Sovereignty and Subjectivity 9781685857097

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Sovereignty and Subjectivity 〫

Critical Perspectives on World Politics 〫 R. B. J. Walker, Series Editor

Sovereignty and Subjectivity 〫 edited by

Jenny Edkins, Nalini Persram, and Véronique Pin-Fat

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 1999 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com

and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner

© 1999 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sovereignty and subjectivity / edited by Jenny Edkins, Nalini Persram, and Véronique Pin-Fat. p. cm. — (Critical perspectives on world politics) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1-55587-803-2 (hc : alk. paper) 1. International relations. 2. Sovereignty. 3. Subjectivity. I. Edkins, Jenny. II. Persram, Nalini, 1964– . III. Pin-Fat, Véronique, 1965– . IV. Series. JZ1320.S66 1999 327.1—dc21 98-36774 CIP

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

∞

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

5 4 3 2 1

For our children

Contents

Foreword, R. B. J. Walker Acknowledgments 1

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3

4

5

6

ix xv

The Subject of the Political Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat

1

Part 1   IdentIty: PerformatIvIty and Power

Violence, Justice, and Identity in the Bosnian Conflict David Campbell

Masquerading and the U.S. “Intervasion” of Haiti Cynthia Weber

Fear and Desire in Anglo-American Fantasies of Asian Sexuality James Moy

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39

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Part 2 the terra of modernIty: Loss and recovery

Spatial Regulation of British Emigration to Argentina Simon Naylor

The Fate of Subjectivity in the New World Disorder Mark Fisher and Rohit Lekhi vii

71

89

viii 7

8

9

10

11

CONTENTS

Hybridization: The Im/Purity of the Political Aletta J. Norval

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Part 3 seLf and other: refLectIons and reformuLatIons

The Sovereign and the Stranger Michael Dillon

Gypsy Identity and Political Theory Éilis Haughey

Hierarchies of Suffering in the Promised Land Gadi Gofbarg and Meir Gal

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141

153

Part 4 concLusIon

Coda: Sovereignty, Subjectivity, Strategy Nalini Persram

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Selected Bibliography The Contributors Index About the Book

177 187 189 197

Foreword R. B. J. Walker

It is difficult to think of an account of modern politics that does not acknowledge an unavoidable relationship, a tension, or even a contradiction between claims about sovereignty and claims about subjectivity. The relationship is unavoidable because modern accounts of sovereign states and modern accounts of individual subjects are both precisely modern: both are crucial dimensions of the forms of cultural and political identity established in early modern Europe. It is also unavoidable because the relationship has been so obviously problematic, so clearly the source of the most difficult conceptual and practical dilemmas of modern politics. Indeed, modern politics might even be defined in terms of the multiplicity of struggles to establish an appropriate grounding for this relationship, and to refine and restructure it in response to all the demands and pressures of modernization and internationalization that have ensued since the early moderns managed to get a clear sense of what was at stake in the massive transformations of their age. Sovereignty, of course, emerged as an expression of a new understanding of the character and location of legitimate authority, one that explicitly, even if rather ambiguously, challenged the transcendental authority of Christianity and the hierarchical orders of feudalism and empire. It expressed and legitimized a new form of political community extending in territorial space and separated from other communities also extending in other territorial spaces. Although the shift was long, complicated, and violent, and although it involved a reworking of established principles quite as much as a radical challenge to them, claims about the sovereignty of states enabled the early modern Europeans to establish the broad outlines of a recognizably modern political discourse. By the mid-seventeenth century, a Hobbes could articulate his paradigmatic account of the necessities of a sovereign authority in a way that more or less laid out the scope and limits of the modern state, opening up all the questions about governance, conix

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sent, representation, liberty, ideology, law, and so on that we now understand to have been taken up by the illustrious canon of modern political thinkers from Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and Mill onward. And not the least crucial condition under which Hobbes was able to articulate the necessities of such a sovereign authority was his stunningly simple assertion that the proper subject of politics, and the most basic component of the “state of nature,” was the free and equal individual, a character that had once been cast in Aristotelian traditions as, quite literally, an idiot, an unpolitical being. Like the sovereign state, this new modern subject (also framed in a language of spatial separations, of self and other, self and world, and thus as a profound challenge to the prevailing subordinations of rank, status, and quality) has come to seem entirely natural, inevitable, even as the apogee of all modern desires and possibilities. The new modern world of spatially separated sovereigns and subjects having been constituted, the great problem became that of working out how it could be put back together again—how individual and collective, public and private, state sovereignty and popular sovereignty, and so on, could be reconciled. Hence all our conventional stories about the social contract; about nationalism, liberalism, and socialism; about public and private, state and civil society; about rights, representations, and democratizations. These are the stories of the great successes of modern politics, of the ways in which we have managed to reconcile our claims to be both free autonomous individual/collective subjects and yet also subject to the ultimate authority of that sovereign that expresses our true subjectivity. These stories present many variations on a theme. The Hobbesian problem of reconciling individual freedom with absolute authority through an account of liberty under the law has often shifted to problems of reconciling claims about state and nation, state and class, and state and minority/majority. Furthermore, the (Hobbesian) attempt to erect a law outside and above the individual to ensure compliance with sovereign authority has often shifted to a (Kantian) attempt to internalize the law of reason, to develop the autonomous rationality, the mature personality realizable within each individual so that it might act in accordance with some universal moral norm. Conceptions of both sovereignty and subjectivity have been transformed in all those ways that now make the paradigmatic formulations of the early modern era seem so archaic. Still, the relation between them remains at the core of modern political thought and practice, and it would be difficult to take seriously any account of modern politics that did not rest on some more or less coherent account of what this relationship should be. In this context, the analysis of contemporary politics confronts two closely related problems. It is the convergence of these two problems, these two aspects of a broad challenge to the relationships established between

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sovereignty and subjectivity over the past three or four centuries, that provides the setting for the chapters in this book. First, it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain many, if not most, of the conventional accounts of what the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity should be. The notion that one can counterpose a unitary subject, whether an individual or a collectivity, to a unitary sovereign state has frequently come to seem radically at odds with the multiplicities, fragmentations, overlappings, and contingencies of so many contemporary claims to political subjectivity. Theologies, genders, ecologies, markets, corporations, criminals, cultures, and movements have all served, in some circumstances and in contradictory ways, to undermine any notion of order that might make sense to a Hobbes or a Kant. Moreover, the sense of disorder they have enabled bears little resemblance to an anarchic struggle between liberal individuals in some state of nature; however it may be characterized, the contemporary “politics of difference” is certainly not a celebration of a proto-market society. Second, many of the most difficult problems posed by the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity occur less in the context of those spaces of political action within the modern state than in relation to realms conventionally delegated to the theorists of political life outside the modern state, the theorists of international relations. The notion that we live in a world organized within and between sovereign states has begun to seem more simple-minded than ever. Questions about what it might mean to express some form of subjectivity, and legitimate authority, in relation to, say, the global articulation of production, information, or the circulation of capital; the dynamics of transborder ecosystems or cultural practices; or claims about global human rights, global governance, cosmopolitan citizenship, regional integration, or transnational regimes are not always easily answered in terms of discourses refined in relation to unitary communities living within sovereign states. To get some sense of what is at stake here, it is helpful to remember that although the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity is at the heart of any reading of modern politics within the modern state, it is almost impossible to imagine it having any significance at all for any self-respecting theorist of international relations. To begin with, given that questions about subjectivity are usually posed in relation to the category of the singular individual, and that so much of the analysis of international relations emphasizes the structural determinations of a states system or a national interest in which individual actions can seem marginal at best, it is not difficult to understand the view that questions about subjectivity are marginal as well. More crucially, perhaps, this view is reinforced by the rigid demarcation between various “levels of analysis” by which the most influential

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theoretical traditions have divided up the world of international relations: they do so not in terms of the relationship between politics inside and outside sovereign states but in terms of a hierarchy of, in order of priority, the determinations of the states system, the actions of states, and the actions of individuals (or at least the consequences of some sort of “human nature” understood mainly in terms of individual psychologies). This formalized insistence on the more or less irrelevance of the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity in the realm of international relations is simply the consequence of the claim, crucial to the constitution of modern politics, that sovereignty and subjectivity can be reconciled only inside the sovereign state. But the resurgence of interest in the proper relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity now occurs increasingly in contexts in which this spatial delineation of distinct realms inside and outside the modern state makes less and less sense, whether in relation to empirical tendencies or to normative aspirations. Many political theorists have become lulled into thinking that most of the puzzles of a modern politics strung between the claims of subjectivity and those of sovereignty have been more or less worked out, at least in principle. Yet contemporary politics seems to be characterized by struggles in which this relationship is increasingly and disconcertingly problematic. Theorists of international relations have become used to thinking that nothing could be more irrelevant than questions about the relation between subjectivity and whatever goes on between states. Yet contemporary politics seems to be characterized by struggles in which questions about sovereignty and subjectivity have clearly spilled over into spatiotemporal realms that seem to defy any easy division between a politics inside and mere relations outside. Many currents of thought and practice have insisted that the claims of modern sovereignty are insufficient to answer all questions about the character and location of political authority in contemporary circumstances. These currents have tended to refer to grand historical and structural forces, to global economies, for example, or new technologies bringing spatiotemporal compression on many dimensions. Many currents of thought and practice have also insisted that the claims of modern subjectivity are insufficient to answer all questions about personal and collective identities. They have tended to refer to quite different phenomena—to psychologies, aesthetic practices, or philosophical traditions. Such phenomena are easily made to seem entirely remote from the necessities of politics, and especially from the hard world of international relations. At most, many have claimed, such phenomena might be interesting insofar as they could explain how individual “personalities,” “ideas,” or “perceptions” can sometimes influence the making of foreign policy. Given the fluidity of all those boundaries that the early moderns taught us to construct as sharp lines between self and other, this state and that

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state, it is not surprising that these long-standing but largely distinct currents of thought and practice have begun to converge in the contemporary literature. They converge, as this book shows, not as a reenactment of banal psychologisms but as a consequence of contemporary reengagements with all those hard questions about who we are and what we can be that Hobbes and his successors thought had been answered once and for all in the twin absolutes of a unitary sovereignty and a unitary individual. These questions, of course, are daunting. The difficulty of raising them in the context of a discipline of international relations that still thrives on the most caricatured accounts of what the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity is supposed to be, and dares to claim a mantle of political realism or of scientific objectivity while doing so, is especially not to be underestimated. In this context, even raising questions about subjectivity, such as the insistence that sovereignty is a highly complex and variable practice rather than just an inert constitutional principle, is a considerable achievement. Yet, given that modern politics was initially constituted on the basis of a specific account of the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity, and that the subsequent development of modern politics has required the constant and strenuously contested renegotiation of this relationship, it is not surprising that so many contemporary scholars insist, as here, on the impossibility of any serious engagement with world politics without coming to terms with what such renegotiations could possibly now mean.

Acknowledgments

There are several individuals, institutions, and funding bodies that we would like to thank: the British International Studies Association and the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, for their support of the Aberystwyth PostInternational Group and the Sovereignty and Subjectivity Conference from which this book arose; those who participated in the conference, particularly the workshops, and helped with the administration; and the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission for financial support of the editors. Special thanks go to John Edkins, Dominic Marner, and Howard Suttle. —The Editors

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1 The Subject of the Political Jenny Edkins & V eronique Pin-Fat Women among themselves begin by laughing. —Luce Irigaray

“Subjectivity” has become a key notion in recent attempts to retheorize the political, particularly those deriving from feminist, poststructuralist, deconstructivist, or psychoanalytic thought. The picture of the rational Cartesian subject and the search for certainty is problematized. Such questionings of the subject and subjectivity are pursued far beyond that which is attempted by an “identity” problematic. Although “identity” is often seen as intersubjectively produced or, in other words, formed through social interaction, what is meant by this is sometimes no more than that a preexisting (but “uncultured” or prelinguistic) subject is socialized into particular cultural settings. In this view, identity then becomes something the subject acquires—and a subject may have many different identities, shifting from one to another either in the course of time or in relation to the different social groups or positions among which the subject may move. In contrast, the postmodern subject is not only fragmented but irretrievably split. It is not just that the subject has to face a difficult and unsettling choice of a variety of subject-positions. In poststructuralist thought, the sovereign individual of phallogocentrism becomes the incomplete, impossible subject, and “sovereignty” is brought into question. There are no settled identities; the subject never achieves the completion or wholeness toward which it strives. It remains haunted by that which has to be excluded for subjectivity to be constituted in the first place. This subject has no respect for sovereignty or its linearities: that which is placed on the outside—the other—turns out to be on the inside after all. In the process, time itself is distorted. In this picture, the subject is always in the process of being constituted; there is no point at which, however briefly, the performance is finished. In some sense the subject does not exist: there is no present time in which that existence could take place in this looking-glass world. The subject only ever will have been. 1

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We want to suggest that this notion of the subject involves a reexamination of what the political might be. The more fixed, normalized subject of modernity can be seen as assenting to political structures that are formed separately, once the subjects themselves exist. What we will argue is that retheorizing the subject implies opening up questions of the political and interrogating the role of sovereignty in particular. The relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity is complex. These two provocative notions overlap and are intertwined, returning to embrace and include each other, in ways that this introductory chapter and the rest of the book will explore, tease out, and eventually challenge. This challenge is long overdue, because the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity is an intensely political one. The inscription of particular forms of subjectivity produces and legitimizes the political arrangements of sovereignty. What is more important, the residues of this process of writing are erased, giving the appearance of already existing entities or objects and obliterating the production and operation of power. This inscription, or picture, holds us captive: as Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests, we think that we are “tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and [we are] merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.”1 The first part of the book examines how this inscription takes place through the manipulation of desire. It explores three notions of performativity (coup de force, masquerade, and act/impersonation) as processes that replay and reiterate sovereignty in different ways and for different (political) purposes. The second section of the book looks at how sovereignty can be subverted and challenged and yet reinscribe itself. The hybridization of identity, for example, does not displace purity but rather rewrites it. In the third section, the book returns to address the question that we explore in a preliminary way in this chapter: is there any alternative to the politics of sovereignty? It offers some openings toward a space where we might begin to locate another politics, a politics that does not evoke sovereignty. This involves another notion of the political.2 In the first part of this introductory chapter, we examine in more detail the move beyond the socialized subject. It is this move that enables us to explore how subjectivity and the social are inseparable and how this, it might be argued, implicates sovereignty. We trace the decentering of the Cartesian subject through a series of moves that pose subjectivity as spoken by language as much as speaking it, as produced by social action as much as taking part in it, and as ruled by unconscious as much as conscious thought. Next we examine the constitution of subjectivity in more depth, noting in particular how this involves the positing of a social or symbolic order. How this symbolic order is constituted and by what exclusions leads us finally to an exploration of how sovereignty and subjectivity implicate each other.

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Toward the end of this part of Chapter 1, before we outline the contribution subsequent chapters will make, we pursue the entanglement of sovereignty and subjectivity further and pose the question of whether there is an alternative to sovereignty. Does the political as such necessarily involve sovereignty as a nodal point, or can other signifiers take its place, leading to alternative structures of authority? More radically, perhaps, is it possible to talk of politics without the fixity such an authorizing concept imposes? We conclude by arguing that it is only without a “sovereign” that a rethinking of the political is possible. THE SUBJECT DECENTERED

The Cartesian subject was produced in response to a sense of loss and a search for certainty amid the confusion of a newly decentered postCopernican world. The resolution of doubt for Réné Descartes was to be found in rational, conscious thought. Since then, as Richard Ashley reminds us, “modern discourse has invoked the heroic figure of reasoning man who is himself the origin of language, the maker of history, and the source of meaning in the world. . . . Reasoning man . . . is the modern sovereign.”3 The challenge to this notion of sovereign subjectivity has occurred through a series of decenterings that have successively loosened its anchorages in language, action, and thought. The first decentering contested the concept of language as no more than a medium for the expression of thought. Ferdinand de Saussure contended that rather than linguistic signs being produced by the allocation of names to preexisting objects, the association of signifier and signified that they embodied produced objects at the same time as naming them.4 Language constituted the world in particular ways. More significantly for the present discussion, since signifier and signified were arbitrary, meaning arose only from the linguistic system as a whole, and words acquired their value through associations. Language as system, however, preexists, and hence is beyond the control of, the speaker. In addition, words spoken are not determined in their meaning, since meaning arises from associations that vary with the context and the listener.5 In an important sense, then, we do not speak language; language speaks us. The sense that language was out of control, and that thoughts could not be “expressed” as such, was only the first challenge. The next was to thought itself, with the notion of the unconscious.6 If it was necessary to posit the existence of a realm of thinking that was not only unconscious (and hence inaccessible) but that operated in an entirely different manner from that of consciousness, then the picture of reason as central to subjectivity was shattered. The status of thought as originary was also contested by the view that social being precedes and to an extent at least determines

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consciousness.7 The whole edifice of philosophy and political thought was argued to be no more than a superstructure resting on the foundations of an economic base defined by its mode of production. Political ideas and aspirations were seen as reflecting and constrained by, rather than leading to, economic and social change. The subject was not in charge of history but subjected to (and by) historical processes. After these several decenterings, what is left? The picture of the rational, conscious, autonomous individual has vanished. In its place, what we have is a subjectivity that is bound up with the social or symbolic order. The constitution of the subject and the social order seem to implicate each other. This leads to the picture of the poststructuralist subject as not only a decentered subject but an incomplete, impossible subject that only ever will have been.8 How does this relate to our contention that subjectivity and sovereignty depend upon and contain each other and that this is a fiercely political relationship? Before we can address this question, we need to elaborate how the impossible, split subjectivities we describe are constituted, thus giving an account of how the social order is posited and how sovereignty as a nodal point is crucial in this process. Subjectivity in Social Order

As we have seen, pictures are beguiling: they hold us captive. The certainty they offer bewitches our desire. We seek to convince ourselves of the existence of “reality” by trying to trace the outline of objects over and over again. As Wittgenstein points out, this is a trick of our language. We appear to be dealing with the essence of a real object, but what we are doing is tracing the frame through which we see it. In the case of the subject and subjectivity, something similar occurs. From a Lacanian perspective, the human subject is condemned to endlessly search for an imaginary wholeness or unity that it will never attain. This search can be traced to the imaginary relationship between the individual and its surroundings, which is inaugurated in the mirror stage. It is at this stage that the (mis)recognition of the self as autonomous agent occurs. Later, the subject is interpellated into the social or symbolic order through a process that takes place in terms of language but involves a similar (mis)recognition. This interpellation, or hailing, constitutes the subject at the level of the symbolic: the subject becomes that which occupies a certain place—as citizen, consumer, intellectual—in the social order. The role of desire in this process is crucial, but this desire takes the form of a questioning of the desire of the Other, the social order. The subject seeks a place in the social, a place that will confirm its existence as subject. It does this by asking what the social order wants of it, what is required. In other words, “The original question of

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desire is not directly ‘What do I want?’ but ‘what do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?’”9 A particular, nonlinear notion of time is involved in these processes. At both the imaginary and the symbolic level, the process operates retroactively. As Jacques Lacan describes it: What constitutes me as subject is my question. In order to be recognised by the other, I utter what was only in view of what will be. In order to find him, I call him by a name he must assume or refuse in order to reply to me. . . . I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.10

This question from the subject constitutes it as subject by positing the existence of a social or symbolic order. The subject poses the question: what does the symbolic order want of me? The subject then becomes the object of the desire of the Other—the symbolic order. In other words, the subject is constituted as that which (it appears) answers the desire of the Other—it becomes what (it supposes) the Other wanted. It answers to a “lack” in the Other. It does this by taking on or assuming certain mandates or roles—subject positions—within the symbolic order. However, this ˇ zek process is never complete, and the subject is faced with what Slavoj Ziˇ calls an unanswerable question of why he or she has a particular mandate, which is always contingent and, therefore, arbitrary. There is more to the subject than the role of citizen, consumer, or intellectual. As such, there is always a nonsymbolizable surplus. The subject remains split or fragmented since it is constituted around a fundamental impossibility. What is crucial for our argument here is that subjectivity and the social order are constituted together, the social order being the frame within which subjectivities are placed. The social order only comes into existence by our positing it in advance, assuming that it already exists, and in doing this we are ourselves constituted as subjects. The next step in our argument is to explore further how (what we call) social reality is constituted; this will then enable us to make the connection between the social order and sovereignty. Sovereignty and the Imposition of Meaning

We have shown that the subject is of necessity incomplete, or impossible. It is always in process; it never fully comes to presence but is structured around a lack. This lack arises, first, from the gap between the real

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and the imaginary in the mirror phase and then from the gap between the imaginary and the symbolic, or social, during interpellation. Like the subject, the symbolic, or social, order is similarly constituted around a lack, one that in this case appears as a constitutive antagonism.11 This antagonism appears in a variety of guises in different social orders, but it is always there and cannot be removed. A society without antagonism cannot exist: social reality can never be complete or whole. However, for life to go on the lack must be concealed and the concealment hidden. This is accomplished by the production of social reality. In order for what we call social reality to be constituted, meaning has to be imposed. This is achieved through the “master signifier,” a signifier that stands in the place of the constitutive lack or antagonism at the heart of the social order. Without such a signifier, the social order cannot constitute itself; the sliding of meaning cannot be arrested. This signifier is the embodiment of lack; it enables us to account for the gap between result and intention. The act of imposing meaning, halting the movement of freefloating signifiers, is an authoritative act, “a non-founded founding act of violence” that recalls the violence of the founding decision in the work of Jacques Derrida.12 At this moment, the symbolic order comes into being, the decision is taken, and the law is founded. The violence that is implicated in this process then disappears: in the history of what happened, what was brought into being with this foundational act is narrated as always already inevitable. Once the decision has been taken, the moment of decision disappears, though not entirely without trace. We are now in a position to suggest how sovereignty and subjectivity implicate each other. As we have seen, subjectivity can only exist, or rather, be constituted, in relation to a particular social or symbolic order. The social order itself is brought into existence, supposed or posited, in relation to a particular signifier, which covers the hole or lack in the social or symbolic order and provides a nodal point around which meaning is articulated. In modernity, one of the signifiers that performs this function is sovereignty. The concept of sovereignty is central to discourses of politics and the international. It informs conventional notions of what political power might be: the relationship between sovereign and subject within the absolutist kingdom, or the sovereignty of a government over the lives of its citizens in the modern nation-state. Sovereignty also plays a foundational role in discussions of international autonomy: the sovereign state is a bounded unit in the international system. This centrality testifies to its place as the master signifier around which a particular symbolic order is constituted. “Sovereignty” as a master signifier is not free and autonomous here but stands implicated and embroiled in questions of “subjectivity.” The authority of the master signifier derives only from its position in the social order— which itself derives only from the subjection of the subjects that evoke it. It

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is an impostor, in a sense: any signifier that found itself at the place of constitutive lack in the structure would do—divine providence, the invisible hand of the market, the objective logic of history, or the Jewish conspiracy, for example.13 Sovereignty performs this task for the social reality that is taken to be modern politics. It conceals antagonism in a particular way and implicates particular subjectivities. For example, it produces politics as subjection and sovereignty as absolute. Within the legal authority it establishes, violence is concealed. That same violence is banished to the nonsovereign realm of the international. The subjectivities it invokes (or rather, that invoke it) are the irresponsible camp followers of power insofar as they naturalize a particular social order. Their actions respond to what they suppose are the desires of authority. ANOTHER POLITICS?

A symbolic order centered on sovereignty is not the only (im)possible solution; we could imagine other social realities. However, once sovereignty is in place, an ethico-political challenge in the name of an alternative becomes illegitimate. This difficulty arises because sovereignty as a master signifier conceals its status as will have been, constituting the social order as always already. As such, sovereignty as a political referent persists and endures almost as if it were an inevitable and unavoidable part of politics. Indeed, it functions to define politics in a particular way such that sovereignty is the only referent by which one can understand the political. We will question this by asking whether another politics is possible, one that does not invoke sovereignty or an alternative master signifier. Arguably, without a master signifier of some sort, neither the social order nor the subject are possible. If this is accepted, emancipation as such becomes impossible. Liberation is always to come. Revolution is a joyous but impossible moment, a singularity outside time, where repressive authority has been overthrown and a new order has yet to be reimposed. There was such a moment during the revolutions at the end of the cold war in Europe, with “rebels waving the national flag with the red star, the communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organizing principle of national life, there was nothing but a hole in its cenˇ zek raises the prospect of “tarrying with the negative,” although tre.”14 Ziˇ the logic of his Lacanian position would repudiate that possibility. Derrida, in a parallel attempt to find a way of being outside the dichotomized violence of logocentrism, suggests an endless process of decisioning.15 Both of these would be a way of engaging with the political and returnˇ zek ing to an ethics—in Derrida’s case an ethics of responsibility, and for Ziˇ an ethics of the real. Examining how an ethics of the real might operate

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leads to some interesting conclusions about the role of sovereignty in preempting such a move. As a master signifier, sovereignty has precisely the task of preventing the emergence of an ethics of the real. The imposition of meaning, which is what the master signifier accomplishes, forecloses ethical possibility. ˇ zek, “there is ethics—that is to say, an injunction which According to Ziˇ cannot be grounded in ontology—in so far as there is a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates fidelity to this crack.”16 We can elaborate what this might mean by examining Derrida’s notion of iterability. For Derrida, there is always the structural possibility that a sign can be detached from our intention, which offers at the same time the possibility that the sign can be “repeated” by someone else. As Henry Staten puts it, “Derrida calls this repeatability “iterability” to bring out the factor in repetition of becoming other. . . . In iteration the identity that is repeated is at the same time essentially altered: ‘Iterability alters.’”17 Because for both Derrida and Wittgenstein signs are determined by context, there is no inviolable core of self-identical meaning, just as for ˇ zek there is no complete, unfragmented subject. But since for Derrida Ziˇ context itself cannot be determined or bounded, this means there are no limits to the extent of transformation of the sign. ˇ zek is If, by “a crack in the ontological edifice of the universe,” Ziˇ invoking a fissure that arises because of the impossibility of defining a total context, then ethics enters into the equation because it “designates fidelity to this crack.” In other words, it designates a fidelity to difference; that is to say, it opens up the possibility of the “nonmasterable dissemination” of meaning.18 If a “nonmasterable dissemination” is one in which there are always possibilities for the relocation of signs in different contexts and in which, therefore, meanings are not self-identical and ontologically “full,” then ethics is about not denying this. However, there is a drawback. Within logocentrism, language is what it is, language, only insofar as it can then master and analyse polysemia. With no remainder. A nonmasterable dissemination is not even a polysemia, it belongs to what is outside language. . . . Each time that polysemia is irreducible, when no unity of meaning is even promised to it, one is outside language. And consequently, outside humanity.19

In other words, to return to the notion of the master signifier, a nonmasterable dissemination is one that has no authority, no master signifier to halt the sliding of signifier over signified, where polysemia is irreducible. Not only do words have many meanings, but the number of meanings is not finite. What Derrida is saying, then, is that without a master signifier we can have no language, no symbolic order. The implication might be that in that case, no human subject as such is possible either. The politico-ethical

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implications of the notion of fidelity to the dislocation of signs may be the impossibility of what we call social reality. Without reality or social fantasy as a support, we are left to face the traumatic real. Ethics, then, is also to be found in the constitution of the subject in the face of trauma. This is “an ethics grounded in reference to the traumatic Real which resists symbolisation, the Real which is experienced in the encounter with the abyss of the Other’s desire.” 20 It is through this encounter that the subject is formed, as we have seen: the subject is constituted as subject within the symbolic only in a concealment of the traumatic ˇ zek lies in mainreal through social fantasy. The ethical possibility for Ziˇ taining a grasp of this as fantasy, or in other words, accepting the impossibility of ontological fullness (as we have called it), the impossibility of symbolizing all aspects of a context and therefore of meaning. This leads ˇ zek back to the master signifier or, in our case, sovereignty, and to what Ziˇ sees as the role of the critical intellectual in maintaining a distance from the master signifier, making its constituted nature visible and challenging claims to naturalness. This is an ethics of fidelity to “the Real which is expressed in the encounter with the abyss of the Other’s desire.” This encounter is an encounter with the impossibility of fullness and with the bleakness of la condition humaine. It is fidelity to this, then, that we are arguing constitutes rather than forecloses ethical possibility. A similar source of ethical possibility is found in Derrida, when he draws attention to the (invisible) process of decision and calls for responsibility, as opposed to the technologizing impulse of implementing a program that claims ontological fullness. The latter constitutes “the crime against the possibility of politics . . . the crime of stopping to examine politics, reducing it to something else and preventing it from being what it should be.”21 The alternative is a politics of the undecidable. Traversing the undecidable, facing the decision, is homologous to traversing the fantasy: it brings us face to face with the trauma of the real, with the acknowledgment that there is no ground for action and that responsibility is unavoidable. What is does not mean is inaction: That justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a state or between institutions or states and others. . . . Not only must we . . . negotiate the relation between the calculable and the incalculable . . . but we must take it as far as possible, beyond the place we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiable zones of morality or politics or law, beyond the distinction between national and international, public and private, and so on.22

What Derrida is saying here is that we must move beyond subjectivity—“the place we find ourselves” in the symbolic—and beyond the distinctions and definitions of the political that sovereignty as the existing master

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signifier locates for us. We must not underestimate the difficulties this move would bring. Sovereignty serves to satisfy our desire. It gives us a place, as subjects, within the symbolic order that it secures. Without it, the ground will shift beneath our feet. Another source of ethical or political possibility might be found in the work of Luce Irigaray. She argues that laughter can be subversive of the order we take as sovereign—phallogocentrism. Laughter in this context is a chuckle rather than a snigger or a sneer. It is a broad smile or a grin rather than a smirk. It is enjoyment. Laughter for Irigaray is another response to the shifting of the ground beneath our feet, a response that takes pleasure in this movement, in the “play” of the signifier. It exploits it rather than concealing it. The unconscious erupts in laughter; laughter is in some sense unmasterable. We will return to how this can be subversive: first, let us look again at the argument we have followed so far. We have argued that sovereignty is the master signifier around which the symbolic order is constituted as far as the realm of the political is concerned. As such it serves to satisfy our desire for an account of power, authority, and legitimacy. This desire is the urge for wholeness, completion, or certainty. It is through the expression of this desire that subjectivities are formed and that the symbolic order is evoked. The question from the void of the subject finds its fantasmic response in the sovereignty of the social order. Subjectivities are thereby constituted that have a ground or a foundation, one provided by the symbolic meanings that sovereignty guarantees. This reassurance is available because the master signifier has imposed meaning where there was none, and what is more, almost all traces of that imposition have been erased to leave a sense of naturalness and rightness that is beyond challenge. The impossibility of this, and the way the real returns to haunt reality, has been hidden. However, what if this desire of which we have been speaking all this time is an expressly “masculine” one? Would this not then constitute, in its articulation, a specifically masculine sovereignty in response? A number of feminists have argued that the Lacanian account is above all an account of the masculinized subject.23 As such, it lacks any account of feminine subjectivity and fails to appreciate the distinct way that subjects are constituted as female. It cannot, surely, be coincidental that the symbolic is guaranteed by a master. For Irigaray, “from a feminine locus, nothing can be articulated without a questioning of the symbolic itself.”24 The symbolic order allows no voice to the feminine. If we accept this, then the dangers and difficulties inherent in moving beyond subjectivity (and sovereignty) that we discussed above take on a different aspect. Yes, there are dangers for “masculine” subjectivities in the challenge to the subject and the master signifier, but

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what if the risks involved are not the same from a feminist perspective? Irigaray argues that our cultural imaginary is a “masculine” one. The feminine does not fit within it but exceeds its limits. In addition to rigorous analysis of the “masculine” symbolic (an examination of how particular forms of masculinized sovereignties implicate certain subjectivities, which is a preliminary step), what is also open to us is laughter. Laughter is subversive here, not only because of its connection with the unconscious, but because phallogocentrism relies upon seriousness. The sway of the master signifier depends on our taking seriously its claims to impose meaning, accepting the importance of meaning as such, where meaning is seen as fixity of definition guaranteed by the master signifier. For Irigaray, the phallic is “tantamount to the seriousness of meaning”; it can be transcended in laughter, “the first form of liberation from secular oppression.” This is the way to challenge the symbolic order without reimposing another authority, another master signifier that will be equally oppressive. This is the impossible “tarrying with the negative,” the endless process of decisioning. As Irigaray says: To escape from a pure and simple reversal of the masculine position means in any case not to forget to laugh. Not to forget that the dimension of desire, of pleasure, is untranslatable, unrepresentable, irrecuperable, in the “seriousness”—the adequacy, the univocity, the truth . . . of a discourse that claims to state its meaning. Whether it is produced by men or women.25

Not forgetting to laugh is also, in more senses than one, fidelity to the crack in the ontology of phallogocentrism, which is, arguably, fidelity to the feminine. The political in the end has as much to do with enjoyment— whose enjoyment and how it is organized—as it does with the fixity of meaning.26 RETHINKING SOVEREIGNTY AND SUBJECTIVITY

We have argued that reexamining sovereignty and subjectivity necessitates another politics, and we have pointed to three ways in which this ˇ zek, Derrida, and Irigaray. A rethinking might be possible, drawing on Ziˇ first step would be an ethico-political project that shows how particular forms of subjectivity produce and legitimize the political arrangements of sovereignty. To imagine such a project is to undermine the notion that language gains its meaning from the naming of objects and, correspondingly, that the role of reason is to picture (represent) reality through the naming of these objects. To rethink sovereignty and subjectivity, therefore, is not

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about locating and “naming” ontologically prior “objects” but rather about understanding how sovereignty and subjectivity are constituted as objects of political analysis and action and the relationship between them. In a variety of ways, each contributor to this book questions the ontological status of both sovereignty and subjectivity as givens and offers an alternative account. Each interrogates the totalizing part played by sovereignty in stabilizing the semantic field. Although these accounts differ, the point remains that each hopes to (re)introduce a politics of naming; that is to say, to illustrate the ways in which power is productive and constitutive of those objects and their meanings. As such, what is offered by this collection is a shift away from prioritizing epistemology (conceived of as comparing pictures with reality) toward understanding the political question of how these pictures are constituted, applied, and reinforced to produce what we call social reality. The problematic that this collection focuses on, therefore, is the way in which pictures of sovereignty and subjectivity hold us captive and foreclose ethical and political possibility and not whether they are accurate representations (true). Two specific questions, which we have already raised, arise from this problematic; first, in what ways do sovereignty and subjectivity implicate one another in their constitutive inscription? And second, is there an alternative to the politics of sovereignty? Broadly speaking, Parts 1 and 2 of the collection can be seen as focusing on the first of these questions and Part 3, the second. We have already suggested that the ways in which pictures (representations) of sovereignty and subjectivity hold us captive invoke notions of desire. This is most clearly demonstrated in Part 1 of this book, “Identity: Performativity and Power.” In that section, the authors present different accounts of sovereignty and subjectivity that stress the ways in which they are performatively constituted. At play are three different notions of performativity; coup de force (David Campbell), masquerade (Cynthia Weber), and more literally, performance as act(ing) in a show or impersonation (James Moy). Given that there are no a priori grounds for political community, the question arises as to how grounds are constituted in claims to sovereign identity (statehood). It is in this respect that the notion of coup de force (see Chapter 2) is helpful. In the absence of any other grounds, what marks the founding moment of a state is an interpretative and violent performative force. What is particularly significant in deploying this understanding of performativity is the way in which it challenges received notions about the linearity of time alluded to earlier. The notion of the “birth” of a nation raises the issue of beginnings. It is precisely the idea of a “beginning” or “root” as an authoritative, fixed, and determinate starting point that is challenged. If no such point exists a priori, then it must be retroactively enacted and constituted as if it were already latently there. The importance of this should not be underestimated, for it not only points

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to the role of violence and power in the constitutive act but also politicizes history. Historical claims to authority are violently deployed as enactments of foundation. Campbell uses the example of the “rediscovery” by Serbs of an Orthodox burial custom whereby the remains of King Lazar were carried through Serbian territory as a way of demarcating the spatial boundaries of Serbian territory. The king, or sovereign, is seen here as master signifier, around which the social or symbolic order is produced. This vividly illustrates the political ends to which violent deployments of claims to historical authenticity can be put. Masquerade, however, is a substantially different understanding of performativity. Weber’s use of masquerade offers two important contributions to rethinking sovereignty and subjectivity. On the one hand, it introduces us to “crossed configurations of sex, sexuality, and gender” in the enactment of state sovereignty through foreign policy strategies. And on the other hand, by using the concept of masquerade to apply to males rather than females, it seeks to subvert psychoanalysis’s “reification of sex, sexuality, and gender categories” (see Chapter 3, this volume). Masquerade suggests that the relevance and importance of the “lack” of grounds for state sovereignty and subjectivity lies not in the absence of sovereignty but in the “pretense” of not having it in certain circumstances. Masquerade “equates a lack of phallic power with a reluctance to make meaning.” This is performed by “pretending” not to possess the means of making meaning (violently reinforcing sovereignty) through transvestism. In other words, as Irigaray might put it, transvestites deny the seriousness of meaning that equates with the phallic. Importantly, drag is a strategy of protection against castration anxiety, for it implicitly reinforces the fact that the subject is male, has the penis, and could therefore wield phallic power to make meaning. In the Clinton administration’s foreign policy toward Haiti, male masquerade covered or dressed a fear of losing power to make international meaning gained during the Gulf War. Furthermore, the United States did not want to seem a bully (i.e., wielding phallic power) in its own backyard, hence the cross-dressing. Transvestism, it is crucial to understand, reinforces that which it pretends not to have. This points up a risk in the strategy of laughter that was discussed earlier, one that parallels Derrida’s notion of the dangers of a too-hasty reversal of dichotomies. In this case, the United States emerged from the intervasion of Haiti as “more sovereign state than all sovereign states.” In contrast, U.S. sovereignty can also be understood as performatively enacted in “straight” configurations of (Asian) sexuality. In this case, Moy offers a notion of performativity that is quite overt and refers to the acting in sex shows and impersonation. The point about focusing on overt “performances” of Asian sexuality is to show how they are the expression of an Anglo-American desire for racial containment and control. Vitally, the

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Anglo-American “pornographic imaginary” can be understood as a site where dominant-culture U.S. sovereignty and subjectivity are (re)constituted and (re)inforced. What is demonstrated is that constructions of sexuality and subjectivity unavoidably implicate sovereignty. What is shown is that Anglo-American private sexual fantasies implicate public yearnings for “a sense of white nationhood” (see Chapter 4, this volume). Thus, the first section of this book provides different constitutive accounts of the violent, performative enactment and reinforcement of sovereign state identity and of sovereignty itself as a nodal point around which politics is produced. The implications that understandings of sovereignty as a marker of racial, ethnic, and cultural control bring to bear on subjectivity are explored in Part 2 of this book, “The Terra of Modernity: Loss and Recovery.” At issue here is the question of identity that is raised when examining the ambiguity and political difficulties of a distinction between colonizer and colonized. The movement of people or peoples between and among states can be traced as a practice subversive of state identities and boundaries. It can also be seen as a part of the way states script themselves through the regulatory mechanisms and practices they bring into being. In the processes of control and administration of immigration and emigration, the states concerned are applying a specific picture of the state and its territorial sovereign space. As Michel Foucault points out, they also produce subject categories and the disciplinary practices that constitute and control them.27 In particular instances, the distinction between the refugee and the emigrant or the immigrant and the colonizer are complex. In the case of Welsh wladfa in Patagonia, for example, refugees from the “colonized” principality of Wales, fleeing the dominance of the English language within the British state, became themselves “colonizers” in Argentina. Simon Naylor’s account in Chapter 5 traces the way this and other British emigrations are implicated in the scripting of the Argentinean state itself through immigration laws and practices. The question of identity can also be raised within the political terrain of postcoloniality through a critical examination of the concept of hybridity. Within this terrain, it is claimed that hybridity, as an “originary impurity of identity,” acts as the marker of identity for both colonizer and colonized. The reason why this is important to explore is not only for the obvious implications it has for subverting the assumed authority and unitary nature of colonial discourse but because it “turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention.”28 Indeed, it is precisely the issue of what form intervention may take that Aletta J. Norval highlights and problematizes in Chapter 7. This analysis of form matters when thinking about sovereign identities, insofar as Bhabha succumbs to a tendency toward a monolithic characterization of postcolonial identity that ends up closing the space for intervention and therefore, politics. What is of con-

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cern, then, is how to understand subjectivities in a way that does not obliterate difference through the articulation of sovereign identities. However, even this concern with difference can be argued as misplaced and, ultimately, a reinforcement of the racism of White Man Face (see Chapter 6). When the picture of the subject as “difference” is taken to its logical limit, Mark Fisher and Rohit Lekhi argue, it implodes, and the way in which it reaffirms the dominance of the (white, western, male) subject is revealed. The ways in which sovereignty and subjectivity implicate one another are indeed complex, as Parts 1 and 2 of the collection demonstrate. Such observations are not simply a matter of highlighting the contestability of such terms but rather question the very terms themselves through an appreciation of the performatively constituted grounds of contestation. Although sovereignty and subjectivity mutually imply one another in certain historico-politico contexts, need this necessarily be the case? As a master signifier, sovereignty produces fixity of meaning in certain particular ways. As we have seen, other master signifiers could take the place of sovereignty: anything that will conceal the gap or lack at the heart of what we call social reality will do. However, the question asked previously was, is it possible to have a social order without a sovereign signifier? Can a symbolic order that admits to its own lack of foundations sustain itself? What might it be like? If such a symbolic order were conceivable (and we discussed three tentative possibilities above), then a different subjectivity might too be possible. These issues are explored in Part 3 of the collection, “Self and Other: Reflections and Reformulations.” One strategy offered is to rethink the human condition as one of estrangement, as opposed to self-possession and knowledge. In Chapter 8, Michael Dillon demonstrates that to do so reveals an ethically and politically significant paradox that claims to conceal sovereign subjectivity; namely, that stranger and native necessarily implicate one another, thereby bringing into question the origin and authority of the sovereign community to which the native exclusively belongs. In this way the lack that is concealed is the radical incompleteness of the self such that it cannot possess “sovereign self-sufficiency, self-possession, or self-subsistence.” As such, subjectivity is not characterized by a metaphysics of presence that sovereignty brings, but rather as an ontological rift that an absence of any sovereignty suggests; an ontology of difference. Human being is therefore necessarily hybrid and plural because it cannot be sovereign. This not only recalls themes prevalent in Part 2 of the collection but provides a call to justice. The call to justice is a being-in-common shared by both native and stranger since the questionability of standards of justice arises for both of them in their encounters. An alternative strategy for picturing nonsovereign identities is to examine the figure of the gypsy. This figure challenges pictures of “interna-

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tional politics” as entailing state-centered, immobile political space and evokes alternatives. Yet stories of gypsy identity told by nongypsies are varied. Is there an authentic identity at the root of these narratives? Éilis Haughey argues in Chapter 9 that there is not and shows that when we turn to examine the accounts of those we call “gypsies,” we find another account altogether—an account that itself does not lay claim to any of the political rights “sympathetic” outsiders are so keen to bestow on the gypsy community. It is not only in their lack of attachment to territory that gypsies challenge notions of political space; their community, with its oral culture, has no settled hierarchy as well as no settled space. Haughey shows how, as a case in which identity and territory are not mutually constitutive, gypsies challenge pictures of international space based on precisely this collocation. The difficulties of articulating a gypsy politics within present categories requires us to rethink identity and political space. Alternative sites of political activity, such as music and dance, are brought into view instead. Rethinking sovereignty and subjectivity, then, is not just an academic exercise that seeks the clarification of categories through accurate and therefore true representation. It is an ethico-political project, albeit differently conceived by the various contributors. Lest we should lose sight of the ways in which claims to sovereign statehood violently inscribe themselves on people’s bodies and lives, the authors of Chapter 10 provide a powerful reminder in the form of an autobiographical account. Recounting their experiences of war and violence, both Gadi Gofbarg and Meir Gal deconstruct a Jewish-Israeli identity made sovereign by the creation of the state of Israel. What we find in the case of Israel is a telling example of a sovereign state attempting to create an “Israeli” identity that founds its inaugural moment on the (retroactive) claim that all Jews share a collective, single identity that forms the basis of nationality. At stake in this “bearing witness” is an ethical impulse to question the fusion of Israeli identity with both masculinity and use of force (Gofbarg) and white European and American Jewry (Gal). As already signaled, encounters with strangers can invoke a call for justice, but they need not do so. The tragic and fatal encounter with the stranger as enemy is movingly recounted in the account of different types of death and bodies. The point about Israeli identity as an example of nationalistic identity is that when one allows personal voices and experiences to be heard, subjectivity cannot be subsumed under a monolithic identity sanctioned by the state. The reading of history to which the Israeli state appeals for its legitimacy, justification, and foundations must be understood as a resource in the state’s (often savage) struggle for its own sovereign identity and that of its citizens. As such, the ethico-political significance of an autobiographical account is the attempt to break the “monopoly historians have held as keepers of the record.” Ethically and

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politically, what Gofbarg and Gal are suggesting is that “the regressive common denominator of state produced collective identities” needs to be overthrown. What must be asked, as a matter of some urgency, is what the role of the intellectual should be. We have tried to show in this introductory chapter that part of the role of the intellectual is to resist the seduction of certain pictures. Narratives of sovereignty and subjectivity are necessarily intertwined, complex, mutually implicating, and seemingly fixed and hence authoritative. However, the intellectual has a role to play in these accounts, by revealing the multifarious ways in which pictures seduce us and conceal antagonism. Indeed, as the conclusion argues, it is precisely this which represents the practice of political theory. To dismiss such contestations as outside politics serves only to reinforce and reproduce a politics that depends on the very pictures of sovereignty and subjectivity that this volume challenges. NOTES

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), §114–115. 2. For a discussion of notions of “politics” and “the political” that makes disˇ zek, For They Know Not tinctions similar to those we employ here, see Slavoj Ziˇ What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 193–195. ˇ zek notes the distinction made by Claude Lefort and Ernesto Laclau “between Ziˇ ‘politics’ as a separate social complex, a positively determined sub-system of social relations in interaction with other sub-systems (economy, forms of culture . . .) and the ‘Political’ [le politique] as the moment of openness, of undecidability, when the very structuring principle of society, the fundamental form of social pact, is called into question—in short, the moment of global crisis overcome by the act of founding a ‘new harmony.’” 3. Richard K. Ashley, “Living on Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism and War,” in International/Intertextual Relations, ed. James der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (New York: Lexington Books, 1989), 264–265. 4. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966). 5. See also Wittgenstein’s private language argument in Philosophical Investigations. 6. See, for example Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). 7. Karl Marx, “Preface to ‘A Critique of Political Economy,’” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 180–184. 8. It is necessary to note here that our use of the term “poststructuralist subˇ zek’s work, a sharp distinction is made between the ject” is not uncontentious. In Ziˇ poststructuralist subject, with its choice of subject-positions, and the Lacanian subject, seen as an impossibly split subjectivity and the subject of a lack. Although we ˇ zek’s analysis of the Lacanian subject in the paragraphs that follow, make use of Ziˇ we should make it clear that we do not adopt his terminology. In general terms, our ˇ zek’s Lacanian subject, whereas “poststructuralist” subject is perhaps similar to Ziˇ

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our “constructivist” subject could (to a limited extent) parallel his “poststructuralˇ zek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), ist” one. See Slavoj Ziˇ 174–175. ˇ zek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 9. 9. Slavoj Ziˇ 10. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1980), 86 (italics added). 11. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: ˇ zek equates this Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). Ziˇ ˇ i zˇ ek, “Beyond notion of antagonism with the Lacanian “real”; see Slavoj Z Discourse Analysis,” in New Reflections on the Revolutions of our Time, ed. Ernesto Laclau (London: Verso, 1990), 249–260. 12. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. David Gray Carlson, Drucilla Cornell, and Michel Rosenfeld (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. ˇ zek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out 13. Slavoj Ziˇ (New York: Routledge, 1992), 39. ˇ zek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of 14. Slavoj Ziˇ Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 1. 15. See, for example, Derrida, “Force of Law”; Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). ˇ zek, The Plague of Fantasies, 214. 16. Ziˇ 17. Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 121. 18. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 248. 19. Derrida, Margins, 248. ˇ zek, Plague of Fantasies, 213. 20. Ziˇ 21. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), ix. 22. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 28. 23. Luce Irigaray is among them. See, for example, Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985). Others have argued that his account is an adequate account of feminine subjectivity too; we live under patriarchy, so female subjectivity is constituted under this cipher. For a summary of the various positions on this, see, for example, Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (St. Leonards, New South Wales: Allen and Unwin, 1989); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990). 24. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 162. 25. Ibid., 163. ˇ zek elaborates a Lacanian analysis of enjoyment in relation to national 26. Ziˇ identification in “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!” in Tarrying with the Negative, particularly pages 201–203. This point is also discussed in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London and New York: Verso, 1994), and For They Know Not What They Do. 27. See, for example, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish—The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). 28. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 171.

