capacity to instrumentalise each other and everything else are so extreme that their mode of greeting each other is done to offset and compensate for their behaviour. But what is crucial for us is that in so doing they offer us a glimpse of this mode of existence where presence itself is a gift and an offering calling for reciprocity. Some forms of religious thought equally capture this dimension by making life and everything that exists a gift of God requiring to be recognised as such, and where the very recognition of this giftness, the sentiment of gratitude, is itself a form of reciprocating the gift. Mauss's analysis of gift exchange showed that while this reciprocal gift-based mode of existence is minor in our society, and indeed tends to become negligible with the increased dominance of calculative instrumental logic, there are societies where this dimension remains far more pronounced. If the order of domestication invites an experience of the boundary as an intrinsic component of defining and consolidating one's sovereignty, in the order of reciprocity the border between self and other is primarily perceived as the site of exchange and inter-relationality. The mutualist mode of existence is also about inter-relationality. But it is in an inter-relationality of a different order. I am borrowing the concept of mutuality here from recent work by Marshall Sahlins on kinship. 6 It highlights an order of existence where people (and animals, plants, objects and so on) exist in each

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other. 'He is from us and in us,' the Lebanese say to emphasise that someone is strongly connected to them. Mutualism is this sense that others are 'in us' rather than just outside us. It can be argued that anthropology's research on mutualist forms of existence begins with the earliest works of Tylor on animism.7 But its critical anthropological ramifications became more developed with Lucien Levy-Bruhl's work on 'participation': a mode of living and thinking where we sense ourselves and others as participating in each other's existence, where the life force of the humans and the non-humans that surround us are felt to be contributing to our own life force. 8 If the domesticating mode of existence stresses a sense of boundaries concerned with the delineation of a space of sovereignty, and the reciprocal mode of existence highlights boundaries and borders as a zone of exchange, the mutualist mode of existence underscores a reality where boundaries between self and other, human and animal, and so on, are far less absolute and even non-existent, where we experience an interpenetration between self and other. In order to grasp what this means for our understanding of racism and anti-racism, it is important to stress again the critical anthropological reach of these modes of existence. Despite some facile claims to the contrary by people eager to attack anthropology's supposed colonial exoticisation of otherness, neither Marcel Mauss nor Levy-Bruhl nor any of the anthropologists who took their work seriously claimed something as simplistic as 'Look at us. We are modern and rational, and look at those others who are so different from us that they live in a world of gift exchange, or in a world of mutuality.' Both emphasised that rational instrumental calculative forms of thinking and living existed in the societies they were examining. They respectively argued, however, that the logic of the gift and the logic of participation were more pronounced in those societies than they were in our own. Thus they were also claiming right from the start that the logic of participation and the logic of gift exchange were not as foreign to us as we might first think. Our world must be made out of a multiplicity of modes of existence, and if those modes of existence like gift exchange and mutuality speak to us it is because they are always already one of our many modes of creating/relating to the world. We can say that Mauss and Levy-Bruhl were multi-realists well before Eduardo Viveiros de Castro introduced the concept. It

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is in this sense that their anthropology was a critical anthropology: it works like a sociocultural archaeology digging up and making apparent modes of existence that, while less salient in our lives, are nonetheless very much part of them. The domesticating, reciprocal and mutualist modes of existence are concurrently part of everyone's lives even if one dominates over others in certain social, historical or personal circumstances. Thus, I might see in a tree something I need to instrumentalise, to cut in order to 'extract' its wood and build myself a house, and in that sense the tree exists for me in the domesticating order of reality. What Mauss and others would insist upon, however, is that there is another mode of relating to the tree, which occurs concurrently, where its mere presence regardless of the value of its wood is a gift: I look at it and I say, 'Thank you for existing, even though I am sorry that I need to cut you down.' Likewise, I might consciously or unconsciously feel that the being of the tree and its life force is participating in my own existence and enhancing my own life force, and when I cut the tree I might, also consciously or unconsciously, feel that my own life force has been diminished when I cut it down. I am living and relating to things in all these three forms of existence at the same time, and perhaps many others of which I am not conscious. With this in mind I want now to move to show how the racism of exterminability draws on a particular experience located in all of the three modes of existence I have examined above. Racists, like all of us, are multi-realists in practice while it is only we the anti-racists who have clung to a mono-realist 'rationalist' mode of existence in theory for too long. When racists classify someone as exterminable, they don't only do so from an instrumentalist/ calculative rationality point of view. To be sure, they do classify them in this way, perceiving them as superfluous and harmful. But this is not enough to explain the lethal and visceral nature of exterminability. Racists also experience and classify the racialised within the realm of reciprocity. As I have argued above, the way we greet a child entering a room is a good example of treating someone's presence as a gift in itself. What is crucial to add here is that it is precisely through this process that we instil in children a healthy narcissistic sense of self-worth. It goes without saying that we might under- or over-do it sometimes, but it remains true nonetheless that it is good for us to walk around

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knowing subliminally that our worthiness is not merely relative to how 'useful' others think we are. It is precisely this intrinsic sense of worthiness inherent to our very presence, and that is beyond or outside instrumental reason, that the racists try to withhold from those they are racialising and in so doing try to remove them from the reciprocal mode of existence. It is this removal that adds an important layer to what it means to be exterminable. indeed, in the case of asylum seekers the withholding of this intrinsic giftness, and the symbolic/psychological injury this entails, is one of the most important dimensions of the racist encounter. While this already adds depth and complexity to our understanding of the significance of exterminability, it is by understanding the way racism also draws the experience of mutuality that the true murderous intent already present in the very affective dimension of the racist classification itself can be more fully understood. As has been made clear above, the mutualist order of existence involves a sense of inter-penetration of existence whereby the other is seen as participating in our very existence and vice versa. In exemplifying this l used the positive example of the life force of others enhancing our own life force. Yet one of the vilest expressions of racism emanates from a negative experience of this mutuality, an experience akin to forms of black magic and sorcery: seeing in the existence of the other malefic forces that are diminishing rather than enhancing one's own life force. This is indeed one of the most unpleasant and visceral forms that racism takes. Here, the racist conceives of the other in the figure of the 'dementor' in Rowling's Harry Potter novels: the mere proximity of someone they classify as black, Asian, Arab or Jew is seen as sucking one's life and soul away from them, leaving them drained. Not only is the presence of the other not a gift, it is also an actual 'existential threat' that animates our exterminatory impulses. What I have tried to show in the above is that by taking the many dimensions of exterminability on board we can begin to think of an anti-racism that can rise to its multi-realist complexity. For if racism constitutes itself within the domesticating, reciprocal and mutualist modes of existence this certainly does not mean that these modes of existences are intrinsically racist. Modes of existence are

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like all social worlds, spaces of struggle. Just as racism finds resources in them to thrive, so can anti- and-most importantly for us-alterracism. Just as the order of the gift implies a move away from the domesticating order of instrumental valorisation, the reciprocal mode of existence offers us an anti-racism that moves beyond the 'valorisation of the other' that characterises multicultural antiracism. More importantly, the mutualist mode of existence offers us experiences where the very distinction between self and other disappears and as such offers one of the most important grounds for setting the utopia of the a-racial on secure grounds. I want to conclude by highlighting the fact that just as social reality in general can be a vegetable soup of realities and anti-racism can consciously aim to operate within this multiplicity, anti-racist writing can also consciously aim at emanating and operating in such a multiplicity. That is, anti-racist writing can itself belong by style and content to the realm of domestication, reciprocity or mutuality; it can be over-analytical treating racism, racists and the racialised as objects of what amounts to analytical domestication. This is when all we aim to do is try to 'capture' reality. Anti-racist writing, however, can also present itself as an offering entering a relation of reciprocity with the people it is analysing. Many anthropological reflections on writing have tried to grapple with this question. Finally, anti-racist writing can also work as a propelling life force that animates and participates in the life of those it cares about most. Sometimes this can be a question of style: it is hardly a revelation for anti-racist and feminist activists that one can highlight a problem among a dominated section of the population and make the problem weigh even more on them; one can highlight it to increase people's agency and capacity for resistance and resilience. Anti-racist writing, in both its academic and activist forms, often-like reality itself-can be a vegetable soup of all these tendencies. Becoming more conscious of the realities it participates in making can give it further strategic depth in what by definition it aims to achieve. It is in this sense that rethinking the forms of anti-racist writing is part and parcel of the process of recalling anti-racism in general.