PART 1 IDENTITY: PERFORMATIVITY AND POWER

2 Violence, Justice, and Identity in the Bosnian Conflict David Campbell Is there not a growing conviction, clearer today among innumerable people, that the dying of people with whom we have nothing in common—no racial kinship, no language, no religion, no economic interests—concerns us? —Alphonso Lingis

Deconstruction is neither a theory nor a philosophy. It is neither a school nor a method. It is not even a discourse, nor an act, nor a practice. It is what happens, what is happening today in what they call society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on and so forth. Deconstruction is the case. —Jacques Derrida1

La victimalitié assortie—assorted victimhoods—is the only universal ideology in the post–cold war world, according to Jean Baudrillard. 2 An extreme assessment, perhaps, but many of the current developments in international politics point in that direction. The “failed state” as international victim has become a preeminent security issue, establishing the limit case of concern when the power of the global media is there to gaze upon the plight of its devastated peoples.3 Whether the site is Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, or Chechnya, the sight is familiar—“generalities of bodies—dead, wounded, starving, diseased, and homeless—are pressed against the television screen as mass articles.” The effect can be strangely comforting for the viewing population: “in their pervasive depersonalisation, this anonymous corporeality functions as an allegory of the elephantine, ‘archaic,’ and violent histories of external and internal subalterns.”4 Through a peculiar trade, a pitiful eye is cast over the victims, consuming their image as a source for compassion. In return, through a process of “cultural anaesthesia,” which banishes “disconcerting, discordant, and anarchic sensory presences and agents that undermine the normalising and often silent premises of everyday life,” we are reassured that the horrors 21

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evident over there are safely confined and our resultant superiority confirmed.5 This is the strange morality of pity that Friedrich Nietzsche warned against. In questioning morality so as establish the possibility for a revaluation of values, Nietzsche paid particular attention to “unegoistic” instincts such as pity. Nietzsche regarded the morality of pity as a danger to all rightthinking persons, for it represented a constraint upon the sovereignty of the individual through the transmission of pain from the victim to the observer. But Nietzsche argued the danger was greater than that, for he saw that some “good” persons sought objects of pity as a means to increase their own position and control.6 The objects of pity would remain victims regardless of the amount of attention directed their way, whereas the pitiers would markedly increase their feeling of superiority. In few places has this productive complex of pity been more evident than the Bosnian conflict. The international community has focused on the abnormality of the conflict through an oft-repeated parade of pathetic images while finding it difficult to confront the normality of life lived in ˇ zek argues, what disturbs us most is the context of violence. As Slavoj Ziˇ not the sense that there is something perversely unique about Bosnia in general and Sarajevo in particular, though most assessments attempt to make that case: The unbearable is not the difference. The unbearable is the fact that in a sense there is no difference: there are no bloodthirsty “Balkanians” in Sarajevo, just normal citizens like us. The moment we take full note of this fact, the frontier that separates “us” from “them” is exposed in all its arbitrariness, and we are forced to renounce the safe distance of external observers.7

To maintain the distance, therefore, we emphasize compassion for the ˇ zek, like Baudrillard, believes something global has emerged: victim. Ziˇ “Sarajevo is but the special case of what is perhaps the key feature of the ideological constellation that characterises our epoch of world-wide triumph of liberal democracy: the universalisation of the notion of victim.”8 To say as much is not to degrade the evident suffering or downplay the abundant horrors of the violence that has consumed the Bosnian capital (among other areas) since early 1992. To the contrary, in order to come to terms with the violence, it is necessary to highlight the function of compassion and what it conceals if we are to respond more effectively. In this conˇ zek argues, that “our compassion, precisely in so text it might be said, as Ziˇ far as it is ‘sincere,’ presupposes that in it, we perceive ourselves in the form that we find likeable: the victim is presented so that we like to see ourselves in the position from which we stare at her.”9 In our empathy toward Bosnian victims, we have, especially through the emphasis upon

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humanitarian aid and intervention, thought of ourselves in a manner that we find congenial—the humanitarians giving charity to the helpless. This desirable sense of our self more often than not does little for the other. Moreover, the victims, who are neither so weak nor easily indulged as we think, can plainly see this. Indeed, the “justifiable contempt” held by many Sarajevans toward both their enemy and those Europeans who, with their “hypocritical contrition . . . bronze their good conscience in the sun of solidarity,” pierces the phantasm of the pitiful victim and exposes the political deficit of compassion.10 For what our surfeit of concern conceals is the “immobilising power of fascination . . . [which] thwarts our ability to act” and prevents a political analysis of the conflict in Bosnia. The “ethics of compassion with the victim legitimises the avoidance, the endless postponement, of the act. All ‘humanitarian’ activity of aiding victims, all food, clothes and medicine for Bosnians, are there to obfuscate the urgency of the act.”11 This is certainly the view of Rony Brauman, a former president of Médecins sans Frontières, who has charged the international community with hiding behind compassion in the face of genocide.12 At the same time, we might offer this cautionary note from Jacques Derrida: However insufficient, confused, or equivocal such signs may still be, we should salute what is heralded today in the reflection on the right of interference or intervention in the name of what is obscurely and sometimes hypocritically called the humanitarian, thereby limiting the sovereignty of the state in certain conditions. Let us salute such signs even as one remains vigilantly on guard against the manipulation or appropriations to which these novelties can be subjected.13

How then might we reclaim politics from pity and enable the exercise of responsibility while at the same time paying respect to those small steps that have already been taken? As a first step, what is required is a properly political analysis of the conflict in Bosnia. At issue in that context is the question of the relationship between violence, identity, and the political. In this chapter I seek to rethink the relationship of violence to the political along lines suggested by Derrida’s recent and more overtly political writings, such as “Force of Law,” The Other Heading, and Spectres of Marx. The intention is to show how the intensification of so-called ethnic and nationalist conflict in places such as Bosnia, while clearly horrific, is an exacerbation rather than an aberration of the logic behind the constitution of political community. Because of the relationship between deconstruction and justice that is revealed by such an interpretation, the overcoming of cultural anaesthesia that this argument effects can hopefully move beyond the self-serving morality of pity and victimhood and direct attention toward more effective strategies with regard to the conflict in Bosnia.

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VIOLENCE AND THE POLITICAL

The deconstruction of the state as subject is not restricted to those states subject to destruction. Although the multifarious discourses surrounding the state that invoke its name and declare its purpose give the appearance of simply reflecting a reality awaiting apprehension, such discourses in actuality constitute that reality, for when pursued, the sources of authority upon which those discourses rest can be considered “mystical.”14 In consequence, the founding moment that institutes the law, a constitution, or the state involves an interpretive and performative force, a coup de force: It is probable, as it might be said, that such a coup de force always marks the founding of a nation, state, or nation-state. In the event of such a founding of an institution, the properly performative act must produce (proclaim) what in the form of a constative act it merely claims, declares, assures it is describing. The simulacrum or fiction then consists in bringing to daylight, in giving birth to, that which one claims to reflect so as to take note of it, as though it were a matter of recording what will have been there, the unity of a nation, the founding of a state, while one is in the act of producing that event.15

The coup de force can take a number of forms. It can involve an interpretive act, a violent performance, or a symbolic enactment. In the Bosnian conflict, all these forms and more have been evident. A good example of the coup de force as symbolic enactment is the rediscovery by Serbian populism of an Orthodox burial custom in which the mortal remains of a ruler are carried through all monasteries in the country prior to burial. In 1989 this ritual was practiced to great effect, if somewhat anachronistically. The remains of King Lazar, the Serbian leader during the defeat inflicted by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo six hundred years previously, were disinterred and paraded from monastery to monastery across Serbian territory. This was the “new birth of the Serbian symbolic community,” which brought something into being as though it had always been there.16 Such communal inscriptions were bolstered by other historical appropriations, and in the Serbian community, none was more important than the remembering of the genocide against its people during the Ustache regime in Croatia.17 No matter how historically secure it appears, the coup de force remains violence without a ground “since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position of the law can’t by definition rest on anything but themselves.”18 Even if earlier laws, resolutions, or conditions are successfully appealed to, “the same ‘mystical’ limit will reappear at the supposed

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origin of said conditions, rules or conventions, and at the origin of their dominant interpretation.”19 Indeed, at each self-declared point of origin, at each supposedly secure ground, the discourse of primary and stable identity “comes up against its limit: in itself, in its performative power itself. . . . Here [at the limit] a silence is walled up in the violent structure of the founding act.”20 As Derrida notes, these features are prevalent in the context of states: The foundation of all states occurs in a situation that we can thus call revolutionary. It inaugurates new laws, it always does so in violence. Always, which is to say even when there haven’t been those spectacular genocides, expulsions or deportations that so often accompany the foundation of states, great or small, old or new, right near us or far away. In these situations said to found law (droit) or state, the grammatical category of the future anterior all too well resembles a modification of the present to describe the violence in progress. It consists, precisely, in feigning the presence or simple modalisation of presence. These moments, supposing we can isolate them, are terrifying moments. Because of the sufferings, the crimes, the tortures that rarely fail to accompany them, no doubt, but just as much because they are in themselves, and in their very violence, uninterpretable or indecipherable. That is what I am calling “mystique.”21

Bosnia is one such terrifying moment, in which we have witnessed “spectacular genocides, expulsions or deportations that so often accompany the foundation of states.” It is, moreover, a terrifying moment many have found “uninterpretable or indecipherable.” But do the concepts of “simulacrum,” “fiction,” “‘violence without a ground,” “the absence of foundations,” and “mystique” offer an incisive understanding? Such notions would appear at first sight to confirm the worst fears of deconstruction’s detractors, that it is beyond reason and nothing more than (in Derrida’s words) “a quasi-nihilistic abdication before the ethico-political-juridical question of justice and before the opposition between just and unjust.”22 But appearances at first sight can be deceptive, particularly if they themselves are motivated by a certain desire to go beyond reasoned argument and simply dismiss that which appears alien, foreign, and strange. For three reasons (and perhaps many more), to speak of the interpretive and performative basis of authority is not to advocate irrationalism, injustice, or any other form of licentious anarchy. First, within the frame of Derrida’s argument, the proposition that the interpretive and performative coup de force gives birth to grounds that must be considered either “illegal” or “inauthentic” is rethought. As Derrida maintains, to say that the foundation of authority cannot rest on anything but itself, that it is therefore violence without a ground, “is not to say that they [the grounds constituted in the coup de force] are in themselves unjust,

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in the sense of ‘illegal.’ They are neither legal nor illegal in their founding moment. They exceed the opposition between founded and unfounded, or between any foundationalism or anti-foundationalism.”23 Second, just as the founding of the law or any similar foundation of authority exceeds the normal confines of either/or logic, so too the authority of reason as that which itself supposedly governs the logic of the either/or—for it is the powers of reason that are said to enable us to distinguish between the just and the unjust—exceeds these confines. Simply put (though this is very difficult to put simply), this is because reason cannot ground the authority of reason. In other words, the authority of reason itself—by which it is said that the argument above is quasi-nihilistic, irrational, and the like—depends upon a similar interpretive and performative coup de force.24 This feature of reason has been forgotten (or, better, it has become a silence walled up) because of the transformation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s principle that “nothing is without reason” into the situation, identified by Martin Heidegger, in which “the principle now says that every thing counts as existing when and only when it has been securely established as a calculable object for cognition.”25 This transformationcum-deformation has meant the erosion of the distinction enabled by reason between “calculative thinking” and “reflective thinking.” But, Heidegger asks, “May we give up what is worthy of thought in favour of the recklessness of exclusively calculative thinking and its immense achievements? Or are we obliged to find paths upon which thinking is capable of responding to what is worthy of thought instead of, enchanted by calculative thinking, mindlessly passing over what is worthy of thought?”26 For Derrida, finding those paths of thought avoided by calculative thinking is integral to uncovering the “silence . . . walled up in the violent structure of the founding act.” Following explicitly both Leibniz and Heidegger, Derrida argues that “to respond to the call of the principle of reason is to ‘render reason,’ to explain effects through their causes, rationally; it is also to ground, to justify, to account for on the basis of principles or roots.”27 This responding, this response-ability, means that the first path avoided by calculative thinking that needs to be taken is to ask, “what grounds this principle [reason] which is itself a principle of grounding?” Taking that path, however, uncovers the disturbing thought that there is an “impossibility for a principle of grounding to ground itself,” such that “this very grounding, then, would have to hold itself suspended above a most spectacular void.”28 Are we just left hanging? Derrida responds to this in two ways. First, he asks a question in the name of reason: “Who is more faithful to reason’s call, who hears it with a keener ear, who better sees the difference, the one who offers questions in return and tries to think through the possibility of that summons, or the one who does not want to hear any

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question about the reason of reason?”29 The answer is implicit in the question, and it produces the second response, one that tries to grapple with the necessary principle of reason and the inescapable void over which it dangles. In a spirit akin to Heidegger’s view on that which is worthy of thought, Derrida argues that “‘thought’ requires both the principle of reason and what is beyond the principle of reason, the arkhe and an-archy.”30 But what politics and what understanding of justice and responsibility, even if we accept that they flow from an adherence to thought faithful to reason, might reasonably respond to the coup de force that produced the silence walled up in the violence of its founding act(s)? Here—and this is the third reason—Derrida offers hope. In his view, the logical result of the walls of authority containing concealed silences is that the resultant structure (be it the law or the state) is “essentially deconstructible, whether because it is founded, constructed on interpretable and transformable textual strata . . . or because its ultimate foundation is by definition unfounded.” 31 In other words, necessarily built into such structures, through a founding act that has no recourse to established, prior grounds, are moments of potential undoing. This potential for dissimulation, however, is not necessarily negative. That the law or the state “is deconstructible is not bad news. We may even see in this a stroke of luck for politics, for all historical progress.”32 How so? One way in which the affirmative and just character of deconstruction can be appreciated is to understand its critical relationship to the traditional grounds of authority that have restricted justice in the past. As Derrida observes: A deconstructionist approach to the boundaries that institute the human subject . . . as the measure of the just and the unjust, does not necessarily lead to injustice, not to the effacement of an opposition between just and unjust but may, in the name of a demand more insatiable than justice, lead us to a reinterpretation of the whole apparatus of boundaries within which a history and a culture have been able to confine their criteriology.33

But I need to defer until later the full development of this crucial thought. The next task is to consider how this understanding of violence and the political relates to the Bosnian conflict, especially the conventional reading of that conflict. VIOLENCE AND IDENTITY IN BOSNIA

Ontopology, the connection of “the ontological value of present-being to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general,” is how Derrida under-

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stands conflicts like that in Bosnia.34 Indeed, a key assumption that informs the Bosnian conflict is that there can and should be a necessary alignment between territory and identity, state and nation. Within the former Yugoslavia, this ideal of alignment is the basis for the conflict, regardless of whether one wants to describe the conflagration as a civil conflict or a war of aggression. As the deputy commander of Serbian nationalist forces, General Milan Gvero, has proclaimed, “We say everybody has to live on his own territory, Muslims on Muslim territory, Serbs on Serbian. . . . This [Serb areas in Bosnia] is pure Serbian territory, and there is no power on earth that can make us surrender it.”35 To reinforce the points, the Bosnian Serb commander General Ratko Mladi c´ has declared that “borders are drawn with blood.”36 Such attitudes confirm Derrida’s proposition that conflicts like this are driven by “a primitive conceptual phantasm of community, the nation-State, sovereignty, borders, native soil and blood.”37 Likewise, conventional readings of the conflict reiterate this logic. For example, John Mearsheimer has declared that in the former Yugoslavia, “ethnically homogenous states must be created . . . a Bosnian state peopled almost exclusively by Muslims, a Croatian state for Croatians and a Serbian state made up mainly of Serbians.”38 Although Mearsheimer’s proposal envisages the necessary population movement of one million people (his estimate) as a peaceful, ordered, practical, and “moral” operation, is it anything other than a case for “ethnic cleansing”? The clearest manifestation of the way in which the assumption of autonomous and settled identities undergird the conflict is the prevalence of the idea that the conflict in the former Yugoslavia is nothing but a playing out of ancient and entrenched animosities. This enframing of the conflict, the notion that this is the way it has always been, that “hatred is the only constant,” is a pervasive tendency among observers and politicians alike.39 News reports speak of the way in which “Serbs savour ancient hatreds,”40 how “Balkan hatreds defy centuries of outside meddling,”41 the way the end of the cold war has seen a “conflict born of old grievances such that “the contagion” of “Europe’s new tribalism could infect us all.”42 Politicians like those in the Clinton administration have also propagated this view of the conflict. In his first inaugural address, President Bill Clinton spoke of a world “threatened still by ancient hatreds and new plagues.”43 Secretary of State Warren Christopher has described the hatred between all three groups in Bosnia as “almost unbelievable. It’s almost terrifying, and it’s centuries old . . . a problem from hell.”44 And Clinton told a 1993 press conference that the people of the Balkans “have been fighting each other for centuries.”45 Tellingly, such representations persisted in the administration and the media in the run up to, and analysis of, the Dayton agreement.46 Academic writings are replete with similar logics.

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Phrases such as “the underlying reality and ‘ethnic memories’ stretching from medieval times to the atrocities of 1941–5” are anything but the exception.47 Even those analysts who might want to dispute the historical fatalism of this discourse themselves share the view that we are witnessing the reassertion (hence with a time-honored quality) of local and particularist identities in the form of tribalism, the “retribalisation of the world.”48 The trouble with this perspective, particularly in its historical determinism, is that it is ethnographically dubious. It overlooks the important fact that in the federal states of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the Communist leaderships did not suppress nationalist identifications but rather constitutionally enshrined and politically utilized them for the furtherance of their authority. With the demise of communism, we should thus not be surprised that ethnic-nationalist bonds are claimed as the remains. Communism did not betray national roots—indeed, communism created the “compulsive attachment to the national Cause. . . . The ethnic Cause is thus the left-over that persists once the Communist ideological fabric disintegrates.”49 Equally, this view overlooks the fact that at the same time as they have spread the line on ancient animosities, news accounts have also contained eyewitness statements of Bosnian residents that speak to the lie of centuries-old hatreds. Misha Glenny has observed that not only did Serbs and Croats live “together in relative contentment throughout the regions which have now been so dreadfully ravaged,” but that even during the ongoing conflict there have been areas (not the least of which has been Sarajevo) where multiethnic communities have survived.50 In addition, it should not be forgotten that though there have been considerable exclusivist pressures, even the army of Bosnia-Herzegovina remains formally multiethnic and multicultural.51 Of course, to take into account these and other everyday realities would have undermined the political premises of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and would have subverted the grounds upon which outside states, including the United States, have built their rationale for inaction. The prevalence in general of the “ancient animosities” thesis should come as little surprise. After all, the intelligibility of violence is also produced by the order it seeks to establish. As Derrida argues: One can say that the order of intelligibility depends in its turn on the established order that it serves to interpret. This readability will then be as little neutral as it is non-violent. A “successful” revolution, the “successful foundation of a state” (in somewhat the same sense that one speaks of a “felicitous performative speech act”) will produce apres coup what it was destined to produce in advance, namely, proper interpretative models to read in return, to give sense, necessity and above all legitimacy to the

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violence that has produced, among others, the interpretative model in question, that is, the discourse of its self-legitimation.52

What is perhaps of some surprise in this regard, however, is the way in which the interpretation of ethnic-nationalist conflict as resulting from a priori foundations is shared not only by the propagators of the violence but also by those who profess to want to ameliorate the violence. This common heritage, the shared performative violence at the center of the interpretive reading of a situation like the conflict in Bosnia, indicates—appearances to the contrary notwithstanding—that the chauvinist nationalization of community and politics in the former Yugoslavia is replicated in western Europe. To this extent, it is not extreme to suggest, as does Baudrillard, that Bosnia is the newest frontier of a European program taken to its logical execution.53 One of the principal effects of the historical fatalism associated with the thesis of entrenched hatred in the Balkans has been to disenable calls for political or military action, to the despair of those who think we have witnessed a genocidal conflict and to the relief, if not satisfaction, of those who prefer to sidestep responsibility. If ethnic and nationalist conflicts are understood as no more than settled history or human nature rearing its ugly head, then there is nothing that can be done in the present to resolve the tension except to repress or ignore such struggles. In this view, the historical animus has to be enacted according to its script, with human agency in suspension while nature violently plays itself out. The only alternative consistent with this understanding would be for nature to be miraculously overcome as the result of an idealistic transformation at the hands of reason. However, a different interpretation of such conflicts, one that sees them as the most extreme version of a coup de force designed to found that without foundation—for example, the attempt to found an ethnically homogeneous state when polyethnicity and national heterogeneity are the reality of the time—offers greater potential for their understanding and resolution. Toward that end, one important effect of deconstructive procedures is the “putting into question the onto-theo- but also archeo-teleological concept of history.” The purpose of so doing, as Derrida argues, is not to banish or finalize history but rather “to show that this onto-theo-archeo-teleology locks up, neutralises, and finally cancels historicity.”54 This theme is crucial with respect to Bosnia because most, if not all, interpretations of the conflict concern themselves with historical animosities. Such a focus is obvious in those that deploy some variation of the ancient animosities thesis but is also evident when the historically constituted nature of the conflict is deployed as an effort to get away from at least some elements of the primordialist understandings. By focusing upon historical constitution, this interpretation suggests the conflict was constituted in history, which

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implies that the hostility has an identifiable point of origin and is transmitted from generation to generation until it reaches the present. History is thus naturalized and historicity extinguished. A deconstructive reading would open the way for suggesting that the conflict is constituted in the present and that “history” is a resource in the contemporary struggle. This proposition would be consistent with Benedict Anderson’s provocative question: “Supposing ‘antiquity’ were, at a certain historical juncture, the necessary consequence of ‘novelty?’”55 This rethinking of history realigns our understanding of violence along the lines suggested by the idea of the coup de force. Violence is normally treated as a surface expression of a deeper cause—what Allen Feldman calls the “psychogenetic schema that begins in grievance (material or ideational), moves to expression, and culminates in violence in the absence of redress.”56 Regardless of the alleged nature of the cause—economic deprivation, virulent nationalism, or political manipulation, among others—many conventional accounts of ethnic-nationalist struggles share the “narrative model of linear history” embodied in these explanations, supporting Feldman’s contention that “sites of legitimation and authorisation suppress historicity through linear, teleological, eschatological, or progressive temporalities.”57 In contrast, if we pursue Derrida’s notion of “thinking another historicity,” 58 we can recast the conflict in Bosnia as “an ethnography of surfaces—those sites, stages, and templates upon which history is constructed as a cultural object.” In this context, “the historiographic surface is a place for re-enactment, for the simulation of power and for making power manageable as a material force,” and political violence is “a mode of transcription” that “circulates codes from one prescribed historiographic surface to another.”59 In these terms, the strategically bizarre cultural violence against symbols of identity in Bosnia—mosques, churches, museums, and memorials—and the horrific violence against bodies—mass rape of women and the disfiguration and rape of men—becomes comprehensible, if no less justifiable.60 As such, the recent intensification of ethnic and nationalist conflict takes on a very different character. Far from being a natural outgrowth of historical animosities and earlier conflicts, we can think of these issues of ethnicity and nationalism as questions of history violently deployed in the present for contemporary political goals. The character of political violence in a place like the former Yugoslavia is as modern as it is premodern, for it constitutes the identities in whose name it is deployed. What is disclosed by this rendering is the way in which there is a continuum of political spaces and transnational surfaces along which “Bosnia” is violently constituted, from the bodies of individuals, through the corporate body of the former Yugoslavia, to the international bodies of the world community.

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RESPONDING TO THE VIOLENCE

The norm of territorial and cultural alignment, the norm of ontopology, is the basis of international relations construction of the world as comprising sovereign states in an anarchic realm. Even more important, it is the norm against which the possibility for international action is considered and the norm that has constrained reaction to the violence in Bosnia. Even though its ethnographic inaccuracy exposes it to be no more than a form of “nostalgia for the politics of place,”61 it continues to function powerfully because it constitutes a cartography of autonomous moral agents who can bear the burden of responsibility. To establish that this is the case, one need only contrast the equivocal reactions to the Balkan crisis with the mobilization of the coalition in the Gulf War of 1990–1991. In the latter case, the fact that the conflict could be enframed solely as an act of territorial aggression devoid of history against a state (even though the invasion of Kuwait was an act of aggression insinuated with many histories) enabled the anti-Iraq forces to engage in a discourse of moral certitude that performatively secured sovereignty for participants (in places that it might have otherwise been insecure), such that the allies could exercise an obligation and Iraq alone could be held culpable.62 With respect to the Balkan crisis, the fact that the battle is so evidently one of contending national and political sovereignties, rendered as conflict over territory in accordance with history, removes the most easily (albeit performatively) constituted ground upon which to mobilize action. In consequence, although the European and U.S. publics have been revolted by the carnage they are witness to, the “political will” (which is the common metaphor for the basis of mobilization) for action has not been apparent. In the past, this will to oppose aggression per se has been effective as a rallying cry because it entails an affirmative aim, the restoration of sovereignty. In pursuit of an equally positive goal, efforts to garner support for measures to oppose ethnic cleansing have either tried to rely upon its shock value or have attempted to indirectly render (someone else’s) sovereign territory as the issue by making reference to the potential for “regional instability” and “containment.” In the case of Bosnia, abhorrence of aggression, even in the extreme versions we have encountered there, has proved insufficient as a basis to bring about the necessary action because restoration of sovereignty cannot be the goal. Since the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991 there has been no going back. The absence of such traditional grounds, along with the seeming inability of “humanitarian concerns” to muster the requisite support, means an alternative impetus for action on the part of states has been (and still is) required.

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The fatal predicament for Bosnia has been the absence of such alternative grounds in the discourse of the West. At the outset of the political transformation of the Balkans, through a “nonpolicy” that one analyst has described as “criminally negligent,” the Bush administration opposed any alteration in the sovereignty of the Yugoslav state.63 Although the Clinton administration has not publicly offered an equivalent view, it has done little to formulate any alternative. Indeed, the official debate about Bosnia, in both Europe and the United States, has been structured around the options of air strikes against Serbian positions, the lifting of the arms embargo against the Bosnians, the creation of “safe havens” for civilians, and other elements of the UN mandate, all of which are means rather than ends, tactics rather than objectives.64 When certain ends have been manifest, as in the international diplomatic initiatives ranging from the 1992 Lisbon agreement through the Vance-Owen proposals and the Contact Group process to the Dayton agreement of 1995, they are ends that have reiterated ontopological premises. An important reason for this near complete silence on the objective that is either desired or sought in Bosnia is that the affirmative political goal around which opposition to aggression could have been arrayed is for the most part considered ineligible. This silence occurs because the most obvious political goal requires acceptance of the very possibility that is being so actively contested in the cultural terrain of the United States and other western nations: multiculturalism. I am not suggesting that western inaction is premised on the basis that these communities are multicultural; rather, I claim that the West’s inability to act in pursuit of a political goal in Bosnia stems from its unwillingness to make multiculturalism that goal. This is so because to mount the case for assistance to the many multinational and multicultural communities throughout the former Yugoslavia would require resolving in favor of plurality one of the most hotly contested cultural controversies in the United States and other western nations, a controversy that is central to the reproduction of the identity of those states. The reluctance of the West might therefore be said to stem from “the nostalgia for the politics of place”65 at home and abroad that underpins so much of our political thought and that the West shares (rather unfortunately) with the Serbian, Croatian, and (at least a few of the) Bosnian nationalist leaders. CONCLUSION

Whereas the norm of ontopology and ontopological interpretations have curtailed an effective and progressive response to the Bosnian conflict, a deconstructive rereading of the relationship between violence and

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the political expands the political possibilities. In making clear the way in which the founding moment (along with the many subsequent moments of refounding) of a sovereign presence such as the state involves an interpretive and performative force, or coup de force, the “primitive conceptual phantasm of community, the nation-State, sovereignty, borders, native soil and blood” that drives ethnic-nationalist conflict can be revealed as a mystical artifice.66 This is not to say that the ontopological narrative can be easily dismissed. It is to say that its grounds for authority and legitimation are performatively constructed through its constantive declaration. Were those grounds natural, the outpouring of violence evident in places such as Bosnia would not be necessary for their security. The tragic irony is that the greater the violence, the less certain the cause. As Derrida has declared, “deconstruction is the case.”67 But in unpacking ethnic-nationalist conflict in this manner, what affirmative position is produced by a deconstructive argument? Democracy. Multiculturalism. Humanitarianism. Justice. All rethought and all reworked to give practical manifestations for the specific context of the Bosnian conflict, which, although as of summer 1998 is free from largescale military activity, is nonetheless ongoing. Of course, such a statement is at this stage no more than an assertion containing a promise. The restrictions of space sadly require the deferral of the promise’s enactment.68 One final point can be made in favor of this inconclusive conclusion. No theoretical project can ever guarantee a specific outcome in the realm of politics (for were such guarantees available, the realm would no longer be politics). But it can be safely said that with respect to Bosnia, the international community’s response, informed as it is by theorizations concerning territory and identity drawn from a broadly defined realist discourse, has furthered the violence and would not be difficult to improve upon. The fact that a range of political options informed by a deconstructive reading might possibly better address the conflict is something strongly in its favor. NOTES

1. The epigraphs come from Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), x; and Jacques Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms About Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms,” trans. Anne Tomiche, in The States of “Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carroll (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 85. This chapter is a substantially revised version of my “Identity, Sovereignty, Responsibility: Reflections on Post–Cold War Moral Cartography,” in The Return of Culture and Identity in International Relations Theory, ed. Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995). It has benefited greatly from the contributions made by the audiences at the Universities of Bristol, Essex, Keele,

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Luton, and Wales (Aberystwyth) to whom it was presented during 1995. It is also part of my larger project, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 2. Jean Baudrillard, “Pas de pitié pour Sarajevo,” Liberation, January 17, 1994. I am grateful to Paul Patton for the reference and Kate Manzo for the translation. 3. Tim Luke, “The Hard Work of Freedom: Failed States, 24 Hour Headline News, and the UN in the 1990s,” Peace Research Centre seminar, Australian National University, May 9, 1995. For the conventional security view, see Gerard Helman and Steven Ratner, “Saving Failed States,” Foreign Policy 89 (winter 1992–1993): 3–20. For the idea of “devastated peoples” as objects of attention, see David Scheffer, “Toward a Modern Doctrine of Humanitarian Intervention,” University of Toledo Law Review 23 (winter 1992): 253–293. 4. Allen Feldman, “On Cultural Anaesthesia: From Desert Storm to Rodney King,” American Ethnologist 21, no. 2 (May 1994): 407. 5. Ibid., 405. See also McKenzie Wark, “Fresh Maimed Babies: The Uses of Innocence,” Transition 65 (spring 1995): 36–47. The “we” here refers predominantly to viewers in the industrialized West. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), preface; first essay, sec. 2. For an overview, see David E. Cartwright, “Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche on the Morality of Pity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (January–March 1984): 83–98. ˇ zek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and 7. Slavoj Ziˇ ˇ zek’s contribution to the arguCausality (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 2. Ziˇ ment here should not obscure his negative and questionable assessment of deconstruction. 8. Ibid., 213. 9. Ibid., 211. 10. Baudrillard, “Par de pitié pour Sarajevo.” This was clearly demonstrated in the angry responses of Sarajevan schoolchildren to the “letters of hope” they were sent by the British counterparts. See “Between the Lines,” Guardian Education, January 16, 1996. ˇ zek, Metastases of Enjoyment, 214. 11. Ziˇ 12. “Hiding Behind Compassion,” Newsweek, December 19, 1994. In BosNews [electronic bulletin board] February 3, 1995. Available from [email protected]. 13. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge: 1994), 84. 14. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992). 15. Jacques Derrida, “The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration,” in For Nelson Mandela, ed. Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili (New York: Seaver Books, 1987), 18. 16. Renata Salecl, “The Crisis of Identity and the Struggle for New Hegemony in the former Yugoslavia,” in The Making of Political identities, ed. Ernesto Laclau (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 213. 17. For a good discussion of the symbolic politics of genocide, see Bette Denich, “Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of Genocide,” American Ethnologist 21 (May 1994): 367–390.

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18. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 14. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 13–14. 21. Ibid., 35. 22. Ibid., 19. 23. Ibid., 14. 24. This point is overlooked by those who blithely offer rationalism as a counter to barbarism. For a clear example, see Eric Hobsbawm, “Barbarism: A User’s Guide,” New Left Review 206 (July/August 1994): 44–54. 25. Martin Heidegger, “The Principle of Reason,” in Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 120–121. 26. Ibid., 129. 27. Jacques Derrida, “The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils,” trans. Catherine Porter and Edward P. Morris, Diacritics (fall 1983): 7–8. 28. Ibid., 9. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 18–19. 31. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 14. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 19. 34. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 82. 35. Quoted in “Exuding Confidence, Serbian Nationalists Act as If War for Bosnia Is Won,” New York Times, May 23, 1993. 36. Quoted in “Bosnia: From Appeasement to Genocide,” Sydney Morning Herald, December 3, 1994. 37. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 82. 38. John J. Mearsheimer, “Shrink Bosnia to Save It,” New York Times, March 31, 1993. 39. “Hostages to a Brutal Past,” U.S. News and World Report, February 15, 1993. 40. Richard Cohen, “Serbs Savour Ancient Hatreds,” Manchester Guardian Weekly, December 27, 1992. 41. “Meddling in the Balkans: A Peril of the Ages,” New York Times, April 11, 1993. 42. “Old Tribal Rivalries in Eastern Europe Pose Threat of Infection,” New York Times, October 13, 1991; “As Ethnic Wars Multiply, U.S. Strives for a Policy,” New York Times, February 7, 1993; “Balkan War Has Left the West Powerless—and New Threats Loom,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 28, 1994; “Europe’s New Tribalism Could Infect Us All,” Manchester Guardian Weekly, February 7, 1993. 43. “An ‘American Renewal’: Transcript of the Address by President Clinton,” New York Times, January 21, 1993. 44. Quoted in “Bosnia Recast,” New York Times, April 8, 1993. 45. “Excerpts from Clinton’s News Conference in the Rose Garden,” New York Times, May 15, 1993. 46. See, for example, the invocation of “ancient ethnic animosities” in “Editorial: Peace in Bosnia,” New York Times, November 22, 1995, and the administration’s June 1995 rationalization of Balkan violence as having been endemic “at least since the 11th century,” in “Peace Pact—Hint of War,” New York Times,

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November 22, 1995, both in BosNet (Digest 475) [electronic bulletin board], November 22, 1995. 47. W. Harriet Critchley, “The Failure of Federation in Yugoslavia,” International Journal 48 (summer 1993): 440. 48. See Michael Walzer, “The New Tribalism: Notes on a Difficult Problem,” Dissent (spring 1992): 164; and Benjamin R. Barber, “Global Multiculturalism and the American Experiment,” World Policy Journal 10 (spring 1993): 49. ˇ zek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of 49. Slavoj Ziˇ Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 207–208. 50. Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 19, 108. The forced (with the pressure coming mostly from the Bosnian Serb side) movement of much of the Serbian population from the suburbs of Sarajevo in the early months of 1996 and their replacement with “Muslim” refugees from ethnically cleansed areas like Srebrenecia, has diminished—though far from expunged—the city’s heterogeneity. For a discussion, see OMRI Special Report: Pursuing Balkan Peace 1, no. 9, March 5, 1996, in BosNet (Digest 88) [electronic bulletin board], March 6, 1996. 51. On the debate within Bosnia about the (un)desirability of religious influences upon the army, see the commentaries in the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodjenje, in BosNews [electronic bulletin board], January 31, 1995. 52. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 32. 53. Baudrillard, “Pas de pitié pour Sarajevo.” 54. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 74. 55. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), xiv. 56. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 18–19. 57. Ibid., 2. An influential example is Steven Van Evera, “Hypotheses on Nationalism and War,” International Security 18 (spring 1994): 5–39. 58. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 74–75. 59. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 2, 7. 60. For a series of examples, see A. Stiglmayer, ed., Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); and Norman Cigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of Ethnic Cleansing (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995). 61. William E. Connolly, “Democracy and Territoriality,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17 (winter 1991). 62. This argument is detailed in my Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1993). 63. Nicholas X. Rizopoulos, “A Third Balkan War?” World Policy Journal 10 (summer 1993): 2. 64. This argument is made in Mary Kaldor, “Protect Bosnia,” The Nation, March 22, 1993. For an example that illustrates this tendency, see “What to Do in Bosnia? 3 Hard Choices for Clinton,” New York Times, April 29, 1993. 65. Connolly, “Democracy and Territoriality.” 66. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 82. 67. Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms,” 85. 68. For the fuller articulation of this argument, see my National Deconstruction, chaps. 6–8.

3 Masquerading and the U.S. “Intervasion” of Haiti Cynthia Weber Is it real? Is it fake? Is the whole thing just a mistake? —“The Happening,” the Supremes, 19641

According to the Clinton administration, the U.S.-led invasion of Haiti never happened. U.S. forces landed in Haiti in September 1994. The Cedras government relinquished power to the Aristide government. United Nations forces (of which approximately 50 percent are U.S. forces) “replaced” the U.S. forces and remained in Haiti until the 1996 transfer of presidential power. Casualties have been incurred on all sides. But as President Bill Clinton told the American people in a televised address on September 18, 1994, an invasion of Haiti was averted. What took its place, the administration suggested some days later, was an “incursion” or an “occupation,”2 or even an “intervasion.”3 It was, as Admiral Paul David Miller, commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, described it, “a tailored force.” He elaborated: we had two options, right? I phrased one called “kick in the door,” and the other phrase is “a soft landing.” . . . But with the President Carter/Senator Nunn/Colin Powell agreement, we sort of went in between those two bookends, is how I characterized it. . . . We had a tailored force, tailored for that aspect of the mission; it was the right force at the right time.”4

This move from an invasion force to a differently tailored force highlights one of the truisms of U.S. foreign policy toward Haiti—what you see isn’t necessarily what you get. And although this has been increasingly apparent in U.S. policy toward the Caribbean in the 1980s and 1990s, the Haiti intervention moves U.S. foreign policy beyond (in)effective simulation to a different kind of manipulation of appearances.5 What the Haiti intervention unveils (or maybe veils) is a new U.S. foreign policy 39

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strategy—presidential masquerade, made possible by the location of America. America is located in an imaginary space in which all things can be achieved, even one’s gender. “What,” asks Tim Dean, “could be more democratic, more essentially American, than a gender that ‘can be manipulated at will?’” He concludes, “Drag is as American as apple pie.” 6 It should come as little surprise, then, that the “symbolic fathers” of America, its presidents, occasionally appear in drag. Presidential cross-dressing is fast becoming a foreign policy strategy, whether it takes the form of a man overdressed as a man (as was a hysterical George Bush) or of men dressed as women (as I will argue is the case with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton). This chapter is organized into four sections. The first section introduces the concept of masquerade and applies it not to females—as it is conventionally used in psychoanalytic theory—but to males. In this chapter I put psychoanalytic categories like masquerade to purposes for which they were not intended. Thus, this theoretical argument and its empirical application to the case of the Haiti intervasion can be read as an active questioning of the psychoanalytic project and its reification of sex, sexuality, and gender categories. The second section suggests how the United States used male masquerade as an empowering strategy in its intervasion of Haiti, even though this strategy required the United States to unveil its internal and external lacks (of domestic support for an invasion and of UN authorization, respectively). The third section explains how former president Jimmy Carter, former chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, and then chairperson of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn—the diplomatic team that represented U.S. interests in Haiti and turned invasion into invitation—themselves can be read as a diplomatic parade of unmarked transvestites. This is because each of these figures embodies the quality of crossing. The final section discusses President Bill/Jimmy Clinton’s new claim to the space of presidential masquerade and its implications for U.S. sovereign subjectivity. PHALLIC AVOWAL AND DISAVOWAL

Who Has the Phallus? I Thought You Had the Phallus Give Me Back That Phallus7

Mary Ann Doane argues, “To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one’s image.”8 It is a strategy whereby something is added (clothes or a demeanor, for example) not to conceal a lack but rather to create the appearance of one. In my critique of

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the U.S. invasion of Panama, I read lack as a lack of phallic power that was exhibited symptomatically through male hysteria.9 Although the meaning of lack remains the same in this chapter, its function differs. Male hysteria equates a lack of phallic power with an inability to make meaning. Meaning cannot be made because the phallus is exposed. Masquerade, in contrast, equates a lack of phallic power with a reluctance to make meaning. This reluctance to make meaning is performed by “pretending” not to possess that which would allow one to make meaning, the phallus. As Doane suggests, “masquerade is anti-hysterical for it works to effect a separation between the cause of desire and oneself.”10 Whereas the hysteric asks “Am I?” the masquerading subject performatively replies, “I am without desire.” “Pretending” not to possess the phallus is, of course, always a double pretense because, as Jacques Lacan reminds us, no one actually can “be” or “have” the phallus.11 As Judith Butler explains, “Being” the Phallus and “having” the Phallus denote divergent sexual positions, or nonpositions (impossible positions, really), within language. To “be” the Phallus is to be the “signifier” of the desire of the Other and to appear as this signifier.12

Women are said to “be” the Phallus in the sense that they maintain the power to reflect or represent the “reality” of the self-grounding postures of the masculine subject. . . . Hence, “being” the Phallus is always a “being for” a masculine subject who seeks to reconfirm and augment his identity through the recognition of that “being for.”13

On the other hand, men are said to “have” the Phallus, yet never to “be” it, in the sense that the penis is not equivalent to the Law and can never fully symbolize that Law. Hence, there is a necessary or presuppositional impossibility to any effort to occupy the position of “having” the Phallus, with the consequence that both positions of “having” and “being” are, in Lacan’s terms, finally to be understood as comedic failures that are nevertheless compelled to articulate and enact these repeated impossibilities.14

Although it is impossible to “be” or to “have” the phallus, it is not impossible to “appear” (not) to be or (not) to have the phallus. This is the very sense of pretending, the “seems to” space in a Lacanian economy of desire. It is the space of masquerade. Discussions of masquerade in the psychoanalytic literature originated with and continue to focus primarily on female masquerade. Female masquerade involves seeming not to have a will to possess the phallus by acting excessively feminine. An excess of “being” the phallus covers for a will to “have” the phallus. In this sense, according to Joan Riviere, “Womanli-

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ness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it.”15 Like female masquerade, male masquerade is also a strategy undertaken “to avert the reprisals expected if [he] was found to possess [the phallus].”16 Male masquerade involves a seeming not to possess that which one is presumed to possess, the phallus. It is a disavowal of the phallus that is also a disavowal of the penis, an adding on of clothes or a demeanor in order to appear to lack the phallus (and penis) and the ability to make meaning that might come from possession of the phallus. This substitution of “seeming not to have” the phallus for “having” the phallus is the space of the male transvestite,17 “who . . . is careful to hide the wherewithal to dumbfound his neighbor.” 18 “Dumbfounding one’s neighbor” as to one’s lack of the phallus is a strategy undertaken not for its own sake but, as Marjorie Garber suggests, as a way of “protecting against the threat of loss” of the phallus.19 Garber writes, “The theatrical transvestite literalizes the anxiety of phallic loss. The overdetermination of phallic jokes, verbal and visual, that often accompany transvestism onstage, is a manifestation of exactly this strategy of reassurance for anxiety through artifactual overcompensation.”20 Emily Apter puts it differently, remarking that male transvestitism “implicitly reinforc[es] the security of being male.” 21 Precisely because the sartorial subject is dressed in woman’s clothes, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the fact that he is male, has the penis, and could “have” the phallus. The strategy of male masquerade, then, serves two purposes. In its performance of phallic disavowal, it (1) protects the male subject from the threat of castration (because he “seems to” already have been castrated), all the while (2) underscoring that he is in possession of the penis and could possibly wield phallic power. Male masquerade, then, is literally a strategy that enables the subject to have it both ways. As I argue elsewhere, the United States was confident that it possessed the phallus in U.S.-Caribbean relations until its encounter with the Castro administration.22 Since that time, U.S.-Caribbean policy has consisted of a series of displacements of castration or castration anxiety, often through a strategy of simulating phallic power (as the United States did in the Grenada invasion and attempted but failed to do in the Panama invasion). In a post–cold war era, one would expect that the U.S. castration complex would have been overcome, especially with respect to the Caribbean. The United States emerged from the cold war as the sole superpower in international affairs. Its position as leader of the New World Order, although challenged, was undeniable. U.S. principles became even more internationalized as the United States, for example, now garnered the forces of the United Nations without Soviet opposition to lead a victorious multi-

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national force during the Gulf War. Surely, the United States possessed undisputed powers to make international meaning from that point on. Yet U.S. foreign policy toward the Caribbean did not exhibit these same characteristics. Although the Gulf War may have been the medicine to cure a nation ailing from the legacy of Vietnam, this victory did not have the same effect for the United States in the Caribbean. The Bush administration’s invasion of Panama that preceded the Gulf War attempted to conceal a U.S. lack of phallic power in the Caribbean (and internationally); however, this failed simulation of U.S. phallic power only drew greater attention to U.S. lack. And although the Gulf War redressed/reveiled this lack internationally, it may have been too successful regionally. Restored with a sense of virility internationally, how could the United States act in its “own backyard” without both seeming to be a bully and risking future castration of the working phallus it had just symbolically regained? It was precisely the unconscious desire to escape from castration anxiety that led the Clinton administration to disavow “its” phallus and become reluctant to undertake meaningful actions in its foreign policy. As President Clinton said in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly just after the Haiti intervention, “The problem is deciding when we must respond [to crises], and how we shall overcome our reluctance.”23 How the U.S. overcame its reluctance in the U.S.-led intervention into Haiti was to appropriate drag as a foreign policy strategy. WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?

Our allies feel that we’ve neglected them. . . . Under this administration we’ve also had an inclination to . . . keep separate the European countries, thinking that if they are separate, then we can dominate them and proceed with our secret, Lone Ranger–type diplomatic efforts. —Governor Jimmy Carter, criticizing the foreign policy of the Ford administration in the Carter-Ford presidential debates24 I have also not had the United States be the Lone Ranger. We had the U.N. come in here. —President Bill Clinton, speaking of the Haiti intervention25

The U.S. foreign policy strategy toward Haiti called upon a masked man. Just who this masked man was—Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, or some composite of presidents and unofficial diplomats—was presented less clearly in U.S. foreign policy discourse than who he was not and what he appeared not to have.26 He was no “Lone Ranger.” And whoever he was, he appeared not to “have” the phallus. The insistence of President Clinton that the United States was no Lone Ranger in the Haiti intervention is important, not just because it introduces

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the notion of masquerade into U.S. foreign policy but also because it points to how the mask was worn to create lack. As Clinton himself suggests, the construction of lack involves the U.S. relationship to the United Nations. The intervention into Haiti was not a U.S. mission. It was a United Nations mission led by the United States. This situation in and of itself is not unique. Under the Bush administration, for example, the United States led UN coalition forces during the Gulf War. But how the United States positioned itself in relation to the United Nations was different in the Gulf War than it was in the Haiti intervention. During the Gulf War, President Bush asked for and received U.S. congressional support for the pending U.S. role in the Gulf War. Although the United States pushed its “line in the sand” political deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait through the UN Security Council, the United States did not rely upon UN authorization for its activities in the Gulf. Its authorization came from the U.S. Congress, which could trace its authorization back to an enthusiastic U.S. public. The UN was but an international organization through which U.S. domestic authorization was channeled. The U.S.-UN relationship during the Haiti affair was altogether different. Repeatedly, the Clinton administration pointed out that it was Resolution 940 of the UN Security Council that provided the Clinton administration with authorization to invade Haiti, not the U.S. Congress. In his September 15, 1994, speech explaining the necessity of the Haiti invasion, the president told the American people that “the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution that authorizes the use of all necessary means, including force, to remove the Haitian dictators from power and restore democratic government.”27 The president made it clear in a press conference that although he would welcome congressional support for the Haiti invasion, “the action of the United Nations should not be interpreted as an approval by Congress.”28 The administration also noted in comments to the media that it was aware of how unpopular the Haiti invasion was with the American people and made no claim that a groundswell of public support authorized the administration’s plans.29 UN authorization of the U.S.-led invasion was instrumental in both accentuating U.S. lack and creating additional U.S. lack. The need for UN authorization itself stemmed from a U.S. lack—of public and congressional support for the invasion as well as an assumed “lack of will” on the part of the United States to undertake meaningful foreign policy action on its own. This is suggested by President Clinton in his September 15 address: “The United States has agreed to lead a multinational force to carry out the will of the United Nations.”30 The United States sought to “accessorize” its internal lack (of domestic support and will to invade) by wearing the emblem of international lack itself—the UN. The UN is emblematic of lack in this situation because it

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lacks the ability to make war—declared or undeclared. This is a right reserved for individual, sovereign nation-states. And although the UN has supported its member states’ war-making activities (as it did in the Gulf) and “humanitarian interventions” (such as Somalia), the UN itself has no authority to make war or to provide one of its member states with such authority. Furthermore, UN support traditionally has been given to such activities in the name of peace—to oppose Iraqi aggression in Kuwait, to assist the civilian victims of Somalia’s civil war, and to broker a peace in the former Yugoslavia, for example. It would be difficult to argue that UN Resolution 940, which “authorized” all necessary means to remove the Cedras de facto government from power was anything but a veil for U.S. regional interests, interests the United States refused to pursue except while shrouded by the United Nations. Indeed, UN authorization of U.S. actions in Haiti allowed the U.S. to decorate its regional effort with flags of many nations. The multinational intervention force that the United States led in the Haiti intervention included such unlikely participants as Poland, Israel, Jordan, and Bangladesh.31 As the list of member states in this force grew to more than thirty, it appeared less and less like a “genuine” response by the international community to the Haiti situation and more and more like the artificial cover for U.S. regional activity that it was. As William Safire commented in a New York Times essay, “With his ludicrous enlistment of cooks and bottle washers from every country on our foreign-aid list, Mr. Clinton fooled nobody but himself about this being an international operation. To pretend it is not our show to solve our refugee problem invites smirks around the world.”32 What drew the most attention to the false appearance of the multinational force was that it was unprecedented for the United States to get extraregional support to carry out foreign policy activities in its own “backyard” that it deemed to be in its national interest. Certainly, the United States had had regional participation in its Caribbean invasions in the past.33 And it has been customary for the United States to request approval for its regional activities from both the Organization of American States and the UN (approval that more often than not has been withheld). But never before had there been extraregional military participation in a U.S.led regional intervention, nor had UN approval of a U.S. mission been required. This seemed to change with the Haiti invasion. President Clinton remarked, “The United States must not be in a position to walk away from a situation like this in our backyard, while we expect others to lead the way in their backyard as long as the United Nations has approved of an operation.”34 If all of this amounts to a lack of desire on the part of the United States to invade Haiti, why did an intervention occur at all? Was it, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff joked in reference to “Operation Just Cause” in Panama,

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“Operation Just Because?”35 Or was it, as the Clinton administration admitted, ultimately an issue of regional and international credibility?36 And if so, how could a strategy of constructing a lack on the part of the United States possibly restore U.S. credibility? As mentioned earlier, there are a number of ways in which lack can be constructed in an intervention scenario. What the Clinton administration did was create a specific type of lack. Its apparent unwillingness (or at least reluctance) to make meaning in foreign policy was a strategy that protected the U.S. both from the charge of being a regional bully and from the threat of future castration. Should the United States have refused to become involved in the Haitian intervention, it would have left unredressed a lack of phallic power that was its regional legacy from the Panama invasion. Masquerade, then, was an empowering strategy for the United States, a strategy that enabled the United States to escape the charge of regional impotence. Although the United States appeared not to “have” the phallus in its foreign policy toward Haiti, it was also careful not to appear to “be” the phallus for Haiti. Clinton’s declaration that the United States was no Lone Ranger in the Haiti intervention can be read as both a construction of a particular type of lack (appearing not to “have” the phallus) and an avoidance of any homoerotic subtext (“being” the phallus for another subject, maybe Tonto?). Indeed, the Haiti intervention marks a move beyond rape, beyond sex, and beyond desire in U.S. foreign policy discourse. This move can be illustrated by contrasting the Haiti intervention with the Panama invasion. Unlike the U.S. invasion of Panama (in which the United States “raped” Panama as a woman would rape a man),37 the U.S. intervention into Haiti disavowed “forced entry” altogether. It took place in a “permissive environment” in which violence and sex were exchanged for “a soft landing” and a disavowal of desire. 38 No cast of diplomatic characters could have been better suited to negotiate this unforced entry than former president Jimmy Carter; the former chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell; and the chairperson of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Sam Nunn. A DIPLOMATIC PARADE OF UNMARKED TRANSVESTITES

The quality of crossing—which is fundamentally related to other kinds of boundary-crossing in their performances—can be more powerful and seductive than explicit “female impersonation,” which is often designed to confront, scandalize, titillate, or shock. —Marjorie Garber39

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In her book Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie Garber introduces the figure of the “unmarked transvestite,” a figure who both challenges the possibility of representation and draws attention to “an unconscious of transvestism, for transvestism as a language that can be read, and double-read, like a dream, a fantasy, or a slip of the tongue.”40 She continues, “For while it is easy to speak of the power of transvestite display in figures like David Bowie, Boy George, and Annie Lennox, these overt cross-dressers, ‘marked transvestites,’ may in fact merely literalize something that is more powerful when masked or veiled— that is, when it remains unconscious.”41 Garber confines her analysis to the domain of theater “to explore the possibility that some entertainers who do not overtly claim to be ‘female impersonators,’ for example, may in fact signal their cross-gender identities onstage.”42 I transfer Garber’s analysis of the theatrical stage to the diplomatic stage, where Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, and Sam Nunn as the diplomatic team representing U.S. foreign policy interests in Haiti did so as unmarked transvestites. My claim is not that Carter, Powell, and Nunn literally dressed as women; my claim is that each of these individuals embodies the quality of crossing. Like transvestites, each in some way signifies both more and less than meets the eye. In this respect, each is beyond representation. In combination, this diplomatic team effected a U.S. foreign policy strategy of masquerade toward Haiti. Jimmy Carter—Beyond Desire and Politics

Staying within your brief is an antithetical to Jimmy Carter. —Comment on Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy style by an anonymous former Carter official43

When thinking about former president Jimmy Carter, a disavowal of desire is one of the first things many people recall. As a male in masquerade, Carter “works to effect a separation between the cause of desire and [himself].”44 This is illustrated by the statement Carter made to an interviewer at Playboy magazine, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.”45 But that is all behind him. That was “when I was young enough to lust.”46 Whether because of age, self-control, or religious conviction, Jimmy Carter appears in the American imaginary not as incapable of lust but as beyond lust, as beyond desire. Carter occupies an “outside sex position.”47 In this regard, he is positioned not just in the location of an unmarked transvestite—one who serves as an unconscious sign of gender crossing. Carter occupies the position of an “unmarked” transsexual—one who “is” the other sex in a presurgical sense and is therefore beyond sex because one

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is neither sex.48 As Dean explains, “The example of transsexual identification . . . suggests that male-to-female transvestism or transsexualism represents an identification not with the other sex but with what is beyond gender, horsexe.”49 Carter, therefore, cannot “stay in his brief” not because of his abundant lust but because briefs don’t fit his (non)sex. Carter has symbolically crossed the sex line, so much so that he not only appears not to “have” the phallus but occasionally appears to “be” the phallus. Symbolically, he is neither male nor female, neither masculine nor feminine, and thus occasionally is mistaken for either sex or gender. He is mistaken for masculine because he was born a man. He is mistaken for feminine because “femininity is fundamentally . . . the play of masks. . . . It conceals only an absence of ‘pure’ or ‘real’ femininity.”50 Jimmy Carter finds himself in the outsider position regarding politics as well. His unofficial power comes from “the veneer of an office he no longer holds.”51 With the Carter Center at Emery University functioning as an alternative Department of State, Carter as elder statesperson has crossed over to free-lance diplomat. One political commentator writes, “Carter sees himself as exploiting a special niche, as one who can bring to any situation the authority of his former office and the credibility gained by years of global good works outside official channels, in exile from American politics.” Because of Carter’s outsider status, he is in a position to be all things to all people. Wrapped up in his moral causes, Carter has intervened in crisis situations such as the Bosnian conflict and the North Korean nuclear crisis as well as the Haitian elections and eleventh-hour negotiations to avert a U.S. invasion of Haiti. Again like an unmarked transvestite/transsexual, Carter is something of a superstar. His position consists of wanting to be All. Whereas the transsexual wants to be “all women, more woman than all women,” Carter wants to be all diplomats, more diplomat than all diplomats.52 Transcending politics, Carter aspires to be a universal peacemaker. Carter made the most of his position outside desire and politics during the U.S. diplomatic mission to Haiti. As “a detached observer, outsider, in the place of the Other,” Carter identified with both the Clinton administration and the Cedras administration positions.53 He could “feel himself to be both the one and the other, and even neither.”54 So positioned, Carter used his shame about desire (forceful entry) for U.S. political advantage. Carter is reported to have told Raoul Cedras that he was “ashamed of the United States policy” toward Haiti at the moment that he learned that President Clinton had dispatched the invasion force. 55 Although Carter later told reporters he was only speaking to Cedras about U.S. economic policy, the effect of his well-timed declaration of shame was to persuade de facto Haitian leaders to sign the agreement that averted the invasion.56

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General Colin Powell—Beyond Identification

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As for his political views, he remains what a New York media consultant, Deroy Murdock, termed “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a uniform.57 —New York Times

General Colin Powell’s participation in the U.S. diplomatic mission to Haiti was vital to the U.S. self-declared strategy of brinkmanship. As a former chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the U.S. architect of the Gulf War, he stood for military preparedness and honor. Although he preferred to save Haitian and American lives, he was man enough to use force when necessary. Giving U.S. foreign policy a masculine face, Powell suggested to the Haitians that the United States “has” the phallus. In this sense, Powell was the perfect choice to balance Jimmy Carter, a figure who (because he lacks the phallus) often appears to be feminine to his very core. This coupling of Powell and Carter on a diplomatic mission was, as Secretary of State Warren Christopher suggested, “one instance where power has served diplomacy in an absolutely classic way.”58 However, Powell’s symbolic function as masculine, although asserted, could not be proved. One could never be sure just what mystery Powell’s uniform veils because just who Powell was could not be represented.59 He was, like Carter, another case of a neither/nor. Powell’s axis of undecidability at the time of the intervasion concerned political affiliation. When asked “the question” of if he is a Democrat or a Republican, Powell replied, “I will not dodge this question. I will answer it right back, straight-forwardly: I am neither.”60 He elaborated that during his military career “my entire code of honor said, don’t be political, never show any partisanship, either Democratic or Republican or anything that would suggest politics.”61 Although some may suggest that Powell is simply concealing his partisanship, the general insists that his political philosophy is evolving.62 The “fact” about Powell’s political identification is that there is nothing to conceal. Like Jimmy Carter, then, the figure of Colin Powell functions in the Haiti mission as a figure beyond representation and, in this case, beyond identification. Senator Sam Nunn—A Sacred Marker

As the French say, there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen. —Sydney Smith63 The sacred thus finds its place at the heart of the transsexual enigma. —Catherine Millot64

If Jimmy Carter (an unofficial diplomat who at times appears to “be” the phallus) and Colin Powell (an unofficial military man who appears to “have” the phallus) combined to ensure a U.S. policy of brinkmanship

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toward Haiti, why was it necessary to include Senator Sam Nunn on this mission as well? The New York Times reported that President Clinton “saw Senator Nunn, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as someone who could tell Haiti’s leaders that strong opposition in Congress [to a U.S.-led invasion] would not necessarily be an obstacle to Mr. Clinton’s action.”65 In addition to this role, Nunn espoused the virtues of parliamentary government. As the only member of the diplomatic team then holding elected office, Nunn routinely confessed his steadfast faith in democracy to the Haitians and to the press. The day after the agreement was reached between the Haitians and the Carter-led diplomatic team, Senator Nunn told reporters: I will repeat the point that I made over and over again to the Haitian leadership, and that is that returning one man, even though elected and even though he certainly should and will be returned, is not democracy. Democracy involves institutions. Democracy involves an elected parliament. I hope that the focal point of our foreign policy can be, in addition to returning President Aristide, free and fair elections of a parliament.66

Nunn’s words to the Haitian leaders were not hollow. As Jimmy Carter noted, “Senator Sam Nunn brought the parliamentary approach to the discussions in their crucial stages.”67 Nunn played the role of the intermediary. To do this, he had to be positioned beyond the negotiations themselves. With his faith in democracy as his guide, Nunn’s role was to refuse to take sides. Positioned as a middleman (or as his name suggests, maybe a middle woman), Nunn functioned as a sacred marker that both distinguished between Carter and Powell as two sides of U.S. foreign policy (diplomacy and power) as well as joined them into one indistinguishable body (a male body in female dress). THE SPACE OF PRESIDENTIAL MASQUERADE

The transvestite does represent a third space, a space of representation, even within a psychic economy in which all positions are fantasies.68 —Marjorie Garber

The space of presidential masquerade is this third space of the transvestite. In this space, no one can “be” or “have” the phallus; one can only appear (not) to “be” or “have” it. The space of presidential masquerade, then, is not a space in which meanings can be guaranteed as they are in a logic of representation (where signifiers refer back to signifieds). Nor is it a space of simulation (where there is a chain of signifiers). Rather, in this space of masquerade signifiers and signifieds appear to match up in boundary-crossing ways. Mixed figures (a diplomatic parade of unmarked transvestites) affect mixed events (the U.S.-led “intervasion” of Haiti).

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We are left with a mixed presidential figure, one whom the press referred to after the Haiti intervasion as “Jimmy Clinton II”—a figure who appeared in foreign policy as a woman so that “his” phallic authority in the Caribbean would be underscored.69 This paradoxical result could not be accomplished outside the space of masquerade, for this is the space in which castration is embraced as a way to escape “the anxiety of phallic loss. The overdetermination of phallic jokes, verbal and visual . . . is a manifestation of exactly this strategy of reassurance for anxiety through artifactual overcompensation.”70 There are few better ways to describe the U.S.led intervasion of Haiti and the combination of diplomatic and military efforts that created it. The United States emerged from the intervasion of Haiti as a mixed foreign policy figure because it overcame its castration anxiety in the Caribbean by embracing castration. Now positioned beyond castration anxiety, the United States in male masquerade appears to be a more sovereign state than all sovereign states. This is the position George Bush claimed for it in the New World Order, but one he failed to achieve for the United States with respect to the Caribbean because he inscribed U.S. sovereign subjectivity in hypermasculine terms, when in fact it could have more effectively been inscribed in the “kinder, gentler” ways of which Bush spoke but which he was not “man” enough to carry out. Bill (Jimmy) Clinton, in contrast, through his mixed policy toward Haiti, has managed to lay a different kind of claim to U.S. sovereign subjectivity by subtly rewriting U.S. foreign policy toward the Caribbean as a male transvestite. No longer does the United States announce its motto as “speak softly and carry a big stick”; rather, the U.S. slogan for its Caribbean policy after the cold war is: “You can’t assume that just because I’m in a dress I left my dick at home.”71 All of this leaves us with an argument for viewing both sovereignty and subjectivity performatively. In contrast to some traditional international relations arguments that position sovereignty or the state as given prior to practice, in this chapter I suggest that sovereign subjectivity is an affect of practice and not a stable ontological category in itself. Ontology only appears to “be” because of the deeds that seemingly give it substance. And, as I have argued in this chapter, these deeds may very well be foreign policy pronouncements that are infused with crossed configurations of sex, sexuality, and gender.72 NOTES

An earlier version of this chapter was delivered at the International Studies Association Meeting in Chicago in February 1995. Special thanks to Diane Rubenstein; thanks also to François Debrix, Michael Weinstein, the editors of this

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volume, and the participants in the Sovereignty and Subjectivity Conference for their helpful comments on this chapter. 1. Jon Erickson’s article, “The Spectacle of the Anti-Spectacle: Happenings and the Situationist International,” makes the link between the antispectacle and the Supremes’ lyrics from “The Happening.” See Discourses (spring 1992): 32. 2. As one U.S. official noted, “We avoided an invasion. But we got an American occupation” (U.S. News and World Report, October 3, 1994, 26). Also see comments by Department of State spokesperson Michael McCurry, who in response to the question, “Are you drawing a distinction between invasion and intervention?” responded, “I think it’s important to distinguish between an intervention that would go into a hostile environment to effect a departure of the de facto regime, and the deployment of a multinational force and then eventually a U.N. mission in a different context, one in which the de facto regime has voluntarily stepped aside” (State Department regular briefing, September 14, 1994; Federal News Service, 11). 3. This, apparently, was the U.S. military’s term for the Haiti mission. See Newsweek, October 3, 1994, 32. 4. Defense Department regular briefing, October 20, 1994; Federal News Service, 3. 5. Cynthia Weber, “Dissimulating Intervention: A Reading of the U.S.-led Intervention of Haiti,” Alternatives 20, no. 3 (1995): 265–277; Diane Rubenstein, “The Is Not a President: Baudrillard, Bush, and Enchanted Simulation,” in The Hysterical Male: New Feminist Theory, ed. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 253–265. 6. Tim Dean, “Transsexual Identification, Gender Performance Theory, and the Politics of the Real,” Literature and Psychology 39, no. 4 (1993): 1–27. Dean’s quote within my quote comes from Esther Newton’s Mother’s Camp: Female Impersonators in America, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 103. 7. Michael Bérubé and Gerald Graff, “Regulations for Literary Criticism in the 1990s,” Teachers for a Democratic Culture, 1994. The quotations are examples of titles that are forbidden under Regulation VI, which stipulates: “No funny or ‘provocative’ titles for papers.” 8. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 26. 9. Cynthia Weber, “Something’s Missing: Male Hysteria and the U.S. Invasion of Panama,” Genders no. 19 (1994): 171–197. 10. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales, 26. 11. Jacques Lacan, “The Meaning of the Phallus,” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985). 12. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 44. 13. Ibid., 45. 14. Ibid., 46. 15. Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1989): 306. On female masquerade, also see Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Stephen Heath, “Joan Riviere and the Masquerade,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen, 1986); John Fletcher, “Versions of Masquerade,” Screen 29, no. 3

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(1988): 43–69; Claire Johnston, “Femininity and the Masquerade: Anne of the Indies,” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Routledge, 1990); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble; Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales; and Jann Matlock, “Masquerading Women, Pathologized Men: Cross-Dressing, Fetishism, and the Theory of Perversion, 1882–1935,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). 16. Riviere, “Womanliness,” 306, my addition. 17. See Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 356. Mary Ann Doane disagrees that male transvestism is of the same quality and function as masquerade. She suggests, “Male transvestism is an occasion for laughter; female transvestism [masquerade] only another occasion for desire” (Femmes Fatales, 25, my addition). For Doane, desire on the side of the male transvestite only enters into the picture in the form of male fetishism (39). My use of Doane’s definition of masquerade to frame my discussion of male masquerade clearly demonstrates that I disagree with Doane on this point. Where Doane sees fetishism, I see phallic disavowal. Although Doane notes that female masquerade “makes femininity dependent upon masculinity for its very definition” (38), she fails to see that male masquerade reverses this, making masculinity dependent upon femininity. 18. Catherine Millot, Horsexe: Essay on Transsexuality, trans. Kenneth Hylton (New York: Autonomedia, 1990), 12. 19. Garber, Vested Interests, 356. Catherine Millot makes a similar argument regarding transsexuals. The transvestite differs from the transsexual, according to Millot, in that “transsexuals may be defined as those who demand the modification of their bodies such that they conform to the appearance of the opposite sex, the underlying conviction being that their true identity is at odds with their biological sex” (Horsexe, 17). Transsexuals and transvestites differ in that transsexuals “must be the phallus” (italics in original; 57), whereas transvestites must only conceal their possession of the phallus; they are similar in that they both seek to disavow the penis, either to mask the body they were born with (transvestites) or to correct it (transsexuals). In both cases, “it is one’s position relative to the phallus that determines whether one is a man or a woman” (38), not one’s biology. 20. Garber, Vested Interests, 256. 21. Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 93. 22. Cynthia Weber, Faking It: U.S. Hegemony in a ‘Post-Phallic’ Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming). 23. Federal News Service, September 26, 1994, 5, my brackets. 24. Carter’s statement was made during the second debate, October 6, 1976. For the transcript, see Sidney Kraus, ed. The Great Debates: Carter vs. Ford, 1976 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 486. 25. Wire service interview, September 14, 1994; Federal News Service, 11. 26. Although the identity of any masked man is ultimately undecidable, I take up the issue of the masked man’s possible identities in the next section. 27. Federal News Service, September 14, 1994, 4. 28. White House news conference, August 3, 1994; Federal News Service, 7. 29. Commenting on the pending intervention, President Clinton said in an interview with wire reporters, “I realize it is unpopular; I know it is unpopular. I know the timing is unpopular; I know the whole thing is unpopular. But I believe it is the right thing” (September 14, 1994; Federal News Service, 6).

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30. Federal News Service, September 19, 1994, 4, my italics. 31. “President Clinton Delivers Televised Address to the Nation on the Situation in Haiti,” September 15, 1994; Federal News Service, 4. 32. William Safire, New York Times, September 19, 1994. 33. Recall how the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States “requested” a U.S. invasion into Grenada and joined forces with the United States during this invasion. 34. Wire service interview, September 14, 1994; Federal News Service, 4. 35. Newsweek, October 3, 1994, 32. 36. “President Clinton Delivers Televised Address to the Nation on the Situation in Haiti,” September 15, 1994; Federal News Service, 1. 37. For this reading of the invasion of Panama see Cynthia Weber, “Something’s Missing,” 171–197. 38. On the desire for the United States to create a “permissive environment” in Haiti, see White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers’s comments to the press (White House regular briefing, September 8, 1994; Federal News Service, 6, and White House regular briefing, September 13, 1994; Federal News Service, 11). Also see comments by Secretary of State Warren Christopher (White House briefing, September 18, 1994; Federal News Service, 3). 39. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests, 354. 40. Ibid., 354. 41. Ibid., 356. 42. Ibid., 354. 43. New York Times, September 21, 1994, A9. 44. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales, 29. 45. Quote reprinted in “Jimmy Carter, It Turns Out, Is a Poet, Too,” New York Times, January 18, 1995, B4. 46. “Tonight Show,” February 8, 1995. 47. Millot, Horsexe, 65. 48. Millot makes no mention of “unmarked transsexuals.” The term is my own invention, intended to accentuate what I regard as the parallel between Garber’s and Millot’s argument. 49. Tim Dean, “Transsexual Identification,” 17. 50. Here Mary Ann Doane comments on how femininity is characterized in the writings of Joan Riviere. See Doane, Femmes Fatales, 37. 51. Jim Wooten, “The Conciliator,” New York Times Magazine, January 29, 1995. 52. Millot, Horsexe, 42. 53. Millot, Horsexe, 66; commenting on the transsexual. 54. Ibid., commenting on the transsexual. 55. William Safire, “Jimmy Clinton, II,” New York Times, September 22, 1994, A19. 56. Carter is quoted in Newsweek as saying, “I’d never say that in my life, to Cedras or any other Haitian.” He goes on to say that he told the Haitians he had been “disturbed at my own nation’s policy, because the economic boycott . . . has cost your children their own well-being.” See Newsweek, October 3, 1994, 38. 57. New York Times, February 1, 1995, A8. 58. White House briefing regarding the agreement reached in Haiti, September 18, 1994; Federal News Service, 4. 59. As an American of African descent, Powell also symbolically deflected criticism away from the overtly racist implications of U.S. immigration policy toward Haiti.

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60. New York Times, February 1, 1995, A8. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Sydney Smith, Lady Holland’s Memoir (1855), quoted in Garber, Vested Interests, 210. 64. Millot, Horsexe, 70. 65. September 19, 1994, A4, my addition. 66. News conference concerning Haiti, September 19, 1994; Federal News Service, 7. 67. Jimmy Carter, “News Conference on Haiti,” September 19, 1994; Federal News Service, 4. 68. Garber, Vested Interests, 356. 69. This is the title of a New York Times essay by William Safire, September 22, 1994, A19. 70. Garber, Vested Interests, 356. 71. Anonymous (a lesbian), S/M Aesthetic, quoted in Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests, 147. 72. Cynthia Weber, “Performative States,” Millennium: Journal of International Relations 27, no. 1 (spring 1998); and Butler, Gender Trouble.

4 Fear and Desire in Anglo-American Fantasies of Asian Sexuality James Moy The Spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact is already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance. —Guy Debord

In a nineteenth-century United States struggling for sovereignty and a sense of national identity, racial containment and control became a fetishistic pursuit. Threats to the Anglo narrative of dominance received vigorous and particularized treatment. Deeply felt guilt over the ongoing American Indian holocaust informed the construction of the native peoples as tragic figures whose inability to adopt sophisticated western ways necessitated their removal. Blacks, although initially constituted as beasts of the Aristotelian-Christian other, emerged as happy, dancing, watermelon-eating workers under the benevolent protection of generous slaveowners. Because the Chinese and Asians in general proved to be highly competitive in the labor force, their representations required particularly strenuous containment and control efforts. On August 13, 1877, the Senate of the State of California formally submitted An Address to the People of the United States upon the Evils of Chinese Immigration. In this document the Chinese were declared to be, morally, the most debased people on the face of the earth. Forms of vice, which in other countries are barely named, are in China so common that they excite no comment among the natives. They constitute the surface level, and below them are deeps and deeps of depravity so shocking and horrible that their character cannot even be hinted. . . . Their touch is

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pollution, and harsh as this opinion may seem, justice to our own race demands that they should not be allowed to settle on our soil.1

This remarkable document articulates a state/national desire to constitute the Chinese as absolutely depraved and therefore a threat to U.S. sovereignty and the Anglo narrative of progress. Indeed, it was commonly held that “from seven-tenths to eight-tenths of the Chinese population of San Francisco belong to the criminal classes.” 2 One must wonder how the Chinese could possibly pose a threat to the white labor market if 70 percent of the population were involved in criminal activity. Still, Chinese labor was blamed for every white social problem from hooliganism to venereal disease. Young white men who could not find work because of the Chinese naturally became hoodlums for lack of gainful employment.3 The hysterical fear that the Chinese worker might eventually overwhelm the white labor force had a very real impact on the social text. The Chinese had to be constructed as sojourners whose temporary presence could be tolerated but whose only desire was repatriation to mother China. Chinese populations in the United States evolved into bachelor societies because Asian families were not allowed on U.S. soil. Asian families carried the threat of offspring who might by birthright qualify for U.S. citizenship. Accordingly, the immigration of any Chinese women into the United States became synonymous with the importation of Asian slaves for prostitution, to service the inordinately high percentage of men living alone in these Asian bachelor societies. And the white imaginary refigured this construction into a threat: Their lewd women induce, by the cheapness of their offers, thousands of [white] boys and young men to enter their dens, very many of whom are inoculated with venereal diseases of the worst type. . . . The fact that these diseases have their origins chiefly among the Chinese is well established.4

Accused of slave-trading women into prostitution rings, the Chinese were thus reconstituted into a threat to the physical well-being of the United States. Indeed, not only were these women “designed for prostitutes” and “deprived of their womanly qualities,” but the Chinamen themselves were “a nation of Sodomites, and that great numbers of boys and men like those shipped to this country were eunuchated when young.” 5 Clearly, what emerges here is at once the socially constructed rationale for the exclusion of the Chinese from the nineteenth-century U.S. landscape of progress and the early deployment of both the constructed sexually consumable Asian woman and the sexually neutralized Asian male. These figurations of Chineseness have stood in as well for Asians in general at the site of representation until the present. The persistent twentieth-century reinscriptions of the Madame Butterfly myth at once both rehearse and demonstrate the endurance of the constructed Asian feminine as consumable.

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For the sophisticated late-twentieth-century avant-garde spectator, performance artist Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia (1985) offers a bizarre rendering of this constructed Oriental sexuality: After you’ve been fucked, sucked, had your tubes cleaned, toes cleaned and nose cleaned and you’re ready for more, you can go rest and relax at a live show. At a live show the women do everything with their vaginas except have babies. One starts with ping-pong balls and a soda fountain glass: Chung, chung, chung, she catches the ball in the glass. . . . Then comes the banana. First she shoots a few lame shots, just boring shots like those Russian rockets that are going to sputter and pop and land on our cornfields. One, two, three. Then, for the finale, she aims her vagina down the center aisle like a cannon, loads it with a very ripe banana and— FOOP!—fires it. She almost hit me in the eye, almost hit an Australian housewife in the head. The banana hits the back wall and sticks, then slowly slides down to the floor.6

Set in Bangkok, this brief section of his monologue purports to describe an activity observed during his involvement with the filming of The Killing Fields (1984), a refiguration of the noble savage motif featuring Southeast Asians. Gray later describes a live sex show in which the Asian performers demonstrate “all the Kama sutra poses.” And he declares the Thais the “most beautiful race I’ve ever seen” while labeling them androgynous. Gray’s construction of Thai women, while demonstrating their supposed sexual virtuosity, should not be viewed as a sexual threat to the United States. This Asian woman reduced to banana-firing cannon displays a virtuosity beyond reason, a virtuosity displaced into aporia. Here, as body parts transcend “normal” use, amusing but ultimately empty simulations emerge with arbitrarily achieved fetish value. Gray’s subjugation of the Asian woman at once places her in a manageable position while neutralizing her as a sexual threat to Anglo womanhood, this despite the fact that she narrowly misses hitting an Australian housewife with one of her bananas. Gray’s claim of mere description, despite the material circumstances that might make its articulation marketable, serves to reinscribe for yet another range of spectatorship a stereotype of constructed Asian virtuosity disfigured. This ploy of “subtle” description with its claim to authenticity, although theatrically marketable, eventually must prove a lie. A deeper understanding of the social text reveals that it was the earlier constructed Anglo touristic expectation of the sexual availability of Asian women that contributed to the creation of the sex tourism industry of which the performance described is a part. Gray, then, merely etches the stereotype more deeply into the American consciousness, even as he offers refigured titillation to his white liberal avant-garde spectatorship. Clearly, these U.S. constructions of Asian sexuality originated out of a nineteenth-century dominant culture’s need to preserve a sense of white

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nationhood. Although few of the conditions that gave rise to these constructions during the nineteenth century persist to this day, Spalding Gray’s latetwentieth-century reinscription and commodification of the stereotype for avant-garde consumption suggests that these now fixed markers of the sexually available Asian woman and the neutralized Asian male continue to carry some currency. Of concern to me are both the persistence of this constructed Asian sexuality in the social text and how the late-twentieth-century United States deploys it within this space, where the dominant culture male makes explicit his desires to a submissive, racially othered female. For it is here that dominant culture desire becomes explicit in its sexuality, further implicating the yearnings of nationhood. Perhaps the most powerful site for this articulation of nationalism occurs within the moment when sexual discourse is complicated by overt racial confrontation. To interrogate this trajectory, I examine the case of B. Carnes (pseudonym), currently serving time in a California jail for mail fraud. In a recent treatment of the B. Carnes case, Soo-Young Chin called him a “dream weaver” who preyed on the “heart of darkness” that compelled the victims to pursue the exotic constructed “oriental” stereotype. What follows, then, is an attempt to measure some of the overt desires articulated within that Anglo-American “heart of darkness.”7 SEXUAL/RACIAL IMPERSONATION

Carnes’s criminal enterprise involved the impersonation of “oriental” women in the personal ad sections of hundreds of newspapers across the United States. After establishing a continuing correspondence link with his intended victims, B. Carnes would ask his respondents to help save a failing business by sending him (her) cash. The six complainants in his case maintained that collectively they lost over U.S.$200,000 to these schemes. Beyond this, postal authorities suggest that B. Carnes likely walked away with at least $1 million because the vast majority of correspondents were simply too embarrassed to face the publicity of a public trial. Postal authorities note that Carnes’s confiscated computer contained a directory of some 9,500 correspondent addresses and that the actual letters taken filled over twenty boxes. Indeed, it was noted by postal authorities that his rented mailbox would overflow daily with packages, letters, and flowers sent by adoring, lovesick correspondents. The crucial step in B. Carnes’s acquisition of potential victims came when s/he asked the correspondent to include details of his most exciting sexual fantasies, along with a request for “sexy” photographs. Once a correspondent proved willing to submit such intimate fantasies (either textual-

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ly or photographically), Carnes knew he had secured a new victim. Future exchanges of letters would take on a decidedly sexual and later monetary tone. Always identifying himself as an attractive “oriental” or “Asian” woman, Carnes’s schemes began with seemingly nondescript personal ads published in carefully targeted newspapers and magazines across the United States. One ad in the Los Angeles Times Mirror “Common Interests” personal section listed “dining” as the common interest while advertising the following: “Attractive, shapely Asian lady desires friendship & romantic adventures with sincere gentleman. Race, financial status unimportant.”8 Similarly, for NSR, a national singles magazine, Carnes placed the following ad using the Chinese-sounding name Sara Wong: “Attractive Asian, 26, desires friendship leading to long term relationship. Prefer someone mature and sensitive. Age, financial status, attraction, unimportant.” For Biker magazine, this aptly worded personal ad was published: “Beautiful Asian Lady, 24, desires to meet someone special. I enjoy weekend get-a-ways, fast bikes and romantic adventures. I’m willing to travel/relocate.” In Update, he ran the following: “Oriental Bi Lady desires discreet fun with open minded guys into safe, casual sex. I’m into all forms of erotic pleasure. No strings, no money for sex either way. Sincere replies only. Possible relationship with Mr. Right.” Clearly, Carnes constructed his imaginary Asian woman to conform to the whorish stereotypes of the nineteenth-century United States. Accordingly, he had but to state that s/he was Asian and attractive with the knowledge that the reader would understand that the subject was also available for sexual consumption. The degree to which sexual content was made explicit depended upon the nature of the surrounding ad copy. This construction now commodified for exchange within the late-twentieth-century economy of desire featured an imaginary “beautiful” and “Oriental” creation. Although nonthreatening (“No strings, no money for sex either way”), she promised to submit sexually (“I’m into all forms of erotic pleasure”), but only to sincere “open minded guys into safe, casual sex.” Indeed, in an L.A. Star personal ad, Carnes’s constructed “Oriental lady” asked for select guys “to join me and my Bi girlfriend for 3-somes. No $ either way. Must be clean, discreet and sincere.” Here, again, the promise of threesomes and group sex without any hint of prostitution (“No $ either way”) offers a promise of hedonistic sexuality with neither boundaries nor cost. Even the threat of sexually transmitted disease (a stated concern of nineteenth-century politicians) is deflected by the requirement for “clean” and “safe, casual sex.” And, finally, in the harshly alienating world of the late-twentienth-century United States, this sexually available Asian woman’s plaintive plea for a “possible relationship” under such explicitly sexual circumstances approaches marketing genius.