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Appendix to chapter 9 Against colonial rubbishing As my Facebook friends know, I take my status updates seriously. This does not mean that I only treat serious topics, or that I take myself overly seriously. Indeed I can be very frivolous, and I always maintain a healthy cynicism towards whichever way I happen to see myself favourably on any given day. What I mean by taking my Face book entries seriously is that I put all-or at least a lot-of myself into them: in them, I am rational and emotional, intellectual and political, public and personal, theoretical and empirical, and a lot more. I am saying this because I am beginning this piece by reflecting on a couple of status updates I have made in the last few months. So, I want readers, especially those who are quickly inclined to do so, to at least wait until I finish before thinking that I am conceited for thinking that my Facebook entries are worthy of any serious reflection at all. What led me to reflect on these entries was a realisation that, despite the different subject matter between at least some of them, they have been driven by very similar sentiments and emotions: disgust, rage, anger, pain and sadness. I want to reflect on the source of this similarity. The first entry is dated 9 March 2013 when I was invited to give a keynote at a conference held at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank. I wrote it after I had been given a tour around Ramallah and Jerusalem the day before the conference. It went this way:

I did tell the organiser of this conference that I don't feel I should be giving a keynote on 'Palestine between dependence and independence', that I am hardly the most empirically knowledgeable person in this field. But he insisted. 'Everyone says you make people think outside the box. That's what we need,' he said. I was flattered. But one day of experiencing the 'settlements' and the wall has already so fundamentally disturbed me. I've read all that can be read about the Wall and the settlements and I was still fundamentally shocked ... How is this possible today? It is like a colonialism running amok with power. Walling

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people as they please, mistreating them as they please, building colonies high up on the hills and literally shitting on those living down the hill by letting their sewer come out outside the settlements for others to cope with it. How heroic is it that the Palestinian people are still managing to squeeze a bit of life in the midst of this? And what is there more to say that does not sound cheap? I seriously am not enjoying the prospect of presenting this keynote. The second entry came following reading a Haaretz article on the occasion of what would have been Walter Benjamin's 120th birthday telling the story of his suicide as he lost hope of escaping the Nazis in Marseilles. The thought of someone as grand, as brilliant and as sensitive a thinker as Walter Benjamin being subjected to so much humiliation leading to his suicide always hits me hard: It always makes me so sad reading about this. You think, 'Fuck fascism and anti-Semitism. Never again.' Fascist anti-Semitic evil might have been banal but that didn't stop it being close to a form of pure evil, and the struggle against fascist anti-Semitism is as 'pure good' as you can get-except for those who pollute it by investing it with the function of legitimising Zionist fascism. I wouldn't say all forms of Zionism are like this, but this is really what the dominant form of Zionism in Israel is: a pollution of the struggle against anti-Semitism.

The third entry was not that long ago following Rudd's infamous introduction of the 'PNG solution' to deal with the dangerous encirclement of Australia by billions of Third World-looking creatures coming to get us: To help think the culture to which Rudd's asylum seeker policy is appealing to and which he hopes will find him appealing, what follows is a creative modification of some cultural and dictionary definitions: 'Stingy, mean'-both mean reluctant to part with money, goods, possessions or benefits; unwilling to share,

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give or spend possessions or benefits. 'Mean' also suggests a small-minded, ignoble, petty stinginess leading to miserable, cheerless, or vacuously cheerful, living. 'Battlers' -old Australian English: working-class people; new Australian English: lower middle-class people who desire and think they deserve to be upper middle class; Old Marxist English: petty bourgeois shits. Characterised by a permanent state of insecurity and a permanent sense that more privileges are never enough; often believe newspaper reports that the 'Australian economy is booming' and feel that things are never booming enough for them when compared to X and Y. 'Ordinary Australians'-Australian-born and immigrants who can't believe their luck that they were born, or have successfully settled, in Australia, and got away with occupying and making use of Indigenous land without having to pay for it (see for comparative purposes 'Israeli settlers'). Can't shake a sense of loving what they have, being perturbed by a feeling of 'haunted enjoyment'. This sentiment has been referred to in a previous Hage publication as the 'sensitivity ofthieves'. 9 'Lucky-worried Australians' -another product of the unequally shared 'economic boom'. A prototype of the lucky-worried subject is a person who is given a business class upgrade on (usually) a very short flight, can't believe their luck, but instead of enjoying it, they spend their time worrying about economy class people entering the business class cabin to use the toilet. The final one, which actually initiated these reflections, came about when a colleague made a light-hearted comment about my recent habit of using photos of 'dead anthropologists' as my Facebook profile picture, rather than a photo of myself. I am teaching a subject on Marcel Mauss's book The Gift, and I initially had a photo of him standing in for me. Now that I have moved to teaching the wellknown influence of The Gift on the thought of Claude Levi-Strauss, it is a picture of Levi-Strauss that is occupying my little photographic fantasy space. I replied to my colleague that I find it quite useful and

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enjoyable to have this little identity shift as I am reading and teaching particular thinkers. I then mentioned, kind of en passant, that I also found it a bit perversely enjoyable to embody or let myself be embodied by the spirit of both Mauss and Levi-Strauss insofar as they are both Jewish thinkers. But then I remembered a night I was reading about Mauss's personal history and discovered that he too had been subjected to the humiliation of the Nazis towards the end of his life, so I qualified my response by adding that, actually, it was not always enjoyable, and that I had been seriously shattered when I became aware that Marcel Mauss in the last days of his life had to walk with a yellow star stuck on his jacket. It was not dissimilar to learning about Benjamin's death. If anything it was even more upsetting. I always identified with Marcel Mauss far more than with his uncle Emile Durkheim, who was a bit 'priestly' for my taste. Marcel Mauss loved life, was a good eater and a cook, and had a great sense of humour. So again the thought of this great mind being demeaned by the murderous and mediocre Nazi machine upset me immensely. I actually cried in my bed that night as I was reading about it. It was not that I consider the intellectual victims of Nazism intrinsically more important than any other victim. It was more a reflection of the kind of people I end up identifying with and sublimating as an academic. It was while recalling this that the thought came to my mind that some of the sentiments of disgust, anger and pain that I mention above-and that I experienced reading about Mauss and Benjaminwere not that dissimilar from the sentiments I experienced when I started thinking about asylum seekers following Rudd's pronouncements on the 'PNG solution'. And certainly not dissimilar to how I felt when I toured the occupied Palestinian territories. Indeed after my Palestinian tour I also had to retreat to my room to let myself cry. I felt ashamed feeling the urge to cry while those who were actually subjected to this inhuman treatment were stoically enduring it by my side. So I had to retreat to do it. What really got to me in Palestine was the settlers letting their sewage run on Palestinian villages. Twice we were driving through a Palestinian village when suddenly there was an invasion of the smell of the Israeli shit 'landing' nearby. I kept thinking to myself that a historical and ethical line was crossed here somewhere: 'You colonise and you

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oppress, OK, it's been done before, but to also literally shit on the people you are colonising takes colonisation into a different realm.' It then struck me that in fact there was probably a classificatory affinity in the eyes of the Israeli colonists between shit and the Palestinians. What differentiates Israeli apartheid from South African apartheid is that white South Africans actually needed black South Africans as cheap labour whereas the Israelis have no need for Palestinian labour. Indeed they have no need for the Palestinians full stop. And so, in the colonists' eyes, Palestinian space is always already a kind of social rubbish dump suitable for letting one's sewage run into. The historians of slavery have often pointed out that, despite the vile racism that characterised slavery, slave owners had an interest in the well-being of their slaves. After all, they were their property, and they were useful. I could see that this was not so in the case of the Israeli relation to the Palestinians. This is when I thought that the similarity between the sentiment that came to me in Palestine, and when reading about the Nazi victimisation of Mauss and Benjamin, was precisely this: the extreme devalorisation of people that I highly valorised; a dumb, insensitive, machine-ic and relentless devalorisation that went so far as treating people like disposable waste. And is that not what is particularly vile about Australia's 'PNG solution'? The vileness resides in the very mode of speaking of refugees by refusing to address them in the sense of looking them in the eyes and recognising their tragic experiences, while addressing instead the 'business plan' of the people smugglers who are supposedly transporting and circulating them. It makes one feel as if Rudd and company could just as easily be discussing the illegal dumping of chemical waste or something along this line. So, there are situations where saying that colonisation can be a 'mode of rubbishing' people is more than engaging in flowery metaphors. 'Rubbishing' is actually a colonial technique. Indeed even Australia's colonisation of Indigenous people took more a form of rubbishing than a form of exploitation of the labour of the colonised. Exterminating people by 'rubbishing them' is always less dramatic than when it is done through massacres. It is more like dumping a truck that one has destroyed somewhere on one's property and letting it slowly rust, corrode and disintegrate. This is perhaps a

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dominant Australian mode of racial extermination, but there are variations on the same theme throughout the colonial world. The historian of French intellectual life, Didier Eribon, tells this story: I recall what Georges Dumezil told me about the day when, during the war, he went to visit his master and friend Marcel Mauss and saw for the first time the yellow star sewn onto his clothing. He could not take his eyes off this frightful stigma. The great sociologist then remarked to him: 'You are looking at my gob of spit.' For a long time I understood this phrase in the most straightforward way: Mauss meant that he considered this bit of yellow cloth as a dirty stain, a piece of filth thrown in his face. But eventually someone pointed out to me that l was mistaken: Mauss had doubtless used the word 'crachat' [literally, 'gob of spit'] in the sense of'decoration'. And indeed, one of the old demotic meanings of the word 'crachat' is that of insigne, medal or decoration. 10 We can trust Mauss, the master analyst of symbolic exchange, to know how to receive a blow and turn it, at least from a personal symbolic perspective, to his favour. Ultimately he manages to replay for us in his own way an old dramatic move: the act of wearing one's humiliation like a badge of honour. It is with this question that I want to end here: who are today the inheritors of this ambivalent badge of honour? Who are the wearers of the equivalent of the yellow star today? Certainly, it is those asylum seekers and indigenous people everywhere who are heroically struggling against their colonial rubbishing. This is true even in the case of Palestine despite the Zionist claims of being the inheritors of the yellow star par

excellence. For, as numerous Jews inside and outside Israel know, the honour associated with the yellow star is not something that can be transmitted ethnically. It is something earned by living up to the nobility of the tragic experience of which it is a metonymy. This is why, while this star has to remain yellow-for anti-Semitism remains

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a real and present danger in today's world-it nonetheless also comes with the added colours of Palestine as well as the colour of all those other indigenous people and refugees who are 'rubbished' in history.