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Within this economy of Anglo-American sexual desire, the position of the Asian male is expressly complicitous. Carnes’s Swinger’s Phone Book ad as a “Foxy Exhibitionist Oriental” reinscribes the state of California’s 1877 “eunuchated Chinaman.” Here, Carnes suggests that s/he advertises herself with her “husband’s encouragement” and notes that s/he can “entertain or travel. Love[s] garter belts, heels, and erotic dress. Might try gang bangs with select groups.” Here, then, the dominant culture male is invited to enjoy this “foxy oriental” without fear of any Asian husbandly complaint. Clearly, the Asian male is neutralized and indeed made complicit in this commodification of the female. The constructed Asian female appears to be given agency, but it is one that elects to accede to dominant culture Anglo sexual desire. THE CORRESPONDENTS

If Carnes’s advertisements and early letters served up the performance of Asian femininity as consumable, it should be noted that this was only one-half of the negotiation. Those who responded completed the construction of this imaginary female. The vast majority of the respondents to the published ads identified themselves as “Americans,” “white,” or “caucasian,” and their contribution to this constructed Asianness is central to this inquiry. The correspondents represent a cross section of Anglo-American society ranging from corporate executives with MBAs and contractors commanding six-figure salaries to carpet cleaners, military personnel, and retired men bringing in less than $10,000 per year. Despite the broad economic range of the respondents, the consistency of the perception of the Asian female as an expressly sexual subjectivity is amazing. Like Spalding Gray, most were “attracted by [the] beauty and mystique. . . . I wish to date Asian women” (GBM 94401).9 One said, “I love Asian Women!” (DMP 44875). Others commented: “I just love the look, the femininity, the sweetness” (JL 28123); “I find them Beautiful and Sexy” (GPT 92120); “I have fantasies about them” (RJC 02056). One writer, who identified himself as an officer of the law, declared Asian women “the most beautiful, loyal, loving women on the face of the Earth. My last three girlfriends were all Asian” (MJR 94112). Another man even went so far as to boast that “Beautiful Oriental Women” were his “hobby” (KT 48197). Clearly, these white male respondents viewed their imaginary Asian women as attractive objects for acquisition: “I find Asian women very attractive, and have had women of many different races. I like to think of myself as free from prejudices” (WLT93101). Despite his stated altruistic sensibilities, this same writer later makes clear an overtly sexual interest: “I

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am studying new techniques that I have read about from the Orient.” One wonders if these “Oriental” techniques comprise the type of disfiguring sexual virtuosity that Spalding Gray seemed so fond of describing. What constructs the Asian woman as attractive also provides the site for sexual subjugation. Within this framework, Asian women “are petite and patient usually sincere and honest” (JP 60148); “more sesual [sic]— devoted than others” (WJD 44622); “Clean, safe, no aids” (M92140); and “make better wives” (VG 48209). In addition to being “honest and trustworthy” (JS 60651), “Asian women are very friendly” (GPT 92120) and at once both “submissive and agressive [sic]” (DK 33871). Clearly, it is this conflation of submissiveness and aggression that provides the grounding for comments such as, “I love Asian women and desire a loving relationship in a 3-some” (MJR 94112), or the response from the man who preferred his Oriental to be a “slender built large busted female who is very submissive, caring, willing to pay her way, willing to teach me how to make love to her in the Greek culture” (DK 33871). Indeed, within this space of sexual construction, racial otherness often becomes confused, as one respondent, after declaring that “Oriental women are very beautiful,” confessed to fantasizing about having “sex with my Spanish sister-in-law Anita” (RGA 46615). Both the letters and many of the photographs submitted make clear the intentions of the correspondents: “I’m interested in Asian women, they’re pretty sexy” (VS 98312); “I like Oriental women very much. . . . They are great lovers” (NLY 92653); “I seek an erotic highly sexed Asian female who would share herself and me with another female friend” (GBM 94401). Other writers were more explicit about what they desired to do to their Asian women: “To have sex with 2 or more women at the same time and receive oral sex by two women front & rear” (RJH 19090). Yet another explains that he prefers Asian women because “they make better wives” and then proceeds to explain what he intends to do with a 20-inch dildo (VG 48209). Just as the 1877 language of the State of California maintained that Asians lived in the “deeps of depravity,” one hundred years later, appropriately aberrant behavior becomes the constructed expectation. In 1877 the state of California claimed that the practice of everyday Chinese life consisted of “depravity so shocking and horrible that their character cannot even be hinted.” By the 1990s, what began one hundred years earlier as a vaguely articulated political program to contain and control the Chinese had devolved into a commodified marker of Asian performance possessing graphic clarity. Here, then, constructed attributes and expectations stand in for Asian sexuality in the United States and, indeed, for Asianness in general. Most compelling is the correspondence between the three ranges of text: the 1877 construction of the Chinese as a sexually depraved race; Spalding Gray’s 1985 supposedly objective and positive

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description of the sexual displays he witnessed in Bangkok; and the explicitly articulated desires of literally thousands of dominant culture AngloAmerican males. Carnes understood that the mere mention of Asian availability would elicit the type of response that he received. That Carnes likely made millions of dollars by exploiting these markers speaks to the potency and broad circulation of this local construction of Asianness. This constructed sexual presence, which in the nineteenth century sought to exclude the Chinese from the mythology of the American dream, now stands as a commodified marker capable of displacing Asian American sexuality into invisibility. THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Certainly, the respondent letters reinscribe a construction of Asian sexuality with a history extending back over one hundred years. Although this imaginary textualization of Asianness suggests a great deal about how Anglo-American men perceive Asian sexuality today, the photographs submitted provide amusing insight into how dominant culture males construct their own sexuality and how they intend to relate to “their” Asian women. The preponderance of the materials sent in response to Carnes’s invitations for sexy photographs articulates a curiously warped American sense of national desire. A significant percentage of the men sent photographs of themselves wearing military uniforms while standing in front of U.S. flags. Others replaced the military uniform and U.S. flag with objects reflecting individual achievement within what might be called the pursuit of the American dream of success. These included images of men standing beside the markers of their success: an antique automobile, an impressive home, expensive fishing gear, a yacht, a prize catch from a day of fishing, and so on. Indeed, one even submitted a photograph of himself unwrapping Christmas gifts, with his child playing in the background. Almost equal in number were the photographs of men in various states of undress. Some men sent in photographs of themselves in what could be called fashion poses imitating the postures of models. Within this category could be found naked men lounging before their most highly valued possessions. Indeed, one image, featuring an expensive article of apparel draped in a studied but casual fashion over an otherwise naked man, seemed to approach art photography. At the other end of the spectrum were sexually explicit photographs of aroused men. These images usually centered on the respondent’s erect penis. This body of phallic images makes explicit the correspondents’ desire for sexual penetration of their imaginary Asian women. Such overt

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phallic articulations suggest that the label of “unspeakable depravity” assigned one hundred years earlier to the Chinese might more aptly describe a masking of Anglo-American desire. In Chapter 3 of this book, Cynthia Weber addresses the masquerading of phallic desire in the articulation of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, U.S. foreign policy is often expressed in veiled sexual terms of the need to “project power,” as articulated through a military ability to penetrate hostile states.10 Significantly, the U.S. government recently reaffirmed its continuing claim that “the burgeoning economies of East Asia can thrive only if there is peace and security, and the best way to maintain those is through a strong U.S. military presence.”11 The Carnes case’s collocation of national pride (expressed visually through the presence of the U.S. flag and military uniforms) and overt expressions of sexual desire suggests a potential rupture at the intersection of these two discourses. That these sexual images that display a yearning for nationhood are directed at imaginary Asian women implicates a desire that exists on a broader, global platform. The local imaginary of U.S. servicemen can have a negative impact on a desired international presence. This reinscription of overt sexual desire on a colonial site can yield tragic consequences. On September 4, 1995, the Labor Day holiday for Americans, this rupture at the intersection of national desire and sexuality achieved a new order of explicit visibility in Okinawa, Japan: two marines and a soldier . . . decided to cruise the seaside boulevards in search of prey. . . . At about 8 P.M. they spotted a girl walking alone on a well lighted stretch of road lined with storefronts and homes. . . . The Subaru stopped along side the girl and two men got out. . . . Before she knew what was happening, they had thrown her into the back seat of the car, where they bound her eyes, mouth, arms, and legs with tape. A little more than half a mile up the road, they parked, pulled their victim from the car and carried her to a deserted stretch of beach [where] at least two of them raped her, before driving away.12

This gang rape of a twelve-year-old girl in Okinawa by U.S. servicemen, taken together with the texts and photographs from the Carnes case, suggests that David Henry Hwang is likely correct when he accuses the West of an international sensibility bent upon rape: The West has a sort of international rape mentality. . . . The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor . . . but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique. . . . Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes. The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated— because a woman can’t think for herself.13

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Clearly, Rene Gallimard,14 the state of California in 1877, and thousands of Anglo-American men in the 1990s constituted Asian-American sexuality in the same way. Devoid of any significant Asian-American agency, this construction takes place strictly within the imaginary of the Anglo-American consciousness. Detailed examination of this construction reveals the explicitly nationalistic desire behind the pornographic imaginary animated to effect racial containment and control. NOTES

1. An Address to the People of the United States upon the Evils of Chinese Immigration, prepared by a Committee of the Senate of the State of California, August 13, 1877, 30–31. 2. Ibid., 31. 3. Ibid., 43, 46. 4. Ibid., 25–26. 5. Ibid. 6. Spalding Gray, Swimming to Cambodia (New York: TCG, 1985), 42–43. 7. Soo-Young Chin, “Cultural Projection: Into the Heart of Darkness,” a paper presented at the American Anthropological Association’s 93rd Annual Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, November 30, 1994. 8. All quotations of advertising copy are taken from the files of B. Carnes (pseudonym). In addition to arresting him for mail fraud, the Postal Service confiscated his computer and some twenty-two boxes of correspondence and other fugitive materials. These materials are currently being held at the U.S. Postal Inspector’s Office in Burbank, California. Included in these boxes are newspaper clippings containing the ad copy, which he saved to confirm the publication of his advertisements. A meticulous businessman, Carnes sometimes stapled the clippings to xerox copies of the original invoice for the placement of his ad. 9. Citations for quotations from letters written to Carnes are coded to protect the identities of the correspondents. The same coding system is used to protect the identity of the men who submitted photographs in response to Carnes’s call for “sexy photographs & fantasies.” I assigned the codes to identify source materials and collaborating images. They are drawn from two small boxes of material representing approximately two days of incoming correspondence. It was agreed by several of the researchers working on this Postal Service cache of materials that this small grouping of correspondence seemed to represent a fair sampling. 10. For recent discussions of this, see George F. Will, “State of the Art Warships Cost Less Than War,” International Herald Tribune, August 25, 1995, Opinion Section; and John E. Mulligan, “Senate Backs 3rd Seawolf,” The Providence Journal-Bulletin, A1. 11. Mary Jordan, “Rape of 12-Year-Old Fans Okinawans’ Anger at U.S. Military Presence,” Washington Post, September 20, 1995, A15. 12. Irene M. Kunii, “Rape of an Innocent, Dishonor in the Ranks; a Vicious Attack in Okinawa Stirs Furor Against an Increasingly Unpopular U.S. Military Presence,” Time Magazine, October 2, 1995, 51–52. See also “3 U.S. Servicemen Held By Japan in Rape Case,” Chicago Tribune, September 30, 1995, 15; Jordan, “Rape of 12-Year-Old,” A15.

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13. David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (New York: New American Library, 1989), 82–83. 14. Gallimard is the French diplomat character in the play who for years had an affair with Song Liling. When he is prosecuted for espionage he learns that his “oriental” lover of many years is a man. The premise is obvious: Gallimard wanted to believe the Orient is passive and feminine, and so this is the perspective he took into his relationship.

PART 2 THE TERRA OF MODERNITY: LOSS AND RECOVERY

5 Spatial Regulation of British Emigration to Argentina Simon Naylor Between 1500 and 1800 an accumulation of technological innovations in the fields of shipbuilding, navigation, horology and cartography, mediated through print-capitalism, was making . . . imagin[ed communities] possible. It became conceivable to dwell on the Peruvian altiplano, on the pampas of Argentina, or by the harbours of “New” England, and yet feel connected to certain regions or communities, thousands of miles away, in England or the Iberian peninsula. One could be fully aware of sharing a language and a religious faith (to varying degrees), customs and traditions, without any great expectation of ever meeting one’s partners. —Benedict Anderson1

This chapter considers a number of textual accounts written during a period of extensive emigration to Argentina in the latter half of the nineteenth century.2 These accounts are in the form of diaries and travelogues, emigration documents, and guides, as well as letters and statistical tomes relating to agricultural productivity and management. With respect to this chapter, I am specifically interested in analyzing these texts’ complicity in European settlement of the Southern Cone of Latin America. I investigate how it was that settlers from Britain (often with very little capital or agricultural knowhow) were able to go out to Argentina and form agricultural and cultural communities there. It is here that I feel Benedict Anderson’s quote is particularly suggestive. For if his polemical work on the forging of “imagined communities” tells us anything, it is that such communities are inconceivable—impossible even—without the aid of particular technologies: the technologies of expansion and communication. Of course, and in relation to this research, we might like to add other technologies to Anderson’s list: travel accounts, statistical charts and measures, the emigration policies and constitutional laws of the British and Argentine governments, the shipping companies’ policies for carrying emigrants, their emigration propaganda and guides, as well as the innovations in exporting animals and foodstuffs from one continent to the next that made it all worthwhile. So I suggest that 71

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agricultural settlers wouldn’t have been able to go to Argentina and set up farming communities if it hadn’t been for a coalescence of all these “heterogeneous” technologies—these legislatures, ordering strategies, moral and other codes, texts, and materials—in particular constellations at that time. Anderson’s quote also says a good deal about space and spatiality. For, in this reading, it suggests the spirits of frontiers and migrations; it invokes sovereignties and empires as well as localities and cultures. So I also investigate the spaces—the particular topographies—that were constituted out of the relations among all these laws, texts, and bodies; the spaces invoked, both as a means of conveying settlers to Argentina and as a result of that movement. Exploring this historically particular, obviously efficient, and spatially specific constellation is, then, the central aim of this chapter. To provide a satisfactory accounting of this complex practice that we call emigration, I base my considerations on two main themes. First, I investigate what we might call the “regulators of long-distance control”; the mechanisms—always embodied in texts—that enabled and supervised the movement of bodies across the Atlantic Ocean from Europe to Argentina. These regulators might include both the emigration reports and guides published by shipping companies and travel guidebooks as well as the legal and constitutional frameworks that regulated this traffic: the mechanisms of emigration that stated who and what might cross the various legal boundaries of the two states. So we should consider the Argentine Republic’s constitutional laws intended to encourage emigration from Europe as well as the laws that were brought into play during the nineteenth century that related to the ownership and purchase of land in Argentina. In short, I want to argue that the republic (through its discourses of immigration and landownership) strategically employed all these mechanisms so as to provide a particular power-effect on and through the settlers. Specifically, I will argue, this arrangement of techniques, effects, and discourses presented very specific codes for settlers: codes of the body and of bodily conduct and movement. Second, I consider the spaces of these control mechanisms: I argue that the technologies of regulation that governed the movement of settlers were also mobilized around a particular notion of space and that this notion was central to the Argentine Republic’s discourse on immigration. 3 Indeed, I suggest that the production of a discourse on movement and regulation was supported by and imbricated within a corresponding emphasis on territoriality. So my two basic tenets in this chapter (indeed, the two motivating forces in the persuasion of nineteenth-century settlers to migrate halfway across the world) are body-movement and “territoriality.” I will deal with each in turn.

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REGULATING (THE MOVEMENT OF) BODIES

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Argentina gained its independence from Spanish colonial rule in 1810. Once freed from the restricting laws of colonialism, Argentina became the object of intense interest within the rest of Europe, and especially Britain.4 As such, a Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and Navigation between the two nations was signed on the February 2, 1825,5 marking a period of genial Anglo-Argentine relations.6 A series of articles were agreed upon and concluded. A number of these had direct relevance to the movement of people and cargo between the two nations. For instance, Act 1 urges perpetual amity between the inhabitants of both nations. Act 2 states that there will be a reciprocal freedom of commerce: The inhabitants of the two countries respectively, shall have liberty freely and securely to come with their ships and cargoes to all such places, ports, and rivers in the territories aforesaid, to which other foreigners are or may be permitted to come, to enter into the same and remain and reside in any part of the said territories respectively.7

Acts 4, 5, 6, and 7 are also concerned with the regulation of importation duties and freights, as well as the setting up of industries in the republic by British investors and the movement of British ships in Argentine waters. Act 12 states that British citizens shall not be “disturbed, persecuted, or annoyed on account of their religion,” 8 and Act 13 gives immigrants freedom to dispose of their own property by their own will or testament.9 In relation to Argentine immigration policy, two pieces of legislation were of particular significance. The first was the drafting and enacting in 1853 of a Constitution for the Argentine Republic. Based on the U.S. constitution and inspired by Juan Bautista Alberdi,10 the Argentine constitution was made possible by the overthrow of General Juan Manuel de Rosas’s twenty-three-year administration in 1852.11 With Rosas’ firm anti-foreign stance now removed, the new government, and especially the administrations of Bartolomé Mitre, Domingo Sarmiento, and Nicolás Avellaneda, began to set out specific policies for the encouragement of European investment and immigration.12 For instance, Article 25 of the Constitution, the basis of Argentina’s immigration policy, states: “The federal government shall encourage European immigration; may not restrict, limit or burden with any tax whatsoever, the entrance into Argentine territory of foreigners who arrive for the purpose of tilling the soil.”13 In addition, Article 67, para. 16, of the Constitution empowers Congress to promote industry and immigration, and Article 107, on the powers of the provincial govern-

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ments, enables them to do likewise. Law 817 was also enacted by Congress in 1876 to promote and regulate immigration into the republic.14 The second piece of legislation follows these broad constitutional policies on immigration. In 1876, by an act of Congress, a General Department of Immigration was created in Buenos Aires under the control of the Ministry of the Interior. This department had a number of objectives: to maintain active relations with foreign and local agents and public functionaries on all matters relative to the encouragement of immigration . . . Any person arriving in the Republic who has paid a second or third class passage or obtained an assisted or subsidiary one, being apt to work, and under sixty years of age, may avail himself of the following advantages: To be lodged and maintained . . . To have employment found and be sent to any part of the Republic free of expense . . . The foregoing, as far as applicable, to be extended to the wives and adult members of immigrants’ families. Certificates of conduct and aptness for any trade or work possessed by immigrants should be authenticated by Argentine consuls or agents abroad before embarking, to qualify immigrants by law, but they are not demanded. All vessels arriving from foreign ports conveying not less than 40 second and third class passengers will be considered immigrant ships, and entitled to “packet privileges” to facilitate their entrance and clearance, loading and discharging, &c. Such vessels will be subject to inspection on arrival, as to proper accommodation of immigrants, treatment, &c. Captains will be liable to fines not exceeding 20l. sterling for conveying as immigrants persons over sixty years of age, not being heads of family, also fugitive criminals, idiots, and anyone incapacitated for work or suffering from contagious disease.15

Immigration Laws: Making Materials Disappear

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Argentine Republic had put into motion a comprehensive set of guidelines for the promotion and regulation of emigrants from Europe to Argentina. But how was it that the immigration laws of the Argentine Republic were able to emerge and consolidate so efficiently out of the political changes of the mid-nineteenth century that they could then project and sustain such wide-reaching powers of regulation and control? I contend that the immigration laws of the Argentine Republic might be viewed as the effects of a number of materials—particularly significant (although by no means the only) materials were the settlers themselves. Moreover, power was gained over these materials via a particular set of strategies. It is important to assert (although it might seem an obvious point to make) that the immigration laws of the Argentine Republic could only be what they were with the aid of those

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materials that could be moved across spaces and frontiers—the bodies that were moving from one country to the next. In other words, it is not sufficient (or even correct) to say that these laws were simply the causes of immigration: these laws were not put into place to, in turn, produce movement (although they definitely made that passage smoother and more durable). Other materials were also required in that constitution. Another (maybe obvious) point is that these laws relied as much on nation-states and frontiers—variously physical and political and definitely historical—on economic and political documents, legislatures, and procedures as well as policymakers and politicians, on ships and innovations in transportation, and on immigration monitors and policemen, as they did on the settlers themselves. So then, the immigration laws also had some material legitimacy and power over those individual and migratory bodymaterials. However, the immigration laws did not contain power. I do not want to suggest that these laws functioned around a series of negative relations, of repressions and prohibitions—a juridical power capable only of setting limits.16 Rather, these laws are simply the overall effects, or terminal forms, that emerged out of the (always and already everywhere) moving substrate of force relations, relations that were imminent in the sphere in which these forces operated and consolidated themselves. The laws did not embody power; rather, they were the (localized) end points of the endlessly mobile and edifying force relations of a complex strategical societal situation.17 Finally, as we consider the power relations that imbued this network and eventually lent the immigration laws particular power to regulate immigrants, I want to suggest that such power was capable because of an indexing of all these materials.18 I am suggesting that the immigration laws were power-effects of all these materials (both human and nonhuman); these effects spread and became gradually more invisible as the network was stabilized.19 Indeed, the laws’ ability to pull on this intertextual economy—or rather, the obligation for someone who queries the operations of the law to investigate all these supporting actors—simultaneously ramifies the seeming power of the law itself and disseminates its “nodal” character as the center around which these other actors gather.20 Thus the immigration laws became an effective metonym for all the materials and practices of which they were made up. As the various materials began to move in closer harmony with one another (or rather, as their resistances were more efficiently constrained), they also became less and less visible and less pertinent or answerable to the successes and failures of the overall endeavors of migration, and in the process all were translated into one single summary point—the laws themselves. In other words, as the British and Argentine governments learned to cooperate over the political and economic issues of emigration; as the shipping companies negotiated

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deals with those governments over the shipping of migrants, and their advertising campaigns began to entice potential migrants; and as ports and migrant asylums learned to cope with increased numbers leaving and arriving—as all these practices became more efficiently organized—they also became less distinct, while their very efficiency was gradually attributed to the laws themselves. So then, these strategies actively concealed the laws’ own manufactured composition by providing discourse upon these bodies. Particularly, I argue that this discourse seemed to provoke and improvise distance: the immigration laws talked to these (moving) bodies, persuading them and coercing them within its discourse while it convoluted and masked its own constitution of and by these materials (these bodies that provided sustenance and life to that very discourse). The immigration laws shifted the materials of which they were made up—the (human and other) bodies that crossed the Atlantic—so that they would become the object of these laws’ discourse. The laws set up a power effect: the ability to speak to, discuss, guide, and even prohibit these human (and other) bodies without fear of reprisal. As a consequence of this policy of coercion, the bodies that moved across the Atlantic Ocean began, in the discourse of the law, to become blurred, or maybe more accurately, they “massed.” As the laws of immigration became more efficient at encouraging and then regulating traffic, the settlers began to lose their definition. They became blocks of emigrants, reduced to flows between nation-states, and to numbers of heads on board ships and passing through ports.21 However, this coagulation of settlers was not in terms of a dangerous, milling, edifying mass or crowd. Rather it prompted and reinforced a precise and detailed disciplinary anatomy onto both the individual body and the body of the “population”: a microphysics of power expressed through the meticulous supervision and recording of detail.22 In fact, in the last four decades of the nineteenth century, there was a massive proliferation in statistical measurement with regard to and in conjunction with this phenomenon: statistical figures for emigration were regularly taken by the Immigration and Emigration Boards of the Argentine and British governments and studiously reproduced in emigration guides23 and travel accounts.24 Retrospective reports also devoted large sections to the documentation of immigration figures and trends. For example, Martinez and Lewandowski lament the lack of accounting for immigration previous to 1853 and lay out, in a very exhaustive manner, the yearly figures of immigration and emigration since that date: The public administration did not take the trouble to keep an exact record of the number of immigrants before the year 1853; and between 1854 and 1870 we have simply the number of new arrivals, without any further details. Only since 1870 have the official statistics classed the immigrants

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according to nationality, and only since 1881 have they recorded other details, such as sex, age, profession, education, etc. During the last six months of 1854, 2524 persons entered the country; in 1855, 5912; in 1856, 4672; in 1857, 4951; in 1858, 4658; and in 1859, 4735. . . . In the decade formed by the years 1860–1869, the number of immigrants increased to 134,325; in the years 1870-1879, to 264,869; but the highest figures, no less than 1,020,907, were reached between 1880 and 1889. [The list continues.]25

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Martinez and Lewandowski’s tacit frustration and their implication of irresponsibility on the part of the Argentine government in failing to take regular records of movements of immigrants supports this swelling impetus to produce a discourse of “masses” and flows. Moreover, the fact that the Argentine government did comply with this impetus, and with increasing vigor—from immigrant numbers only to a comprehensive compartmentalizing of the particulars of each immigrant along the axes of sex, class, and age—acknowledges the intensity and power that this discourse asserted. This dissection of immigrants by sex, age, and so on supported the impetus for an intensification and proliferation of a discourse on immigrants. The ability to speak with confidence about the particulars of the immigrant—that is, the generation of a comprehensive knowledge of immigrant populations—enabled the translation of those individuals into categories, increasingly introducing them into the realm of the statistic and account sheet.26 Immigration Laws: Marking Out Useful Bodies

Discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, “docile” bodies. —Michel Foucault27

As the immigration laws signified a new and burgeoning discourse on movement, which was mobilized around the technologies of the statistic, so too they began to employ a form of regulation along other parameters— along the lines of behavior, discipline, and utility.28 Once the immigrants had been transformed into statistics of types and forms, they divided into useful, employable, and moral bodies (more on this in a moment). As Foucault points out, this very nineteenth-century form of regulation was not based on slavery, asceticism, or vassalage. Rather, it employed notions of obedience and usefulness: it at once dissociates power from the body while bestowing aptitude and capacities onto that body, both actions coupled with a strict control. Once these bodies had been classified as statistics, they could then be located, distributed, and partitioned according to usage.29 Bodies were picked out, delimited, magnified, and analyzed according to “use” to ascer-

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tain which had capacity or utility and, conversely, which were of no value. Foucault famously argues that this form of supervision and partitioning is articulated in architectural and institutional forms—the prison, the clinic, the mental asylum, and the home, for example. In this instance, the ports of Argentina are our (simultaneously material and textual) sites of control. As Foucault notes, “A port, and a military port is—with its circulation of goods, men signed up willingly or by force, sailors embarking and disembarking, diseases and epidemics—a place of desertion, smuggling, contagion”;30 the presence of such malaise in the nineteenth century produced “the need to distribute and partition off space in a rigorous manner.”31 In the case of immigration to Argentina, this form of regulation was performed on all materials, both the nonhuman and human. The strategies of supervision for nonhuman materials at the port were embodied in customs duties. For instance, the Argentine Department of Immigration’s regulations relating to goods owned by settlers, stated that settlers are “to be allowed to bring in, free of duty, any apparel, furniture, agricultural implements, tools and articles pertaining to the respective calling or trade, as well as one gun for each adult immigrant.”32 Meanwhile, customs duties at Argentine ports stated that “books, printing materials, and paper, plants, fruits, ice, tobacco for sheep, gold and silver, also articles for church use, scientific instruments, machinery for steamboats or new industries, furniture and effects of immigrants are imported duty free.”33 As such, all goods coming into Argentina were effectively individualized according to usage to the settler, epitomized by the free importation of “scientific instruments,” machinery for farming, and “articles for church use.” Moreover, all these materials are also indexed according to very specific moral codes, which were aligned to the moral and altruistic callings of science, religion, industry, and the tending of the land. With regard to the human cargo, although the Argentine immigration laws seem to provide free movement through these points of control (the Argentine government, you may remember, “may not restrict, limit or burden . . . the entrance into Argentine territory of foreigners who arrive for the purpose of tilling the soil”), they do enforce a comprehensive vetting procedure—a policy of selection—onto the immigrant body.34 In fact, the quote just given hints at that form of control. After all, free passage into the Argentine Republic was not extended to everyone, only to those who were capable of wielding a spade and driving cattle. This very strict form of regulation is also present in the Department of Immigration’s objectives, quoted earlier. Persons were allowed into the country only if they were of a certain age; were male (the objectives state that the immigration regulations are “extended” to wives; there is no stated extension to the husbands of female settlers); were “apt to work”; and were certainly not “fugitive criminals, idiots,” or “anyone incapacitated for work or suffering from conta-

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gious disease.” Moreover, rather than the republic having to make a public display of weeding out these “disabled” bodies from those of the healthy immigrant on the dockside, the captains of the ships that carried these people across the Atlantic were put under financial pressure to do the job themselves; they were penalized for anybody they were carrying who was not “up to scratch.” Where Argentine officials were required to enforce these regulations, the procedure was undertaken onboard the ship itself, with the undesirables presumably shipped straight back, and at extra cost, to the United Kingdom: An emigration commissioner will accompany the visit-officer of the port in boarding vessels to hear any complaints against the captain of the vessel, take note of births or deaths that may have occurred on the voyage, and see if maimed, decrepit or insane persons be among the passengers, [and take] name, age, sex, nationality and profession. . . . Any captain contravening these rules [of bringing in the decrepit, the maimed, the aged, and the insane] shall be fined 200 hard dollars by the Port Captain, for benefit of the National Treasury.35

Thus we are constantly witness to a confluence of a regulation of passage by procedures of surveillance and record taking and of examination along the lines of utility, exemplified in the regulation of the human and nonhuman body-material. 36 The overall effect of this complex form of regulation is the production of a useful and specifically moral body. These two parameters—utility and morality—become coupled, so that the moral body is that which is able to work and has some relation with the land and the soil (think back to the statement in the Constitution, for instance). 37 As well as imbuing the immigration laws themselves, this sentiment—this dual imposition onto the body of the settler—was supported in the popular accounts and guides on Argentina at that time. These guides were saturated with reports pontificating on the characteristics the settler should possess: his38 physical abilities and skills, his financial status, and his moral fiber and ideal nationality. M. G. Mulhall and E. T. Mulhall suggest, for example, that farm servants (“unmarried men, of strong constitutions, sober, steady, accustomed to country life, and able to stand rain and sun”) and young married couples 39 (“preferred on the ground of steadiness”) were ideal for the job.40 Likewise, Wilfred Latham states: “There is an unquestionable ‘Eldorado’ in the Rio de la Plata [the lands around Buenos Aires], but it is for the industrious, the intelligent, the practical, and the enterprising.”41 So, to set up an effective form of regulation and coercion of those emigrants crossing the Atlantic, various technologies were employed. These included the immigration laws themselves as well as port and ship regulations. Also included are the numerous travel accounts and emigration

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guides that were in circulation at that time (of course, intertextual relations existed between all these material-technologies). Power relations were also embodied in the ships that carried the settlers to Argentina, in the ports of the Argentine Republic and its immigrant asylums, and in the bodies of the settlers themselves and their possessions. Specifically, these (settlers) bodies were reconstituted as either moral, useful, and docile bodies or bodies of no use: the body of the insane or the aged, the woman, or the cripple. THE DEPLOYMENT OF TERRITORIALITY

Gobernar es poblar (“to rule is to settle”) —Juan Bautista Alberdi42

Let me now introduce the second factor into this regulatory economy: the notion of “territoriality.” I am using this term to suggest a bounded space that forms and functions in conjunction with some form of control, all of which reinforce its frontiers.43 Already we have traced (in a somewhat anemic fashion, I admit) the construction of one, particularly demographic, Argentine frontier by the deployment of its laws of immigration. In this section, I consider in more depth the construction of a consolidated Argentine territory through the strategic use of immigrant-settlers.44 First, I consider the relationships between morality and place as they were sustained in the settlers’ documentary accounts. Second, I briefly discuss the effects of the Argentine Land Act of 1867 and the Desert Clearances of 1879–1880. Although movement and morality were significant in the regulation of the immigrant body as far as the ports of Argentina, so too were specific notions of space, both in the regulation of the immigrant to and beyond these points and in the imposition of a particular morality over that migrant.45 In fact, the links constructed among the body, migration, and morality (i.e., that the body with the right to move is also the utilizable body, the body ready to work) and those between the body and place are remarkably similar: the immigrant body that has a right to a space in Argentina—the body that will find a connection to the land (or “sense of place”)—is that body that will tend the land there, will work hard, and will yield produce. In other words, the immigrant body has both a right and a biological connection to land and place in Argentina if he can make that land economically productive. This constructed, and particularly biological, link between people and place is an interesting one because it is in contradistinction to other prevalent philosophies on the subject at that time. For instance, late-nineteenthcentury climatology and anthrogeography were employed both to legitimate the colonial subjugation of the colonized subject as well as to prevent

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emigration.46 However, in the case of Argentina, rather than sustaining residual links between people and place, this biological relationship is precluded by both a dislocation and a movement. In fact, the consolidation of an agricultural territorial space in Argentina was the conclusion of, as well as the catalyst to, movement. This territory was the pretext to movement (the “promise” that lay at the end of migration across the Atlantic) as well as the conclusion to the construction of a moral body: the final proof of the body’s utility. For instance, in his influential account of agricultural life on the pampas, Wilfred Latham asserts the interconnected qualities of the land, climate, and work in Argentina: The extent to which the rich pasture and fertile lands have passed, and are daily—I might almost say hourly—passing into the hands of British settlers, marks beyond question the congeniality of climate and occupation, while it testifies to the advantages that have resulted, and are resulting, from their investments in land.47

As such, the colonist-body is still tethered to a notion of morality, which is in turn defined by utility, aptitude, and capacity. (In this sense, Latham’s “investments in land” might be interpreted as a reference to the time and effort asserted by the settler into its teleological improvement as much as to capital expenditure.) So, the colonist’s relative claim to his land—to his own piece of pioneering territory—is still ranked according to his own use, his own moral capacity.48 This is particularly apparent when settlers were unsuccessful in their cultivation of land in Argentina. When they lament the unproductive soil, the high costs of land, the ravaging weather conditions, and the plagues of locusts and other pests in their writings, their problems are easily dismissed as an obvious failure on their part in the fostering of a right and correct relationship with the land. For instance, in a letter to The Field newspaper in 1869, one English settler in Argentina writes: Unfortunately . . . it is too true that numbers of young Englishmen have lately invaded the River Plate, without friends or introductions or dollars, and who are too proud or too lazy to turn their hands to serious labour. . . . Men such as these do no good either to themselves or their entertainers, whose hospitality they generally abuse, and eventually they return home.49

The author does not eschew settlement in Argentina as such (in fact, he goes into great length on the advantages of settlement there). Rather, he simply warns of the emigration of those settlers who are doomed to fail as farmers; whose immoral behavior (their lack of desire to work) dictates their own failure.

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THE LAND ACT AND DESERT CLEARANCES

While we consider the spaces of settlement, it is also important to note that the land laws of the Argentine government utilized European settlers as a way of claiming land under Argentine sovereignty. In fact, the 1867 Land Act, as well as the Desert Clearances of 1879–1880, provided the main impetus for the conclusion of the debate over territory in Argentina.50 By persuading people to settle on marginal and disputed land, the Argentine government was able to claim it as sovereign territory. British settlers, often unaware of this fact, were employed to great effect. This policy was nowhere more apparent than in the granting of land in Patagonia to the Welsh settlers. At that time, Argentine territory extended only as far as the Rio Negro river; its expansionary ideology was confounded by the indigenous populations south of that point. If Argentina aided in the founding of a colony well over this frontier (which, it was stipulated, must raise the Argentine flag above its colony), Patagonia could be included as part of the Argentine Republic.51 This was later assisted by General Julio Roca’s Conquest of the Desert (1879–1880), in which he led the Argentine army southward to displace and exterminate the Indian tribes living there.52 This conquest provided new areas of national territory westward and south of the Negro River, where estancia (farm) and rail expansion had previously been checked. Interestingly, in raising the sum needed to enable Roca’s land conquest, Congress mortgaged the land in advance of its possession.53 As such, Roca’s conquest of the desert freed vast amounts of land for Argentina but, paradoxically, reinforced a land policy of private ownership and concentrated landownership even further into the hands of the elite and the land speculator. Due to this policy, by the end of the century it was beyond the power of national authorities or coastal provinces to create land policy suited to the needs of the small farmer.54 Commercial groups in Buenos Aires, foreign investors, and speculative interests had acquired huge tracts of land on the pampas and in Patagonia, Misiones, and Chico, but settlers were forced to rent land at expensive rates. As such, both space and spacing have very important roles to play in this history of British emigration to Argentina, and not only in the most literal sense. Not only was the material deployment of settlers on “unclaimed” land by the Argentine government significant in the establishment of sovereign-state territory, but also it was important in the consolidation of the united and symbolic space of the modern state. (It is no coincidence that in the same year Roca completed his operations in the southern reaches of the Republic, Buenos Aires became the national capital of the entire state.) As Klaus-John Dodds has noted, once the initial acquisition of territory in Argentina had been achieved, the attainment of topographical and geographical knowledges of that territory soon followed:

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During and after the “Desert Campaign” itself there was much official encouragement by the Argentine state for explorations to be mounted in Patagonia. . . . The sketches that often accompanied these reports were as important as the texts because they codified and legitimated Argentine sovereign claims over that territory. The landscape of the South was represented as colonised and populated.55

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Thus, the military endeavors of the Argentine army, the mapping excursions undertaken by the army, academics, and government bodies, the landownership policies of the Ministry of the Interior, and the physical settlement by European settlers themselves were intricately entwined in the production of a consolidated and progressive—an owned and “known”— territory. Of course, while we trace the new frontiers of Argentine territory at the level of the macrosocial, it is important to remember that similar frontiers were being formed at the local level; that the settler went about creating both material and textual territories of his own. This was achieved, as I argued earlier, by the construction of a moral relationship between the body of the settler and “his land”: the settler marked out and consolidated his territory through the deployment of these codes onto the land; the land was his to manage because he possessed the “right” codes of conduct. CONCLUSION

So, in a sense, we have traced the production and decay of an entire circuit of regulation—the initial coercion and eventual dissuasion of emigration from Europe to Argentina: first, we began by considering the regulatory mechanisms (as they were embodied in texts) that supervised who and what could move from Britain to Argentina. Second, once the settlerbody had been vetted and allowed to proceed across the administrative frontiers of the Argentine state, we were witness to the emergence of a relationship between that body and place. Third, we briefly considered the consolidation of Argentine state territory by the Argentine government. We saw that the settler was deployed by the government as a way of “claiming” disputed territory. This had the end effect of pushing settlers out of Argentina back to Britain, or of dissuading settlers to venture to South America in the first instance. I would also argue that, in this reading at least, we have considered the processes of settlement and colonization in a slightly unusual way. This is because we have taken into consideration (or combined) the materialities within the spaces of colonization. In other words, when considering the production of nineteenth-century spaces of settlement, it was not just knowledges that were transported across frontiers and between continents,

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nor simply discourses of asymmetrical power. Rather, and this seems to be forgotten in some accounts of empire, all of these things, as well as numerous materials, were engaged in and were moved along a complex circuit of control. It was this circuit—made up of documents, devices, and people56— that labored, and for a time achieved, the end effect of settlement in Argentina.57 NOTES

Empirical research for this chapter was conducted in the Royal Geographical Society Library, Kensington Gore, the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, and the Public Record Office, Kew. Thanks to the librarians of all these institutions for their help and assistance. Thanks also goes to the Geography Department, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, for providing me with an affiliation there for the duration of my research, as well as to Cherry and Michael for putting me up during my stay in London. A number of people have read, commented on, and helped me develop various versions of this chapter: thanks to Steve Hinchliffe, Tony Philips, Miles Ogborn, Klaus-John Dodds, Pyrs Gruffudd, and Theresa Aldridge, as well as the editors of this volume. 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London, New York: Verso, 1991), 188. 2. These considerations are part of a broader doctoral dissertation that deals with a number of representations of Argentina by British scientists, naturalists, and Foreign Office officials, as well as emigrants, between 1860 and 1920. See Simon K. Naylor, “Britain and Argentina During the ‘Age of Empire’: Four Historical Geographies of Writing at the End of the Nineteenth Century” (Keele University, unpublished diss.), 1998. 3. For a general discussion of law, power, and space, see Nicolas Blomley, Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power (New York and London: Guilford, 1994). 4. Under Spanish rule, the South American colonies were permitted to trade only among themselves and with Spain itself, and that trade was regulated by the South American viceroyalties. 5. M. G. Mulhall and E. T. Mulhall, Handbook of the River Plate, Comprising Buenos Aires, the Upper Provinces, Banda Oriental, and Paraguay (volume 1) (Buenos Aires, Standard Printing Office, 1869), 116. This book was first published in 1863 by the editors of The Standard, the main British newspaper in Buenos Aires. J. R. Scobie, Revolution on the Pampas: A Social History of Argentine Wheat, 1860–1910 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 186. 6. J. Colin Crossley, “The River Plate Countries,” in Latin America— Geographical Perspectives, 2d ed., eds. Harold Blakemore and Clifford Smith (London and New York: Methuen, 1983). 7. Mulhall and Mulhall, Handbook, 116. 8. Ibid., 119. 9. However, although this official framework assisted in a period of liberal Argentine policies regarding foreign trade and migration, it was soon impeded by the dictatorial regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas, which lasted from 1828 to 1852. Rosas was a strident federalist and nationalist whose policies actively encouraged national industry while forbidding foreign trade.

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10. Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 174. 11. Thomas Skidmore and Peter Smith, Modern Latin America, 3d ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 12. J. G. Merquior, “Patterns of State-Building in Brazil and Argentina,” in States in History, ed. J. A. Hall (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 13. Quoted in C. Ahuradle and E. C. Villalobos, A Statement of the Laws of Argentina in Matters Affecting Business (Washington, D.C.: Pan-American Union, 1965), 5. 14. Ahuradle and Villalobos, Statement, 5. 15. The UK Department of Emigration, Summary of the Argentine Laws of Immigration (London: Emigration Information Office, 1908), 34–35. 16. Cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1979] 1990). 17. Foucault, Sexuality, 93. 18. John Law refers to this phenomenon as “punctuation” in “Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity,” Systems Practice 4, no. 5 (1992): 385. 19. Ibid. 20. See Bruno Latour’s discussion on the “contexts of citation” in Science in Action—How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 35. 21. This descriptive shift, or rupture, in the last four decades of the nineteenth century, from the (romantic descriptions of the pioneering and individualistic) explorer to the (quantification and mass accounting of the) emigrant-settler, was marked by one particular emigration: in 1865 a group of Welsh settlers left Liverpool and the United Kingdom for Patagonia. This emigration produced a flurry of correspondence among the Foreign Office, the Emigration Board, Liverpool, and the Colonial Office. The very particular nature of this emigration (a patriotic movement to found a Welsh colony removed from the colonizing English) marked the end of a very specific “pioneering” discourse. In the Foreign Office correspondence on emigration to Argentina, the Welsh emigrants are significant in the fact that no other British colony but theirs is discussed at such length (Public Records Office, Foreign Office correspondence blocks FO6-260, FO6-262, and FO6-496). See Glyn Williams’s The Welsh in Patagonia—the State and the Ethnic Community (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991) for a detailed discussion of this emigrant community. 22. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish—The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 138–139. For a work that deals with issues of law, discipline, and the state, see Miles Ogborn, “Law and Discipline in Nineteenth Century English State Formation: The Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869,” Journal of Historical Sociology 6, no. 1 (1993): 28–55; and on the body, power, and the state, see Patrick Carroll, “Science, Power, Bodies: The Mobilization of Nature as State Formation,” Journal of Historical Sociology 9, no. 2 (1996): 139–167. 23. Mulhall and Mulhall’s Handbook is an exemplary case in point. Although it was initially published in 1869, it was reissued and updated in 1875 and 1885 and consistently contained details on, among other things, emigration numbers. 24. Sir Horace Rumbold’s South American travel account, for example, includes a chapter entitled “Immigration—the Foreign Communities”; an inclusion in line with a resurgent trend. See H. Rumbold, The Great Silver River—Notes of a Residence in Buenos Aires in 1880 and 1881 (London: John Murray, 1887).

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25. A. B. Martinez and M. Lewandowski, The Argentine in the Twentieth Century (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911). 26. For a general discussion of power, surveillance, and the (local and central) state, see Miles Ogborn, “Local Power and State Regulation in Nineteenth Century Britain,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geography N.S. 17 (1991): 215– 226. 27. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 138. 28. Ibid. 29. For a discussion of moral statistics, see Felix Driver, “Moral Geographies: Social Science and the Urban Environment in Mid-Nineteenth Century England,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geography N.S. 13 (1987): 275–287. 30. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 144. 31. Ibid. See also Ogborn and Philo’s work on the military port and “moral locations”: Miles Ogborn and Chris Philo, “Soldiers, Sailors and Moral Locations in Nineteenth Century Portsmouth,” Area 26, no. 3 (1994): 221–231. 32. The UK Department of Emigration, Summary of the Argentine Laws of Immigration, 34–35. 33. Mulhall and Mulhall, Handbook, 418. 34. Cf. Susan Smith, “Immigration and Nation-Building in Canada and the United Kingdom,” in Constructions of Race, Place and Nation, ed. Peter Jackson and Jan Penrose (London: UCL Press, 1993), 50–77. 35. “Past Regulations Relative to Immigrants,” UK Public Records Office, FO6 318 (March 14, 1872). 36. Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge— Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980): 63–77. 37. See Chapter 2 in this volume for a discussion of similar themes in relation to the Bosnian conflict. 38. These guides always endow the settler with a masculine gender. As such, I will continue to refer to the immigrant in this gender throughout the rest of this chapter. 39. The woman’s role in this economy is always played out as a support for her husband. As such, and although I do argue that the female body is subject to strict forms of regulation and exclusion, it must also be noted that that form of regulation is also somewhat different from that of the aged or the insane, for instance. Put crudely, the female body can play an integral part in the sustenance of the moral economy of the male settler—as wife—although she is also always subordinate to that male in that role. (Thanks to Theresa Aldridge for pointing this out and discussing this with me.) 40. Mulhall and Mulhall, Handbook, 161. 41. Wilfred Latham, The States of the River Plate (London: Longmans, 1868), 214. 42. Juan Batista Alberdi, Bases y puntos de partida (1852), quoted in Shumway, Invention of Argentina, 279. 43. Ogborn, Local Power and State Regulation, 217. 44. It is worth noting at this point that I am not interested in accounting for the construction of an Argentine nation-state, only in the strategic use made of European settlers to consolidate Argentine territory. However, this is not to say that immigration didn’t have an important role to play in Argentine state formation. On the contrary, without immigration from Europe, the production of a consolidated Argentine state would have been severely impaired.