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10

Dwelling in the reality of Utopian thought

For a long time now-throughout the history of modern Western thought, particularly the history of radical political thought, where it has had a prominent presence-the concept of 'utopia' has been clustered with an ensemble of terms that include 'romantic', 'vague', 'dreamy', 'idealistic' and 'sentimental'. What all those terms have in common is that they denote a detachment from, or lack of connection to, reality. Indeed, the term 'unrealistic' easily belongs to the cluster. To speak of utopias is to speak of ontologically non-existent spaces, non-realities. Utopias can be inspired from an idealised past and a fantasised future. They can also attempt to negate at the level of fantasy negative features of the present. But they are not articulated to a present reality. Indeed, the more seriously utopian a utopia is, the more in need of a 'reality check' it is considered to be. The main ontological assumption lying behind this conception of utopia is what I will refer to as mono-realism: the idea that there is one, and only one, reality that our thought is, or can be, connected to. This mono-realism is expressed in the Marxist-inspired political division between materialism and idealism, where thought that corresponds to a reality is described as materialist, and thought that

doesn't is described as idealist. It is within this construct that utopian thought is seen as a variety of idealism. A relatively recent school of thought, building on a long anthropological tradition that questions the core ontological assumptions of modernity, has shown mono-realism to be one among those core assumptions. Developed particularly around the works of Bruno Latour and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on multi-naturalism, this approach invites us to think of ourselves as always inhabiting a multiplicity of intersecting spatialities and realities. 1 From this emerges the possibility that what we call 'reality' is merely a dominant reality, and that there are always minor realities in which we are equally enmeshed. A further consequence of this is that thought, utopian thought included, even when not speaking to the dominant reality, is still emanating from and speaking to a reality; that utopia, rather than being a space inspired by an idealised past that has disappeared, or a future-oriented imagining of that which has no existence, is metonymic of minor and repressed spaces in which we already dwell in the present.

Critical anthropology: from the realities of the other to other realities Of all the social sciences anthropology has undoubtedly been the most important in providing utopian thought with its raw materials. As is suggested by Levi-Strauss's programmatic statement that anthropologists bear witness to manners of being that reveal to us the contingency of our own, 2 which I take to be a cornerstone of this mode of thought, anthropology enables us to imagine ourselves as being vastly different from what we are. In fact, we can imagine this because in certain ways we are already different from what we are. The anthropological other is both our other and ourselves. Our otherness dwells within us. At this point the affinity between this utopian thought and critical anthropology is most palpable. This idea that anthropology shows us to be other to ourselves, that it provides Patrice Maniglier's 'mirror image of ourselves in which we do not recognise ourselves', 3 is more challenging than it might first appear. It was already demanding for the local imagination to cope with the accounts of world travellers who, well before anthropology came to existence, began to note the existence of

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cultures and customs of people who lived differently from us. But anthropology began by saying much more than this. It told us that these radically different modes of being were relevant to us. They speak to us. And it is here that lies the complexity of the proposition. Anthropology not only notes the existence of other cultures but also makes a proposition about us, our own modern culture and the spaces we inhabit: if the otherness of these cultures speaks to us, then there is something about us that is in a relation of affinity to what is being said, something about us that is already other. Thus, anthropology always aims to connect the existence of other cultures elsewhere to the existence of otherness among us. What does it mean to speak of the 'existence of otherness'----of other cultural forms, of other modes of being-within and among us? This is perhaps one of the most productive problematics that anthropology has generated. Does this otherness exist in a virtual or potential state within social reality? And do anthropologists, like the shamans they study, bring that virtuality into being, allowing it to disrupt and haunt our dominant modes of dwelling in the world? Or does this otherness exist in the form of a psychological disposition or a mental structure that can be linked to the presumed 'unity of human kind'? The multi-naturalism and radical perspectivism of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Bruno Latour opens up a way of thinking differently about this otherness. It allows us to think of it as articulated not to virtual but to actual realities-albeit minor onesthat are continuously present, even if they are overshadowed by more dominant ones. From such a perspective the possibilities of another way of being in the world are no longer seen as necessarily belonging to some pure act of the imagination disconnected from the real. Instead, they can be seen as fully enmeshed in minor, 'eclipsed', but nonetheless existing, realities that a critical anthropology helps bring to the fore. This can also be true of those 'idealised forms of being' that constitute the affective and imaginary building blocks of many utopian projects (and that are of particular interest to us here): intense loving relations, organic forms of social solidarity, 'romantic' relations of communion with nature, and so on. I will examine more fully the example of a particular socio-affective thought that is constitutive of many utopias: the idea of a non-instrumental relation

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to nature. I will show how we can see this utopian thought as speaking to a reality in which we are already enmeshed, rather than as an 'idealist' or 'romantic' vision fantasising a reality that does not exist. Before I do so, however, I will delve further into what the notion of 'reality' -and particularly what I have referred to as 'minor reality'-means from the perspective of 'multiple realities' or 'multinaturalism'.

From the subjective point of view to ontological perspectivism The notion of multi-naturalism emerges in Viveiros de Castro's work as a logical complement to his ethnographically derived conception of Amerindian perspectivism. The latter, he has argued, challenges not only the varieties of perspectives that we have 'on reality' but also the very idea we have of perspective as being a subjective/cultural perspective on a natural reality. Consequently, before seeking-as a cliched anthropological formula would have it-to understand reality 'from the natives' point of view', we need to work out first what the natives think a 'point of view' is: their point of view on the point ofview. 4 The alternative is to uncritically allow a Western conception of what a 'point of view' is to prevail. However, Viveiros de Castro's target is really a dominant Western conception of the point of view. As I will briefly show, there are some versions of perspectivism within Western cultures that are, at least in some regard, closer to-and can act as a bridge to better understand-the Amerindian version. Undoubtedly, the most popular way of understanding the notion of'point of view' in Western cultures is a subjectivist one. That is, a 'point of view' is most often taken to mean a subjective take on what is either explicitly or implicitly posited as a single objective reality. This is the implicit assumption in statements such as 'you have your point of view, and I have mine'. And it is less implicit when people speak of having 'different points of view' or a 'different understanding' of a 'situation'. This idea is closely linked to an equally subjectivist notion of 'interest' that is particularly dominant in the political sciences: people see 'things' or 'a conflict'-both implying a single 'reality' -according to their interests. The most common opposition to this mono-realist objectivist view is a relativist 'social constructionist' conception of multiple

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subjectivities. Here, there is no objective reality at all that matters; what matters are the multiple subjectivities that are themselves the only realities that matter. However, there are variations within this polarity. For example, not all 'social constructionism' is a form of relativism and idealism. There are conceptions of subjective interest and perspective that end up with an objectivist conception of social construction. Here the idea of interest is seen as leading to selective interaction with particular elements of reality. Recently, my wife was serving as host for an ecologist from Italy, and I took our guest to see the Sydney Opera House. After dropping her off at the Botanic Garden, where one has a breathtaking view the famous building, I went for a swim. When I came back, my guest was very excited. She told me how many incredible species of birds she had managed to see while walking there. She did not once mention the Opera House; it was as if it had no presence for her. Clearly, she did not see what I was seeing there (and hoping she would see also). Her subjective interest made her perceive reality in a very different way. But her reality was not subjective: the birds and a world made out of birds were objective enough for both of us. Her subjective interest made her see reality and construct reality in a specific way, but in no way was this construction subjective. In much the same way, we can say that an artist and a road engineer looking at a valley-one to paint it and the other to build a road through it-have different points of view and different perspectives on what they are looking at. They thus will see different things and have different takes on the present reality, but each of their social constructions of reality is objective enough. Here, to say reality is a social construction is no different from saying that a chair is a social construction as opposed to a tree. In no way is one saying that the chair is more or less objective than the tree by claiming it to be a social construction. We can see therefore that here the subjective interest, in interacting with reality, does not produce a subjective point of view; rather, it positions one in a particular objective construction of reality. This conception of perspectivism is closer, but still very far, from the multi-naturalist view. It is closer because it conceives of each person's reality as the product of a relation between oneself and one's surroundings, not something that is given. As we shall see, reality as a relation is crucial for multi-naturalism. However, for the

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latter, the relation is perceived to be between the objective modes of existing, inhabiting, and relating to our surroundings with our body rather than, as is the case above, the interaction between our subjective interest (as a painter or an engineer) and our surroundings. The above perspectivism also differs from multi-naturalism because it still posits the existence of one and only one reality that exists outside our interaction with it. Thus, in the example above, we who are not painters or road engineers and gazing on both have no trouble seeing that each are positioned in one dimension of reality that is nonetheless part of the one reality which we, the outsiders, are able to capture as the reality. What lies beyond those realities created out of the interaction between our bodily habitus and its surrounding is a non-accessible, non-symbolically 'capturable', all-encompassing element akin to what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called 'the Real'. Realities are our interaction with this Real, an interaction based on objective modes of bodily insertion in, and relation with, this Real-or what I will refer to as a plurality of modes of enmeshment in the Real.