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45. Links have been drawn between (the formation of the state) territory and the role of surveillance (as the accumulation of coded information and the exercise of supervision within systems of control). Ogborn, Local Power and State Regulation, 217. 46. David Livingstone has argued that by presenting the African population as biologically connected to their (hot) climate, European imperialists were able to claim that the Africans were also slothful and lazy and that they would benefit from the innervating effects of European colonization. Meanwhile, in the case of early twentieth-century Ireland, Nash argues that notions of race, gender, and place were fused to retain the “reproductive” woman both in the domestic sphere and within the bounds of the nation. David N. Livingstone, “The Moral Discourse of Climate: Historical Considerations on Race, Place and Virtue,” Journal of Historical Geography 17 (1991): 413–434; Catherine Nash, “Remapping the Body/Land: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender, and Landscape in Ireland,” in Writing Women and Space—Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, ed. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose (New York and London: Guilford Press, 1994), 237. 47. Latham, States, 212. 48. Of course, the connections of body to movement and to land are sustained by one and the same discourse, and so maybe this corollary is not so surprising. However, there is an anomaly here worth noting: where the immigrant was asserted only the status as body-object in movement, with this new sedentary connection to the land, he is able—he is “given the space”—to assert his own forms of regulation, often at the expense of others. In other words, the settler seems to gain agency in his acquisition of the farmstead. 49. Letter by A. P. (full name not provided) to The Field newspaper (May 1, 1869) and subsequently reprinted by the Central Argentine Railway Company (London, 1869). 50. Frank J. McLynn, “The Frontier Problem in 19th Century Argentina,” History Today 30 (1980): 28–32. 51. UK Public Records Office, Foreign Office correspondence block FO6260/2. See also Williams, Welsh in Patagonia. 52. General Julio Roca, upon the successes of his Conquest, went on to become president of the Argentine Republic from 1880 to 1886. 53. McLynn, “Frontier Problem.” 54. J. R. Scobie, Revolution on the Pampas, 118. 55. Klaus-John Dodds, “Geography, Identity, and the Creation of the Argentine State,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 12, no. 3 (1993): 323. See also the work by Naylor and Jones on the Regional Survey Movement in the Southern Cone of Latin America: Simon Naylor and Gareth A. Jones, “Writing Orderly Geographies of Distant Places—the Regional Survey and Latin America,” Ecumene 4, no. 3 (1997): 273–299. 56. John Law, “On the Methods of Long-Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation and the Portuguese Route to India,” in Power, Action, and Belief, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1986). 57. See the work of Latour on cycles and centers of accumulation and calculation (respectively). Latour, Science in Action.

6 The Fate of Subjectivity in the New World Disorder Mark Fisher & Rohit Lekhi

This chapter presents a polemical denunciation of the notion of difference as it has been employed in recent political and cultural theory. It argues that, contrary to the claims of those who operate within a difference paradigm, difference actually reinforces rather than undermines the dominance of the (white, western, male) subject. Pursuing its logic to the point of implosion, it is Jean Baudrillard who performs the most effective immanent critique of the difference paradigm. For Baudrillard, discourses of difference can only be reconciled through the annihilation of the “other” they affect to revere. But Baudrillard’s attack doesn’t rehearse the familiar poststructuralist critiques that end up in a deconstructive impasse, reinforcing identity even as they unravel it. Baudrillard’s Other isn’t the dark half, the supplement necessary for the construction of identity, but a sovereign alterity dedicated to the voracious consumption of all identity. In a sense, though, all of this is academic. Identity is disintegrating, not as a result of the end of metaphysics or other idealist speculations, but under pressure from material convergences (markets, disease), whose shared abstract qualities can only be mapped using a rigorously hypermaterialist program. Politics, long-term planning, and all the other trappings of humanist agency are finished. The real successor to structure is not poststructuralism but the systemic, nonlinear theoretical approaches emerging out of connectionism, cybernetics, and chaos theory. The successor to politics is virally disseminated K-tactics (K, from the Greek, Kubernetes, cybernetics). Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s schizoanalysis (or rhizomatics) diagonalizes between the universalizing imperialism of state philosophy and the fragmentation of poststructuralism. The New World Disorder isn’t undifferentiated chaos but escalating complexity. The real other is alien; 89

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not our shadow self or supplement, not our projection or our ethical interlocutor, but what has come to consume us. It’s already there, at the heart of the Old World: not deconstructing it, not decentering it, but fatally contaminating it. . . . We are hell-bound once again, on a punitive expedition disguised as interplanetary fiction: “colonial marines packing state-of-the-art firepower” sent to rescue “terraforming” colonists who have lost contact with their State-corporate sponsors. The jungles of the Third World are transformed into a planet swarming with pestilential life, to be infiltrated by commandos on a search-and-destroy mission—or “bug hunt,” to use their post– Vietnam Syndrome term that passes off xenophobia as grunt cynicism.1

Modernity sees history as progressive development (of the West), a movement away from the jungle culminating in the establishment of universal humanity (whether on the model of the Prussian state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the Freudian ego). The New World Disorder has it differently. The future you’re being dragged toward is soundtracked by breakbeats, subbass, and weird electronics. It resembles the beginning of Predator 2: scrub land around Los Angeles fades into a cityscape riven by wars between immigrant drug economies. 2 Aliens move imperceptibly around the metropolis. As the dense, humid vegetation of the posthuman crawls across the socius, and facialized monotheism collapses into faceless techno-voodoo, human history cuts out. Welcome to the jungle. Modernity emerges out of

*

*

*

a new relation between humankind and parasitic micro-organisms . . . a more stable pattern of parasitism, less destructive to human hosts, and correspondingly more secure for the parasites. . . . Massive growth of civilized populations, and correspondingly accelerated destruction of the remaining isolated human groups was the first and most obvious consequence of the new disease regime, a disease regime we can appropriately call “modern.”3

The bug hunt: the security alliance between European man and parasitic microorganisms expedites modernity’s guiding illusion of one-way communication and unilinear time. What appears to it as the spread of civilization or “progress” is, in reality, the consequence of Europe’s ability to “cut down formerly isolated populations that came into contact with disease-bearers from one or another of the civilized centres, and thereby facili-

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tate . . . the ‘digestion’ of small, primitive groups into the body politic of persistently expanding human civilisations.”4 From the point of view of modernity, the New World Disorder is a disease of the body politic, an assault on European health. Constituted by the simultaneous emergence of a range of interexciting runaway processes— organized crime, terrorism, immigration, drugs, new diseases, technology, the disintegration of the nuclear family, and, not least, deregulated commerce—it is a massive viral attack on civilization. And it comes from within as much as from outside. Referred to variously as a body without organs, a rhizome, and a nomadic war machine (among other designations), the New World Disorder is emergent complexity itself, a zone of intensities or field of potentiality. The bugs are smart now. Politics is the first thing to go. Cybernetic operativity, the genetic code, the aleatory order of mutation, the uncertainty principle, etc., succeed determinate, objectivist science, and the dialectical view of history and consciousness. . . . You can’t fight the aleatory by imposing finalities, you can’t fight against programmed and molecular dispersion with prises de conscience and dialectical sublation, you can’t fight the code with political economy, nor with “revolution.” . . . Can we fight DNA? Certainly not by means of the class struggle.5

This is not an ideological struggle; it’s biological warfare. “A contaminated body is a monstrous body which inspires fear and repulsion, or pity and compassion. A body in fusion, it is subjected to segregation.”6 The state has always engaged in a futile attempt to preserve the integrity of the white face. Protect and serve—search and destroy. At the heart of the modernist fantasy is the fear of viral contamination. Imperialism is the ultimate quest to eradicate disease, slavery the purest form of incubation. Deleuze and Guattari get it right: “Transcendence: a specifically European disease.”7 Contagiousness is inherent to the destruction of a symbolic order; it is the fluid circulation of all informational elements in societies which can only manage to create a self-image by constructing backdrops which signify their history. More and more often, modern societies tend to practice automuseography and implement their own symbolic frameworks, which allow for the proliferation of archaisms by mimicking the return of social or cultural archetypes.8

The Andromeda strain escapes the monitored confines of ghettoized state control. “Narco-terrorists” are the enforcers of the new world economy. “Peddling the imported, high-profit rock stuff to a bipolar market of

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final consumers, including rich Westsiders as well as poor street people, the Crips have become as much lumpen capitalists as outlaw proletarians. . . . In an age of narco-imperialism they have become modern analogues to the ‘gunpowder states’ of West Africa.”9 What was once a source of “voyeuristic titillation” in white cinemascope actualizes into an absolute fear of immanent viral contagion: “The Viet Cong abroad in our society.”10 Identity is a virus; “difference” is the carrier. Inasmuch as the humanist logic of difference is in some sense a universal simulation, . . . it leads directly, for all its benevolence, to that other desperate hallucination of difference known as racism. . . . a racism which quickly takes on a viral and automatic character, and perpetuates itself while reveling in a generalized semiotics. And this racism can never be countered by a humanism of difference, for the simple reason that it is itself the virus of difference.11

The identity virus is incubated in Europe, “the earth’s paranoia laboratory,”12 and spread as ocean exploration territorializes the globe. Modernity updates the Platonic “Empire of the Selfsame” from a locked-down republic into an expansionist universal state. The classical image of thought, and the striating of mental space it effects, aspires to universality. It in effect operates with two “universals,” the Whole as the final ground of being or all-encompassing horizon, and the Subject as the principle that converts being into being-for-us. Imperium and republic. Between the two, all of the varieties of the real and the true find their place in a striated mental space, from the double point of view of Being and the Subject, under the direction of a “universal method.”13

Dialectics map out philosophy for the state as a gloomy gothic castle from which there’s no escape: the dank corridors always curve back to the center. Hegelian contradiction does not deny identity or non-contradiction. . . . It is said that difference is negativity, that it extends or must extend to the point of contradiction once it is taken to the limit. This is true only to the extent that difference is already placed on a path or along a thread laid out by identity. Difference is the ground, but only the ground for the demonstration of the identical. Hegel’s circle is not the eternal circle, only the infinite circulation of the identical by means of negativity.14

Poststructuralism redesigns philosophy as an elegant torture chamber, replete with trip wires, false mirrors, and booby traps, an Escheresque detour always bringing us back to the same point: identity, lack, and the Father (with God, duty, and law never far behind). “These systems, even when they are based on radical indeterminacy (the loss of meaning), fall

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prey, once more, to meaning. They collapse under the weight of their own monstrosity, like fossilised dinosaurs, and immediately decompose.” 15 Under the “paranoiac despotic sign,” the last Europeans become expert morticians, covering up the stench of decomposition with the beguiling perfumes of “archaism . . . and neoarchaism”16 while Paris burns. Difference ensures monopolistic relations of exchange. The white face always wins out. To be different is to be “merely different—that is to say, dangerously similar.” Capitalist relations of difference, guaranteed through the violently enforced protectionism of western colonial expansion, ensure the one-way genetic flow from West to East. But now all of this is pure Euro-fantasy. The European Community is a semisealed bunker, a mixed economy buttressing the putrefying remains of the socius against insurgent K-commerce. “Racism is modern. Previous races were ignored or eliminated, but never under the sign of a universal Reason. There is no criterion of man, no split from the Inhuman, there are only differences with which to oppose death. But it is our undifferentiated concept of man which gives rise to discrimination.”17 Racism emerges as a, by no means arbitrary, side-effect of (European) modernity’s drive to universality. Modern power functions not by the partitioning off of otherness but by rendering it impossible via the opening up of a generalized humanity under the sign of a transcendent norm: the white male subject. (And there is no subject that is not white and male.) European racism as the white man’s claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies that the stranger is grasped as the “other.” Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavours to incorporate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto, sometimes erasing them from the wall, which never abides alterity (it’s a Jew, it’s an Arab, it’s a Negro, it’s a lunatic . . .). From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be. Racism never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out (or those who only allow themselves to be identified at a given degree of divergence). Its cruelty is equalled only by its incompetence and naiveté.18

Constituted only by divergence in relation to the assumed gold standard of (European) identity, difference is in no way subversive of the White Man Face’s claims to universality. Neither is “Otherness,” so long as it is construed, in dialectical or poststructuralist terms, as a complementary or supplementary component of an identitary structure. Simply proliferating

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identities or even pointing to the differences within particular identities does nothing to disturb the facializing machinery of European subjectivity. It is now easy for us to characterise the nomad thought that . . . does things differently. It does not ally itself with a universal thinking subject but, on the contrary, a singular race; and it does not ground itself in an allencompassing totality but is on the contrary deployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, desert or sea. An entirely different type of adequation is established here, between the race defined as “tribe” and smooth space defined as “milieu.” A tribe in the desert instead of a universal subject within the horizon of all-encompassing Being.19

Defending smooth space is by no means the same thing as defending (an) identity; in fact, the defense of smooth space depends upon a resistance to identitarianism and its settled codes, an affirmation of (fluid) becoming as opposed to (static) being. “Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins.”20 What is always already bastard, marginal, minoritarian is switched on. As Arthur Rimbaud has it: “I have always been of an inferior race. . . . I am of an inferior race for all eternity. . . . There I am on the Breton shore. . . . I am a beast, a nigger. . . . I am of a distant race: my ancestors were Norsemen.”21 “We murdered all this but now it infects our blood, into which it has been inexorably transfused and infiltrated.” The sovereign other’s “viral, spectral presence in the synapses of our brains, in the circuitry of our rocketship”22 makes clear, not some arcane postmodern retro-trashed nostalgia for the past but rather the immanent feedback of the future: Euro-vulnerability confronted head-on, to be devoured, savaged in a cannibalistic frenzy of “techno-economic interactivity.” 23 “No homily of reconciliation or apologia for difference” is going to save us now.24 The sovereign other: All other cultures are extraordinarily hospitable, their ability to absorb is phenomenal. Whereas we waver between the other as prey and the other as shadow, between predation pure and simple and an idealizing recognition, other cultures still retain the capacity to incorporate what comes to them from without, including what comes from our western universe, into their rules of the game.25

These cultures are sovereign precisely in Bataille’s—dissipative—terms, their radical generosity and cannibalistic ability to absorb contrasting with the possessive and boundary-conserving parsimony of the western individual. Xenogenesis: this is Octavia Butler’s name for the end of humanity not in apocalyptic annihilation but in trade, absorption by the sovereign other.26 Although Butler is concerned with gene trading (identity warping

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in the most graphic sense), she draws attention to the way in which all trade dissolves identitary boundaries. Identity imagines itself as an essence, unchanging over time, protected by a putatively impermeable skin, but “even the most reliable Western individuated bodies, the mice and men of a well-equipped laboratory, neither stop nor start at the skin, which is itself something of a teeming jungle threatening illicit fusions, especially from the perspective of a scanning electron microscope.”27 Trade always contaminates cultural purity: flows of goods disrupt both the temporal continuity and spatial boundedness on which identity is predicated. “The strength of the Japanese lies in the kind of hospitality they accord to technology and to all forms of modernity (just as, in the past, they opened their doors to religion and writing). . . . Japanese culture is thus a cannibalistic form—assimilating, absorbing, aping, devouring.”28 Precisely because they do not live by the illusion of a universal law, [other cultures] are not rendered oversensitive as we are, who are constantly being commanded to internalize the law and to make ourselves the origin of our own selves, tastes and pleasures. Primitive cultures do not burden themselves with pretensions of this order. Being oneself means nothing to them: everything comes from the Other. There is no such thing as oneself, nor is there any call for such a thing.29

Western history is all about the oedipalized subject, the possessive individual for whom the whole world becomes a screen on which to project his own dreary dramas of guilt and redemption. “We have abolished ‘elsewhere.’ . . . Nothing can come from anywhere except from us. This is, in a way, the most absolute misfortune.”30 We hanker after an understanding of other cultures in order to guarantee our own survival, but this is an illusion. To understand is simply to differentiate once again, to make reasonable what is wholly unreasoned, to reclaim our identity. The sovereign other knows that exercise to be unreservedly futile and cruel. The first thing the sovereign other steals is your children or your ability to reproduce offspring like yourself. Since Butler’s gene traders have no identity (they are defined not by what they are but what they absorb), what loses out when they splice themselves with humanity is identity itself, the majoritarian norm. The gene traders are radically hospitable: what for human beings can only be apprehended in identitary terms as “hybridity” and experienced as species destruction is for them a mode of exchange, a kind of love. In contrast, from its own point of view, the White Man Face is already finished as soon as it is forced to miscegenate: the moment you’re not allwhite, you’re black. Fear of a black planet. The moment there’s anything animal, machinelike, or female in you, you’re not human. Man, “the west[’s] highest product,” defines himself precisely as “the one who is not

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animal, barbarian, or woman,”31 but at the end of his history there awaits only werewolf transformation, cyberfeminization, and racial mutation. Scribbled lines from Rimbaud anticipate planetary molecularization: “No I am not of your kind, I am the outsider and the deterritorialized, ‘I am of a race inferior for all eternity. . . . I am a beast, a Negro.’”32 It is nonlinearity that liquidates subjectivity: the collapse of inside and outside, center and periphery, into an immanent network of promiscuous interconnection. “The rhizome connects any point to any other point,”33 burrowing out of fixed structuration to engineer unregulated channels of communication. Black markets, marketization as insurgent blackness: the disintegration of the White Man Face will occur in impersonal telecommercialism. Trade is the secret underside of Hegelian progressive history. Even total exterminations bring particles of the other, unperceived, back into the midst of the West, the slave trade injecting the black genome into the white gene pool, infecting western culture with Africanness: “the centre itself is the true nomad, it is where all cultures come to exchange their moments and to lose themselves”;34 the United States is a “fragment of the Third World that has succeeded and has preserved its immense zones of underdevelopment”;35 “the veins of Latin America opened up by C.I.A. mobsters and generations of foreign policy bureaucrats in starched shirts are bleeding northwards, pumping the Third World into the heart of Los Angeles.”36 Rejecting the leftist impulse to “withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist ‘economic solution,’” Deleuze and Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus recommends accelerated marketization as the “revolutionary path.”37 The economic solution is always a final solution. Merging Rousseau-nostalgia with Parisian structuralism, they use Cambodia to show that the only way back to year zero is via genocide. The war on markets is a war on emergent complexity. “In comparison to the capitalist State, the socialist States are children, but children who have learned something from their father about the axiomatizing role of the State. But the socialist States have more trouble stopping unexpected flow leakage except by direct violence.” 38 Capitalism learns to go with the flow, but in the end the flows spin out of its control. Deleuze and Guattari track capitalism’s inevitable collapse not into a resurgent socialist commune but into a global K-market: the body without organs as telecommercialized deterritorium. Initially parasitic upon state-friendly “Western capitalism,” with which it is mistakenly equated, Kmarketization slides its tendrils into the heart of civilization, coolly rendering national sovereignty redundant and supranational (Europe-wide) sovereignty stillborn. The economy migrates to smooth (cyber)space, and the common antimarket disintegrates into bickering and nostalgia; meanwhile, India and China wait in the wings.

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As sino-pacific boom and automized global economic integration crashes the neo-colonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis. Hyper-fluid capital deterritorialising to the planetary level divests the first world of geographical privilege; resulting in EuroAmerican neo-mercantilist panic reaction, welfare state deterioration, cancering enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse and the release of cultural toxins that speed-up the process of disintegration.39

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The destruction of identity is immanent to the process of unmediated exchange. K-commerce accelerates the death of corporate security systems engendering absolute contamination. Paranoiac reaction not withstanding, cancer devours the body’s organs. Identity’s own logic dematerializes to the point where “eventually we can glimpse the time of man’s definitive universality that will coincide with the excommunication of all men—the purity of the concept alone radiant in the void.”40 Meanwhile, hypermaterialism junks humanity by tracking the transpersonal material processes that dissipate oedipalized subjectivity, resulting in identity crash—what Deleuze and Guattari term “schizophrenia.” While deconstruction conducts an interminable autopsy on the calcified relics of structure, cybernetics diagrams the pulsing engines of system, discovering networks, emergent properties, and feedback loops. Out of the ruins of the western (Hegelian) teleologic, predators and replicants, “rejoicing in the illegitimate functions of animal and machine,”41 feed on the detritus of identity, rewiring politics into pragmatics, remixing memory into desire. Just as what we deem fatal in catastrophes is the world’s sovereign indifference to us, so what we deem fatal in seduction is the Other’s sovereign otherness with respect to us. . . . This other, when it makes its appearance, is immediately in possession of everything that it will never be given us to know. This other is thus not . . . as in alienation, the locus of our difference . . . the obscure model of what we lack. Rather, this other is the locus of what escapes us, and the way whereby we escape ourselves.42 NOTES

1. Paul Virilio, “Aliens,” trans. Brian Massumi, in Zone: Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 446. 2. Predator 2, 1990, directed by Stephen Hopkins, 20th Century Fox, with film references. 3. William H. McNeill, Plagues & Peoples (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 208–209. 4. Ibid., 208. 5. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 3–4.

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6. Henri-Pierre Jeudy, Social Overload (New York: Autonomedia, 1994), 77–78. 7. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 18. 8. Jeudy, Social Overload, 72. 9. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Vintage, 1992), 310. 10. Mayor James Van Horn of Artesia, California, quoted in Davis, City of Quartz, 268. 11. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Bendict (London: Verso, 1993), 379. 12. Nick Land, “Cybergothic,” unpublished paper, 2. 13. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 379. 14. Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 49–50. 15. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 4. 16. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 260. 17. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 125. 18. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 178. 19. Ibid., 379. 20. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 177. 21. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 379. 22. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 137–138. 23. Nick Land, “Meltdown,” unpublished paper, 1. 24. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 138. 25. Ibid. 26. Octavia Butler, Dawn: Xenogenesis (New York: Warner Books, 1987). 27. Donna Haraway, “Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 215 28. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 143–144. 29. Ibid., 142. 30. Ibid., 143–144. 31. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 156. 32. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 105. 33. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21. 34. Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Passages from Le Mur du Pacifique,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992), 62. 35. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 231. 36. Peter McLaren, Critical Pedagogy and Predatory Culture: Oppositional Politics in a Postmodern Era (London: Routledge, 1995), 9. 37. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 239. 38. Ibid., 236. 39. Land, “Meltdown,” 6. 40. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 125. 41. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 176. 42. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 174.

7 Hybridization: The Im/Purity of the Political Aletta J. Norval

Reflecting on the intersecting forces that have fostered his sense of identity, ranging from being black and African in the middle of the twentieth century to being Igbo and from a small town, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has the following to say: Is the poor fellow stretched by competing claims on a painful rack of rival antagonistic identities? I regret I cannot report any intolerable stress or excitement. Perhaps it is my Igbo inheritance which comes to my aid by upholding so insistently the notion of plurality. . . . Perhaps it all goes back to the Igbo relationship to the pantheon of their gods and goddesses. . . . The Yoruba . . . may have 400 gods in their pantheon but no one need be a devotee of more than one of them. The Igbo grants no such reprieve. They have to worship all their gods all of the time. . . . So Igbo culture teaches if you can.1

Achebe’s remarks take us right into the heart of contemporary debates on the nature of identity. Tejumola Olaniyan, in an article entitled “AfricanAmerican Critical Discourse and the Invention of Cultural Identities,” rather admirably summarizes the main features of two distinct discourses that can be discerned in debates on cultural identity and difference.2 He calls them the sacred and the profane. The basic assumption underlying a sacred conception of cultural identity is that culture is a given totality, separated and separable from other cultures with the exactness of “a puritanical slide rule.” The constitutive elements of culture, in this reading, are taken to be noncontradictory and nonantagonistic; in short, monolithic. This homogeneity underwrites the category of difference from other cultures as a difference that is absolute, closed, and impenetrable. Profane discourse, however, insists on the historicity, on the “madeness” of culture and, therefore, on the inventedness of every identity. Culture is conceived as a com99

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plicated articulation of often mutually contradictory, antagonistic elements, such that neither the end result (culture) nor its constitutive elements possess any necessary character.3 In this sense, cultural identity cannot be conceived as closed and positive but exists as fragile and vulnerable, as hybrid and nonpure. Profane discourse thus insists on the nonpurity or hybridity of identity. It is important in this respect to clarify the logically possible dimensions of “hybridity” and their relation to practices of articulation. I take it that hybridity can be understood in a variety of ways, ranging from a mixture of two essentially pure identities to an assertion of the original nonpurity of all forms of identification. If the first is taken as a model for thinking hybridity, then we encounter first the assertion of two or more pure or sacred identities that only later become corrupted. Here only a very limited role can be attributed to articulation, for a process of articulation can in this case be understood only in the sense of a putting together of two already formed (essential) identities. It is difficult to see how hybridity can come into existence at all in this case, for if both are fully constituted identities, the process of putting them together can only consist in the elimination of one of them. If the second is taken as a model, the emphasis tends to fall on the theorization of an originary impurity of identity. In this case, it seems as if articulation becomes more central. But if hybridity is asserted as a general condition of all identity—on either historical or theoretical grounds—it is simply given; there seems to be little need for its articulation or construction. Several problems regarding the exact status and implications of such a position remain to be addressed. For instance, what, if anything, can be derived from the claim that all identity is always already “impure”? Does that claim also entail the further assertion that such impure identity is “experienced” as impure? And what would that involve? Could any political conclusions be drawn from it? In a sense, my aim in this chapter is to attempt to work through these and related questions. To anticipate my response in general terms, I argue—through a reading of these themes in the literatures associated largely with questions of postcoloniality, difference, and marginality—that it is necessary to open up a certain space between the thought of hybridity and its articulation, if satisfactory answers to these problems are to be provided. HYBRIDITY AND POSTCOLONIALITY

Why the emphasis on postcoloniality? Because it is in this terrain that the question of hybrid identity is first encountered, and perhaps more perti-

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nently, it is a terrain that explicitly characterizes itself as more properly, more openly, political than the terrain of postmodernism with which it shares a number of concerns.4 However, in what precisely does this “more proper” sense of the political consist? The terrain of discussions now characterized as postcolonial reemerged during the 1980s from within debates in literary theory departments and is indicative of a shift away from “English studies” as a privileged norm that acted as a template for the denial of the value of the “peripheral,” the “marginal,” and the “uncanonized.”5 Politically, it has been argued, this terrain was aligned with a liberal strategy of incorporation and assimilation of all the elements of postcolonial literature that may have seemed threatening to the dominance of the privileged norm.6 What was first called colonial discourse analysis and later postcolonialism concerned itself with processes of “othering” that operated in texts of colonial discourse and can thus be argued to follow a trajectory very similar to that of Edward Said’s analysis of Orientalism. This general field is occupied by various and very different modes of critical analysis. I want to focus on only one of them: the “model” that argues for features such as hybridity and syncretism as constitutive elements of all postcolonial literatures and, more broadly speaking, of the condition of postcoloniality as such.7 Here Homi Bhabha’s work is exemplary. However, I ought to make clear from the start that what I am concerned with is less the specificity of the literary field than the de facto extension of the mode of analysis to a far wider set of concerns. It may be useful to start, retroactively, from a series of problematizations to which this model of postcoloniality, as an occupation with fragmentation, nonpurity, and hybridity, has been subjected. I do so in order to distinguish different types of critique from one another as well as to enact a process of dissociation from a number of those problematizations. When working in this field, one immediately has a sense that “there are problems everywhere” with this picture of postcoloniality.8 Let me reiterate some of them. Benita Parry, together with a number of other critics, sees one of the foremost problems of such a picture as an “erasure of agency.”9 For her, the privileging of the colonial text—which on her reading follows directly from the deconstructive impulse animating this picture—inevitably either erases the voice of “the native” or limits “native resistance” to devices circumventing and interrogating colonial authority. 10 The “occluding of reverse discourses,” for her, obliterates the role of “the native” as historical subject and combatant, possessor of an-other knowledge and producer of alternative traditions. The protocols of Gayatri Spivak and Bhabha, she argues, thus act to “constrain the development of an anti-imperialist critique.”11 This complaint, in fact, subsumes two quite different problems

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under one heading. The first concerns the question of agency and how it is to be theorized (in general, and not just with reference to postcoloniality), and the second, the problem of how to think about resistance in relation to subjectivity.12 I will return to this problem, for it forms the central axis of my argument on Bhabha’s conceptualization of hybridity. Following on from this line of criticism, theorists like Abdul JanMohammed criticize Bhabha’s work along similar lines. The latter’s fetishization and celebration of “ambivalence” and “indeterminacy” for JanMohammed can only be understood as “a product of deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist duplicity.”13 The wider charge here is that the entire dense history of the material conflict between Europeans and natives is circumvented. Theorists of postcoloniality and Bhabha more specifically are thus charged not only with erasing “agency” but with erasing history as well.14 Continuing the theme of the treatment of history in writings on postcolonialism, Anne McClintock has more recently argued that these writings reenact tropes of linear progress, thus reinforcing rather than subverting the boundaries and binaries of self/other, metropolis/ colony, center/periphery, and colonial/postcolonial.15 She complains that a binary axis of power (colonizer/colonized) is replaced with a binary axis of time, “an axis even less productive of political nuance since it does not distinguish between the beneficiaries of colonialism (the ex-colonizers) and the casualties of colonialism (the ex-colonized).”16 Like others, she also argues, correctly in my view, that there is a tendency to singularization and historical abstraction in talk about “the postcolonial condition,” “the postcolonial intellectual,” and “the postcolonial other,” such that the singular category postcolonial licenses too readily a panoptic tendency to view the globe within generic abstractions voided of political nuance. The solution McClintock offers, however, falls back into an uncritical revaluation of history by enumerating instances of both continued colonization and continued subjection of real women. The argument against the tendency of postcolonial theory to obliterate differences in historical experience is a valuable one. However, theoretical problems are not solved by invoking historical examples or “real people.”17 Writings on postcoloniality and hybridity are also plagued by criticisms of their use of theory. Bhabha, for instance, has been repeatedly castigated for employing “the transcendental categories of psychoanalysis for the analysis of the historical phenomena of colonialism.”18 Such arguments usually take two forms. The first charges that certain categories, be they drawn from psychoanalysis or from any other body of theory, are “western” in essence and cannot, therefore, be applied to “nonwestern” contexts. The second asserts that they lead to a “timeless characterization” that, as a result of its generality, would hold good for all historical periods and contexts.19

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Another attempt to address the lack of internal nuances in the category of postcolonialism can be found in the writings of Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, who shift the terrain of discussion from historical stages to that of ideological formations.20 In this manner, they distinguish sharply between two kinds of postcolonialism—oppositional post-colonialism and “complicit postcolonialism”—distinguished from one another not only by the presence/absence of a hyphen but also by the valuation attributed to each. Oppositional, or “good,” post-colonialism for these authors always has at its heart three fundamental principles (racism, second language, and political struggle) that are absent in complicit postcolonialism. Complicit postcolonialism, by contrast, takes a postmodern form: it celebrates subversion, hybridity, and syncretism, which continue to operate at the level of the grand narrative of postcolonialism.21 A consequence of this form of postcolonialism, they argue, is that it leaves one unable to distinguish between “real” post-colonial societies (nonsettler colonies) and complicit postcolonial societies (settler colonies). For these authors, all the terms associated with theories of postcolonialism—subversion, pluralism, hybridization—can be put into question by their ignorance of the “material conditions which give rise to postcolonial difference.” For example, within the domain of literature, the category of subversion not only becomes the distinguishing mark of the postcolonial experience, but it can also be applied—and this for Mishra and Hodge clearly is where the problem lies—without change, to tendencies within the canon itself. Their problem is that this would do away with, or subvert, the specificity of the postcolonial. It follows from this position that concepts should contain substantive references that would disallow such dispersion and, yes, subversion, of dominant literary or political traditions. The same goes for hybridity, syncretism, and so forth. This policing of the boundaries of postcolonialism leads very quickly to a hardening of the distinction between the good and the bad, the oppositional and the complicit. This disallows a reading back of the effects of subversion into the metropole because, in these authors’ view, such a reading back would simply amount to reasserting the dominance of colonial theory and would inhibit more nuanced readings of the relation between colony and metropole and between dominant and subversive traditions. Although many of the issues raised in these criticisms may have some pertinence, it is quite clear that they cannot be resolved either by a simple rejection of notions of hybridity or by a reassertion of “real,” brute history and the dominance of “practice” over “theory.” Many of the criticisms rehearsed here, as I have indicated, have some bearing on Bhabha’s work, which was seminal in the dissemination of the idea of hybridity, and there are problems—apart from those real or imagined just enumerated—that remain unsolved, and it is to these that I now turn.

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AMBIVALENT HYBRIDITY

Bhabha’s work has been criticized on a number of counts that may be relevant to the previous discussions. For instance, the tendency in his work to move too easily from a particular text or enunciative act to a theory of all colonial discourse has been singled out for severe criticism, and so has his purported ignorance of history and especially the history of colonial encounters as it took place “outside” literary texts. I want, however, to focus in more closely on the ambivalent and ever-expanding usage of the idea of hybridity in his work and on its political consequences. At least two, and quite possibly even more, distinct senses of the term can be discerned in his work. At the outset, and before outlining them, it is important to state that Bhabha explicitly disavows an understanding of hybridity as a “third term” that resolves the tension between two cultures. For Bhabha, colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures that can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism:22 hybridity is never simply a question of the admixture of pre-given identities or essences. Hybridity is the perplexity of the living as it interrupts the representation of the fullness of life; it is an instance of iteration, in the minority discourse, of the time of the arbitrary sign . . . through which all forms of cultural meaning are open to translation because their enunciation resists totalization.23

Hybridity is that which allows for the contestation of the coincidence of colonial discourse with itself, that which subverts the discourse’s presumed unitary nature and thus questions its assumed authority. It addresses the problematic of colonial representation produced in the moment of the (colonial) utterance. In short, the splitting of the subject in the moment of enunciation is the condition of possibility of all subjectivation. 24 Discrimination between the mother culture and its bastards, the self and its doubles, for instance, presupposes that the trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different—a mutation, a hybrid. Hybridity thus marks the identity both of the colonized and the colonizer. Having thus run ahead of myself, the first usage of hybridity is already outlined. I repeat: the effect of colonial power is seen to be the inevitable production of hybridization (rather than the command of colonial authority), and this hybridization is at the root of the possibility of subversion founded on uncertainty. In Bhabha’s words, it “turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention.” Two important consequences have to be drawn out at this point: (1) the emphasis on the penetration of hybrid logics into both the identities of the colonizer and the

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colonized, and (2) the emphasis on “intervention.” The question as to what follows from such an assertion of an original splitting of the subject from itself or from the difference that inaugurates all identity is left open, but it is an openness that marks the space of an intervention. In this reading, postcolonial criticism bears witness to the “unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority,” and it intervenes in a field of critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination.25 From this initial moment of hybridity, the postcolonial emerges as a space of contestation that resists a “liberal” and consensual sense of cultural community; it insists that “cultural and political identity are constructed through a process of alterity.”26 Whereas, for Bhabha, (liberal) conceptions of cultural diversity take culture as an object of empirical investigation and operate with a historically linear conception of time, the cultural difference that emerges on the postcolonial scene results from a process of enunciation through which statements of culture and on culture “differentiate, discriminate and authorize the production of fields of force, reference, applicability, and capacity.”27 It is only once we understand that “all cultural statements and systems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation, that we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or ‘purity’ of cultures are untenable, even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate their hybridity.”28 From this reading, which initially stems from the theorization of the hybrid relation between colonizer and colonized, is then developed a picture of postcolonialism that “lives on the border lines” of our present. This view theorizes in-between spaces, interstices in which the subject is formed such that any conception of identity as pregiven is set aside; binary logics of self and other are questioned in favor of a reflection on the interstitial “passage between fixed identifications that open up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.”29 These reflections on difference also lead Bhabha to articulate a different conception of historical time as iteration that problematizes the binary divisions of past/present and tradition/modernity at the level of cultural representation.30 With iteration, it is a problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated, and translated. This emphasis unequivocally subverts and refuses the possibility of a return to a pure origin or an originary past. In contrast to a celebration of the idea of the fragmentation of grand narratives,31 for Bhabha the wider significance of the postmodern condition lies in the fact that the limits of ethnocentric ideas thus shown are also “the enunciative boundaries of a range of other dissonant, even dissident histories and voices—women, the colonised,

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minority groups, the bearers of policed sexualities.”32 In this sense, the boundaries become the place from which something “new” begins. It is a place that for Bhabha is marked by a certain unhomeliness, which may be characterized as “living on the borderlines of our present.” This thought can be further explicated by reference to Bhabha’s understanding of our relation to the present and to tradition. Instead of deriving its power from a given, static, solidified tradition, the articulation of social difference—from a minority perspective—reinscribes tradition through a sense of contingency and contradictoriness (that attend upon the lives of those who are in the minority).33 This immediately puts into question the possibility of access to an originary identity or received tradition. For Bhabha, social differences are not given through the experience and tradition of an already authenticated cultural tradition. Rather, they are signs of “the emergence of community envisaged as a project.”34 It is a vision, and thus a construction, that takes one “beyond” oneself in order to return to the present in a spirit of revision and reconstruction. What, then, is this space of the beyond? The beyond is characterized as a process of repetition, which necessarily involves disjunction and displacement. The present is no longer a break or a bonding with past and future; it is already marked as the space where something “new” begins that does not seek to totalize experience. Identity, present, community, history: all are thought in terms of iterability or the possibility of repetition; repeatability is the condition that fundamentally marks all those signifiers and thus shows the impossibility of a pure, originary identity or community. These sites of the enactment of cultural difference for Bhabha already presuppose that which is most characteristic of our contemporary condition: dislocation, displacement, uncertainty, unhomeliness. The unhomely, says Bhabha, is paradigmatic of the colonial and postcolonial condition.35 However, here already some real shifts have begun to take place. Bhabha argues, on the one hand, that such unhomeliness/hybridity characterizes both the identities of the colonizer and the colonized, both dominant and subordinate discourses. On the other hand, a slight shift, with radical implications, occurs as soon as the “wider significance” of this idea of hybridity is drawn out. In this second sense, the hybridity is associated with a recovery of specific dissonant voices—of women, the colonized, aberrant sexualities, and so forth—that seek to “authorize” cultural hybridity. There is a certain “right”—and this is strong language—to “signify from the periphery of authorized power,” from the position of a minority.36 Thus, the condition of postcoloniality authorizing hybridity no longer operates on the general terrain of the splitting of the subject—where it was equally applicable to colonizer and colonized—but instead becomes substantively occupied, and this is an occupation by right, that is, de jure, by “minorities.”

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It is precisely at this point, as the result of a certain untheorized decision, that the celebration of the postcolonial as hybrid becomes entrenched in a set of problems that Bhabha’s work does not even begin to address.37 It is also at this point that the idea of hybridity, although in some respects infinitely more sophisticated, falls into the same trap as that of a simplistic celebration of “fragmentation.” Let me take the argument step by step. In outlining the first sense of hybridity, I suggested that there were two consequences of significance. They were that the splitting of the subject, which “grounds” hybridity, is a generalized phenomenon. It penetrates all identity. The second was that this hybridity, or undecidability, opened a space for intervention, that is, an open (or unrealized) possibility.38 Now, what occurs in the movement toward an articulation of hybridity’s wider significance is that Bhabha fills both the general possibilities with specific entities. The notion of hybridity is aligned, in the first place, with “minority” identities. As a result, the generality of the logic is occluded and so is the generality of its possible subversive effects.39 That is, the postcolonial subject is reinscribed as a precise, named singularity, coinciding with the “subaltern subject,” and the space of intervention is now a space that is occupied by right. No argument for this movement is presented. It is simply asserted, as if it follows by nature. Several difficulties open up from these naturalized assertions. Let me illustrate this with an example. Bhabha holds that the general experience of a certain displacement or diaspora, the “living on border lines” that characterizes the postcolonial condition, inexorably leads to a “progressive” thought of hybrid identity. However, one has to pause here and ask: why should this be the case? Are there no other possible responses to this experience? What does one make of the contemporary reassertions of sacred identities? Take, for example, the case of Serbian nationalism. Bhabha takes this “hideous extremity” to be proof of the very idea that a pure, “ethnically cleansed” (or sacred) identity can only be achieved through the death, literally and figuratively, of the complex interweaving of history and the culturally contingent borderline of modern nationhood. Although one is naturally in agreement with this sentiment, this agreement cannot be used to cover over the lack of argumentation here. Not for a moment does Bhabha contemplate the possibility that this hideous nationalism may have emerged precisely out of those conditions that he argues are the markers of our postcolonial time: migration, cultural and political diaspora, major social displacements, and so forth. At this point, a possible response could be to assert, as Bhabha does, that the terrain of postcolonialism by right excludes such assertions. But then we are back to the position of a Mishra

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and a Hodge who are policing between good and bad, oppositional and complicit postcolonialisms. The result of this would be that the argument concerning identity as hybrid can no longer be extended to dominant discourses and thus would lose its value as a general subversive logic. That such hideous possibilities are unthinkable for Bhabha arises out of the obliteration of the movement from the space of hybridity to that of politics. To put it differently, the deeply pervasive valorization of all subjectivities that could be characterized as minorities in his writings works inexorably against any differentiation between such minorities. Consequently, Bhabha ends up with a list of subjects—women, colonized populations, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and so forth—who are all lumped together and leveled down to a homogeneous totality.40 This gesture, made in the name of difference, in fact obliterates difference. Moreover, as demonstrated clearly in the Serbian example, the possibility of critique, of a critical valuation of positionality, is erased. Again, in the name of a defense of interruption and subversion, differences are ignored with possibly disastrous political consequences, disastrous because the very moment of political articulation and intervention, given so much importance in other places, is circumvented in the haste to subscribe to all that falls under the rubric of minorities. Equally important is the fact that once this has occurred, it is no longer possible to contemplate the abyssal “experience” of such dislocation, which may lead either to a celebration of unfixity and impurity or to a reassertion of sacred identities. Bhabha—and here I have to side with critics such as Ahmad—quite simply forgets that the experience of displacement may also be articulated not as plenitude but as torment.41 A further example may make the problem encountered here even clearer. In his discussion of literature that captures this sense of unhomeliness, Bhabha uses the example of the work of Nadine Gordimer, a South African novelist, to argue that the unhomely moment can be seen in the condition of being “colored” in South Africa: without definition, a halfway house of racial and cultural origins, “the coloured South African subject represents a hybridity, a difference ‘within,’ a subject that inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality.” 42 Without going into the painful reality of the constitution of colored identity in apartheid discourse, which was precisely responsible for the trauma accompanying it, and without going into the attempts to articulate “being colored” as “being black,” the problem with this conflation of an ontological condition of all identity with a “liberatory” or critical space is abundantly clear. If that conflation is to be avoided, then it seems to me one could return to the first understanding of hybridization articulated by Bhabha, namely that hybridity, or impurity, affects all identity constitutively. As I have argued, this reading opens the space or marks the possibility of an interven-

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tion but does not also already fill it with a particular content. The problem in Bhabha’s work, and this also holds for a variety of writings that are produced under the banner of postcoloniality, is that the movement from the general conception of subjectivity and the generalized openness that accompanies it is erased in favor of a filling of that space with particular subjectivities, which are always already presupposed to entail a “subversive” politics. Before proceeding to say something more about that occluded movement, it is necessary briefly to address the question of a generalized model of subjectivity. A number of Bhabha’s critics have argued that the use of any transcendental categories is problematic.43 Robert Young, for example, puts it in the following terms: Bhabha’s concern is to demonstrate an ambivalence in colonial and colonizing subjects . . . according to the conflictual economy of the psyche. . . . The difficulty, however, politically speaking, is that such an analysis cannot but be equally applicable to colonized as to colonizer.44

This objection captures the essence of the problem at stake here: since hybridity as general condition is not separated from its political articulation, it becomes difficult to make an a priori distinction between the subjectivity and discourse of the colonizer and that of the colonized. What bothers Young, and what leads him to assert that the general conception of subjectivity is a problem, is precisely the fact that on such a reading it would not be possible to maintain the “purity” of the subversive position of the colonized. In order to maintain a political difference, Young thus falls back on an ahistorical decontextualized demand for it. Against a general theory of subjectivity that will not allow for an a priori assertion of political difference, Young calls for another general theory (one that would allow us to assert the subversive effects of all minority discourses). With this, the space of intervention is closed off; no political articulation would be necessary any longer. As I have argued, it is precisely this blindness to the necessity of articulation that constitutes the most serious problem in Bhabha’s work. Not only is it not necessary, but it is also not desirable to foreclose this moment because the very possibility of thinking and theorizing the idea of an intervention, and thus of resistance, only becomes possible insofar as this hybrid, undecidable space is opened up. And this, of course, takes us to the terrain of hegemony, which, while recognizing the contingency of any political articulation and therefore of any identity, nevertheless concerns itself with the forms and practices through which a partial and precarious fixation of identity may come into being. It is only once we are on this terrain that it becomes possible to reopen the question as to what may follow from the thought of hybridity. My answer to this question must be clear by

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now: nothing, save the possibility of intervention, follows from it. What forms such intervention may take and whether they will be regarded as subversive or not depend entirely on their political articulation. This is what I believe the very idea of hybridity or of undecidability in Derrida’s sense entails: that it is an open but not indeterminate terrain allowing in principle for a nondetermined political articulation.45 This line of argument brings us back to one of the other problems referred to earlier with respect to Bhabha’s work, namely the relation between the ambivalence of the colonial text and the articulation of resistance. Following Young, I have pointed out that Bhabha vacillates between presenting his work as a description of a forgotten moment of historical resistance and presenting it as a reading that renders visible an “inarticulate resistance.”46 If one takes the position that I have defended here, namely that such ambivalence is to be regarded as a site of possible resistance and that resistance itself is a second moment that may or may not utilize that possibility, then one will no longer be forced to make a choice between the two moments, wrongly conceived of as incommensurable. That is to say, it is always, in principle, possible to show the constitutive undecidability of any discourse, and that holds both for dominant and resistance discourses. But whether or not that undecidability is made visible and whether or not such visibility has subversive effects remains, strictu sensu, an issue that could only be settled by further historico-political investigation. Hence, it is important to distinguish between the de jure presence of a certain nonclosure in all discourse—its undecidability—and the de facto resolution of that undecidability—the moment of the “decision,” of the resuturing of the terrain. It is also important to keep in mind that in my opinion, the resolution or decision, which will always have a partial and contestable character, stands in an uneasy relation to the terrain of the undecidable. It bears a relation to it since the decision has of necessity to intervene in the terrain in which it is set and to which it is a response. But this is an uneasy relation for, precisely as a result of the undecidability of the terrain, it will not and cannot simply follow from it. It has to be articulated, and this articulation can take many different forms depending upon the precise context in which it is effected. At this point it is necessary to return to the characterization of two logics of identity with which I opened the discussion: the sacred and the profane. The point is that the thought of hybridity/undecidability can lead to either, and which option is taken depends entirely on the political articulation that takes place. The presence of a certain nonclosure of subjectivity thus does not inexorably lead to “profanity” or “hybridity” in the second sense in which Bhabha deploys the term. Having said this, it is important also to question the simple assertion of a profane identity. If simply assert-

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ed as an essential impurity of identity that celebrates itself as such, it no longer can be thought in terms of a “living on border lines.” Another alternative would be to think of hybridity as an experience of thinking the inbetween, the border line itself. Rather than a celebration of impurity, it would imply a difficult, never-ending negotiation between purity and impurity, which cannot be resolved decisively in either direction. This thought, however, does not simply follow from, nor is it entailed by, the undecidability of the terrain. It has to be articulated; it has to be thought of as a political project. Nothing thus follows automatically from the experience of dislocation that is held to be characteristic of our age. Minority subjects do not naturally or necessarily adhere to a celebration of “unhomeliness.” As the quote from Achebe, with which I started, makes clear, one has to learn to live with, and enjoy, the impossible. NOTES

1. Chinua Achebe, “Words of Anxious Love,” Review Guardian May 7, 1992: 11 (emphasis added). 2. Tejumola Olaniyan, “African-American Critical Discourse and the Invention of Cultural Identities,” African American Review 26, no. 4 (1992): 536–537. 3. I use articulation here in the sense in which the term has been theorized by Laclau and Mouffe. They define “articulation” as “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice.” See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 105. It is important to note that this theorization already presupposes the nonclosure and thus nonessential character of any element. Moreover, articulation is a social practice, which puts together elements with no necessary belonging. 4. There exists a large literature on the relation between postcolonialism, or the condition of postcoloniality as some prefer to call it, and postmodernism. Broadly speaking, some authors posit an essentially antagonistic relation between the two fields, whereas others acknowledge areas of convergence without conflating them. My position comes closest to that articulated by Grewal and Kaplan, namely that postmodernism all too often has been associated with a problematic, excessively aestheticized celebration of Western popular culture. Cf. I. Grewal and C. Kaplan, “Introduction: Transnational Feminist Practices and Questions of Postmodernity,” in Scattered Hegemonies, ed. Grewal and Kaplan (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 4–9. 5. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffen, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 3. For a discussion of a precursor of this debate in political theory, which concentrated on the form of the postcolonial state, see A. Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” Race and Class 36, no. 3 (1995): 1–7. 6. Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” 4. Benita Parry, in “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987), makes a similar point.