The critical and political ramifications of multiple realities Clearly, the multi-natural argument is a critical anthropological argument. That is, it is more than an argument that 'the Amazonians have their reality and we have our reality'. It does mean the latter, but it also means that their reality speaks to ours. It haunts us with the possibility that we, as well, live in multiple realities. Viveiros de Castro's perspectivism highlights the Amazonian's sense of multiplicity of natures structured around the multiplicity of bodies: the body of the human, the body of the jaguar and so on. In speaking to us, however, it also-and it is crucial not to think in either/or terms here-highlights the multiplicities that are within each and every body. If a reality is an encounter between the affective, postural, libidinal and physical potentiality of the body and the potentiality of the Real, to think of ourselves as inhabiting a multiplicity of realities is to recognise the multiplicity of the potentialities of the human body. That is, it is also to recognise the multiplicity of modes in which the body is enmeshed in its environment. Let me give a quick personal example. I am hearing-impaired. I began losing my hearing in my twenties. Before losing my hearing, I

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had developed a 'bad habit': I used to eavesdrop. I developed the habit following years of being taken, as a kid, by my parents to work and to lunches with people I had no capacity for or interest in understanding. I developed the habitus of an eavesdropper in that well after I stopped being subjected to the situation that led me to become an eavesdropper, I continued to have a strong disposition towards eavesdropping on conversations around me, regardless of where I was. From the multiple-realities angle I want to invite thinking with, eavesdropping was a mode of being enmeshed in my surroundings. Indeed, eavesdropping produces a very specific reality with very specific properties. Take, for instance, the fact that 'in reality' the closer a sound is to you the more you hear it. This is not true of the reality in which one finds oneself to be an eavesdropper, where the opposite is true. Sounds that are further from you start to become clearer than ones near you. There is no better proof that my disposition towards eavesdropping created its own reality than the fact that the capacity was the very first thing I started losing when I started going deaf. And with the loss of my capacity to eavesdrop I lost the whole reality that came with it. I didn't lose a subjective point of view on reality; I lost a whole reality. If I had gone totally deaf I could probably also argue that I lost the whole reality: the whole world of sound, produced by the capacity for hearing. This is so, since one's hearing is a particular mode of bodily enmeshment in one's surroundings. Indeed, this goes for all of our senses. Each enmeshes us in our surroundings in a specific way, producing at the same time a reality specific to this mode of enmeshment. What we call our sensorial reality is really a fusion of separate realities produced by the body's sensory enmeshment in its surrounding. If we lose one of our senses we lose one reality-not a particular take on reality, or a particular dimension of reality. Continuous and concurrent immersion in a multiplicity of realities provides an important consolidation of the critical anthropological ethos of 'we can be other than what we are'. The historical and social conditions that have encouraged us to dwell in one reality more than in others do not exhaust the possibilities for deeper immersion in those others. While we might only have a vague sense of it, we are shadowed by and persist in these realities, and can

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expand our being in them beyond this level of persistence. Here, critical anthropology transforms into a critical politics. 'Being other than what we are' is not just conceptually possible. It is materially possible since one is already dwelling in it. Such a conception of multiple realities opens up the possibility to perceive domination not only as the product of a struggle within a reality but also the struggle between realities. This idea that dominant groups do not just dominate an already given reality but impose their reality is already present in social theory, most explicitly in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. 5 It is not surprising that Bourdieu, of all the social scientists working on modernity, gets very close to a multirealist conception of the world. The reason is Bourdieu's thinking derives not only from Spinoza but also from an adaptation of Husserl's notion of Umwelt, a conception of the bodily habitus as always being part and parcel of the very social reality it helps give rise to. Behind Viveiros de Castro's multi-naturalism lies a similar conception of the body, evidenced by his invoking of the notion of' habitus' to express this conception. 6 Bourdieu's different worlds are produced by different competing interests and orientations within an always modern conception of reality. As such, they are far from encompassing the possibility of radical alterity in the way it is present in Viveiros de Castro's work, and closer to the objectivist form of 'social constructionism' mentioned above. Nonetheless, through his conception of habitus, Bourdieu sees interest as a bodily mode of existing in reality rather than as a 'subjective' dimension of the self. Furthermore, by offering a conception of politics as a struggle between different realities, Bourdieu opens up a path for us to understand that what he calls symbolic violence is also a form of ontological violence: certain realities come to dominate others so much that they simply become 'reality', foreclosing their history as a process of domination and equally foreclosing the very possibility of thinking reality as multiple. To use Gramscian language, there are processes in which certain forces become hegemonic within a reality, but there are also processes whereby a reality becomes hegemonic over other realities. As suggested above, I want now to exemplify some of the dimensions of the utopian ecological imaginary and its relation to reality when seen through a multi-realist lens.

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The reality of eco-utopian thought The ecological crisis, whether in the form of global warming, environmental degradation, or the overexploitation of both the human and the non-human elements constitutive of our planet, has generated a continuous stream of ecological utopian thought. In this thought, human relation to nature is imagined in a variety of ways other than the instrumental and exploitative mode of interaction that has come to dominate our lives. More often than not such utopian conceptions of human-nature relations are perceived as pure fantasy. If they are related to reality at all, it is a negative relation, in that utopia here is an attempt to negate the harsh ecological reality by transcending it in thought. One can be inclined to see it as embodying the very Marxist definition of ideology and 'false consciousness': an attempt to transcend at the level of thought that cannot be transcended at the level of practice. Nonetheless, it should be equally clear that these ecological utopian ideas are also connected to another reality: the reality of the alternative primitivist tribal modes of inhabiting and relating to nature as they have been depicted by the accounts of travellers and anthropologists throughout Western history. The recent work of Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, is perhaps the most important compilation and analysis of the multiple ways in which humans have conceived of their relationship to nature to date. 7 One can easily see how many of these alternative modes of inhabiting and conceiving the natural world, which began their lives in the West by being recorded by anthropologists and others, have now made their way to the ecological/utopian imaginary, whether in holistic intellectualised utopian constructs in the Thomas Moore tradition, or in partial utopian imaginaries in a variety of cultural forms: literature, dance, sculpture and so on-and, perhaps most importantly today, science fiction films. Such alternative imagining abounds in the science fiction blockbuster Avatar in its depiction of Na'vi culture. 8 I will reflect on one particular imagined relation in the film: the ability of Na'vi riders to 'plug' themselves into and bond with animals like the 'Direhorse' and the 'Mountain Banshee', such that they become together a type of fused, integrated assemblage. Far from being the product of 'pure fantasy', the idea of a deep connectivity and oneness with certain parts of the natural world was

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the subject of seminal work by Lucien Levy-Bruhl through his description of the 'participatory' mode of being. This mode entails a less marked delineation between self and other and a radically different conception of the boundaries of being. One of the achievements of Levy-Bruhl, in what perhaps constitutes a defining moment for anthropology, was his interpretation of the famous statement captured by the ethnographer Karl von den Steinen, in which the Amazonian Bororo tribespeople told van den Steinen 'the Bororos are Araras' (referring to a local species of bird). Levy-Bruh! confronted this 'we are birds' statement by moving away from explanations that could easily be encompassed by Western thought, keeping it within its comfort zone-such as 'what the Bororos really mean when they say they are birds is that they are so metaphorically'. Levy-Bruhl's attitude was more akin to 'they say they are birds; if you are an anthropologist, either bring yourself to understand how one can exist in the world in such a way that they can credibly think they are birds or forget it'. In developing his conception of participation, Levy-Bruhl was trying to describe-and show there were-other ways of existing in the world than the instrumental mode of being that dominates our lives. He thus differentiated between the 'logical mentality', which depends on and creates a separation between self and other and is part of the instrumental/rational mode of inhabiting the world, and the 'mystical mentality', which is part and parcel of the process of participation, where self and other exist in relative states of fusion. Crucially, however, in continuation with the arguments about the anthropological conception of otherness developed earlier, LevyBruhl's distinct 'mentalities' are not reified modes of thinking specific to 'civilised' and 'primitive' peoples, but represent dynamic modes intermingling in every individual. 9 Thus, for Levy-Bruh!, there is no inherent propensity on the part of 'primitives' to think mystically and on the part of the 'civilised' to think logically. Nor was he saying that the primitives lived in a mystical world about which we know nothing. Rather-and especially as his later writings became less about 'mentalities' and more about experience-the difference becomes precisely about which experiential reality, in the sense of which modality of enmeshment in the Real, comes to dominate over others.

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That is, if we are to make him speak in the language of multiple realities, both we and the primitives are bodily enmeshed in our environment such that we produce and live in a multiplicity of realities. Among these are the realities associated with both the logical and the mystical mentalities that interested him. Crucially, being enmeshed and dwelling in the reality associated with the logical mentality that has become the dominant feature of our modernity has never stopped us from being enmeshed and dwelling in a multiplicity of other realities, including the reality of participation and the mystical mentality associated with it. Consequently-to go back to our original concern with utopia-the utopian idea of state of fusion, far from being 'pure' fantasy, speaks to a reality where we actually do exist in a state of fusion with nature, and which we continue to inhabit, but which has been obscured by our capitalist modernity. But there is more to Levy-Bruhl's argument than the idea that we always already exist in spaces where our relation to nature is other than what it appears to be. Perhaps more important is the fact that Levy-Bruhl helps us undermine any political and ethical polarity that we are tempted to create between a modernity associated with instrumental reason and a primitiveness associated with a state of participation and a mystical mentality. Indeed, he does not see instrumental reason as specific to modernity. Rather, he helps us think that what perhaps characterises modernity most is the way we have increasingly come to see instrumental reason and the reality associated with it as the only possible mode of being and the only possible mode of reasoning. In this sense, rather than instrumental reason as such, Western modernity's greatest 'achievement' has been to make us mono-realists, minimising our awareness of the multiplicity of realities in which we exist, always grounding our utopian thought in the past or the future, rather than in the present, where it has always been grounded.