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7. Much ink has been spilled on the question of what may count as postcolonial literature. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffen have argued, for instance, that the term postcolonial should cover “all cultures affected by the imperial process” and so would include African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, New Zealand, and the United States. See Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, 2. Others like Ahmad complain that the effect of such usage is to evacuate the very meaning of the word and to disperse “that meaning so wide that we can no longer speak of determinate histories of determinate structures such as that of the postcolonial state.” Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” 9. 8. “There are problems everywhere” is used in the sense in which Wittgenstein argued about the Augustinian picture of language. In other words, what is at stake here is not simply criticism of this or of that appropriation of the term but, more fundamentally, with the very term itself. 9. Edward Said’s work has been subjected to criticisms of a similar sort. 10. Parry, “Problems in Current Theories,” 34. The use of the term native is Parry’s. 11. Parry, “Problems in Current Theories,” 34. It is, of course, patently obvious that she misreads the very enterprise of deconstruction in order to save a position from which a critique, radically “outside” the field, can be developed. 12. Robert Young, in White Mythologies, analyzes the shifts in Bhabha’s work on the possibility of resistance, arguing that Bhabha moves from an initial position where the ambivalence of colonial discourse does not present a threat to its strategic operation, to a position where such ambivalence undermines colonial authority because it repeats it differently. In the context of that discussion, it also raises the problem of the position of “the interpreter” or critic: does the resistance remain inarticulate until the interpreter comes along and “reads between the lines” of history, or was it effective and effectively there all along? Cf. Young, “The Ambivalence of Bhabha,” in White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990), 141–156. 13. Abdul R. JanMohammed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 61. 14. A similar criticism is made by Ahmad, who holds that in Bhabha’s work, “history” becomes a mere “happening” in the pages of theory, thus denying the pertinence of structural features and coordinates of power. See Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” 13–15. Although some dimension of the criticism may be pertinent, Ahmad misreads Bhabha’s enterprise. Bhabha repeatedly addresses the problem of history and its representation in his work, and it is crucial to remember that he is concerned, not so much with history per se, even if it were possible, but with its representations in writing. For example, see Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291–322. 15. Anne McClintock, “The Angels of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Postcolonialism,’” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 292. 16. Temporality receives a sophisticated treatment in Bhabha’s work. See, especially, Bhabha, “DissemiNation.” 17. One would have to investigate what it is in which the category of postcolonialism itself that leads to this possibility. 18. Young, “The Ambivalence of Bhabha,” 144. 19. Ibid., 146.

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20. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, in “What Is Post(-) Colonialism?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 276, 284, argue for a distinction to be made between post-colonialism (with a hyphen) and postcolonialism without a hyphen, where the former designates something that comes after colonialism and the latter a tendency that is always present in “any literature of subjugation marked by a systematic process of cultural domination through the imposition of imperial structures of power.” 21. Ahmad takes a diametrically opposite position on this. For him, the “true post-colonials” are the postmodernists, and he is happy not to be counted among them. Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” 10. 22. Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 113–114. 23. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 314 (emphasis added). 24. Bhabha puts it in the following manner: “The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that two places be mobilized, passing through the structure of positionality (which is not revealed in the structure of the utterance . . . , and this is the indeterminate space of the subject(s) of enunciation; the constitutive split which marks every subject and every culture.” See Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” The Location of Culture, 36. 25. Bhabha, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” in The Location of Culture, 171. 26. Bhabha, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” 175. 27. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” 34. 28. Ibid., 37 (emphasis added). 29. Bhabha, “Introduction: Locations of Culture,” in The Location of Culture, 4 (emphasis added). 30. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” 35. 31. Bhabha critically distances himself from certain forms of multiculturalism. Quoting Renee Green approvingly, he argues that the multiculturalist cause has to be “enlarged,” since it does not adequately reflect the complexities of identities that are “split” (Bhabha, “Introduction: Locations of Culture,” 3). 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Ibid., 2. 34. Ibid., 3. 35. Ibid., 9. 36. Ibid., 2. 37. The unthought or untheorized decision here is a consequence of the demands of something that escapes the strictures of the argument itself. That is why “decision” should not be seen here as equivalent to a decision taken by a subject that is fully in control of that decision. Rather, the decision is one of an ethico-theoretical nature. As Derrida argues, it is the point in a text where another path could have been followed, but adherence to a tradition or a political position disallows its exploration. A possibility of thinking otherwise is thus opened up but not realized. 38. Insofar as hybridity is present, it creates a space for an intervention. It is important, however, that it does not follow from the mere presence of that space, that the space for intervention will become politically relevant. That depends on whether the possibilities opened up are realized or not.

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39. If hybridity is a characteristic only of “minority” subjects, it is no longer possible to argue, for instance, that the colonizer’s identity is equally split. The generality of effects of that insight is thus immediately limited. 40. Grewal and Kaplan, “Introduction,” 41. 41. I do not, of course, subscribe to Ahmad’s solution in this respect. Ahmad’s nostalgia for a settled “place” and “materialism” offers no solution to the problem articulated here. 42. Bhabha, “The Locations of Culture,” 13. 43. Young argues that the “transcendental” categories of psychoanalysis employed for the analysis of the historical phenomenon of colonialism are inappropriate. There are at least two problems with this argument: the first is that Young in effect denies the historical character of categories of analysis themselves: second, he treats the historical phenomena in question as somehow isolated from wider influences and debates. Bhabha himself is notoriously ambiguous on the point of the role of theory. Although he repeatedly asserts that he is not interested in developing general theoretical claims, his work is replete with just such claims. The idea of the “quasi-transcendental,” as developed in the works of Derrida, may be useful in overcoming this problem. 44. Young, “The Ambivalence of Bhabha,” 145 (emphasis added). 45. There is a tendency in the literature to conflate “undecidability” with a generalized “indeterminacy.” This, quite simply, is to misread Derrida’s texts. Undecidability, for Derrida, is always a matter of a regulated tension. See Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 148. 46. Young, “The Ambivalence of Bhabha,” 149.

PART 3 SELF AND OTHER: REFLECTIONS AND REFORMULATIONS

8 The Sovereign and the Stranger Michael Dillon

The concept of sovereignty is integral to a political thought that is indebted to the philosophical tradition of the West, and the philosophical tradition of the West is a metaphysics of presence. Sovereignty is the apogee of secure self-presence to which this tradition aspired as the secure foundation of its understanding of truth. Once the Christian God lost its ascendancy in the western thought of being, and the thought of politics began to escape from the onto-theological determinations of the church, the sovereign political subject of the modern state began to make its appearance, moving quickly to the center of political theory, especially that of international political thought. It remains firmly lodged there still, despite the revisionist arguments of internationalizers and globalizers. Although the simulation and construction of sovereignty has begun to be critically reappraised and its genealogy traced, my concern here is to consider how sovereignty appears from the standpoint of a philosophy that has challenged the very ontological underpinnings of the metaphysics within which the thought of sovereignty has always been located.1 Although this philosophy is variously indebted to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, it has been developed in a variety of contested ways by many other thinkers. In this chapter I seek to bring some of the different ontological arguments of that thinking to bear on the question of sovereign subjectivity by exploring the radically disturbing impact that the advent of the stranger has upon the sovereign. For you must have noticed that it is a natural characteristic of a well-bred dog to behave with the utmost gentleness to those it is used to and knows, but to be savage to strangers?2

Thus does Plato have Socrates compare the task of the state’s guardians with that of a guard dog when introducing the first theorization 117

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of politics at the beginning of The Republic. The dog’s disposition to be “annoyed when it sees a stranger, even though he has done it no harm,” is contrasted with the way in which “it welcomes anyone it knows, even though it has never had a kindness from him.”3 This trait, says Socrates, “is a trait that shows discrimination and a truly philosophic nature”: the dog distinguishes the sight of friend and foe simply by knowing one and not knowing the other. And a creature that distinguishes between the familiar and the unfamiliar on the grounds of knowledge or ignorance must surely be gifted with a real love of knowledge.4

Plato thought politics in the way that he did because of the way that he thought. And the way that he thought was taken to inaugurate metaphysics. It was Plato’s work, then, that was used to initiate a political and philosophical tradition, culminating in the inaugural moment of the modern state as a state of exception and expressed with unparalleled clarity in Carl Schmitt’s political dictum that the essence of the political is to be found in the friend/enemy distinction, which threatens native and stranger alike because every native is ineradicably marked by strangeness as well.5 It is, nonetheless, also evident from the guiding metaphor of the guard dog that individuation for Plato necessarily entailed differentiation, indeed, a certain act of differentiation for which dog and guardian, alike, had to be rigorously trained. Even here, then, differentiation somehow precedes individuation. Without differentiation, there can be no individuation. There is friend only because there is enemy, and vice versa. Even here, then, there is stranger only in relation to native, but in a way such that identity is privileged over difference. So privileged, in fact, that The Republic is designed to teach how the principle of identity is to be elevated, learned, and operated. But who is not a stranger? What human is not a mortal and temporal being bearing the mark of difference within itself as that which makes itself possible, difference which does not merely individuate each human being as the individual self that it is, but which each actively bears constitutively within itself? It is that difference which both opens it up and opens it out— the spacing of time—as the responsive, receptive, projecting and communicating, plural and hybrid, temporal and singular way of being-with-others, on the way from birth to death, that each human being is. Who, in short, is not a bearer of this very strangeness of human being itself? For not only were all natives once strangers, but they are necessarily also strangers to themselves—however well they may think they know themselves—because of this active constitutive difference that they bear within themselves as the selves that they are.6 Conversely, all strangers require to settle a while, that is to say, for the duration of their mortal exis-

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tence. There is no human who is not simultaneously both native and stranger. This very strange hybridity is bound, however, to put even the most well-bred dogs off their scent and send them wild with murderous frustration. The mortal danger not only to strangers but inescapably also to the constitutive strangeness of the native as well lies, then, not in either’s inescapable human hybridity but in the institutionalization of the philosophical and political mentality of the guard dog. As with the delimitation of any place of dwelling, the constitution of a people, a nation, a state, or a democracy necessarily specifies who is estranged from that identity, place, or regime. The very act of delimitation itself does not dispense, of course, with the stranger. For the limit or boundary—the very mark of the actively constitutive process of differentiation that becomes so evident with the advent of every concrete stranger and that is fundamental even to the actions of Plato’s guard dogs—is what actually brings native and stranger together as well. No more so in fact than when, as in our time, the delineation of political spaces has reached a kind of global limit. All global space is politically demarcated and so also therefore contested space, and there are no “unmapped” political spaces any longer. The world does not possess the boundaries that would “make it into a plane surface”: “When the plane becomes a globe, the boundary becomes immanent to the world, no longer marking the border between what is possessed and not possessed, but between what is possessed by some and not by others.”7 Contemporary global politics is thus a space in which human beings are fated to encounter each other as strangers and, by virtue of that very encounter, encounter the very strangeness of the human condition itself. As we follow the trail of human estrangement we come to appreciate and address freedom, politics, and justice differently because these issues come to be posed differently in the course of the trial to which the condition of estrangement subjects the human. The very ontological assumptions that underpin the sovereign idea of sovereign subjectivity—together with the politics, freedom, and justice associated with it—are profoundly challenged by that trial. In the process an entirely different set of ontological considerations concerning the way of being of human being is projected to the fore. An obligatory freedom becomes the ontological condition of human being; Justice, the call that resounds tellingly throughout it; and Politics, the taking place—topos or khora—of that encounter.8 All this is made possible by the constitutive and inerradicable hybridity and Otherness to which human being bears testament in itself, as it is freely disclosed and individuated in the world through the difference to which the foreignness of the individual stranger alerts us. More attuned to the inherent strangeness of human being than that of the tradition of sovereign subjectivity is the alternative political sensibility

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first expressed by the Greek poets. Because they conceived the truth and so also the truth of human being and human knowing differently, they were especially sensitive to the manifold trials of estrangement that individual human beings and communities undergo in their politics—and to the enigmatic “law” of hospitality that estrangement continuously invokes. Therefore, I want to pick up the trail, and trial, of human estrangement at this starting point, somewhat different from that afforded by Plato earlier, and subsequently the trail of the metaphysical tradition that, in the way it has received and axiomized Greek thought, threatens to bequeath us nothing but a politics of sovereign subjectivity by well-trained dogs. In a very short but penetrating essay on the figure of the suppliant in Greek poetry, Maurice Blanchot, for example, notes that the suppliant and the stranger are one. Both, he says, “are cut off from the whole, being deprived of the right that founds all others and alone establishes one’s belonging to the home.”9 Outside the sovereign community, the suppliant is the stranger who represents an appeal for Justice that goes beyond the justice which is ordained and dispensed by the sovereign law of the community. Blanchot goes on to analyze the uncanny status of this suppliant/ stranger. Sovereignties are in possession of everything—“authority, force, the power of decision, freedom”—and the inequality between suppliant and the one being supplicated is manifest. Yet it is precisely through this lack that the stranger radically disturbs the very foundation of the sovereign community itself. Through his or her humiliation the figure of the stranger may seek a ritual appeasement of the sovereign but simultaneously must let it be known, indeed (in virtue of presence alone) cannot hide the fact that being thus separated from all law and authority, he or she escapes the jurisdiction of the power and law of the sovereign. In doing so, the stranger powerfully invokes another, if obscure, domain of law and belonging in which both sovereign and suppliant are somehow antecedently, or at least more originally, implicated. The reverberations of this paradox cannot be contained short of problematizing the origin and authority—indeed the very idea—of the sovereign subject itself. For the reality and the truth of the strange suppliant cannot be denied, even though the appeal of the suppliant stranger may be refused, regarded as unrealistic, legislated away, or rejected as untruthful in the ways that it frequently is, now, in the contracting asylum and refugee regimes of western Europe and North America. Blanchot succinctly summarizes the inevitable consequence: “The suppliant is thus the man [or woman] who is coming, always on the move because without a place and of whom one must ask the most mysterious of questions, that of the origin.”10 Every new arrival, therefore, raises a profound and inescapable question, that of the provenance of the native (socalled sovereign subject at home with and within herself) as well as the

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provenance of the stranger. “Where did you come from?” is a question that applies equally to both. Every new arrival also, however, poses a profound and inescapable truth. That truth is the truth of their common facticity in a provenance that, although they actually share in it, nonetheless remains mysterious to them. Who knows from whence their being ultimately derived, or where it may finally be headed? Each, stranger and native, stands out and is thereby disclosed in the opening of existence itself. Thus encountering the stranger, the native undergoes a trial of estrangement herself that discloses the estrangement she, too, bears within herself. No one, it turns out, is at home in this encounter. Strangers to each other, each is also a stranger to herself in that no one of them does, in fact, know her original provenance. Neither the question, “Where are you from?” nor the curious truth that although none of them knows, this is precisely what they nonetheless share in, must or can be turned away.11 But where that question, or where that truth, may lead, and whether either should be welcomed and pursued, is precisely the challenge that all face.12 This radically unsettling state of affairs is compounded, then, because the answer to the question and the status of the truth to which it points are not transparent and will never be clarified. Although inescapably posed— Here is the stranger. What are we to make of her or of him? What does that disclose about one’s own constitution?—they remain irredeemably opaque. But how else could it be? The stranger, by his or her very nature, is outside the settled modes of questioning, the received understandings of truth and identity, and the sovereign will and law of which the sovereign subject is comprised. And, yet, the stranger is there, not only in all of the mystery that provokes the question but also in all of the inescapable and shared facticity that demands a response. The mystery is compounded further because the suppliant is not the weaker or even the weakest of the parties concerned. The suppliant stranger is, quite simply, off the scale. Being off the scale is precisely what calls into question not simply the measures that the sovereign subject takes in respect of the suppliant, therefore, but the very measure by which the sovereign constitutes and takes stock of itself; its own scales, the justice of its laws. For the Greek poet, there was ultimately a dishonesty and impiety in appealing exclusively to this justice when one of the parties did not even register on the scales. The scales may have to be used because they are the only things present to hand, but they are not the final judge because the advent of the stranger brings the very status of the scales themselves into question. Consequently, the scales of justice are continuously subjected to another test, one that exceeds their technical application within the community. They are submitted to a politicized examination of their responsiveness to the veritable excess of Justice to which the mere presence of the suppliant attests and in which both parties—native and stranger alike and however obscurely—are

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always already mutually implicated. That excess is something that Michael Walzer, for example, recognizes but does not (given his way of thought, cannot) think about when he considers the exemplary case of the stranger, that of the asylum seeker: “At the extreme,” he concedes, “the claim of asylum is virtually undeniable. I assume that there are in fact limits on our collective liability, but I don’t know how to specify them.”13 What more can be said about this obscure mutual implication in an excess of Justice or call to Justice that the encounter between stranger and native-disclosed-as-stranger reveals as constituting some “original” differentiating bond between them? From whence does it arise? How is it manifested? What kind of claim does it constitute? How does it relate to the establishment and to the institutions and practices of the sovereignty that the stranger’s arrival so profoundly problematizes? Despite the manifold and ultimately accidental ways in which each of them have been shared out into different times and different places, what is this strange “being-there” that each shares in as strangers to themselves by virtue of the fact that each is undeniably here, and here indeseverably with the other in a world whose very constitution in difference is indebted to the excluded one? What is this strange being of human being that makes their being here a “being-in-common” by virtue of its indeseverable belonging together in that estranging Otherness of a condition, for which it was not ultimately responsible, but which it shares with others?14 For—manifestly—it does. Such a call to Justice cannot derive from sovereign power because it is antecedent to, more “original” than, sovereign subjectivity; even if it only ever becomes apparent in the relations of power and legality constitutive of the worlds, into which human beings always already find themselves thrown, that aspire to such sovereign self-possession. More disturbingly for modern discourses of emancipation, neither can this call of Justice arise from understanding human beings as individual rather than collective sovereign subjects, as isolated and autonomous entities comprised of rights. For only certain regimes of power and knowledge can effectively endow them with, or deprive them of, that particular status. However they are and however they discover themselves to be as human beings in this encounter with one another, the call to Justice cannot derive from rights sovereignly acknowledged or denied. It issues out of something more original than the claim of rights that sovereignties (dis)empower—the very absence of any such thing as sovereignty at all. This profound absence or lack in the way of being that human being itself is, is what the stranger forcefully brings to attention in the manifestness of her own need. This ontological rift is not, of course, a mere attribute of the stranger, however desperate the stranger may be in her need. It is something in which native and stranger share. Otherwise hidden—no more so, in fact, than in the relation between native and stranger precisely

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because in that encounter, neither shares in the traditional bonds of a community—the very presence of the stranger nonetheless, ineluctably and irresistibly, draws attention to it. Moreover, that lack or absence is another way of talking about the difference that each individual human being bears within herself. That difference, which accounts for the hybridity and heterogeneity of the human self as well as of human selves, is precisely the absence of sovereign self-sufficiency, self-possession, or self-subsistence. Such a self, itself comprised by difference, is never and can never be complete in itself. Finally, and just as oddly to our habitual patterns of thought, this constitutive lack or absence in the self of the self is no deficiency. “It never enters the field of view of our calculating reason,” Heidegger writes, saying “that a no and a not may arise out of a surplus or abundance, may be the highest gift, and as this not and no may infinitely, i.e. essentially, surpass every ordinary yes.”15 This mutual implication in an excess of Justice, this original differentiating bond, this something that human beings share in even as they are shared out in so many different ways across the many worlds in which they live their lives—and perhaps most when they come, as they do now daily in their millions, as strangers in the guise of refugees and asylum seekers deeply traumatized because they are bereft of almost any world at all—this being-in-common comprises, instead, a radical and inexhaustible excess to which the presence of the stranger draws our attention, and in terms of which our hospitality is ultimately judged. An excess, it should be emphasized, not simply of needfulness, however immediately needful the refugee’s need initially appears. For refugees are no mere victims, and it would miss the point being made here only to draw attention to their needfulness. Rather, refugees are, instead, in their very needfulness and in a way that recalls Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the gift, a trace of the reserve that is charged with possibilities.16 One might say that the mutual implication in the call to Justice arises precisely because of the very absence of any determinate justice whatsoever, and of the absence of any truly sovereign subjectivity able to issue and administer it. Because there is no sovereignly conceived and compelling command ethic, there is only the compulsion of the call of Justice itself. That call is one that continuously demands to be realized, not in any sovereign code but in the constant invention of practices that attempt to satisfy it by giving concrete expression to it in the knowledge that they can, nonetheless, never exhaust its demand: because that demand arises afresh every time native and stranger, in encountering each other, disclose that shared estrangement as human beings that is the lack that comprises the way of being that human beings are as human beings. The suppliant stranger has no status in the community, and by definition, its sovereign authorities do not empower her or him. Neither, how-

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ever, can she or he be certain that whatever paradoxically powerful position of reverse power she may appear to deploy against the sovereign as suppliant will guarantee her introduction, or reintroduction, into a world that will recognize her facticity and grant that existence its due; allowing her as other to be other as she is. THE LANGUAGE OF ESTRANGEMENT

Only one thing holds out the prospect of this prospect. It is the articulation of the radically hermeneutic relation that is the living question of being for human being. For being (t)here does not consist in anything other than the question of being itself, and here it is posed—takes place—in as unadorned, as brutal, and as mortal a way as it possibly could. The advent of the stranger gives voice, then, to the question of being in which human being cannot avoid being judged in its judging as it judges. Hence the call of Justice, which has no other voice, no other occasion, and no other articulation than that which takes place in the singular instances of human being, of which the advent of the stranger is one.17 Thus, “the suppliant is, par excellence, the one who speaks.”18 Having a voice itself, however, again speaks of an extremely curious connection between the stranger and the one to whom she comes and addresses herself. Whether the stranger speaks the language of the community does not matter, of course, because it is in the nature of being a stranger that she will not. The stranger, “lacking all common language, is paradoxically the one who is present solely through” her speech.19 It is the existence of the word, the fact that the suppliant speaks at all, that matters. Speech separates—the stranger lacks all common language—but it also joins. It constitutes the in-between-the-two that connects the stranger to the native. In the case of the stranger/suppliant, the stakes at issue in that real but opaque, problematic, and ambiguous communication are always stark, unproblematic, and unambiguous. No speech, no food. No food, no speech. Life or death. Precisely because the stakes here are so basic, none of the three analogies for a political community—neighborhoods, clubs, and families—that Walzer, for example, used to discuss the question of membership, come anywhere near doing Justice to the issues that the advent of the stranger and the question of being in the form of belonging pose, and how he or she poses them. None of them, indeed, address the point Walzer concedes at the outset of his discussion—that “statelessness is a condition of infinite danger”20—or how that is true precisely because of the very ways in which the identity of the sovereign subject is itself conceived and membership in it constituted.

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Language as such, then, is the password that effects the opening toward, and the possibility of transfer between, native and stranger. 21 Language effects the transitivity—mobile moment of “communicability,” its flow and overflow—that allows the call of justice to take place from case to case, from place to place. It grants time to them and gains time for them. Without breaking down the distance between the two of them, the fact of the word forces the sovereign to become an interlocutor and enter a space of discourse with the stranger. It is a space of discourse that these two parties have not rendered transparent; indeed, it never will be transparent, but it manifestly exists between them in the facticity of their encounter by virtue of the existence of language itself. Of course, this is not a space that they occupy with equal force and advantage, but it is there. Moreover, it is precisely there—in virtue of “speech having arranged this space betweentwo where [wo]men meet who are separated by everything”—that this being-in-common shared in by native and stranger becomes disclosed as such to each of them once again.22 This mysterious median space—that simultaneously separates but unites, that resists transparency, and that neither of them commands whether they occupy it as needful suppliant or putative sovereign—once again makes their being-in-common possible for each of them, native and stranger alike. For, remember, it is the very presence of the stranger that calls the settled, so-called sovereign, life of the native fundamentally into question. “Such,” Maurice Blanchot observes, “is the great lesson of the Iliad,” in which it is said: “When a mortal . . . unexpectedly arrives at a rich man’s house from a foreign land, a wonder seizes those who approach him.” Even the great Achilles, despite being forewarned by his mother, loses his composure when Priam, an enfeebled and defeated old man who has succeeded in crossing the enemy lines, appears to confront the slayer of his sons: “Priam’s [the stranger’s] presence in and of itself troubles the order of things.”23 But the lesson of the poem does not end there. It does not terminate in the perplexity and confusion into which the native is thrown by the appearance of the stranger. Neither does it end in setting the dogs on him. Rather, after having listened to the old man, wept with him, and spoken in his turn, Achilles will not rest until Priam has eaten. “Now then, divine old man,” the warrior-king concludes, “you too must think of a meal.”24 When Priam resists taking his place at table, the furious Achilles comes close to killing him. “There is,” Blanchot points out, “really no third term: you shall be either benevolent host or murderer. . . . From which one might conclude that to supplicate is to speak when speaking is maintaining, in all its severity and its primary truth, the alternative: speech or death.”25 Eating with others bears the prospect of an apprenticeship in civility. A recognition of shared humanness and necessary preparation for living with others, it

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does not, of course, exhaust what such living entails, but it does broach the very question itself. It signifies that, for the moment at least, you are not to be consumed. There is no guarantee that “we” will or can live together, that “we” will not consume one another. Commensality is, however, a sign that the other shares in the question-able “we” of the human. Without that sign—however it is signified—the question of whether or not and how to live together simply does not arise. Paris, Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed in political distress with the early modern condition, is for those “who can no longer forgo eating humans.”26 In sitting down to eat together—in the hospitality that each must extend not only to the other if there is to be any hospitality at all, for there would have been none if Priam had not accepted Achilles’ invitation, but also to the very idea of the other’s being there—the contestants consummate a “communion” with their own as well as each other’s being there in a meeting that becomes a meeting of strangers in acknowledgment of their common estrangement as human beings. That communion is also a communion with the excess of the call to Justice in which they are mutually implicated because they have been at war with each other over their judgments, and to whose appeal they remain subject in their judging. The enigma of the stranger/suppliant recalls, then, a belonging together and a domain of obligation that exceeds, and therefore recasts while not altogether dispensing with, the sovereign’s justice. That excess is exhibited in the Law of hospitality that must be specified anew the instant the very presence of the stranger invokes it. This hospitality consists less, Blanchot says, “in nourishing the guest than in restoring in him a taste for food by recalling him to the level of need, [my emphasis] to a life where one can say and stand hearing said: “And now let us not forget to eat.”27 Recalled to the level of need is to be recalled not only to the excess of what they share in but also to the requirement to nourish and welcome this ontological rift in their being, that lack or absence that literally articulates—separates and joins through Language—their being-in-common. Commensality here, I suggest, is a gastronomic gesture that renews as it recalls that being-in-common. Note, also, that Priam does not become the same as Achilles when he sits down to eat with him, and neither does Achilles become the same as Priam. Here, instead, a solicitude toward the other is extended that lets the other be as he is.28 This is a fragile act of mutual hospitality, full of risk and danger, extended to each other and the being they share in, a welcoming that intimates a complex and delicate political praxis all its own. More always arrives with the stranger, then, than meets the eye; more even, that is, than the mere communicating presence of the stranger herself. Something hidden comes across in the presence of the stranger. But, in whatever way it is indicated—the obscure mutual implication in an excess

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of Justice, the “original” bond of differentiation, this sharing in of a beingin-common—it is exhausted neither by the stranger nor by the very existence of Language, which somehow contrives the space that native and stranger inhabit. However much it depends upon each for making its presence felt, it is not identical with either the stranger or Language. It exceeds both and never makes its appearance as such. Once again this “something”—disclosed in the very arrival of the stranger, and the fact of Language—is the mystery of that in which native and stranger share and to which they are called. That they share in it does not, however, mean to say that they are compelled to respect it or to accede to its call. On the contrary, it is in the way of their being free, to be free also to reject it, and more often than not they do, formalizing and institutionalizing that rejection, for example, in the law and thought of sovereign subjectivity. Even if denied, however, it cannot be legislated away. It is the specter that haunts all thought of sovereign subjectivity.29 This “commonalty,” which might now be said also to be a commonalty in virtue of being addressed by a call to Justice, is hidden, in other words, in Language as well; in the sense that speech enjoins us as an enigmatic “we” the human. There is a commonness here, also, which is not only hidden but which, combining identity and difference, never defaults into either one of them. It cannot, therefore, be denied as a manifold of identity/difference in which Otherness stands out, 30 although it may, of course, be refused. This commonalty is hidden in Language in the sense also that, joined in identity and difference, the very existence of Language enjoins us to give this being that is nothing but possibility its due; to attend to the call of Justice that sounds throughout it, most especially when the advent of the stranger announces the Strangeness of an insatiable and mundane call that issues only because “we” are here and to which only “we” can respond. Exceeding sovereign systems of communal and intercommunal justice, yet nevertheless only ever arising as such in the specific historico-political settings of such systems, Language brings to presence a demand that does not specify how it can be satisfied or whether it can in fact be satisfied at all. The demand thus issued necessarily exceeds sovereign justice. It also exceeds the Language in which it finds specific expression, at particular times and in particular places. Not only the Language of sovereign subjectivity, for example, but also that of universal human rights. This claim, manifest in the advent of the stranger and manifest also in Language— coming across most powerfully, therefore, in the stranger who speaks— puts sovereign justice into question and continuously measures, against a seemingly immeasurable measure, how such justice welcomes that to which it is itself only a limited and limiting response. In short, the very hospitality of sovereignty to the call of Justice that arises with the advent of the stranger is the issue that is undeniably posed by the stranger, however

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much it is ritually and rigorously denied, or subject to assimilation and extermination, by philosophical and political systems which aspire to sovereign presence. Here is a call of Justice for Justice, then, which constitutes a tribunal that never convenes as such, of which “we” are nonetheless the occasion, and which invokes radically indeterminate terms of reference that defy codification. It is, nonetheless, real. In specifying the substantive “we” that is included within the sovereign rule of law, all communal codes necessarily bring this indeterminate and inexhaustible call of Justice, in which human beings are wholly and mutually implicated, to presence. They do so even as they deny it and when they are most inhospitable or cynically self-serving in relation to it. The reason is very simple. It is because all sovereignly ordained law simultaneously constitutes the historically specific stranger who continuously brings home this curiously inescapable fact to the native heart(h) of the sovereign thus constituted. MAKING ENEMIES OF STRANGERS

Recall that even Plato’s understanding of the principle upon which the polity is founded betrays the operation of a relationship of difference. The well-bred guard dog is engaged in differentiating friend from enemy. Although it employs the idea of identity in order to be able to differentiate between the two, it is not simply responding to and deploying some innate principle of unity. It has, instead, to be very carefully trained to be equipped with and operate such a principle, precisely because it does not automatically possess it. In short, it has to be taught to differentiate on the basis of identity in order to be able to elevate identity to the privileged position it will enjoy.31 Recognition that the inauguration of a political entity within the western tradition is not to be found within the entity, in any kind of principle or essence of identity, but as a function, instead, of a differentiating action that establishes a relationship of difference and identity surfaces again with G. W. F. Hegel. It is formally theorized and made politically axiomatic, however, in the work of Carl Schmitt. According to Schmitt, a political entity comes into being when the distinction between friend and enemy is drawn—“the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy”32—and the entity drawing this distinction is the political entity. For him, in the modern age, that entity is the sovereign state: The state . . . [as] an entity and in fact the decisive entity rests upon its political character. . . . To the state as a political entity belongs the jus

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belli, i.e., the real possibility of deciding in a concrete situation upon the enemy and the ability to fight him with the power emanating from the entity.33

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But, he is careful to note, any agency that operates in this way is a political agency. This fundamental understanding of the essence of the political, however, does not merely establish a principle for differentiating the political from all other acts of differentiation—such as the good from the evil, the beautiful from the ugly, the profitable from the unprofitable— it necessarily also does much more than this, as Schmitt’s own texts often reveal. It establishes, in effect, a certain economy of differentiation, designed, indeed obliged, to make war on alterity, difference, and hybridity because that is the way the western tradition has come to establish and privilege identity (especially in the inauguration of the sovereign political subject) as such. Hence, within this framework of understanding, there is a prevailing need to eliminate “unwanted perturbations or unwanted needs.”34 Moreover, there is a fundamental requirement also to review all alien life, within and without, not only as a potential threat to the life of the sovereign subject that is established in this way but also as only being truly other in the form of a mortal threat to the political subject. “The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly,” Schmitt insists. He “need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions.” The crux of the matter is, however, precisely this: “He is nevertheless the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.”35 Schmitt emphasizes the extremity of the antagonism and of the threat that the stranger must make to sovereign political subjectivity understood in this way.36 But he does so at the level of possibility. It is evident, therefore, that it is not so much the scale of the material threat but the very possibility of radical difference, because of the way the identity of the community is itself conceived (ideally as a sovereign, “organised political entity, internally peaceful, territorially enclosed and impenetrable to aliens”37), fundamentally threatened, and offended by difference, which establishes the requirement to draw the friend/enemy distinction. The “truly other” here is other only, however, in terms of its relation to the subject. It is a mortal threat to identity because of the way identity is conceived and that understanding privileged. What that understanding necessarily demands is a continuous review of all alien life so as to determine whether or not it does pose such a threat. One has continuously to ask, and these fundamentally are the only questions worth putting to strangers according to the Schmittian rule of sovereignty: Is the stranger equivalent? If not, is the stranger assimilable? If neither, the alien is the

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enemy. The test applies equally to the alien within, of course, as it does to the alien without: The endeavour of a normal state consists above all in assuring total peace within the state and its territory. To create tranquillity, security, and order and thereby establish the normal situation is the prerequisite for legal norms to be valid. Every norm presupposes a normal situation, and no norm can be valid in an entirely abnormal situation. As long as the state is a political entity this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy. Every state provides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy.38

In this way, Schmitt inadvertently reveals how the sovereign political subject is prone to violate itself as well as others—because it is itself composed of Otherness—in order to control itself. For this definition cuts both ways. If political community is only to be established upon the basis of being able to identify the enemy, it follows that we must establish enemies, or we cannot found a political community. Otherness has to be a mortal threat to the sovereign subject, even if it is constitutively installed within the subject itself. Moreover, the foundation of the political community must take place here outside the law because Schmitt concedes that there is no law that tells you who the friend or who the enemy is, or where and when conflicts over the very life and character of the political community will arise: “These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgement of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.”39 This is a politicized way of denying any belonging together of human being in its apartness. If the question of friend or enemy appears to be an exceptional one because it arises outside the law, it is nonetheless also a mundanely obsessive one because such a subject must continuously review the difference within itself, as well as between itself and other subjects, so as to constitute and preserve itself as a single sovereign unitary subject. In the process of pursuing and seeking to realize such an understanding of what it is to be a subject, it is condemned to making an enemy of itself. For Schmitt, as for Thomas Hobbes, this is the condition from which the law—and, hence, the inauguration of the sovereign political subject—is derived: that of the lawlessness of putatively sovereign subjects that deny their own hybridity. DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE AFTER THE EVENT

Ultimately, this is a point that a liberal like Walzer must, and does, also concede. “The distribution of membership is not pervasively subject to the

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constraints of justice,” he writes.40 In fact, given that justice is the distributive justice of the sovereign political subject, it cannot be subject to the constraints of its own justice at all because the foundation of sovereign subjectivity is always outside law. Contra Walzer (and Hobbes and Schmitt), the community and its membership are not a matter of distribution, as if each somehow existed before the manifold of difference that brings each human being into being as the historical being that it is. Being-in-common is not a contract and belonging, or what Walzer calls membership; it is not a distributive good, as if human beings were born into some abstraction rather than a world, however depleted that world may be. Belonging is “ontological,” not contractual. There is always already a dissemination, a share out, that invests each human being with its being in a world, which world is a world of questioning about that very distribution and its future. We do not suddenly appear as sovereign subjects with a contract to negotiate and a question of distribution to consider. We arrive amid a distribution and, challenged by having our being to be, have questioningly to decide its living out. This dissemination or share out, a belonging together with others in the Otherness manifested in the strangeness of human existence itself, is the openness of an obligatory freedom. That freedom is always and everywhere also a specific historical condition that consists in the particular challenges and demands that make up a determinate form of political life. The fundamental differences between the tradition, of which Walzer is a part, and the approach adopted here, then, include the following. For Walzer, there are subjects who are different. Relationality is, consequently, intersubjective; something that arises after the event of there somehow being subjects, when subjects, for whatever reason, come together. That difference is a relational concept of difference that projects the other in relation to the subject such that the other cannot truly be other at all. Here, relationality is the event of human being, inherent in the very understanding it has in its way of being that must always ask itself how to be; in that, bearing difference within itself, it is always already a belonging together with others in the Otherness of a historical existence in which it finds itself thrown, and from out of which it must project its future as it takes on its obligatory freedom to be. Here, instead also, there is difference that brings to presence in its hiddenness the radical strangeness of all human being, an Otherness of which each human being bears its own trace. Although Walzer’s understanding of intersubjectivity allows him to pose the question of the interrelation between subjects—“like us but not of us: when we decide on membership we have to consider them as well as ourselves”41—it does not allow him to consider what Derrida calls the “strange” phenomenological symmetry between the self and the other in that they are the same in the difference that sutures them. Nor does it allow him to consider the

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ethical asymmetry that arises between self and other, in which each is called to give the other its due in the Otherness they share, to which I have been referring as the excess of justice, and that the advent of stranger draws to our attention. For Walzer, then, there is a community of intersubjectivity. Here, instead, there is the belonging together of being-in-common. For Walzer, morality enters as a prudential ordering of intersubjective relations. Here, Ethicality is integral to the call of Justice to which all are subject because it resounds tellingly throughout the very operation of difference that individuates.42 For Walzer it is a matter of the political and moral question of the distribution of goods, where the boundary between inside and outside is extant. Here it is a matter of the politics and ethics of difference, where the boundary between inside and outside is immanent. Here, then, precisely because there is not a sovereign point of departure that ordains a difference, but an arrival—instead, amid, and in virtue of a difference that, because it continuously demands a response, effects a multiplying process of duplication and reduplication—a continuous renewing reply to the excessive call of Justice is possible. Even the distribution of the common good of membership, as Walzer construes it, is never merely a distribution. No distribution of membership simply serves the exercise of the sovereign power or will of a community. Through what Peter Goodrich calls the “copious particularity”43 of the law—which simultaneously also establishes a theater of attachment via the entire panoply of its discursive practices, rhetorical tropes, and iconic forms—the distribution of membership always and everywhere repeats the whole complex of sovereign initiation through which the sovereign political subject is violently reinaugurated at the expense of the other, for we do not “come together to share, divide, and exchange.”44 Sharing, dividing, and exchanging—the manifold of the specific historical spatio-temporal occurrence of difference that individuates—is how we are brought together within the communities into which we find ourselves thrown. The “rights to choose an admissions policy,” Walzer accepts, “are . . . basic . . . , for it is not merely a matter of acting in the world, exercising sovereignty and pursuing national interest. At stake here is the shape of the community that acts in the world, exercises sovereignty, and so on.”45 At stake here, rather, to echo Hannah Arendt, is the world. CONCLUSION

The stranger is inscribed as stranger by the entire writ of the law, both national and international. An alien is thus an alien in virtue of the operation of the law itself. Being off the scales is a function of the scales.