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It was while heading towards Cowra in western New South Wales for a birthday party that my wife Caroline, my two daughters and I drove past the city of Bathurst. Bathurst is where my grandparents migrated to in the late 1930s. They went there after a brief migration to Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic), where my mother was born. Although they were making some money in the Caribbean, a friend from the village lured them to Australia, telling them that they could make even more money there. So they re-migrated, staying in Sydney for a short while, then going to Bathurst, where they opened a small clothing factory. My two uncles and my aunt are all Bathurst-born and bred, although they later moved to Sydney. My mother went to a Bathurst school until she was fourteen. As the eldest child she had to leave school to help her parents at home and in the factory. She loved being part of running the factory, and had good memories of many years spent zigzagging New South Wales in the family's Studebaker delivering clothes to various regional shops around Bathurst as far apart as Lithgow and Young. Nonetheless, in the mid-1950s-when she was thirty years old-she left Australia for Lebanon, supposedly for a stint of travel. I am not sure whether she did so specifically to find herself a husband, but she says that she was by chance

introduced to my father-an influential gendarmerie officer at the time-by chance, fell in love, possibly fell also for the status and the military hype, and stayed. Although I never visited Australia as a youth, Bathurst was of course a familiar name to me. It was often on my mother's lips. It was on the sender's address stickers on the many large boxes that arrived for us by ship at Beirut's port, and which contained, among many other things, the ubiquitous furry koala and kangaroo toys that began to take over every corner of our house. These clearly marked our household's Australian connections. So did the distinctness of my mother's accent when speaking English. I remember Carla, the blond German Lebanese neighbour-and the secret object of my passions in my early teens-asking me: 'Why does your mother always say "aahy" instead of "eehy"?' But far more important to me than the stuffed toys or the accent were the pictures of my grandparents in Bathurst, which my mother kept in her drawer and which I took out and examined carefully every now and then. It was primarily these photos that constituted the portal through which I started to imagine what life in Australia was like. The adventures of Sandy and his friend Happy the Kangaroo in my favourite French comics journal, Spirou, helped extend my imagining. Sandy and Hoppy were really my first introduction to the Australian outback and its culture, albeit in a cliched European way. Nonetheless, even today, the drawings of Willy Lambil, the series' Belgian creator, appear as a serious attempt to capture the Australian landscape. And although Sandy and Happy's adventures took place in various places, largely somewhere on the border between the states ofVictoria and New South Wales-Poursuite sur la Murray was the title of one suspenseful adventure-somehow, these drawings fused with the family photos to create my own particular imaginary of Bathurst. When in 1976, as a nineteen-year-old, I finally moved to Australia in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, I lived in Sydney but visited my grandparents in Bathurst. They were old by then. The clothing factory was no more, and all that remained was a 'frock shop' that my grandmother kept going, in order to make a few more dollars, which she spent during short telephone conversations with what was referred to, quite obscurely to me, as 'the bookmaker'. The

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Bathurst bookmaker was destined to remain a totally alien and mysterious figure to me. Soon after I arrived, my grandparents sold the Bathurst house and the shop and moved to Sydney, where their children could look after them. Despite having visited the Bathurst house a number of times, I had no memory of it when I tried to locate it on my way to Cowra twenty-five years later. This is not surprising as I don't remember much about my first couple of years in Australia. I spent them in a state of almost total detachment from reality. It was not so much that, as the saying goes, 'my mind was elsewhere'. It was more that 'my mind was nowhere'. My most distinct feeling, as far as I can recall, was living in a state of suspension produced by an acute sense not only of displacement but also of 'directionless-ness'. While, as a kid, I dreamt of what it would be like to be in Australia, it was never with a desire to live there. Australia was simply not in a zone where I envisaged my life unfolding. I was far too Euro-centred to see Australia as more than a quaint location on the edge of the universe. Paris, London, Montreal, Chicago, New York, yes. This was where all of my Beirut friends were heading. But Australia? This has now changed, but at the time middle-class people in Beirut-always on the lookout for a social put-down-affected a peasant accent when talking about migration to Australia. They would say about someone: 'He's going to Estrolio.' This was to denote that only peasants from underdeveloped parts of Lebanon go to Australia. This was largely true until the mid-1970s. Furthermore, I had not encountered the notion of Antipodes, let alone its etymology, yet in the back of my mind when thinking of Australia I always conjured a vaguely preGalilean image: the earth was flat, and soon after you got to Australia people would start falling off the gigantic cliff. I somewhat mysteriously fantasised about a famous cliff. And so, when my parents insisted I go to Australia to escape the Lebanese civil war and continue my university education, I felt I was being removed from my vital space and positioned at the edge of the universe with no task other than to wait ... for whatever ... This made Australia, for me, a transitional space unsuitable for settlement purposes and long-term planning. Perhaps this is what Pierre Bourdieu calls spaces where 'social gravity is suspended'. For Bourdieu, social reality pulls us towards it through what becomes

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known to us as the 'necessities of life'. These 'necessities' are not given. They develop according to how 'serious'-that is, how deeply inserted and interested in what is happening in our social surroundings-we are. If one has no interest in the social reality in which one exists, then reality in turn fails to impose itself on one's senses. It loses its importance, and because of this, it also loses its consistency, and even the materiality of the physical environment diminishes. This was certainly the way I experienced Australia to begin with, and Bathurst even more so. As such, except for having once watched a car race on Mount Panorama and subsequently adopting my first Australian hero, Peter Brock, Bathurst did not really leave much of an imprint in my mind. I did not particularly miss anything about it when I stopped visiting. But that day on our way to Cowra, Caroline and the kids were eager to see where Teita (Granny) grew up. So I tried to locate the house, remembering that it was on the Mount Panorama side of a long shopping street. And so, with the memorable Mount Panorama in sight, it was not hard to locate what looked clearly to me like the house. Next to it, I was almost certain, seemed to be my grandmother's old frock shop. Nonetheless, I still had some doubts, and when we all got out of the car, I was still trying to convince myself that I was not mistaken. That's when a woman came out of the shop, locking the door behind her. She was about to go down the street, but she noticed us all standing there. 'Are you looking for something, love?' she said. 'Is that the Debs house?' I asked her. (Debs is my mother's maiden name.) 'Well, yes,' she said, 'but it hasn't been the Debs house for a very long time.' When she inquired further I told her that my mother grew up here. The woman said that she remembered her, then she immediately asked, 'Would you like to go in and have a look?' Caroline responded before I had a chance to say anything: 'Yes, thank you.' We all went in and looked around. Although we were told that 'nothing had changed', I could not remember a thing ... not the house's layout, not the shop's interior, not the pieces of furniture ... nothing. I was a bit disappointed. The woman even showed us some garments that were still there from 'Mrs Debs's time', but I was unaffected. It wasn't until I went to the backyard that something quite spectacular happened to me. The backyard had been left unkempt;

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there was no lawn, only a chaotic entanglement of high and low vegetation. Nonetheless, there, amid the chaos, I could discern three unmistakable forms: a fig tree, an olive tree and a pomegranate tree-the Mediterranean holy trinity ... or one of them at least. At the very sight of them a complex web of emotions welled in me, as wild as the vegetation at my feet. In a flash, I glimpsed a moment from my past when my mother, sitting on a long chair in front of our beach house to the north of Beirut, was telling someone about the time my grandmother had an argument with my grandfather because she felt that he was wasting his time insisting on planting these very trees. I remember that moment because I also remember my mother looking sad, even through the laughter that came to her as she told the story. It was one of the rare occasions where I came face to face with her nostalgia for Australia and her family. I am not sure why the sight of the trees affected me so much, especially since-even though I had no memory of it-I must have seen them before during my early visits. Perhaps because now that I am as seriously immersed and interested in Australia as one can be, I am pulled by its social gravity, and because of this Bathurst has acquired a weight and a materiality that it never had for me before. Perhaps this is because migratory emotions and the little bits and pieces of material reality to which they attach themselves and grow are now something I research and think about intensively. Or perhaps it is simply because I am now older, more 'existential' and more appreciative of whatever bits of memory and feelings come my way. But the thought of me in Australia, on my way from Sydney to Cowra, standing in the middle of this backyard in Bathurst next to a couple of trees that my grandfather planted more than fifty years ago, was 'awesome' -as my teenage daughter would say. Roots, routes, Lebanon, family, the cosmos, Heidegger and many more, all came racing into my mind. Among all of the above there was one feeling that was particularly discernible and that I want to highlight here: next to these very Lebanese trees, planted by my very Lebanese grandfather, I stood feeling rooted there, feeling more Australian than ever. What was surprising about this feeling was not its paradoxical nature. Rather, it was how non-paradoxical, or to repeat using the equivalent of paradox in the emotional realm, it was how non-ambivalent this

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feeling of rootedness in Australia was. The Lebanese trees did not make me feel Australian and Lebanese, although I do feel both at many moments of life. Nor did they make me feel torn between my Lebaneseness and my Australianness. They simply made me feel, as I said, more Australian. When I reflected on this, I came to understand that this was because it was not the trees themselves or the presence of my grandfather in Bathurst that made me feel rooted there. If I had seen those trees simply as Lebanese trees on Australian soil, I probably would have felt nostalgic for Lebanon. But this was not the case. Nor did the trees represent a memory of my grandfather that would have lifted me to the time when he lived there. What seemed to me to have been crucial to my experience was the very memory of my grandfather planting the trees. It was the practice that symbolised a specific relation to the land that made me feel rooted, and the trees stood there as a metonymic extension of that practice and that relation. Now, despite the elevating feeling that overwhelmed me, I knew Australia's history too well to forget that I was in a town that was at the heart of the white settlement of Australia. I was also in a backyard: as quintessentially an Anglo mode of marking and shaping, and rooting oneself in, the land as can be. So, I was well aware that others have come, in a different way and at different times, through their practices, and rooted themselves in this space. And, of course, I am too politically correct, and proudly so, to have missed the fact that 'my' Lebanese trees and the Anglo backyard in which they were planted were both 'on Aboriginal land'; that although it might be acceptable to feel all emotionally silly over a couple of trees planted fifty years ago by my grandfather, it is also good to keep things in perspective when there are people around whose rootedness in the land goes back thousands of years. So I was well aware at the time-indeed at the very moment I was experiencing a high admiring my grandfather's trees-of the conflictual histories of violence, domination and appropriation, of heroism and overcoming, of resistance, defeat and perseverance that mark the land on which these trees have grown. But, again, this awareness did not diminish the sense of rootedness they infused in me, for this was not-nor could it afford to be, mind you-a possessive rootedness that claimed monopoly over the space of its