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Interestingly, the discourse of universal human rights (as well as the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness) becomes complicit in this process through its insistence that “everyone has a right to a nationality.”46 The corollary, of course, is that no one has a right not to have a nationality or not belong to a state. Only this form of political subjectivity is licensed; an insistence that poses particular difficulties, for example, to nomadic and aboriginal peoples, and not only to such peoples in the lands that the West usually thinks of as strange. The case of the Romanys in Europe, particularly in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, provides a perfectly good illustration as well. The refugee is exemplary in this respect. Precisely the between-thetwo, propelled out of one world and on the threshold of another, the refugee discloses the very trial of estrangement because he or she is explicitly exposed to the test of being determined as truly alien or not. In the process, the related issues of the availability of the word (the ability to speak and the opportunity to be heard) and of the habitability of the world become matters of life or death. Here, the violent reinauguration of sovereignty is repeated as the refugee-stranger is put to the question of whether or not she is truly “the other, the stranger . . . in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien.”47 How might the different ontology, the ontological rift of the ontology of difference, which discloses an understanding of the human way of being so radically contrary to that of sovereign subjectivity and which comes so powerfully to presence with the refugee-stranger, be summarized? And what might its political implications be? We can begin by acknowledging that a human being is a finite temporal being whose intentional way of being is an issue for it. It is consequently always already in the condition, as well, of having to interrogate the position it finds itself in (its world) in order to decide itself (project ahead into a future into which it is propelled by its very mortal temporality). Human being means being such a self, but not simply because every self cannot know from whence it originally came or be certain about where it is headed. It is such a self because, fundamentally, it is born to die. A finite mortal natality on its way from birth to death—decided and yet deciding— it is a plural and mutable openness (a has-been, which currently is on its way to being something else) in the motility of the ecstasies (past, present, and future) of time. And here, time is that which spaces things out and so prevents everything happening at once or, indeed, of ever becoming a singular sovereign presence. You might say, then, that human being, being both a foundling and a changeling (thrown into a world), is a way of being that is always open to the future because it is continuously challenged to assume how it is to be in a present that is constituted by a “not yet” (always not yet knowing, for example, how one is going to assume this very respon-

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sibility), which is bequeathed by a “once was.” The present is consequently always the future because, as the “not yet” indicates, it is always pointing beyond itself and coming toward its projection of itself.48 Such, among many other things, is the ontological thought that Heidegger’s early thought recalls to contemporary thought.49 Moreover, such I also take to be one of the most important preoccupations of the thinking by Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Nancy (to name three other influences at work here), which has taken up Heidegger’s thought in a radically questioning way. An ontological thought that also recalls the tragic understanding of the self of the Greek poetic tradition, this thought is one which has always been fundamental to politics.50 We can only ever begin, it insists, while we are already underway. Inauguration is continuously recalled, repeated, and reinstituted in every action. Inauguration’s imagined moment of self-initiated and completed presence is never, of course, realized.51 But inauguration as repetition is most evident, and Walzer, too, notes this, when decisions are being made about belonging.52 That is why the advent of the stranger is so informative about the very character of the way the foundation of “community” as such is not only conceived but also organized as a practice. What is at issue here, however, is not the closure necessary to the “distinctiveness of cultures and groups,” which Walzer endorses. It is instead the operation of difference that, as it individuates, simultaneously issues the demand that the other not simply be taken into account but respected in its Otherness. It asks how we are to think and act in acknowledgment of the issuing of this demand, rather than systematically elevating the foreclosing claim of the inside over the outside. Which “outside,” in any event, as Howard Caygill irresistibly argues, no longer has the space to be outside, but is always at the door, that very threshold that ought to be the domain of thought of an international relations that lives up to the “inter” of its name. The founding of a people, nation, or state, together with whatever international regime simultaneously orders their relations and serves to sustain them as the agents that they are within the terms and conditions of that regime, necessarily introduces us to the trial of human estrangement itself, here, in this historical time and in these specific places. As it does so it necessarily and immediately also invokes the Law of hospitality, what Derrida refers to as “the very secret duty of hospitality.”53 Derrida’s “secret duty of hospitality” is, therefore, to be distinguished from the “material aid” that Walzer regards as a calculable obligation and therefore prudential limitation on the right of closure by which a political community is constituted.54 For the obligation to grant material aid is itself a limited one governed by immediate policy considerations, whereas Derrida’s “duty” is unlimited because it concerns the very reception we give to, as well as the very recep-

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tivity of, our being. The matter at issue is the poverty of the political welcome that sovereign subjectivity extends to that being. Just as the creation of a place simultaneously also displaces, so the law that is thus engendered is simultaneously obliged to say not only how the stranger is to be received but also how the strangeness that haunts us as human beings is itself to be welcomed, or not. Arising as the very difference that actively constitutes and individuates identity of any sort, inauguration is, however, not something that once took place or is definitively to take place at some future point, as if once it had happened it could be over and done with. It cannot be grasped once and for all. It is never pure but always adulterated, because it always already and, necessarily, comprises unoriginal inclusions. Inaugurations—the subject’s claim to sovereignty, the constitutional act of foundation, the stranger’s trial of asylum, the immigrant’s process of naturalization—consistently give themselves away as acting into something that is always already under way. That is why they are to be judged, ultimately, by the hospitality they extend toward mortal life’s interrogatory motility. Whereas the autarchic appeal of sovereignty claims to have initiated itself, cannot see why it should welcome any other, and is driven, rather, to normalize or war against the stranger, it is condemned, instead, to betraying the very incompleteness, that uncanny undecidable in-betweeness of life, the end of which it strives to secure. This is why the problematic of human estrangement, the problematic of the political itself, is so evident in the domain of international politics. For it is there that being in the middle—living an existence that is always and everywhere in-between—is so manifest. What is at issue, therefore, for an international relations that takes the “inter” or betweeness seriously, is not only the way in which political space itself is demarcated and of how contemporary sovereign subjectivities work out, or ought to calculate, their political arithmetic. It is how being between operates and issues a call for the inherent Otherness of human being to be made welcome politically. Three disturbing and radically disruptive political issues consistently force themselves onto our attention, therefore, when differentiation is first presented to us politically, even when that is done only—as with sovereign subjectivity—to privilege identity. The first is, What obligation is owed to the ensemble identity/difference, since even from the beginning with Plato it is clear that neither identity nor difference is complete, or indeed possible, without the other? The second is, What if there is an operation of identity/difference that in separating individuals from one another, simultaneously joins them together somehow? And, third, What if the operation of that identity/difference is not simply something that separates one self from another but is actively born(e) within the self it-self, such that any self is always already divided within itself as a self and could not in fact be a self

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if this were not so? If that were so, and the philosophic position to which I subscribe says that it is, such difference (born with the self as it is borne by the self) would inevitably make each self a stranger to itself. How would the idea of politics—the political itself—stand in the light of this radically opposed understanding of the human way of being? What would it, then, be like for politics to be a work of nonallergic relating to whatever is not the self-same, for it to be dedicated to mitigating the murderously narcissistic fear of the impurity of endemic plurality? The response might begin by noting that estrangement rather than sovereign subjectivity—the condition that is always under way, taken-up in the middle, and laid-down before it is complete, hence never securely at home—is the condition of possibility of the political. 55 That estrangement—not the foreignness that is particular to the stranger but the estrangement of human beings that is integral to their condition of being here as the beings that they are, hybrid and plural, bearing difference within themselves and with no certain knowledge of their original provenance, which the strangeness of the stranger recalls to native and stranger alike—makes the inauguration of political space itself a possibility. That, in doing so, estrangement is the taking place—the topos of encounter—of an insatiable call for Justice through which human beings are challenged to take up their being by taking on the political as a means of keeping open their very possibility of being. That estrangement accomplishes this because it is a difference that in both separating and joining, poses the issue of human being’s belonging together in its very apartness; wherein which, also, the human itself has always to assume responsibility for that free way of being in ways that continuously do Justice to it in the specific historical locations in which it is necessarily always already located.56 That estrangement, rather than sovereign subjectivity, finally, is the obligatory freedom into which human beings are thrown and whose rigors of judgment and decision they are continuously obliged to assume in novel ways against the foreclosures of sovereign subjectivity, if they are to make the Ethically charged being of their being welcome and its worlds habitable. NOTES

1. For three recent studies, see Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds., State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 2. Plato, The Republic, 2d ed., trans., with an introduction, by Desmond Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 127. 3. Ibid.

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4. Ibid., 128. 5. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1976), 26. Michael Walzer notes that in ancient times the word for stranger and enemy was often the same and that we have only slowly come to differentiate them in a way that allows us to treat the stranger with hospitality. Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 32. Whereas most Schmitt commentators emphasize (correctly) the way in which his understanding of the political is indebted to Hobbes (notably Leo Strauss; see a recent essay on this theme by John P. McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany,” Political Theory 22, no. 4 (November 1994). I would like to draw attention to how his definition of the political is also powerfully reminiscent of the guard-dog metaphor. The connection is not incidental. I suggest that it reveals, instead, the continuity of the tradition of thought— metaphysics—from which political thought itself has derived. It is not simply a matter of Hobbes or Schmitt introducing something like the friend-enemy distinction into political thought. Metaphysics demands such a thing of political thought. See Michael Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London: Routledge, 1996). 6. See Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). 7. Howard Caygill, “Violence, Civility, and the Predicaments of Philosophy,” in The Political Subject of Violence, ed. David Campbell and Michael Dillon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 52. 8. See Dillon, Politics of Security, for an account of politics as the topos of encounter. See also Jacques Derrida, On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), for a related discussion of Khora. 9. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, “Measure, the Suppliant,” Theory and History of Literature, vol. 82 (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), 93. 10. Ibid., 94. Hence the traditional response in Greek poetry to the provenance of the stranger was, “he who comes from elsewhere comes from Zeus.” Ibid. Priam was, of course, protected by Zeus in his adventure across the lines to Achilles’s tent, and Zeus was, among other things, the god of suppliants. The point, then, is not that Achilles would have been in trouble with the top god had he maltreated Priam. Rather, the point is that Greek theogony and the Greek poets understood the significance of the stranger/suppliant so well that they placed it under the protection of their highest deity. 11. All these points are brilliantly illustrated in specific and compelling historical detail in T. Todorov’s extraordinary analysis of the reverberations, for native and stranger alike, of the early Spanish encounter with the Americas: The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). 12. My own view, for which there is little space to develop here although this chapter is itself an attempt to practice it, is to adopt a radical Heideggerian phenomenology of the hidden as it comes to presence in its hiddenness. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), chap. 2. 13. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 51. He goes on: “But, if that is true, why stop with asylum? Why be concerned with men and women actually on our territory who ask to remain, and not with men and women oppressed in their own countries who ask to come in? Why mark off the lucky or aggressive, who have somehow man-

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aged to make their way across our borders, from all others? Once again I don’t have an adequate answer to these questions” (51). 14. I explore the idea of being-in-common in Dillon, Politics of Security, and draw it from Jean-Luc Nancy’s extensive Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger over the very question of ontological freedom. See, in addition to work already cited: Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991); and Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 15. Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 132. 16. Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 17. I use the term “radical hermeneutics” to distinguish it from traditional hermeneutics and signify the difference that arises with Heidegger’s reflections on and subsequent abandonment of “hermeneutics.” See, in particular, Jean-Luc Nancy’s subtle essay “Sharing Voices,” in Transforming The Hermeneutic Context, From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990), 211–259. See also John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 18. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 95. 19. Ibid. 20. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 34. 21. Jacques Derrida, Aporias (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 9. 22. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 95. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Quoted in Tracy B. Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (London: Sage, 1994), 153. 27. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation. 28. For an original account of this solicitude, a standing up for, rather than a standing in for, the other, see Heidegger, Being and Time, chap. 4. 29. I take this, in substantial measure, to be what Jacques Derrida is thinking through in Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994). It is a thought that he has been working and reworking politically one way or another in a number of recent texts, including, in addition to works already cited, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Nass (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); On the Name; and, notwithstanding its explicit subject matter and theme, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 30. See William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), for a stimulating collection of essays on this theme. 31. Hence the preoccupation of The Republic with education. 32. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 26. 33. Ibid., 44. 34. Ibid., 48. 35. Ibid., 27. 36. Ibid., 49, especially.

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37. Ibid., 47. 38. Ibid., 46. 39. Ibid., 27. 40. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 61. 41. Ibid., 32. 42. For an exploration of what “ethicality” means here in relation to Heidegger’s thought, see Joanna Hodge, Heidegger and Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995). 43. Peter Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 210. 44. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 3. 45. Ibid., 61–62. 46. Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (1961), Article 15(1), 989 United Nations Treaty Series 175, entered into force December 13, 1975. See also University of Minnesota Human Rights Library (http://heiwww.unige.ch/humanrts/ instree/w2crs.htm). 47. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 27. 48. This de-privileges the present and argues in favor of human being as futural being. See Heidegger, Being and Time. 49. See, specifically in relation to this interpretation of Heidegger: Dillon, Politics of Security; and, also, David Farrell Krell’s introduction to Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1984); and Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 50. It is exemplified, I would argue, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, where Oedipus the supreme knower did not know himself. See “Oedipus Asphaleos: The Tragedy of (In)security,” in Dillon, Politics of Security. Peter Euben’s work provides the best general introduction to the relation between tragedy and politics. See Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (London: University of California Press, 1986); Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Euben et al., eds., Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Jean-Joseph Goux has produced a stimulating politico-philosophical reading of Oedipus Rex in his recent Oedipus, Philosopher (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). See also Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 51. See Michael Dillon and Jerry Everard, “Stat[e]ing Australia,” Alternatives 17, no. 3 (summer 1992): 218–312. 52. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, 31. 53. Derrida, Aporias, 8. 54. See Walzer, Spheres of Justice, chap. 2. 55. Peter Goodrich recounts a wonderful example of this, which, in addition, illustrates the point about the stranger within as well as without. He does so when discussing a dispute in 1985 between the Haida Indians of Lyell Island in the Queen Charlotte archipelago off the coast of mainland British Columbia, and the U.S. logging company that had been granted permission by the government of British Columbia to log the island. The testimony presented to the court by the Haida “was extremely novel in legal terms. It took the form of symbolic dress, mythologies, masks and totem poles as well as the legends, stories poems, songs, and other forms of interpretation that such art and mythology implied. The argument was both lyrical and visual, narrative and aesthetic, and it extend far beyond the contours of con-

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temporary Western languages of law.” The Indians, of course, lost the case: “That language was annulled in the simple, direct and brutal sense that it was not even referred to save as a curiosity, a relic, a more primitive remnant of a more savage past. The court would not compare mythologies, it refused even to countenance the question of the ‘other.’” Languages of Law, 183. 56. This analysis is, of course, heavily influenced by Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein, to which the question of difference and the belonging together (Mitsein) of human being (Dasein) is essential, such that Mitsein neither qualifies nor modifies the Sein but belongs to it essentially and constitutively. Given the importance of these points and the disputes surrounding them, Peg Birmingham clarifies them in an exemplary way and forcefully demonstrates through a close reading of Being and Time that, for Heidegger: “Dasein’s embodiment is the place of difference, disallowing the possibility of understanding identity as solus ipse. Inauthentic or authentic Dasein’s embodiment means that it is originally and inescapably with others, immersed in its world and permeated by that world.” See Birmingham, “Logos and the Place of the Other,” Research in Phenomenology 20 (1990): 36. Jean-Luc Nancy extensively develops this aspect of Heidegger’s thought in ways that contest other aspects of it. See, for example, Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common,” in Community at Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991); and Nancy, Being-With, Working Paper no. 11 (Essex University, Colchester: Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, March 1996). William E. Connolly also subtly explores the political implications of the ensemble identity/difference in Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox.

9 Gypsy Identity and Political Theory Eilis Haughey

Traditionally without attachment to territory or political hierarchy, the Gypsies provide an interesting lens through which to review the language and assumptions of the dominant discourse of international politics. In the first section of the chapter, I attempt to provide an insight into the complexity and diversity of Gypsy identity and culture. The stories woven by the Gypsies regarding their “origins” undermine the very assumption of a single origin. In the next section, I look at some of the specific concepts that frame contemporary analysis of international politics. Thus, for example, the issues of territorial sovereignty, national identity, and unanimity are addressed, with emphasis on the problems and paradoxes inherent in these terms and the possibility of relating them to the Gypsies. Finally, I move on to consider alternative ways in which Gypsies might practice their politics, looking also at the ways in which Gypsies are being accorded rights or recognized as a group only by compromising some of their distinctive cultural features. GYPSY HISTORY: A WESTERN RENDITION

The estimates of the number of Gypsies in Europe range from four to eight million. Part of the reason for this spread lies with the term gypsy itself. It is generally used (by the settled population) to refer to groups carrying on the nomadic tradition of their forefathers. It is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed., 1989) as a member of a wandering race (by themselves called Romany), of Hindu origin, which first appeared in England about the beginning of the 16th c. and was then believed to have come from Egypt.

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They have dark tawney skin and black hair. They make a living by basket-making, horse-dealing and fortune-telling, etc.; and have usually been objects of suspicion from their nomadic life and habits. Their language is a greatly corrupted version of Hindi with a large admixture of words from various European lang[uage]s.1

Linguistic analysis in the nineteenth century discovered Indo-Aryan roots to the “Gypsy language” group known as Romani. Many similarities of etymology and syntax confirmed its connection with Sanskrit, an ancient language of northern India, little spoken in the last thousand years. However, Angus Fraser is careful to point out that we should not confuse the origins of a language with those of its speakers: entire ethnic groups switch language over time, and a similarity of language may not indicate a similar geographical origin.2 The perceived movement of a language may or may not inform us as to the movements of a people. Nevertheless, western scholars are fairly sure that between 800 and 1000 A.D. there was some sort of migration out of India, possibly in three groups, of either peripatetic craftspeople or entertainers within India or even a sedentary group who left for political or religious reasons.3 On each of these details, uncertainty prevails. Subsequent research unearthed documentation and evidence of linguistic “borrowing,” which suggests that these groups traveled west across Persia over the next hundred years or so, spending a good deal of time in what is now Armenia, Turkey, and Greece. It seems the nomadic way of life was not strictly adhered to: there are references spanning a century to a large Gypsy settlement at the port of Modon in Greece, for example. By the end of the fourteenth century, Gypsy groups were widely established in the Balkans also. In both Wallachia and Moldavia, two states enjoying only brief periods of independence, the Gypsy populations were enslaved almost immediately. According to western historians, 1417 is the year when Gypsy groups began their grand sweep across Europe. These arrivals are widely reported, and the Gypsies were often well received in those first years—partly because of the letters of commendation they carried that purported to be from figures of authority such as the pope. The initial reaction was shortlived, and very soon Gypsies were banned from many European towns. From the sixteenth century onward, there are frequent references to Gypsies in official papers, pilgrims’ journals, and literature, most of it hostile. The last five hundred years have seen a more or less concentrated effort to either expel Gypsies from European society, eradicate them completely, or at the very least assimilate them into mainstream society, destroying their identity(ies). In Britain the death penalty was imposed until 1783, for being, behaving like, or associating with Gypsies. By 1906 Germany had taken the first steps toward granting Gypsies some measure of (national and) international status—by signing nine bilat-

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eral treaties with its neighbors for the exclusion of “foreign” Gypsies. The stage was set for the horrors to follow. Once again, the figures vary widely, but it seems almost half a million Gypsies perished during the holocaust, with the highest death toll in the former Yugoslavia. Postwar progress has been slow: Gypsy children in Switzerland were still being taken from their parents and placed in foster homes until 1973 as part of the assimilationist program. Since 1975, the Council of Europe has made statements specifically referring to Gypsies and encouraging its members to tackle discrimination and recognize their particular needs in terms of education, welfare, and training. In 1989 the Council of the European Community called for a “global structural approach to education” to be founded on “respect for culture, additional resources and special training for teachers” and is now funding some transnational educational programs specifically for Gypsy children.4 There is continuing debate about the detail of this account, although the broad outline is accepted: the confusion or multiplicity of possible genealogies is in a sense crucial to the story. “THE GREAT TRICK”: WHO THE GYPSIES SAY THEY ARE

In contrast to the findings of western scholars, the Gypsies themselves never claimed Indian origin, and many sources reveal all kinds of wild and wonderful tales told about their previous existence. One version of events relates to the time they spent in Greece, where they were exposed to Christianity: realizing the privileged status accorded to pilgrims, they opted for this very guise themselves. A journal of Herman Cornerus, Chronica Novella, records the visit in 1417 of a band of three hundred men and women, “very ugly in appearance and black as Tartars,” claiming that they were doing penance for a lapse of faith, which required them to wander the Earth for seven years.5 Many groups are reported to have said they came from “Little Egypt”—hence the name Gypsy. Some professed a connection with the flight of Mary and Joseph from Egypt and claimed that was the reason for their persecution. In June 1418, the city of Frankfurt apparently welcomed such a group, providing them with money, food, and shelter. Others presented themselves as traveling aristocrats from countries such as Ethiopia. Some stories were used as a means of protection when things were getting “tricky”—in order to deal with accusations of theft, for example, it was claimed that they had the authority of the king of Hungary to steal what they needed during their period of penitence. Mocking the methods of Europeans in other ways, Gypsies procured (probably forged) papal letters of recommendation, said to have been granted them since they had been persecuted for their faith. These served as an early form of passport and were very successfully used to obtain food and shelter.6 O Xonxano

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Baro, or the “Great Trick,” is the name by which the Gypsies remember this and other means of relieving people of their money. Up to this point, the discussion has presupposed the existence of an identifiable “Gypsy identity.” Even this betrays a western-induced tendency to define, simplify, or render mono-vocalic that which is rich in meaning: there is not even a Romani word for “Gypsy” or any word designating the group as a whole.7 There is a Romani word for “outsider”: Gorgio is the term by which they refer to most people who are not members of their group or a recognized Gypsy family. Within the group, though, the Romani word for “man” is rom. The Gypsies refer to themselves—their own group—as Roma, the plural of rom, which translates simply as “the people.” Similarly, in France, some tribes call themselves Manouches, again a plural form of the word manus (man) in another dialect. Thus, the Gypsy name for themselves omits any mention of national, geographic, or ethnic origin, religious affiliation, or nomadic lifestyle and seems almost to restrict itself to saying “we are who we are.” The crucial point is that they traditionally claimed no unifying group identity. This is reflected all over Europe: there are innumerable tribes and subgroupings, each considering themselves quite separate from any others. They also refer to subdivisions of groups by the traditional occupation associated with that family, such as the Kalderash (“coppersmiths”) or the Lovara (“horse-dealers”). Gypsies have, of course, thrived on the selective absorption of many linguistic and other traits of their different “host” cultures. This partly explains the development of different dialects forming a continuum of languages (many of which are mutually unintelligible) and cultures merging imperceptibly—as did other modern European languages until the advent of the state (and the printing press). Paradoxically, this “two way acculturation” has probably been one of the major factors that enabled any kind of Gypsy identity to survive persecution.8 Recognition within a particular Gypsy group is largely based on blood and marriage. Judith Okely’s study found that children of a mixed marriage may be referred to as “half and half” but will be accepted as one of “the people” if brought up as such.9 Observance of customs and taboos and “the Gypsy way”—as defined by that particular group at that time—is also crucial. Fraser points out that even if there had only been one Gypsy-Gorgio marriage in every hundred marriages since the exodus from India, no Gypsy today would have as much as 50 percent Gypsy blood.10 Rather than an emphasis on “objective” criteria, such as country of origin, language, or occupation, people claiming connection with these groups must satisfy constantly changing cultural norms. It is interesting that these norms do not appear to include leading a nomadic lifestyle per se, something that adds to the difficulty of pinning down the essence of Gypsyness. The majority of Gypsies in Europe are now sedentary. For those still traveling, Thomas

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Alan Acton and other Gypsiologists posit possible economic reasons for movement, again challenging the one common link we might think could unite these multilingual, multicultural, nonconforming peoples.11 Okely claims that each group perceives itself as part of a “true Gypsy” family. There are numerous terms for all kinds of not-quite-Gorgios such as “mumpler,” “pikie,” or “hedge-crawler”—people on the road perhaps, but not true Gypsies according to that particular group. This is linked to the absence of perceived group identity, but persecution through the years may have as much to do with this intergroup rivalry as any Gypsy tradition, each group being anxious to distinguish themselves from those under attack. In their dealings with the “settled” population, many Gypsies prefer the name “Travellers,” not, it would seem, for reasons of accuracy, but because of the negative connotations the name Gypsy has acquired. Even so, some Gypsies still cling defiantly to this name (though it is always confined to their interactions with the Gorgios). Ironically, the question of the ‘true Gypsy’ is a technique widely employed by Gorgios to almost define Gypsies out of existence; note, for example, this extract from an eighteenth-century Chambers Cyclopaedia that describes “Egyptians” as a counterfeit kind of rogues, who, being English or Welsh people, disguise themselves in uncouth habits, smearing their faces and bodies, and framing themselves to an unknown canting language, wander up and down; and under pretence of telling fortunes, curing diseases &c. abuse the common people, trick them of their money and steal all that is not too hot nor too heavy for them.12

The same attitude led to the enactment of a “Law for the Avoiding of All Doubts And Ambiguities” (1562), which operated on the assumption that most, if not all, so-called Egyptians actually colored their skin and were simply criminals. 13 It therefore extended the death penalty to all “counterfeit Egyptians.” Similarly, in Spain in 1619, Prince Phillip asserted that Gypsies were not a “nation” but “a collection of vicious people drawn from the dregs of Spanish society”—assimilationism, albeit in an unusual form.14 SOVEREIGNTY, SELF-DETERMINATION, AND OVERDETERMINATION

Territory is a crucial element in the existence of a state in international law: “the mission and purpose of international law has been the delimitation of the exercise of sovereign power on a territorial basis.”15 From this perspective, there can be no “sovereignty” without territory. An alternative view sees modern sovereignty as residing in the people. The tension

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between these two views is clearly seen when the issues of self-determination or decolonization arise. As many have noted, “peoples” and borders are rarely coterminous. UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 and several other UN documents declare the right of “all peoples . . . to self-determination . . . by virtue of [which] . . . they freely determine their own political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”16 Thus this right apparently attaches to peoples. Equally however, both the UN Charter and Resolution 1514 limit this right by subjugating it to the “territorial integrity” and “national unity” of the countries in question. The implication is obviously that without territory or at least an aspiration to same, a people is effectively written out of the script. Perhaps that explains why several writers have referred in this context to the overdetermined nature of identities, in other words, the imprisonment of identity within territorial boundaries. The movement of the Gypsy populations also forces us to ask, Who is the self? when considering self-determination. Traditional analysis is conceptually unequipped in a case in which the “self” does not claim territory. Add to this the lack of clear perception of group identity and the fact that Gypsies are now mostly sedentary, and the dominant discourse shows further signs of strain. Face to face with the Westphalian urge to categorize and fix people in static groups, we see the tendency to let territory determine the people and not people determine themselves. Despite the diversity of meaning incorporated in Gypsyness, this fixity is the antithesis of any kind of Gypsy culture, and there is no “space” within this schema to accommodate that difference. The Gypsies remain silenced by a further connotation of self-determination. Territory brings a voice at international level—though only one voice per patch. In spite of the evident cultural diversity of Gypsy groups, it is perhaps natural to attempt to draw together some strands that distinguish “us” from “them.” But the Gypsies problematize this boundary also, effortlessly illustrating arguments that present identification as a site of conflict. Most of Europe’s Gypsies are now sedentary to a greater or lesser extent, thus undermining the assumption of the nomadic lifestyle typical of Gypsies. In fact, it is not unheard of for Gypsy families to request special help in settling down, based on their Gypsy identity, in spite of its nomadic associations. Still, we might say, they form a distinct cultural group; but to whom? It is only recently that conscious efforts have been made to impose some unity on them as a means of protection. A recent human rights report described race as a “biologically and socially redundant term.”17 Ethnically, Gypsies exhibit wide diversity in terms of language and cultural behavior. Often Gypsies are portrayed as living outside “society,” even though in many ways the traditions of self-

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employment—doing repair-work, dealing in secondhand goods, and carrying on recycling—are not unusual to or incompatible with sedentary society. In the past, doing this kind of work enabled a symbiosis with the dominant culture that has to a certain extent been lost due to technological advances and bad town and country planning. The Gypsies defy our efforts to talk about them and thus effortlessly subvert tendencies to simplify identities and categorize people. After all of this, it is not possible to pin down the essence of Gypsyness, and this for reasons that undermine our other pinnings-down. The attitude toward the other of the Gypsies themselves provides an interesting contrast. Referring to themselves as simply “the people,” omitting any mention of race, ethnicity, territory, or religion, they question the significance of these labels as employed within the Gorgio tradition. In effect, they dismiss any concept of “national interest” and refuse to fit into even the most laudible efforts to study “their” needs or recognize “their” interests. However, within extended family or social circles, they are often reported to be fiercely protective of their particular traditions and culture and refer to most people as Gorgios, including those we might call Gypsies. Bertha Quintana notes the paradox of this conservatism employed to protect a constantly moving, changing way of life.18 It sits strangely with the widely noted Gypsy tradition of selectively absorbing whichever facets of a host culture were deemed useful, making these their own. The Gypsies of Andalusia provide a fine example of this—even musical experts struggle to distinguish whether the roots of many of the supposedly “traditional” tunes of the area are Andalusian or Gypsy.19 The irony of the fact that Gypsies were roaming around Europe since before states existed cannot be overemphasized. The growth of the state system occurred in a way that marginalized and threatened Gypsy identities, and yet today, those identities still challenge the orthodox view of world affairs that is predicated upon a clear divide between the “domestic” and the “international.” In 1906, Germany signed treaties regulating the exclusion of “foreign” Gypsies and binding countries to contain their “own” outsiders. In 1995, Gypsies all over Eastern Europe suffered attacks based, in theory, on “ethnicity.” Are they then a domestic or an international problem? The rights of Gypsies clearly do not fit neatly into either category, exemplifying the increasingly blurred nature of this divide. It is interesting to contrast the importance we place on our fixed notion of nationality, even in a casual holiday situation, with the multiplicity of tales told about Gypsy origin. We are encouraged to remember and take pride in the factually verifiable details of our genealogy and national history. In contrast, for a thousand years the Gypsies have been covering their varied and fascinating tracks so that their contemporary understanding of their own identity/identities does not in any way feign reliance on a great

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and glorious (or otherwise) past. This view of identity gives space for interpretation and diversity and allows more recognition of strands of culture, personality, and opinion: the absence of grand narrative allows for the plurality of selves encompassed within the “Gypsy identity.”20 BOUNDARIES AND REPRESENTATION

Given the difficulties of articulating a Gypsy politics within the existing system, the purpose of this section is to explore alternative sites where (Gypsy) politics might be practiced. The concept of identity has been discussed as a building block crucial to our understanding of politics. In connection with boundedness and definition, however, Jonathan Rutherford emhasizes the overdetermined nature of identities and the unrecognized, transient quality of identity in general. Identity is “an interchange between self and structure, a transforming process—otherwise language only conjures up the past.”21 In a similar vein, Stuart Hall suggests that we consider identity “as a production that is never complete, always in process and always constituted within and not outside representation.”22 Thus, perhaps, “identity” is the metaphorical Gypsy of political theory, unbounded and difficult to pin down, having life or meaning only in the moment. Can movement beyond static, simplistic representations of identity bring us a step closer to a more inclusive politics? “Inclusions” are evident in other areas: “international relations” (IR) seems to have burst its definitional banks also, such that much of the criticism of current approaches is actually coming from outside the discipline, in the writings of prominent sociolgists, anthropologists, and geographers. Because IR theorizing transcends both traditional disciplinary boundaries and the state boundaries designated by the dominant discourse, it is becoming more difficult to portray IR as a separate independent discipline at all.23 Extending the analogy, then, could we possibly argue that postmodern writers, in their efforts to uproot fixed assumptions and render “definition” problematic, are in some sense the Gypsies of the IR discipline—unattached to territorial (or academic) divisions, trying to move the discourse beyond western liberal and Christian democratic assumptions, remaining largely unrecognized in the practice of international politics, rejecting the grand narrative approach, and subverting notions of the unanimity of states as actors? “So the place I am writing from is somewhere in motion,” says Rutherford.24 Taking Stuart Hall’s notion of identity as “positioning oneself within a given narrative,” we must consider the possibilities open to those who find themselves excluded from the narrative in question.25 How do Gypsies practice their politics? Given their oral culture and (perceived or enforced?)

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separateness from western culture, Gypsies tend to be considered apolitical in terms of traditional practices. In challenging this assumption, we again problematize boundaries. The importance that music holds in oral-dominated Gypsy culture, as the main method of passing on cultural norms or the “Gypsy Way” as well as (hi)story and mythology, is well documented in Quintana’s extensive sociological survey, ¡Que Gitano!26 Quintana’s informants stressed the extreme importance of the different types of Gypsy songs and music in passing on traditional values: the faster coplas for cultural norms such as marital fidelity, filial devotion, and loyalty to the Gypsy Way and the slower cante jondo (deep song) for the themes of freedom, revenge, or tribal justice.27 Music was said to be a primary means of communicating not only the norms of the Gypsy Way but penalties incurred for any breach thereof. Ironically, Gypsy music is the one thing the West has given Gypsy culture recognition for. So why not examine this as an alternative site of political activity? Of course, this is by no means a new idea: Gypsy music was banned in Bulgaria in the 1980s, deemed politically subversive in a country trying to legislate Gypsies out of existence, as Fraser puts it.28 The same occurred in the 1960s in Hungary. Appreciation of the political side of music is not unheard of in the West: the American Indian cult of the “Ghost Dance” was highly significant in the last year of their militant efforts to fend off the white man. As Henry Steele Commager writes: “Throughout the summer of 1890 the tension increased on the reservations. In the autumn the ghost dancing commenced. Too late, Indian service officials realized the deep hostility of the new ritual.”29 The result was the massacre of Wounded Knee, “an isolated epilogue” to the wars deliberately provoked by the Sioux in the belief that they now had the power, supported by the ghosts of their ancestors, to win the battle against the white settlers. They did not, of course, but they inflicted very serious losses on the U.S. cavalry. Closer to home, many Irish dances are named after political events, for example, the “Siege of Ennis” or the “Walls of Limerick,” and the British government made great use of Van Morrison’s music in a television advertisement campaign in Northern Ireland in support of the peace process. Clearly, there is selective recognition of the political aspect of music, but there is simply no space within IR to make a move toward even considering such an issue. The particular importance of music to Gypsies is well expressed by Agnes Daroczi, a Gypsy attending the World Romany Congress (WRC) in 1981: “Gypsies are probably the only people left in Europe with a folklore that is still living and growing. Our songs, dances and traditions are not just some sort of staged presentation, they are the means of describing our everyday lives.”30 It is argued that the Romani language would never have survived so long in an oral culture, a minority for a thousand years, were it

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not for the strength of the musical tradition. Is the logos of the Gypsies, then, sung or even danced? Tony Gatlif, a film director of Gypsy blood, angered and inspired by the suffering of Gypsy peoples, has made a film aptly entitled Latcho Drom (Safe Journey) to tell a tale of Gypsy travels from India. His understanding of Gypsy lifestyles led him to tell his tale entirely without dialogue, a “musical odyssey” of singing and dancing that told of their travels and persecution in an uncompromisingly Gypsy way. Assimilation into the host culture has been a possible option for Gypsies in most countries, except during periods of specifically ethnic attacks, such as are taking place at the moment in Eastern Europe, for example. There is an enormous sacrifice to be paid to the dominant culture. The experience of the Gypsies is reminiscent of that of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia and Canada, who were forced to deny or abandon one of the distinguishing features of their culture in order to preserve that lifestyle. Aborigines had to go to court and claim ownership of the land—something alien to their culture—in order that that culture might survive. It can only be a positive development that in the former Yugoslavia, Gypsies have been accorded cultural and political recognition and television has begun showing programs in the Romani dialects of the various tribes, but it is somewhat disturbing that Gypsies have been roused to31 adopt Gorgio-style behavior to assert themselves in world politics.32 The Comite International Tsigane was formed in Paris in 1965 in an effort to stimulate feelings of unity among the diverse Gypsy populations of the world and to combat the generally similar types of maltreatment perpetrated by “host” societies. The first WRC was held in 1971 to raise awareness of Gypsy issues and campaign for just treatment. To this end, the WRC even adopted a flag and anthem, “Opré Roma!” (“Gypsies Arise!”), and at the second WRC in 1978, they elected representatives to the UN, the UN Commission on Human Rights, and United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. There have been several such congresses since then, including the first Congress of EU Gypsies in Seville in July 1994, led by a member of the European Parliament who is himself a Gypsy. For a variety of reasons, little has been achieved, except perhaps concerning awareness of educational needs. As Derek Hawes and Barbara Perez point out, most of these movements have been led by non-Gypsy apologists, and it is still not clear that many Gypsies are either aware of or in support of this type of action.33 In the present climate, with increasing numbers of racial attacks, more and more Gypsies may feel drawn to these movements as a necessary form of protection. In a similar vein, and for all the world like a nation-state trying to foster unity and homogeneity, there are plans to “produce” a standardized version of Romani. There are more Gypsies in Europe than Irish people; they have suffered at least a thousand years of persecution, yet they cannot be heard within the

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existing system. This is partly because they have many voices, being a diverse group of tribes, but mostly because of static representations of international politics that operate to exclude both peoples and ideas that are of significance in challenging conventional ideas about global affairs. The underlying aim of the argument in this chapter has been to show the repressive and inadequate nature of state-centric renditions of international politics and to problematize a simplistic analysis through the widening and deepening of debate to include alternative and changing visions of the world, interdisciplinary approaches, and recognition of multiple loyalties and identities—or seeing “things as they truly differ.”34 In some ways, the suggestions could be summed up in the idea of being a bit more gitano ourselves. With this in mind, Latcho Drom! NOTES

1. Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed., 1989), s. v. “Gypsy.” 2. Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1992), 20. 3. For example, Grellman, cited in Thomas Alan Acton, Gypsy Politics and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1974). 4. Council of the European Community, 89/C153/02 May 22, 1989 “Resolution of the Council and the Ministers of Education Meeting Within the Council of 22 May 1989 on School Provision for Gypsy and Traveller Children,” Official Journal of the European Communities C153, 32 (21 June 1989): 3–4. 5. Fraser, The Gypsies, 67. 6. Ibid., 54, 71–74. 7. Jean Pierre Liegeois, quoted in Derek Hawes and Barbara Perez, The Gypsy and the State: The Ethnic Cleansing of British Society (Bristol: SAUS, 1995), 144. 8. Bertha B. Quintana, ¡Que Gitano! Gypsies of Southern Spain (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 26. 9. Judith Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) , 69. 10. Fraser, The Gypsies, 24. 11. Acton, Gypsy Politics, 137. 12. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia: or, a Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 7th ed. (London: W. Innys, 1751). 13. Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies, 3. 14. Quintana, ¡Que Gitano! 19. 15. Sir Robert Jennings, The Acquisition of Territory in International Law (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963), 2. 16. UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (xv), “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples”; United Nations, “Resolutions Adopted by the General Assembly During Its Fifteenth Session,” vol. 1, 20 September–20 December 1960 (New York, 1961). 17. House of Commons, Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights, 18th Annual Report, 1992–1993 (London: HMSO), p. 36. 18. Quintana, ¡Que Gitano! passim.

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19. Ibid., 23. 20. The significance of other perspectives in actually shaping “reality” cannot be overlooked: based on this realization, there is a Gypsy encyclopedia being written, not about Gypsies but specifically for Gypsies. Fraser, The Gypsies, 317. 21. Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 10. 22. Stuart Hall, quoted in Rutherford, Identity, 222. 23. See, for example, Julian Saurin, “The End Of International Relations,” in Boundaries in Question, ed. John Macmillan and Andrew Linklater (London: Pinter, 1995), 244. 24. Rutherford, Identity, 13. 25. Hall, quoted in Rutherford, Identity, 225. 26. Quintana, ¡Que Gitano! passim. 27. Ibid., 68. 28. Fraser, The Gypsies, 281. 29. Henry Steele Commager The West (London: Orbis, 1976) 246. 30. Agnes Daroczi, quoted in J. Marre, Beats of the Heart (New South Wales: Pluto Press, 1985), 193. 31. Fraser, The Gypsies, 282. 32. Ibid., 315–318. 33. Hawes and Perez, The Gypsy and the State, 144. 34. James Der Derian, ed., International Theory: Critical Investigations (London: Macmillan, 1995), 388.