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emergence. It is this open, non-exclusivist rootedness that allows for a superposed multiplicity of roots that I want to highlight here. Roots have a bad name in certain intellectual circles. They are associated with stasis, conservatism and narrow-mindedness. There is no doubt that roots can be experienced this way, especially if some people end up burying themselves in their roots and cannot see a difference between being rooted and being located within one's roots-which, rather than 'being rooted', is like claiming to 'be a root', whatever that might mean! For such people, their rootedness becomes a territorial and a claustrophobic one. Roots become a space that one occupies and as such becomes difficult to share. So there is certainly a good reason to capture the negativity that is part of such a conception of roots. But there is no reason to universalise this. For many immigrants I've worked with around the globe, a greater sense of rootedness did not mean a sense of occupying space statically, of being locked in the ground unable to move. On the contrary, their roots were paradoxically experienced like a pair of wings. It seems to me this is what Deleuze meant by 'rhizome'. Far from being 'anti-roots' as some have made him out to be, he was describing a different mode of being rooted that is positive and is on the side of movement. And this was exactly how I experienced 'my trees'. I felt them propelling me. It is important to stop and fully comprehend what 'propelling' means here. When we are pushed by a force it can make us go forward. The same goes with a force that is propelling us. Yet there is one important difference: when we are propelled, the force that pushes us stays with us. It seems to me, there lies the importance and the power of the roots that I am referring to: they are not roots that keep you grounded; they are roots that stay with you as you move. Gertrude Stein well understood this when she famously said: 'What good are your roots if you can't take them with you?' I think this 'with' is akin to the strength that Heidegger wanted to give the 'with' in conceptualizing his mit-Dasein. It is a with-ness that gives strength to our being. It is the 'with' we wish someone when we tell them something like 'May God' or 'May the Force' be with you. Likewise with the 'gaze of the Virgin Mary' that some Lebanese peasant immigrants feel stays with them as they cross the oceans, or with the

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varieties of talismanic icons-a supposed fragment of the cross, or a Koranic verse-that they wear around their necks, which are also something that both stays with them and keeps them rooted in their faith. The wide variety of such propelling forces clearly indicates that they have both a paternal/masculine dimension that acts on us from the outside to give us power and a maternal/feminine dimension that embraces us from within to give us protection. It is the fusion of both that makes this propelling so empowering. To me, this seems to explain to some extent why I experienced such a high next to my trees. I felt them acting on me as a force that increased my potential to, existentially speaking, 'move in life', and I felt them at the same time giving me a comforting embrace: they were a boost for my being and my thriving; a rush of energy traversing the body and making it feel capable of doing more ... more of whatever it wants to do ... I cannot help but think that this is as close a definition of what Spinoza calls 'joy' as I can think of, but perhaps such a trajectory leaves me at risk of over-theorising. To make a long story short, let me put it simply and clearly: my roots were unmistakably good for me! I want to emphasise this mode of rootedness and its positive character because in it I glimpsed not just a way of being rooted but also a mode of belonging that can stand in opposition to the dominant narrow territorial mode also corresponding to the narrow territorial way of being rooted I have critically referred to earlier, and which has often generated sadness and paranoia. The latter is a truly colonial mode of belonging. It inherits its territorial exclusivist mentality, which operates with an either/ or logic: either my roots or yours, either this land is mine or yours, either you belong here or there, either you are sovereign or I am. The experience of rootedness that I found so uplifting seems to offer a path to a different mode of belonging that, clearly, we all have within us. But this is not an anticolonialism, which shares the either/or dualism of colonial logic. Nor is it a post-colonialism, which prematurely sees colonialism as something superseded. If anything, it is a supra-counter-colonialism, in that it counters colonialism from a space outside and beyond itcertainly a space outside the usual conflict- inducing determinations in which the protagonists of colonial antagonisms are locked.

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Perhaps this is the space that Badiou refers to in his early work as the horlieu-'outsideplace'-and which in his later writing becomes the sphere of emergence of his well-known notion of the event: that which comes from an outer plane and carries with it the potential of transforming the existing. This is where I see the potentiality of the mode of rootedness I have described above, and let me reiterate this point to make it clear: such a mode of rootedness and belonging is not oppositional in the colonial sense. It is not opposing the belonging of the colonised to the belonging of the coloniser. Nor is it, as already mentioned, postcolonial in the sense of positing a mode of belonging in which colonialism is superseded. Rather, it is a mode of belonging that recognises the existence of colonial relations of power, colonial modes of belonging and the importance of anti-colonial struggles, but along those lines and at the same time, it posits the existence of an other sphere of experiential life and belonging where one can abstract from those relations of power. This neither means forgetting them nor mystifying them; rather it means finding a space from outside them that might allow us to act on them differently to help supersede them. It means that there are other spaces of experience in which colonialism, and even politics more generally, do not prevail, and which offer different human potentialities that we need to explore and tap into. This is an important dimension of what we have referred to throughout this book as alter-politics.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Hage, 'Thesis Eleven'. 2 Weber, Economy and Society, p. 507. 3 Colletti, 'Marxism: Science or revolution?' 4 Hage, White Nation. 5 Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism. 6 Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Elspeth Probyn's Blush: Faces of Shame and, more recently, Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism have had an important impact on the affective dimension of my writing. I 1

2 3 4

The globalisation of the late colonial settler condition Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism. Hannerz, Transnational Connections. Brague, The Law of God. Agamben, State of Exception.

Tbid.,p. 3. Nietzsche, The Will to Power. Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 345. Nietzsche, 'Genealogy', pp. 508-9. See for instance Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 10 Agamben, 'For a theory of destituent power'. 11 Bourdieu, Sur l'Etat, p. 582. 12 Comaroff et al., Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism.

5

6 7 8 9

l 2 1 2 3 4

On stuckedness Bourdieu, Sur l'Etat. Hage, 'A not so multi-sited ethnography'. Hage, White Nation. See edition, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Socia/es, L'insecurite comme condition de travail', vol. 175. 5 Williams, 'Structures of feeling'. 6 World Trade Center, directed by Stone. 7 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, pp. 256-7. 8 Badiou, Petit Pantheon Portatif, p. 30. 9 Ibid., p. 31. 10 Chalandon, 'Le Visiteur', p. 26. 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 IO 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

222

Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today All translations of quotations in this chapter are by the author. Hardt & Negri, Commonwealth, pp. 123-4. Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 15. Freud, 'A difficulty', p. 135. Trouillot, 'Anthropology and the savage slot'. Levi-Strauss, L'Anthropologie Face au.x Problemes du Monde Moderne, p. 51. Diamond, 'The search for the primitive'; Marcus & Fisher, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, Puvinelli, 'Routes/worlds'. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations. Foucault, 'Governmentality'. Povinelli, 'Geist'. Hage, 'Multiculturalism'. See for example Bamyeh, 'On humanizing abstractions'. Graeber, Debt. Pignarre & Stengers, La Sorcellerie Capitaliste. Hardt & Negri, Commonwealth, p. 103. Viveiros de Castro, 'Introduction', p. 18. Viveiros de Castro, 'Intensive filiation and demonic alliance', p. 220. Viveiros de Castro, 'Introduction', p. 34. Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy's Point of View. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid. Viveiros de Castro, 'Perspectival anthropology', p. 4. Ibid., p. 2. Viveiros de Castro, Metaphysiques Cannibales, p. 4. Viveiros de Castro, 'Introduction', pp. 14-15. Ibid., p. 15. Latour, Politics of Nature. Viveiros de Castro, Metaphysiques Cannibales, p. 25. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 40. Viveiros de Castro, 'Perspectival anthropology', p. 3.

Notes

32 Swancutt, 'The ontological spiral', p. 237. 33 Viveiros de Castro, Metaphysiques Cannibales, p. 13; Bryant, Srnicek & Harman, The Speculative Turn. 34 Latour, 'Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?', p. 454. 35 Simondon, Du Mode d'Existence des Objets Techniques. 36 Keck, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, p. 7. 37 Levy-Bruhl, How Natives 1hink, p. 131. 38 Latour, 'Whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?'; see also Stengers, Cosmopolitiques. 39 Carrithers et al., 'Ontology is just another word for culture', p. 175. 40 See Hage, 'Dwelling'. 41 Viveiros de Castro, Metaphysiques Cannibales, p. 40. 42 Graeber, Debt, pp. 94-102. 43 See for example Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. 44 Balandier, Steinmetz & Sapiro, 'Tout parcours scientifique comporte des moments autobiographiques', p. 58.

4 1 2 3 4 5 6

5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

The Arab social science and the two critical traditions This chapter was a keynote speech presented to the inaugural conference of the Arab Council of Social Sciences, Beirut, March 2013. Bentham, Bentham's Handbook of Political Fallacies, p. 9. Eagleton, After Theory, p. 5. I a tour, Modes of Existence. Viveiros de Castro, Metaphysiques Cannibales. Derrida, OfGrammatology. On ethnography and political emotions Hage, 'A not so multi-sited ethnography', and 'Migration'. See Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, Proposition XVII. For a general overview of the literature, see Lutz and White, 'The anthropology of emotions'; Milton & Svasek, Mixed Emotions. Hage, White Nation, and Against Paranoid Nationalism. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. Chodorow, The Power of Feelings. Gilsenan, Lords of the Lebanese Marches. Bourdieu, Ce que Parler Veut Dire. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling. Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 438. Kulick, 'Theory in furs'. Volkan, Bloodlines. Kakar, The Colors ofViolence. M. Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion; R. Rosaldo, Ilongot Headhunting, Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments; Lutz, Unnatural Emotions. Myers, Pintupi Country, p. 105. Kleinman & Kleinman, 'Suffering and its professional transformation';

Notes

223

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

6 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

224

Good & Good, 'Ritual, the State, and the transformation of emotional discourse in Iranian society'; Obeyesekere, The Work of Culture. Besnier, 'The politics of emotion in Nukulaelae gossip'; Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling; Svasek, Postsocialism. Spinoza, Ethics. Gatens & Lloyd, Collective Imaginings. Nietzsche, The Will to Power. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, pp. 164-5. Lacan, Ecrits. Kapferer, The Feast of the Sorcerer. Kakar, The Colors ofViolence. In the following dialogue, IE is the interviewee and IR is the interviewer. Ellipses denote pauses. Greimas, 'On anger'. Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, Postulate 58. Llngis, Dangerous Emotions. Saint-Hilaire, Acclimatation et Domestication des Animaux Utiles.

Alter-political rationality and anti-political emotions Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 62. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 22. Hardt & Negri, Commonwealth., p. 103. Ibid. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 155. Hardt & Negri, Commonwealth, p. 103. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 160. Hardt & Negri, Commonwealth, p. 103. Ibid., p. 104. Bhabha, p. xvii. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 3. Bhabha, p. xv. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 86. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 22. Tbid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 24. See Bourdieu, 'The philosophical institution'. Hardt & Negri, Empire, pp. 44-5. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, pp. xvii-xviii. Farron, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 23. Shohat, 'Black, Jew, Arab', p. 48. See Hage, 'Analysing multiculturalism today'. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, p. 160. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 85. Ibid., p. 84.

Notes

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

7 I 2 3 4 5 6

8 I

2 3 4 5 6

9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Ibid. Cited in Dubois & Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789-1804, p. 172. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, pp. 132-50. Guex, La Nevrose d'Abandon, p. 13. Fan on, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 83. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., pp. 82, 84-6. Ibid., p. 236. Franon, The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 312, 15-16, cited in Shohat, 'Black, Jew, Arab', pp. 46-7. Curthoys, 'The refractory legacy of Algerian decolonisation', pp. 109-29. Mbembe, De la Postcolonie, p. xvi. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 2. Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad, p. 25.

On narcissistic victimhood Presented as a public lecture for a seminar organized by Raimond Gaita, who later published it in his edited book, Gaza. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Hage, White Nation, pp. 55--67. Waltz with Bashir, directed byFolman. Herzl, The Jewish State, pp. 2B-9. Kimmerling, Politicide. The unoccupied This chapter is the keynote delivered at conference 'Between dependence and independence: What future for Palestine?', Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute oflnternational Studies, Birzeit University, Ramallah, Palestine, 9 March 2013. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 142; see also Hage, 'Social gravity'. Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, Postulate VI. Freud, 'Wolfman', p. 282. Bourdieu, Logic, p. I 06. Diana Allan's Refugees of the Revolution, which has recently come out, provides an excellent ethnography of the way Palestinian lives are always in excess of the political logics that try to construct them into a variety of political causes. Recalling anti-racism Latour, 'Recall of modernity', p. I 1. Wilson, 'People have a right to be bigots, says Brandis', p. 5. Miles, Racism after 'Race Relations'. Bourdieu, Logic, p. 27. Balibar, 'Difference, otherness, exclusion'. Sahlins, What Kinship is-and is Not. Tylor, Primitive Culture.

Notes

225

8

Keck, 'Causalite mentale'. Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, p. 152. 10 Cited in Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times, p. 137.

9

IO 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

226

Dwelling in the reality of utopian thought Latour, Politics of Nature, Viveiros de Castro, Metaphysiques Cannibales. Levi-Strauss, I'Anthropologie Face aux Problemes du Monde Moderne, p. 51. Maniglier, 'La parente des autres', pp. 773-4. Viveiros de Castro, 'Perspectival anthropology'. See especially Bourdieu, In Other Words; Pascalian Meditations. Viveiros de Castro, Metaphysiques Cannibales, p. 40. Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture. Avatar, directed by Cameron. Keck, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, p. 7; Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 131.

Notes

J

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233

Index

9/11 terrorist attack 41 1967 Arab-Israeli war 160 a-racial attitudes 185-9 a-racist culture 178-9 Abu Ghraib 21, 150 academics, obligations of 148-9 Actes de la Recherches en Sciences Sociales 77-8 After Theory 83 Against Paranoid Nationalism 15 Agamben, Giorgio 19, 29-30 Akerman, Piers 6 Ali (informant) 92-3 alter-modernity 49, 63, 121 alter-politics passion in 2 rationality and 120-41 traditions rooted in 84 Althusser, Louis 137 Amazonian peoples 205, 209 American University of Beirut 45 Amerind peoples, points of view of 203 anthropology critical 49-78

emotions in the field 94-7 of exterminability 173-99 on realities 201-7 anti-colonialism 2, 158 anti-politics 2, 120-41 anti-racist activism 128-30, 158, 173-99 Antilles, students from 126 apartheid 25-8, 184-5, 197 Arab world, social sciences in 79-87 Arabic, source materials in 98 Arawete people 64-5 Archaeology of Violence 65-6 Arendt, Hannah 182 Arrernte people 55 Asad, Talal 65 asylum seekers 44, 173-4, 194-5 Australia asylum seeker policy 44, 194-5 author's attitudes to 216 author's early experience of 213-14 conspicuous consumption in 14 detention centres in 22 multiculturalism in 95 autonomy of social sciences 82-4

Avatar 208 avoidance relations 136

Chakrabarty, Dipesh 127-8 Christianity in Lebanon 14-16,

'bad others' 21 Badiou, Alain 42-3, 219 Balandier, Georges 77-8 Balibar, Etienne 182 Bathurst NSW, author's experience of 211-15, 218 Bauman, Zygmunt 13 Beck, mrich 72 Beirut see Lebanon Benjamin, Walter 65, 194, 196 Bentham, Jeremy 82-3 Bergson, Henri 69 Beyond Nature and Culture 208 Bhabha, Homi 123 Birzeit University 193-4 Black Skin, White Masks 123, 131-2 body 68-70, 72-3 Borom tribespeople 209 Bourdieu, Pierre on dominant realities 207 on friends and enemies 4 on habitus 104 on illusio 57, 102-4, 118, 165 on logic of politics 116 on multi-realism 72-3 on political logic 146-7 on proletaroid culture 99 on racism 179-80 on social gravity 213-14 as sociologist and anthropologist

citizenship, as form of conscription

20-1, 151-2

79-82

on strategic foreclosure 170 on trajectory 23 Brock, Peter 214 Brown, Wendy 27 Bush administration (US) 21 Butler, Judith 135-6 Candea, Matei 72 capitalism 34-5, 61 see also neo-liberalism Capitalism and Schizophrenia 64 capturing of reality 87 Carla (neighbour) 212

236

Index

31

class distinctions 26- 7, 84-6 Clastres, Pierre 64 Colletti, Lucio 4 colonialism globalisation of 6, 9, 13-32 nationalism and 154, 157 racism and 120, 131-9 resistance to 170 revolutions against 60 rootedness and 218-19 rubbishing and 193, 197 Commonwealth 49, 121-3, 128 community feeling, 'waiting it out' and 40-1 conatus 167, 171 confirmationist intellectuals 148 conspicuous consumption in Australia 14 criminality in Gaza 149 crisis, critique of 33-45 critical anthropology see anthropology critical thought 28-32, 51-2 critique, crisis in 33-45 Critique of Dialectical Reason 41 Cronulla riots 6-9 cultural issues 176-9, 201-7 Darwish, Mahmoud x de-industrialisation process 13, 181-2

de Saint-Hilaire, Geoffroy 117-18 Debt: The First 5,000 Years 74 defatalisation 52, 79 Deleuze, Gilles 64, 69, 83, 217 Delgres, Louis 133 denaturalisation 52, 79-80 Descola, Philippe 208 Diamond, Stanley 55 Distinction 99 Diver, Stuart 39 domesticating mode of existence 187

Dumezil, Georges 198 Durkheim, Emile 196 Eagleton, Terry 83 eavesdropping by author 205-6 ecological issues 57, 60-2, 208-10 el-Zein, Abbas 107 emotive imaging 101 Empire 127 empowerment of racialised subjects 177-8 Eribon, Didier 198 Ethics I03, 113 ethno-national identities 180-1 ethnogrnphy 91-119 see also anthropology Europe, terrorism in 3 European universalism I31-41 existential angst 151-2 existential mobility 36-8 exterminability, anthropology of 173-99 Facebook 193 family relations 99-IOO, 136 Fanon, Frantz 120-41 fantasies of omnipotence 159-60 feminine toughness 23-4 feminism, phallic 25 fields of power 81 financial services industry, conspicuous consumption in 14 foreclosure 135-6 Foucault, Michel 60, 182 Freedom Flotilla 164 Freud, Sigmund 5, 6, 169-70 From the Enemy's Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society 64-5 gay-washing 24-5 Gaza, Israeli occupation of 145-65 gender-washing 24-5 gift exchange 187-8 Gift, The 195 global financial crisis, response to 34

globalisation of colonialism 6, I3-32 green politics opposed to 61 ofracism 180-1 governmentality 42, 44 Graeber, David 62, 74 green politics 57, 60-2, 208-IO Greimas, Algirdas 113 Guex, Dr 136 Haaretz 194 habitus 72-3, I04, 170 Hamas, Israeli aims for 160 Handbook of Political Fallacies 82-3 Hanson, Pauline, followers of 37-9 Hardt, Michael 121-3, 140-l Harry Potter novels 191 Hegelian spirit, extinguishment of 9 Heidegger, Martin 217 heroism 39-40, 43-4 Herzfeld, Michael 65 Herzl, Theodor 155-6 Hezbollah 93, 112-14, 161 historical critical thought 51-2 Holocaust, comparison to Gaza 153 homosexuality, repressive treatment of 25 Howard, John 175 Hurricane Katrina 44 Husserl, Edmund 207 identification 'with' vs 'through' I09 IE (respondent) 110-11 India, Hindu-Muslim conflict in 97-8, IOI Indigenous Australians 38, 55, 197 informants, anthropologists humiliated by 96--7 inquiries into atrocities 21 interpellation 131-9 Tran, rise of as Islamic nation 18 Iraq, invasion of 151 ISIS, Western nationals associated with 18 Islam see also Muslims globalisation of threat from 16--18

index

237

Kakar, Sudhir 101 Kapferer, Bruce 106 Keck, Frederic 70-1 Kimmerling, Baruch 156 kinship relations 188-9 Klein, Naomi 121 Kristeva, Julia 95 Kulick, Don 99

Lebanese immigrants attitudes to Israel 93, 109---14,125 inAustralia 16 class distinctions among 27-8 identify with Hezbollah 114 Lebanese attitudes to 213 mis-interpellation and 133-5 mobility of 37 mourning ceremony 116 talismanic icons 217-18 views of Western policy 91-2 Lebanon attitudes to Australia in 213 attitudes to Israel in 97-8 author's attitudes to 216 author's mother moves to 211-12 Christians in 14-16, 20-1 class distinctions in 26, 84-6 'crisis-free space' in 45 evolution of society in 13 greetings in 37 involvement in massacres 151-2 Israeli attacks on 106-14, 161 reaction to anthropologists in 96-7 tracing migrants from 92-3 Les Dijferents Modes d'Existence 69 Levi-Strauss, Claude 53-4, 195--6, 201 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien 70-1, 189, 209-10 llamas, domesticating 117-18

La Sorcellerie Capitaliste: Pratiques de Desenvoutement 63 Lacan,Jacques 104-6, 137,205 Lambil, Willy 212 late colonial settler condition 13-32 Latour, Bruno on multinaturalism 66-7, 140, 201-2 on 'recalling' 174 as sociologist and anthropologist 79, 83 Viveiros de Castro and 64 on William James 69-71 Le Pennist racism 37-8

Madagascar, anthropology of 62 Malik, Kenan 140-1 Malinowski, Bronislaw 95 Mandela, Nelson 178 Maniglier, Patrice 66,201 Mannoni, Octave 120 Marwan (interviewee) 6-7 Marxism analysis of Lebanon 13 failure to internalise 3 on false consciousness 208 on kinship terminology 85 'Marxism: Science or Revolution' 4 mono-realism and 200-1

Israel see also Zionism attacks on Lebanon 93, 106-14 attitudes to 101 author's attitudes to 110, 113-14 critical anthropology in 76-7 fantasies of omnipotence 159-62 occupation of Palestine 165-72, 196-7 Palestinian attitudes to 97-101 Palestinians stereotyped in 21-2 policy towards 91-2 racism in 183-5 sense of insecurity in 162-3 treatment of Gaza 145-65 turns back Freedom Flotilla 164 as 'white society' 8-9 Jackson, Michael 97, 106- 7 James, William, on pluriverse 69 Jameson, Fredric 121 JohannesburgWorkshop in Theory and Criticism 174 Jones, Alan 6

238

Index

notion of crisis in 33-4 political imaginary of 58 realist multiplicity and 73 rise of as 59 Sartre on 41-3 Thesis on Feuerbach 3-4 masculine toughness 23-4 Mauss,Marcel 187-90, 195---6,198 Mavi Marmara 164 Mbembe, Achille 139 Metaphysiques Cannibales 65, 69 Miles, Bob 178 mirror stage 137 mis-interpellation 132-41 mobility 27, 36-8 modernity, reflecting on 174 modes of existence 69, 191-2 modes of writing 87 mono-realism 200-1 More, Thomas 208 Mount Panorama, Bathurst 214 multiculturalism, religiosity opposed to 16-17 multinaturalism, conception of 66---78,201-7

multiple subjectivities 203-4 Multiplying Worlds 69 multirealism 189-90 'multitude', understanding of 60 Muslims 9, 16, 95 see also Islam; Lebanese immigrants mutualist mode of existence 187-9 MV Mavi Marmara 164 mystical mentality 209-1 O narcissistic victimhood 145---65 nation-states, limits of 163 nationalism 101---6,154---6 negative interpellation 132 Negri. Antonio 121-3, 140-1 neo- liberalism as explanatory principle 81 racism and 180-l and state of permanent crisis 36 Netanyahu, Benjamin 153, 162 Nietzsche, Friedrich, on power 103-4, 160-1

non-communicable topics 145--6 non-interpellation 131-2 occupation, Palestinian resistance to 165-72 Occupy collectives 59 ontological perspectivism 203 otherness 69-70,201 Otto, Peter 69 Palestine anti-colonialism in 163 attitudes towards 101, 153 author's speech in 193-4 centrality of in Muslim thought 92 Israeli stereotypes of 21-2 narcissistic nationalism in 157 relations with Israel 97-101, 107-8, 145-65, 196---7

resistance to occupation 165- 72 parliamentary culture in Australia 14 participation 189 participatory mode of being 209 particularism 123-8, 183-5 permanent states of exception 20 perspectivism 128-31, 203-5 phallic democracy 24-5 Pignarre, Philippe 63 PNG solution 194-5, 197 points of view, cultural differences in 203 political correctness 175---6 political emotions ethnography and 91-119 national emotions and 101-6 productiveness of 2 repression of 5 political issues, multiple realities and 205 politicide 156 politique politicienne 79 Popontology 61 post-modernity 13 Poursuite sur la Murray 212 Povinelli, Elizabeth 55, 61 power relations 99-100, 109-14 proletaroid culture 4, 82, 99

Index

239

Provincializing Europe 127-8 psychoanalysis 52 quasi-total social domination 99-100

queuing for a bus 41-3 racialisation, forms of 131-2 racism analysis of 173-4 class origins of 37-8 colonialism and 120 combating 175-9 difficulty identifying 128-30 effects of 105 Fanon on 123-4 multirealism in 190-1 rise of 173-4 radical political imaginary 49-78 radicalism, as political quality 79 rationality and alter-politics 120-41 'Real, the' 205 really existing communism 2 recalling anti-racism 174-5 reciprocal mode of existence 187 reflexive turn 74-5 refugees 44, 173-4, 194-5 religiosity 14-17 see also Christianity in Lebanon; Islam; Muslims resilience as strategic foreclosure 167-72

resistance, unoccupied space and 165-7

rootedness 217-19 Rowling, JK 191 rubbishing, colonialism and 193,

Schmitt, Carl 19 securitarianism, Agamben on 29-30 self-censorship, valorising 175-6 sense of power 22-3, 103-4 serie 41-3 sexuality, Freudian view of 5 shamanism 67 Shohat, Ella 131 Simondon, Gilbert 69 social constructionism 203-4, 207 social gravity 116 social sciences in Arab world 79-87 sociology, critical thought in 51-2, 55-6 Souriau, Etienne 69 South Africa 15-16, 174, 197 space of self-constitution 102 Spinoza, Baruch Ethics 113 on conatus 167 on joy 102-4, 218 on vacillation 118 Spirou 212 states of exception 19-20 Stein, Gertrude 217 Steinmetz, George 77-8 Stengers, Isabelle 63, 69 Stone, Oliver 41 strategic foreclosure, resilience as 167-72

Strathern, Marilyn 64 stuckedness 33-45 Svasek,Maruska 102 Swancutt, Katherine 68 Sydney Town Hall, mourning ceremony in 116 symbolic violence 73, 79, 207

197

Rudd, Kevin 194, 197 Rushdie, Salman, Muslim threats to 18 Sahlins, Marshall 64, 188-9 Sarkozy, Nicolas 44 Sartre, Jean-Paul 41-3 sauvegarde de l'etat sauvage 118 savage slot 53

240

Index

techno-worlds 78 terrorism, mis-interpellation

and

140-1

The Gift 195 'the Real' 205 The Wretched of the Earth 139 Thesis Eleven 3 Thredbo disaster 39 toughness in colonial power 23

trajectory of declining power 23, 160-1 translation, conception of 65 transnational mourning 110-11, 116 Tupi-Guarani people 64-5

Umwelt 207 ungovernable spaces 61-2 United States, Bush administration 21 universalism 183-5 universality, desire for 123-8 unoccupied space 165-72 Utopian thought 200-1 O Veneuse, Jean 136 victimhood, narcissistic 145-65 victims of racism, supporting 177 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo critical anthropology of 49-50, 63-74 on modes of existence 83 on multinaturalism 201-3, 207 on multirealism 189 on perspectivism 205 Volkan, Vamik 101

von den Steinen, Karl 209 Wagner, Roy 64 'waiting it out' 33-45 Walled States, Waning Sovereignty 27 Waltz with Bashir 151 warring societies 18-24 West Bank settlements 169 Western economies, de-industrialisation of 181-3 White Nation 8, 150 white nationalism, wave of 8-9 Williams, Raymond 40 Windschuttle, Keith 148 World War II, Fanon's experiences in 131-2 Wretched of the Earth, The 139 Zionism see also Israel attitudes to Israel and 98 colonialism and 158-9 conspiracy theories regarding 6-8 future of 154 goals of 184--5 racism in l 74 self-perception of 15-16

Index

241