10 Hierarchies of Suffering in the Promised Land Gadi Gofbarg & Meir Gal

THE SCENT OF BIGOTRY

Modern political Zionism was based on the proposition that Jews all over the world constitute a single nationality and that the only solution to anti-Semitism was the concentration of all Jews in a Jewish state established in Palestine, which was accomplished in 1948 with the creation of Israel. In 1967, when the so-called Six Day War broke out between the Arabs and Israelis, I was a teenager living in São Paulo, Brazil. As the Israeli army moved into the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, I felt as if I myself were an Israeli soldier gloriously averting another holocaust. My personal identity was fused with the collective Jewish identity being reshaped by the Israeli state through a spectacular display of military force. Israel’s sweeping military victory had been exhilarating. It changed my life. I dropped out of school and emigrated to Israel. Shortly after my arrival, I went with a friend for a night walk in recently occupied East Jerusalem. We walked until morning, feeling like conquerors as we strolled noisily down the narrow streets of the ancient city. Impersonating Jesus, we dropped to the ground laughing every time we came to a station of the cross on Via Dolorosa. When young Jewish boys from Brazil occupy a sacred Christian site, irreverently mimicking and mocking the God of the Christians, they reenact an old ceremony of intolerance. Such a display of insensitivity is consistent with the way I’ve always been taught to view Gentiles. I also wrote home: “I think Arabs stink more when they are alive than when they are dead.” I had never seen or spoken to an Arab in my life, and yet I expressed such virulent racism. I adopted bigotry as if it was the latest fashion. The Israeli state, in its campaign to recruit devotees to its nationalistic schemes, established an elaborate system of indoctrination, both in Israel GADI GOFBARG

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and the diaspora. In order to construct a new Jewish identity, it tapped into old Jewish fears. It not only appropriated the Nazi holocaust that had destroyed the thousand-year-old Ashkenazi culture of Eastern Europe as the traumatic legitimacy for the creation of the state but used its mythical dimension as a justification for its future. The Jewish legacy of persecution persuaded Israelis to see force as the only answer, the only tangible political reality. One of its best recruiting instruments became its military accomplishments, coupled with the obligatory demonization of the Arab enemy. In 1822, during the Ottoman Empire, there were no more than 24,000 Jews in Palestine, less than 10 percent of the mostly Arab population, and relations between Palestinians and Jews were stable and peaceful. It was only after the advent of Zionism, followed by the arrival of the British in 1917, that tensions between Arabs and Jews developed. BLOND JEWS AND DARK JEWS

My family’s erratic voyages in the region in the past two hundred years could be used to narrate the grotesque consequences of the political pendulum. My parents were born in the West Bank during the British colonization of Palestine. As Palestinian Jews, apart from a ten-year hiatus in Egypt as a result of a severe drought, my family lived among Palestinian Arabs for eight generations. In the 1920s, Palestinian Arabs and Jews demonstrated together against the aspirations of the incoming European Jews and the intervention of the British army. This alliance did not last, and old neighbors gradually turned against each other. The animosities quickly escalated and finally peaked in the 1929 massacre. My family survived because their Arab landlord protected them and later evacuated them to the Jewish part of Jerusalem. Thus, I am pulled by Israeli and Palestinian roots—a juggler of historical dilemmas. My mother always thought that because of our proximity to European Jews, we would grow up to resemble them. Frequently, I would hear my mother’s longing for a tall blond boy. The rejection of the North African and Asian culture was effectively orchestrated by the state alongside the glorification of the superior European type. The head principal of my school, a German Jew, also expressed his dissatisfaction. Selecting suitable candidates for a social event, he scrutinized the class. When he saw me excitedly raising my hand he said: “Meir, put your hand down. We need tall, blond, and beautiful children.” The classification of Asian and North African Jews as an inferior group is deeply rooted in the history of Zionism. The blueprint for the division of labor of the Israeli state was designed in Europe as early as the 1890s. European Jews were to be the consumers and producers of culture, whereas MEIR GAL

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non-Europeans were allocated the brunt of hard labor. Already in 1903, Yemenite Jews were shipped to Palestine to prepare some land for the arrival of European Jews. Around 1949, David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, gave the official stamp to the view that Zionism was a domain of European and American Jews and that the Jews of Europe were the leading candidates for citizenship in the state. When the final magnitude of the holocaust was understood, Ben Gurion said: “Hitler, more than he hurt the Jewish people, hurt the Jewish state. . . . He destroyed the substance, the main and essential building force. . . . The state arose and did not find the people who had waited for it.” The scarcity of European Jews forced the state of Israel to bring Jews from Arab countries. The immigration policies that were quickly drafted utilized language reminiscent of that used against Jews during the holocaust. Emissaries were sent abroad to examine the “quality of the human material” and select immigrants according to age, health, financial status, and political affiliation, as outlined by quotas determined by the big political parties. Ben Gurion traced the historical affinities between Arab Jews and the Africans who were brought as slaves to America. In a letter to one of his senior emissaries, he ordered that “if a group of 30,000 North African Jews can be found whose percentage of welfare recipients does not exceed 10–13 percent, we should bring them at once . . . among them will be a few thousand young males, who will strengthen our army.” It is 1973, and I’m fifteen years old. I am at the Western Wall where thousands of people are gathered for Yom Kippur prayers. A deafening siren fills the air. I run from the Arab city in the east to my neighborhood on the west side of Jerusalem. It feels familiar and exhilarating—a perfect meshing of a traumatic past with an ominous present. The historical past has returned as the adhesive that holds us together. The public receives full attention from the state and is offered the illusion of a full partnership in state affairs. The radio begins to broadcast emergency codes, and slowly the men begin to leave. My father collapses, pleading with my mother to prevent the army from drafting him. Some years later during a demonstration against the war, a hand grenade was thrown into the crowd, and a member of the peace movement was killed. My father expressed his satisfaction: “maybe now, these traitors will learn the lesson.” Estranged from his own predicament, he continued to support the state, projecting his own betrayal onto a dead protester. Thrown into the precariousness of a feeble male within a society that worships lustrous warriors, my father in a single utterance remade his history—most males manipulate battle stories in order to replicate the historical image of the masculine Israeli. Under such circumstances, memories have a bizarre duration; one moment they register vicariously in personal memory, and in another, they assimilate into an inventory of collective memories. Within this construction, gender stereo-

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types are clearly demarcated. It seems to many of us that when males go to war they do so taking their identity for granted, but in fact every social event, including that of war, is an opportunity to forge male identity. As young males, we didn’t understand our susceptibility to war—and the state never had any interest in explaining it to us. BODIES

I was 23 years old when the war started in 1973. Certain that I was going to get drafted, I waited anxiously for the phone to ring. When it finally did, I became exhilarated. I was about to participate in the ultimate Israeli experience— a rite of passage. I quickly grabbed a few things, threw them into a pack, and headed for the front. I remember trying to figure out the logic of packing a toothbrush to war. There I was, concerned about my teeth while submitting my whole body to the devastating consequences of war. To me, participating in a war was something vaguely similar to watching a war movie—at the end you go home. It didn’t include the possibility of dying. The mythology of war preempted the possibility of real death. Later that day, I was in the Golan Heights serving with a medical unit in the middle of it all. The following morning I got orders to join a special armored unit that followed tanks into the battlefield and fixed them as they broke down. I felt as if I stood on the border as it moved forward. When artillery shells began to fall on us, we took cover under idled tanks. This went on all day. The violence of the shelling shook me so much that when we got back that night to the relative safety of the rear, I ran away. My desertion changed the initial feelings of exhilaration into fear and anger. For the first time in my life, my allegiance to the state wavered, and I felt guilty. I walked aimlessly through areas that not too long before had been under bombardment. Eventually, I ran into my medical unit, where I served the rest of the war. The next morning I saw the first dead body. They brought in a reservist, in his forties, on a stretcher. His skull was cracked, and as I surveyed his body, I noticed a few drops of semen at the tip of his penis. That’s what I remember the most—his involuntary discharge at the moment of death. The penis, in its most inglorious ejaculation, brutally declared the futility of the whole enterprise. A few days later we moved into a Syrian village that had been emptied of its inhabitants. The soldiers made themselves at home and found comfortable spots to spend the night. I refused to enter the villagers’ homes and decided to sleep outside to the delight of my “buddies” who thought the whole episode was very amusing. I spent the following night in a bombedout school, warming myself by a fire made with pupils’ desks, watching the GADI GOFBARG

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flames slowly consume the names of Arab children etched on it. I remember soldiers racing village donkeys and chasing chickens between the bombing raids. After the cease-fire, an entrepreneurial Israeli soldier brought an 8 mm movie projector from home and charged admission for a screening of sex films in what used to be a family bedroom in the Arab village. During the 1973 war, Israelis’ unconditional loyalty to the state began to erode. The pioneering spirit that had fueled the birth of the state was debunked when soldiers were exposed to the brutal realities of battle. Most adult Israeli males were mobilized to fight a war they could only interpret through a folklore carefully constructed to represent war as a glorified event. But the fears, the wasting of bodies, and the violence revealed the deception perpetrated by the state and replaced it with a distrust that continued to grow as Israel prepared for its next war in Lebanon. MORE ABOUT BODIES AND DIFFERENT TYPES OF DEATH

It is 1978 in Lebanon. I’m standing over a body of a dead soldier. I saw him running past me a few minutes earlier. For the first time, I felt the disparity between the official version of death furnished by the state and the actual death of this person. For years I repeated this story as my first encounter with a dead body. While writing this chapter, I realized that the body of the Israeli soldier was not the first I had witnessed. A few days earlier, while preparing for an overnight camp, we encountered the bodies of three Arabs. We had two choices; we could either bury them or spend the night in the company of these corpses. The wish to remember does not guarantee the desired results. My backward glance reveals my involuntary participation and ignorant ideological affiliations. My experience is not a rarity. Many Israelis routinely conceal their own account of suffering; it is overshadowed by the sufferings of the state and the hierarchy of suffering it has established. In the national ethos, death is portrayed through heroic stories that celebrate the dead as martyrs. Major events are preserved in collective memory as an archive of nostalgia and sacrifice in a traumatic heritage that solidifies a monolithic view of the past. In the process, the official memory of the state is stored in the public unconscious and maintained in a constant state of recollection; when recalled, the past makes yet another spectacular appearance—inherently elusive, it does not reappear preserved, but rather it is harnessed to masquerade, to fit perfectly into the shape of the present. Five years later I’m in Lebanon again. A bomb exploded on the main road south of Beirut, and injured Lebanese civilians are rushed to me. Upon MEIR GAL

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seeing the injured people, I forget all my medical training; after all, eight hours earlier I was still wearing jeans in Jerusalem. As I turn to vomit, I force myself to stare at the enormous hole in this person’s arm, and I begin to function. I tell him that he is going to be all right. My commander approaches from behind and tells me, “Let them go; they are not worth the treatment.” Later, on a news broadcast I heard the following: “A car exploded near the town of Damour. There were no Israeli casualties. Lebanese civilians were injured in the explosion. They were treated by our forces and evacuated to a local hospital.” From the site of the explosion, I heard my story retold to the nation and the official voice of the state again reassert its capacity to usurp personal experience and render it invisible. ONE FOR THE ROAD

My father died in 1991 during the Gulf War as scud missiles fell on Tel-Aviv, not too far from where he lived. You could say the war killed him, although you wouldn’t say he died in the war. That day he hadn’t been able to get enough vodka, so he smoked even more than usual. He went to bed early. His bedroom window was sealed with plastic for protection against chemical attack. He couldn’t breathe. It took the medics forty-five minutes to arrive—they thought my father was merely stressed out because of the war. They were so prepared for chemical warfare that they didn’t have the time for an ordinary heart attack. The setup that was designed to protect him killed him instead. Extremely afraid of violence, my father couldn’t invoke the romanticized notion of the Jewish warrior, so he appointed the Jewish state to do it for him. He relinquished his destiny and his identity to an ideology that promised redemption. In Brazil, he personified the powerless Jew forced to rely on the kindness of Gentiles to survive; to be a helpless Jew in the Promised Land was more than he could bear. The Gulf War had brought the battle into Tel Aviv. Israelis passively waited in their sealed rooms for the missiles to land. My father was caught between his terror and the inability of the state to fulfill its promise to protect him. Unable to negotiate those extremes, he asphyxiated himself with cigarettes and drowned himself in alcohol. Zionism was characterized by its concentration on a fast transition from inferiority to overcompensation. It profoundly altered the predicament of Jews in the last century. It elicited their complicity, thereby inhibiting their capacity to articulate their own priorities. My father found himself at an impasse induced by his own sense of worth and the excesses of the state. GADI GOFBARG

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The stories we tell represent merely a fragment of the experiences of those who, lacking their own sense of history, must surrender to the forces that forge officially sanctioned identities. These snippets, at times embodied in strangely poetic reveries, are part of a process of encroaching on the monopoly historians have held as the keepers of the record. Historians and other agents of memory collaborated with the state in defining Israel’s formative years as a period governed by survival and heroism. Forty years later, we have inherited idealized role models, falsified history, and a research wasteland. We have taken the work of recent historiographers and redeployed it through our own work. Faced with the discrepancies between official history and personal accounts, we have deliberately exposed our own racism, criticized our patriotism, and indicted our past allegiances. Our work has precipitated a great deal of reaction because we question the most sacred tenets linked to the establishment of the Israeli state. Our opponents argue that such activities will diminish the public’s desire to embrace the prescribed mythical image of the masculine Israeli and ultimately lead to the destruction of the country. When we unveil the mechanisms by which we were induced to resort to violence as a way of solving problems, we risk losing our closest relationships. Our families do not want us to mess with our fathers, and our friends do not want to see what we have become. In a small nationalistic society, loyalty to the state takes precedence over family ties and friendships. Sometimes we feel helpless as we witness how successful the state is in recruiting the individual to implement its agenda. We feel defeated when the public, faltering between nationalism and its own desire, takes out its rage on itself. We can’t explain why intellectuals are indifferent and ineffective. How does the public become disinterested and violent? What is the role of intellectuals? Edward Said writes: “The hermetic discourse between 3000 intellectuals . . . a class badly in need of moral rehabilitation and social redefinition . . . exists solely within the academy . . . that has abandoned the public to the new Right.”1 Academic institutions are manufacturing generations of students with little interest in synthetic practices. The cultural discourse offers utopian solutions and creates cultural segregation; small groups form that maintain themselves by formulating a unique language. This continues without considering political and economic forces at the state level, which play a considerable role in shaping personal lives. While universities fail to offer a realistic solution to the reorganization of the public, the state successfully offers nationalistic identity and unity by demonizing fictional enemies. MEIR GAL

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Julia Kristeva claims that lack of basic knowledge about our identity and its origins results in the assimilation of personal identities into collective nationalistic identity.2 In this regressive climate, the state maintains its position by satisfying the survival needs of the individual at the expense of the development of a desire for personal freedom. The discussion about the position of personal identity within society and history should include a wider audience than that of the academy. In the best-case scenario, an informed public would question the declared needs of the state and turn interpretation into social activity. This would help locate the self within vast histories and salvage personal experiences from the regressive common denominator of state-produced collective identities. NOTES

1. Edward W. Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community,” Critical Inquiry, no. 9 (September 1982); reprinted in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 135–159. 2. Julia Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 34.

PART 4 CONCLUSION

11 Coda: Sovereignty, Subjectivity, Strategy Nalini Persram Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.1 —Roland Barthes

The diverse chapters in this collection are bound together by an insistence upon the critical significance of sovereignty and subjectivity for the project of retheorizing the political. The studies in the book illustrate the many ways in which sovereignty cannot be considered fundamentally as the juridical status of states or the central organizing principle of international relations theory but must be viewed alongside the process of subject formation. They demonstrate that the call to subjectivity within the social and political discourse of global life necessarily speaks about sovereignty. The task of this final chapter is to enunciate some of the ways in which sovereignty continues to operate as a strategy of power and identity. Sovereignty and Subjectivity, with its emphasis on the crucial intimacy of subject formation and the constitution of political community, will be situated in relation to some of the recent theoretical developments in the discipline of international relations. In so doing, the character of the collection as a highly politicized intervention into this arena becomes clear: it represents an attempt to maintain “fidelity to the crack” in critical theorizing about world politics. Almost a decade ago, Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker stepped into one of the most established forums of international relations theory and presented a powerful collection of critiques of sovereignty that has left a very visible mark on the discipline. The articulation of sovereignty in terms of lack, supplement, binary and logocentric logic, ahistoricity, and the reproduction of power is thus far from novel. Yet the serious implications of this kind of critique continue to demand reiteration and relentless substantiation within academic debates surrounding world politics. 163

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This situation is not a result of a productive engagement with challenges to such radical approaches. Although in other areas of the social sciences and humanities there have been sustained and in-depth responses to, for example, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, poststructuralism, theories of identity, and post-Marxism, in the discipline of international relations such responses have been relatively few. Analyses of world politics continue to be dominated by either rationalism or a scientism of some kind. Obscurantism—the resort to a discourse of vagueness, irrelevance, remoteness, and relativism in the interests of abating threats to the dominant order—is the standard explanation.2 But contrary to mainstream portrayals of the wide diversity of approaches that attempt to confront the limits of modernity as obscure, if anything the obscurity lies not in the character and relevance of this scholarship but in that of neo-orthodox and pseudo-critical responses to it. If there are clouds of vagueness and layers of metaphors that are perceived threats to the scientific standards of clarity, relevance, and most important, predictive capability, they are made to settle into brittle fortress walls. Whether it is out of fear at the audacity of the critique of modernity or sheer incomprehension of the concept “modernity,” a barrier is erected with the purpose of sealing off the obscure (sometimes made into the obscene) from the real subject of international relations theory. The first strategy has unfolded through the strategic use of social constructivism. In a recent sketch of competing paradigms in international relations theory in the pages of a prominent mainstream journal, Foreign Policy, this perspective has been placed in an obvious hierarchy—a wholly unstated one, it must be said, depicted horizontally in a trio of pillars—with realism and liberalism in that order coming “above” it.3 The theoretical lines of each approach, as well as its main insufficiencies, are indicated. The imbalance between the seemingly symmetrical columns is apparent in the way power and security are implied to be the most important problematic of the study of international relations, to which only realists are truly committed. Realism’s admitted deficiencies, furthermore, are deemed to occur only in the realms of anomaly (i.e., change) and thus are of relative insignificance. As for liberalism, the fundamental concern for power is “overridden” by economic and political considerations, the insular logic of the typology being made evident in the identification of its particular weakness as the tendency to ignore the role of power. But even as it is subordinate to realism, liberalism is still presented as an instrumental part of the dominant mode of thinking about international relations insofar as it functions, in its focus on the state, as a dialogician for realism’s attempts to refine itself rhetorically. If this bald sketch aligns realism and liberalism, respectively, with the two basic issues of traditional international relations theory—war and

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peace—constructivism is shown to represent nothing of particular relevance to either of these two essentialisms. This “paradigm” is interested only in the apparently superfluous realm of beliefs, norms, identities, and individuals. With its “main instrument” (of weakness) being “ideas” and (erroneously) “discourse,”4 it is reduced to “agnosticism” since (in a rather bizarre formulation) “it cannot predict the content of ideas”; that is, it can only describe the past, not anticipate the future. There is, as the title suggests, only “one world,” even if there are many (but really only two) theories about it. It is the incredible simplicity of this account that is its greatest contribution to furthering an understanding of how knowledge is put at the service of power in international studies. According to the subtext of the article, the diagram portraying classical Greek structure (evocative of the architecture of U.S. state buildings) is actually that of a realist amphitheater, one that is built for liberal audiences with the constructivists left standing outside. The underlying assumptions about the primacy of the concern for power, prediction, and “great power competition” are what structure the categories that indicate the characteristics of each paradigm, the most revealing of which is that of “Post–Cold War Prediction.” Basically, the principles of realism and state sovereignty are the standard by which the two other perspectives are measured. The instrumental role of social constructivism in an account such as this one requires some elaboration in order to illustrate the way in which the mainstream legitimizes itself by appearing to fulfill the principles of intellectual democracy and tolerance. First, by achieving “pillar” status, the “radical” aspect of international relations theory is given prominence. However, its construction as a column of low density renders it not edifice but artifice, placed so as to create the illusion of balance but made to bear little structural weight, to carry little theoretical responsibility. The second accomplishment in this investigation of “the frontiers of knowledge”5 is the way that the substantively radical in international studies is completely marginalized. In asserting that constructivism is the “preeminent radical perspective on international affairs,” a replacement for Marxism, constructivism appears to have accommodated a large and diverse field of scholarship.6 The double-handed maneuver of seeming to encompass contemporary radicalism in international relations theory without any consideration whatsoever of feminism, critical theory, radical ecology, normative theory, poststructuralism, or other bodies of work that pose a fundamental challenge to the mainstream effectively works to maintain the status quo via an implicit pathologization of all that refuses to view the state as the only significant unit of analysis. The symbolic capital of such an account must be emphasized. At the end of the century in which the discipline of international relations was

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established, the eternal features of world politics are shown to be encapsulated by the science and rationalism of realism. All other perspectives, in treating issues of secondary importance to those at the heart of the dominant approach, merely pay homage to realism’s enduring relevance. That is the message. Mission accomplished. Realism may indeed still dominate the study of international relations, but it is certainly not this kind of account that offers the most effective means of keeping it dominant. The issue is still obscurantism. But in the second approach to power politics attended to in this chapter, it is handled in a much more convincing way, one that claims to be formulating a critical theory of international relations. Regardless of the impetus—which could be the recognition that global politics are forcing a rearticulation of political community, governance, and security; the realization that the discipline of international studies risks isolationism if it does not engage with intellectual developments elsewhere; or the determination to keep the dominant tradition(s) dominant by whatever means necessary, including appropriation—there is an acknowledgment of the potential force harbored by the increasing output of critical analyses relegated to the margins. Institutional/ disciplinary7 power, in this context, works through both a recognition of the limitations of dominant modes of theorizing about world politics and, alternatively, the dismissal, appropriation, and neutralization of any threats to them. Hence the greater sophistication of the second strategy, which works with social constructivism to uphold the traditions of the discipline of international relations. Unlike the first strategy, the second involves an acknowledgment of the following: the idea that the social is neither a given object nor constituted by autonomous elements and that identities, roles, norms, and institutions in the social world are inherently intersubjectively produced is now present in some capacity in virtually all accounts of world politics within the discipline that can begin to be taken seriously. The legacy of postpositivism is evident in the way that it is no longer inconceivable to view individuals as having multiple rather than singular identities, to think that social institutions and conventions are the result of value systems and hierarchies of meaning that shift over time, or to consider that the environment in which individuals operate does not exist in passive relation to them. Indeed, this condition has allowed neoliberals a means by which to shift the systemic intransigence of neorealism. When Alexander Wendt spoke about structure and agency, he began by stating that there were two “truisms” of social life. The first was that human beings and organizations are “purposeful actors,” whose actions contribute to the reproduction or transformation of society. The second was that society comprised “social relationships” that structure the interactions between purposeful actors.

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Structuration theory attempted to avoid the unhelpful consequences of individualism and structuralism by allowing equal ontological status to both agents and structures. This conceptualization would engender a rethinking of the fundamental properties of (state) agents and system structures, which had been “co-determined” and “mutually constituted.” The main argument was that theories of international relations must be about theorizing the state, but they should have foundations in theories of both principal units of analysis.8 The “sociological” approach of constructivism, Wendt stated, filled a “lack” in neoliberalism by bringing to it “a systemic communitarian ontology in which intersubjective knowledge constitutes identities and interests.” For Wendt, “strong liberalism” + constructivism = “structurationistsymbolic interactionist discourse,”9 an equation that illustrated the way in which the preoccupation of integrationist theorists with the formation of communities could be addressed from a “state-centric perspective with the latter thereby made into a critical theory of world politics.”10 Two main obstacles to this profitable association presented themselves: a tendency in constructivist critique to take too seriously the questions of “ontology and constitution” and a failure to make sufficient effort to address “the causal and empirical questions of how identities and interests are produced by practice” in, for instance, anarchic conditions. In short, the emphasis on social construction and intersubjectivity had neglected “neoliberal insights into learning and social cognition.”11 There are several aspects of this work that may seem to have specific relevance to themes expounded in Sovereignty and Subjectivity. The first has to do with the concern over the limits of rationalism and (philosophical) realism in international relations theory that would seem to have some affinity with the picture/framing analogy used in Chapter 1 in this volume. Constructivism is a critique of rationalism and realism; similarly, the account of subjectivity, in drawing attention to framing and the role of the unconscious, diminishes the authority of both these epistemological positions. Second, statements like “intersubjective structures give meaning to material ones, and it is in terms of meanings that actors act,” or notions that states not only acquire collective interests but do so through processes at the systemic level and that this hypothesis “dissents from rationalist versions of systemic theory, realist or liberal”12 might appear to have important implications for the argument about how sovereignty speaks to subjectivity. Third, the rejection of the rigid, essentialist, ahistorical character of social identities—defined as being “sets of meanings that an actor attributes to itself while taking the perspective of others, that is, as social object,” which are based on “cooperative or conflictual” intersubjectivity 13—in being conveyed through the language of psychology and psychoanalysis with terms like “self,” “other,” “egoism,” and “consciousness”14—may

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suggest a conceptual overlap between the psychoanalytic notion of the subject and constructivist conceptions of the individual. It is not, however, the case. But these are the kinds of conflations that have produced some of the worst pronouncements on a variety of critical approaches that, apart from the very banal acceptance that the world is socially constructed, have very little to do with the reigning articulation of social constructivism. A recent account of the history of international relations has ended with the division of constructivism into empirical and relativist approaches, with Wendt being one of the empiricists. Apparently, the obscurity of the “relativist” argument, said to be represented by poststructuralism, lies in the notion that “a scholar cannot say everything” and that “for every claim made there are several other possible claims that are silenced (and many of these may be important).”15 If this is supposed to be a damaging critique of some of the more radical theorizations in international studies, there is very little that can be said about the intellectual potential of the mainstream and quite a lot more to be done about the state of international relations theory. To continue, nonetheless, a circular logic, along with deeply misinformed claims, is again apparent in this recent account of the discipline. The reason given that “so many” dismiss poststructuralist analysis as nonscientific is not that its (explicit) political project involves a critique of science (something Torbjorn Knutsen manages to bypass) but because “it puts no demand on its employers to touch empirical reality.” There may indeed be those who “lead aloof existences as parasites along the margins of established texts, lost in ever-multiplying interpretations and elaborate loops of constructivist self-reference,”16 just as there may be those who lead sad existences as the guardians of selective anachronistic texts, oblivious to the contingencies of global life and its demanding complexities, but any poststructuralist worth his or her political salt cannot reject the empirical, as even the most scant reading of some of the most innovative theorizing in international studies will demonstrate. What will unfold throughout the rest of this chapter is how the apparent affiliations between the themes of constructivism and those of this collection are quite at odds with each other, politically and theoretically. In concluding his argument about the two truisms of social life, Wendt admits that, notwithstanding the suggestive terminology, his analysis ultimately has been a product of the “anarchy problematique” in its theorizations that use the “anthropomorphic terms” of states as “purposive actors interacting under anarchy.” Despite the deviation from the “dominant ‘economic’ vocabulary,” the state had indeed been treated consciously as an agent with interests, rationality, an identity, and so on. There may be many important objections to this approach, but, he claims, it is “legitimate for many purposes.” Part of this legitimacy apparently arises from the fact that “the problem” is not the inability of state-centric international relations the-

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ory to explain structural change, but the commitment of structural theory to realism and rationalism.17 There is an instructive narrative here, one that has a well-defined objective and tactical rhetoric. In making the formulation of a mainstream critical theory of world politics the goal, drawing upon concepts of social construction and intersubjectivity that are taken by too many to be indicative of the cutting (but not dangerous) edge of international relations theory, and finally stepping away from this mode of interpretation, what is produced is an account that has proved to be convincing to a number of scholars who believe themselves interested in the development of a critical theory of world politics. There is an air of having grasped the crucial insights of some of the more influential contemporary social theories and having been discerning and selective in order to make an important contribution to the refinement of the study of what really continues to matter in international relations: the state. The ingenuity lies in the overtness of the distancing maneuver: it is what makes the narrative seem plausible and innovative and what construes its author as a craftsman. The implications associated with the critique of epistemology (realism and rationalism) that would initiate an ontological shift (at the conceptual level of the state) are cut off. What remains is an aura of reconstructedness that lends a renewed authority to primacy of the reified unit of analysis in international relations theory, the essentialized state. The account of constructivism, while neglecting subjectivity, speaks of radical transformation using the overdetermined vocabulary of the “cognitive individual.”18 But no degree of gesticulation toward the notions of intersubjectivity or social construction—toward “expanding the vocabulary”—can change “the ground one is walking on” if, to stay with the analogy, that ground is a linguistic structure.19 Critiques of rationalism and realism notwithstanding, rationalism in its instrumental form is left largely intact, appearing as the promise of the increasing technologization of power through the manipulation of cognition, itself a concept that remains wedded to the notion of a fundamental separation between “structures” and “agents”; not too far behind it trails a form of realism that draws upon the powers of cognition to act “as if” there were a real world out there. A recent rendition of social constructivism states that realism and liberalism share, broadly speaking, a complementarity whereby theories of norms and identity fill the gaps of other perspectives.20 Constructivism has been shown to overlap with rationalism in its focus on choice21 and elsewhere has even been characterized as being one color of the many “stripes” of realism.22 The discourse of constructivism reflects an exemplary moment in the exercise of appropriation in international studies. If singularity has had its day, then better a dual ontology than a split subject, is what seems to be the slogan. From the mainstream, constructivism appears to be subtle and

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sophisticated; from the critical sidelines it looks very different in its uncouth engagement with the practice of disciplinary sovereignty.23 By refusing to shake the assumption of the subject as essentially unified ego and therefore to take on the profound implications that follow such radical questioning, constructivism represents not the possibility for developing a critical theory of world politics but newly adorned neo-orthodoxy. The overall argument may be restated in the context of some remarks on war. Consider the following: One would assume that costly failures at war, in terms of casualties, would destroy any positive bond between war and success. . . . It would also eliminate much of the romanticism in war and domestic support for it. On the basis of this logic, one might expect that, if a negative connotation grew up around the institution of war in a particular society, not only might that state try to avoid war, but it might also have a tendency to avoid practices associated with war.24

Now this:

A nurse and veteran of Vietnam, an activist organizing readjustment counselling for the nearly 8,000 women who were stationed in Vietnam, many of whom suffer from the delayed-stress syndrome widely recognized in Vietnam combat vets, acknowledges all the horror, but then tells a reporter for the New York Times, “I think about Vietnam often and I find myself wishing I was back there. There was no such thing as a black or white, male or female, we dealt with each other as human beings, as friends. We worked hard, we partied hard, we were a unit. A lot of us, when we left, wished we didn’t have to come home.25

War, Jean Bethke Elshtain continues, involves a “complex seduction”: it is a powerful narrative that molds our thinking, often “unconsciously.” War is interesting to us.26 This insight is what, from an international studies perspective, makes a great deal of sense out of Judith Butler’s assertion that “a theory of the subject should take into account the full ambivalence of the conditions of its operation.” To situate this in relation to the stated interests of social constructivism is to say that it is not productive to think about power as being external to the subject, as “acting on” it, or power as constitutive of the subject, as “acting by” it. Agency goes beyond the power by which it able to act; in other words, “the purposes of power are not always the purposes of agency.”27 For social constructivism, however, this is not a possibility. Contrary to the illusion it may produce for some, there is very little in this perspective that is not in the interests of scientific closure. The recourse to such notions as intersubjectivity, meanings, values, and social construction does not rep-

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resent an opening of the study of world politics to an examination of the processes by which power reappears in unexpected and historically and politically uncunning ways. Rather, it represents a refinement in the endeavor to forward predictions about state power and systemic balance. There is no fundamental questioning of how power operates through subjectivity, nor of the means by which the semblance of sovereignty is made persuasive. Instead, there is an assumption about power, and with that assumption, power risks assuming another form and another direction.28 To summarize, if agency is the concern for social constructivists, it is nevertheless vacuously theorized. For power to act, there has to be a subject, but that requirement does not make the subject into the origin of power.29 In lacking any account of subjectivity, constructivism quite deliberately posits both structure and actor as the autonomous sources of power. The consequence is that the closer constructivist analyses come to innovative and productive insights about global political life, the more efficiently their categories are undermined. This is one of the curious—and insidious—features about this approach: that its progressive step toward the idea that the social world can never be a given creates implications for its analyses that place it even further in the depths of mainstream international relations theory. The pseudo-progressive vocabulary of intersubjectivity and all the rest cannot hide the uncritical categories through which constructivism expresses itself. In so doing, ironically, it serves to illustrate very clearly the severe limitations of the two “pillars” of international relations theory at the same time as it highlights, by implication, the difficulty of attempting to confront the complexities of global social and political life. Constructivism thus quite unexpectedly brings into focus the crucial achievements of the marginalized scholarship labeled “critical international relations theory.” Three things should be made clear. First of all, the argument presented here is not about forgetting the state. As the discursive construct by which the idea of the “international” occurs, it is impossible to ignore the state in any analysis that claims to be speaking about world politics. Louis Althusser’s powerful and insightful essay still continues to resonate heavily in contemporary theorizing about power that concerns itself precisely with the state because of its notion—very familiar to traditional realists as well as constructivists—that the state “must reproduce the conditions of its production at the same time as it produces, and in order to be able to produce.”30 Second, if theorizing about world politics must retain the state as a focus of analysis, then the power effects of the state must be radically retheorized. With regard to this imperative, it is crucial to note that Althusser’s classic essay is all about sovereignty and subjectivity. The argument is that institutions and individuals are meaningless concepts in

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themselves without theories of ideology and interpellation to illustrate how, for instance, the state is truly one of the most powerful instruments for mediating social and political processes, for constituting “concrete” individuals as subjects, the very subjects through whom the state—even the one of “power politics”—comes to be identified as such. The assertions that “there is no practice except by and in an ideology” and “there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects” together are only one formulation among many that articulate, along similar lines, a crucial concern with politics and one, moreover, in terms that explicitly refer to the state.31 What this collection has illustrated is that the most significant aspects about “the state,” during this continuous moment of global transformation and in light of the innovative developments in social and political theory, will be kept hidden without a deeper understanding of the concepts of sovereignty and subjectivity. There is, third, much work to be done in order to investigate the many ways in which sovereign subjectivity operates within the social and political and in order to reveal the numerous practices that illustrate these dynamics through the categories of international relations and world politics. Theoretical formulations of performativity, the symbolic, political gesture, postmodernity, interpellation, mediation, valorization, the will to power, desire, and discourse, as the chapters in this volume have shown, provide clues to the way in which the political may be so elusive and yet so tenacious. This ambivalence is exactly what generates suspicion of theories that succumb to the myth of simplicity as ingenuity, especially metatheories that purport to be able to account for the unimaginable density and porosity of social and political life. In the chapters in this collection, the claim to criticality was articulated as a rethinking of the political through theorizing the associations between subjectivity and sovereignty. The collective study was initiated with an account of the way in which sovereignty and subjectivity imply and constitute each other. The impossibility of sovereignty arose from the account of the simultaneous emergence of the subject and the symbolic order; subjectivity occurred through a splitting that left consciousness and the unconscious coalesced around desire. Subjectivity thus came into being by virtue of the myth and promise of sovereignty for the subject within the social order, which also claimed sovereignty for itself. The rest of the chapters worked within some variant of this account to depict some of the ways in which, for instance, identity is politicized, power is produced and reconstituted, transformation commences, and resistance is performed. With respect to the argument outlined here, the most important insights have illustrated very well how the categories of “actor,” “agency,” “consciousness,” “cognition,” “intersubjectivity,” “norms,” “values,” and “social construction” face severe, even self-defeating limitations when

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made operative in the interests of developing a critical analytical framework without, at the very least, an account of subjectivity. In lacking such theoretical weight, furthermore, they speak of sovereignty, “the most important practice in modern world politics,” only in the most minimalist of terms.32 As such, the primacy of the categories of state and system are left to their own unproductive devices, caught in the ambit of an increasingly restrictive realism and rationalism. It is by now apparent that the differences between, on the one hand, the assumptions underlying the chapter about sovereignty and subjectivity, and, on the other, those informing social constructivism, do not represent a turf war of radical approaches to world politics—one where a reasonable sociology triumphs over a flighty aesthetics within a rubric of intersubjectivity and all the rest. As the work of one international studies scholar has shown, the diverging directions of the two sets of assumptions, despite the initial appearance of (superficial) modalities in common, can mean the difference between a scientistic concern for predictability and an interest in political possibility.33 Rather than a psychology for reluctant traditionalists in international relations theory, the analyses collected together in Sovereignty and Subjectivity represent, first and foremost, the practice of political theory— the endeavor founded upon a willingness to rethink one’s politics on the basis of questions posed, rather than to opt for a dogmatic stand at the cost of both life and thought.34 NOTES

1. Roland Barthes, cited in the opening to a recent, powerful rewriting of feminist history in France by Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1. 2. John Gerard Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47, no. 1 (1993): 170. 3. Stephen Walt, “International Relations: One World, Many Theories,” Foreign Policy 110 (Spring 1998): 38. 4. Walt says that the “common theme” of constructivism “is the capacity of discourse to shape how political actors define themselves and their interests, and thus modify their behaviour.” Walt, “International Relations,” 41. 5. This is the heading under which Walt’s essay sits in the journal’s table of contents. 6. The suspicion is that the assertion by Paul Kowert and Jeffrey Legro that “constructivists appear to offer another approach to the problem of change and continuity, relying on a conceptualization that views structures and agents as linked in a dialectical synthesis” was the impetus for the simplistic use of the term “marxist” in this context. See “Norms, Identity and Their Limits: A Theoretical Reprise,” in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 489. 7. In international relations it is particularly difficult to separate the two.

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8. Alexander Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory,” International Organization 41, no. 3 (1987): 338–339, 365. 9. Alexander Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 46, no. 2 (1992): 425. 10. Alexander Wendt, “Collective Identity Formation and the International State,” American Political Science Review 88, no. 2 (1994): 385. 11. Wendt, “Anarchy Is What States Make of It,” 425. 12. Wendt, “Collective Identity Formation,” 384, 389, 391. 13. Ibid., 385, 386. 14. Ibid., 386, 387. 15. Torbjorn L. Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory, 2d ed. (1992; reprint, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 280. 16. Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory, 277. 17. Wendt, “Collective Identity Formation,” 392, 393. 18. One critique has identified the problem with constructivism as being the tendency to totalize while explicitly claiming to do the opposite. The “reclamation of culture/identity as the key category reintroduces, through the backdoor, a lost notion of totality to comprehend all those facets of subject-subject and subjectobject relations which remained previously unaccounted for in IR.” Christian Heine and Benno Teschke, “On Dialectic and International Relations: A Reply to Our Critics,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 26, no. 2 (1997): 467. For a related discussion that engages in a critique of Nancy Fraser’s Justice Interruptus (London: Routledge, 1997), see Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” New Left Review 227 (1998): 33–44. 19. John Gerard Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond,” 144, 172, 174. Some of the best and most instructive work on territoriality and historical sociology that represents a critique of conservative ontologies of the global is severely hindered by a failure to engage in the issue of subjectivity at a fundamental level. Ruggie’s emphasis on the understudied concept of territoriality—the materialization of state sovereignty—eclipses a focus on the understudied concept of identity—the effects of which preclude the investigation of subjectivity. The seemingly incidental statement that “identities are logically prior to preferences” is enough to reveal that subjectivity is completely assumed. Once again, the “relatively modest and pretheoretical” task is in the interests of a “search for a vocabulary and for the dimensions of a research agenda by means of which we can start to ask systematic questions about the possibility of fundamental international transformation today.” Within the pretheoretical, however, lies a latent theory of subjectivity that posits the Subject as autonomous, rational, conscious, and a sovereign agent. For another, more recent example of the implicit assumptions accompanying the recourse to constructivism, see Emanuel Adler, “Imagined (Security) Communities: Cognitive Regions in International Relations,” Millennium 26, no. 2 (1997): 276–277. 20. Kowert and Legrois, “Norms, Identity and Their Limits,” 496. 21. Rey Koslowski and Friedrich V. Kratochwil, “Understanding Change in International Politics: The Soviet Empire’s Demise and the International System,” International Organization 48 no. 2 (1994): 225. 22. Kowert and Legrois, “Norms, Identity and Their Limits,” 490. 23. See Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, “Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in International Studies,” International Studies Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1990): 367–416. 24. John A. Vasquez, “War Endings: What Science and Constructivism Can Tell Us,” Millennium 26, no. 3 (1997): 673–674. Another example is the following:

CODA

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“While the sociological perspective rejects the realist preoccupation with uniquely material forces, students of norms cannot afford to ignore the material world. Norms do not float “freely,” unencumbered by any physical reality. They are attached to real physical environments and are promoted by real human agents (though norms, of course, are not themselves material).” (Kowert and Legro, “Norms, Identity and Their Limits,” 490.) Similarly, Robert Keohane’s assertion, that “if there were no potential gains from agreements to be captured in world politics—that is, if no agreements among actors could be mutually beneficial—there would be no need for specific international institutions,” betrays a view of the world that is as rationalist as it is realist in its assumption about the transparency of both the instrumentality of institutions and the preferences of actors. It is difficult to accept that this is an instance of theorizing in the interests of understanding how world politics operates. Given the consistently increasing spectrum of studies on the global social world using and stretching and sometimes obliterating the categories of international relations theory, it takes a great deal of determination to assume that such assertions are not closely ascertained discursive attunements to the politics of a highly combustible mixture of policymakers, patriots, moralists, state philanthropists and agents, intellectuals, radicals, institutional managers, and ambitious academics. Disciplinary politics are, of course, apparent in both the mainstream and the marginal or critical. The difference, as with all struggles with domination, is that it is the more powerful who are attempting to extinguish the less powerful and not the other way around. See Robert O. Keohane, “International Institutions: Two Approaches,” International Studies Quarterly 32 (1988): 386. 25. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Thinking about Women and International Violence,” in Women, Gender, and World Politics: Perspectives, Policies, and Prospects, ed. Peter R. Beckman and Francine D’Amico (Westport, Conn., and London: Bergin and Garvey, 1994), 111. 26. Elshtain, “Thinking About Women and International Violence,” 111. 27. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford University Press, 1997), 15. 28. Ibid., 21. 29. Ibid., 203, fn. 5. 30. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes ˇ zek (London: Verso, Towards an Investigation),” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Ziˇ 1994), 101, 129. 31. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 128. 32. Keohane, “International Institutions: Two Approaches,” 386. 33. Roxanne Lynn Doty, “Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A PostPositivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines,” International Studies Quarterly 37 (1993): 298. 34. This is a variation on a theme by Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 162, that I have found very useful in rearticulating the concept of political theory.

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The Contributors

David Campbell is professor of international politics in the Department of Politics, University of Newcastle.

Michael Dillon is professor in politics and director of the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University.

Jenny Edkins is lecturer and Leverhulme Special Research Fellow in the Department of International Politics, University of Wales Aberystwyth.

Mark Fisher is a research student in the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, which is dedicated to exploring the convergence of theory, fiction, music, economics, and communication in posthuman culture.

Meir Gal is an artist living in New York, where he teaches at the City University of New York.

Gadi Gofbarg is an artist living in southeastern Ohio, where he teaches at Ohio University in Athens.

Éilis Haughey is currently based in Belfast, where she has worked with the Committee on the Administration of Justice, the Northern Ireland Civil Liberties Council.

Rohit Lekhi is lecturer in politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. 187

188

THE CONTRIBUTORS

James Moy is professor of theatre history and theory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Simon Naylor is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Geography at Oxford University.

Aletta J. Norval is lecturer in the Department of Government, University of Essex, where she is also director of the MA programme in Ideology and Discourse Analysis.

Nalini Persram is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology, University of Essex, where she is working on comparative colonial policy in the Guyanas and contemporary European immigration practices.

Véronique Pin-Fat is lecturer in international relations in the Department of Government, University of Manchester.

Cynthia Weber is associate professor of political science at Purdue University.

Index

Achebe, Chinua, 99, 111 Achilles, 125, 126 acting, 2, 12, 13. See also impersonation aesthetics, xii agency, 166, 167, 170 Alberdi, Juan Bautista, 73 Althusser, Louis, 171–172 America, imaginary, 47; location of, 40 American Indian holocaust, 57; massacre of Wounded Knee, 149 Anderson, Benedict, 31, 71, 72 Anglo-American: desire, 13–14, 57–66 antagonism, 6, 7, 17 antagonistic identities, 99–100 anti-Semitism, 153 apartheid, 108 Apter, Emily, 42 Arendt, Hannah, 132 Argentina, 14; emigration to, 71–84; and territoriality, 80–83 Argentine Land Act of 1867, 80, 82 Aristide, 39, 50 Aristotelian-Christian other, 57 Aristotle, x Ashley, Richard, 3, 163 Asian sexuality. See under sexualities asylum-seekers, 122, 123, 135. See also refugees authenticity: and Asian sexuality, 59; claims to historical authenticity, 13; of Gypsy identity, 141–148; of identity, 16 authority: of colonial discourses, 14, 101, 104; foundations of, 24–27, 34;

historical claims to, 13; performative basis of, 25; sources of, 24–25; of sovereign community, 15; sovereignty as, ix-xii, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 24, 120, 169 Avellaneda, Nicolás, 73

Balkans, Gypsies in, 142. See also Bosnian conflict Bangkok, 59, 63 Baudrillard, Jean, 21, 22, 89 beginnings, 12, 15, 134; of the “Serbian symbolic community,” 24 Bhabha, Homi, 14, 101–111 blackness, 57, 95–96, 97, 108 Blanchot, Maurice, 120, 125, 126 bodies, 16; body-movement, 72, 73–74, 77–80; politic, 91; colonist, 81; contaminated, 91; flows of, 14, 72, 76, 77; human, 76; immigrant, 80; and power, 16; regulation of, 71–84; and violence, 16, 31, 155–160 Bosnia-Herzegovina. See Bosnian conflict Bosnian conflict, 21–34, 48; and ethnicnationalism, 23, 28, 31, 33, 34; and genocide, 23, 25, 30; and symbolic communities in, 24; and territory, 27–28, 34; victims in, 21–23; and violence, 21–34 boundaries: crossing of, 46, 50; of identity, 95; and representation, 148; of sovereignty, xi-xiii, 6, 13, 14, 16, 21, 23; spatial, 13 Britain, 71–83

189

190

INDEX

Buenos Aires, 74, 79, 82 Bush, George, 40, 43, 44, 51 Butler, Judith, 41, 170 Bulter, Octavia, 94–95

California, state of, 57, 60, 63, 66 capitalism, xi, 92, 93, 96, 97 Caribbean, 39–51 Carnes, B., 60–65 Carter, Jimmy, 39, 40, 43, 46–51 Cartesian subject. See under subject, the castration anxiety. See phallic power categorization: and control of immigrants, 14, 57–58, 71–84 caucasian, 62 Caygill, Howard, 134 Cedras, Raoul, 39, 45, 48 chaos theory, 89 Chinese immigrants: as threats to U.S. sovereignty, 13–14, 57–58, 63–65 Christopher, Warren, 28, 49 Clinton, Bill, 13, 28, 33, 39–40, 43–46, 48, 50–51 Cold War, 42; end of in Europe, 7 colonization: colonial discourses, 14, 101, 104, 106, 110; colonial subject, 14, 104; colonist bodies, 81; colonized subject, 14, 80; of Palestine, 154; processes of, 14, 71–84; settlers, 71–84, 103; western colonial expansion, 93. See also postcolonialism Comite International Tsigane, 150 communism and nationalism, 29 community: “imagined communities,” 71; nationalization of, 30; and nonterritoriality, 16; and sovereignty, ix–xii, 6, 12, 15–16, 23, 33, 120–124, 130–134, 163; symbolic communities in the Bosnian conflict, 24 compassion. See under ethics complexity, 2, 15 constitutive act, 6; and violence, 12–13, 14, 24–27, 29–31 constructivism. See under international relations, theories of Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, 133 Copernican. See post-Copernican

Council of Europe, 143 coup de force, 2, 12, 24–27, 30–31, 34 Croatia. See Bosnian conflict cross-dressing, 13, 47, 50; by U.S. presidents, 40, 42, 43, 46, 47, 50; as transvestitism, 40, 42, 46–48, 50, 51; and “unmarked” transvestites, 40, 46–48. See also masquerade culture: and difference, 99–100, 104–111; dominant culture desire, 57–66; of Gypsies, 141–151 Cybernetics, 89, 91

Dayton Agreement, 28, 33 decentering, 90; of the Cartesian subject, 1–4 decision/decisioning, 6, 7, 9, 11, 110 Deleuze, Giles, 89, 91, 96 democracy, x, 34, 50; triumph of liberal, 22 Derrida, Jacques, 6–11, 13, 21, 23–31, 34, 110, 123, 131, 134 Descartes, Réné, 3 Desert Clearances, 80, 82, 83 desire: Anglo-American, 13–14, 57–66; dominant culture, 57–66; masculine, 10; for racial containment, 13–14; and subject formation, 4–5, 10; and U.S. foreign policy, 39–51, 65. See also Lacan difference, 8, 15, 118, 128, 129; critique of, 89–97; and culture, 99–100, 104–111; and identity, 118, 132, 134–136; lack of, 22; ontology of, 15; and racism, 15, 92 Doane, Mary Ann, 40, 41 dominant culture desire, 57–66 drag. See cross-dressing

Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 170 emancipation, 122; and the end of the Cold War in Europe, 7 emigration: to Argentina, 14, 71–84. See also immigration enemy and stranger, 16, 128–130 English language, 14 enjoyment, 10, 11 epistemology, 12, 167; philosophical realism, 167, 169, 171, 173; rationalism, 164, 166, 167, 169, 173

INDEX

ethics, 16; of compassion, 21–23; of the real, 7–9; of responsibility, 7, 9–10, 27 ethnic-cleansing. See under racial containment ethnic-conflict, 23; interpretations of, 28–31, 34 ethnography of surfaces, 31 Europe 7, 33; early modern, ix–x European Community, 93 European Jews, 153–155

fantasy, 47; of Asian sexuality, 57– 66; sexual, 14, 60; traversing the, 9 fear: Jewish, 154, 156; of impurity, 136 femininity: Asian femininity as consumable, 58–66; female masquerade, 13, 40–42; feminine subject, 10– 11 flows, 96; of bodies, 14, 72, 76, 77; genetic, 93; of goods, 71, 73, 95 foreign policy, xii; as masquerade, 13, 39–51, 65; and performativity, 13; and the phallus, 13, 40–51, 65. See also U.S. foreign policy Foucault, Michel, 14, 77, 78 founding moment, 6, 16, 134; in Bosnian conflict, 24–27, 30, 34; of Israeli identity, 16, 153–160 frontiers, 72, 75, 83

Gallimard, Rene, 66 Garber, Marjorie, 42, 46, 47 gender, 13, 51; categories, 13, 40; dominant culture males, 60–66; feminine subject, 10–11; masculine identity and war, 155–158; masculinized subject, 10–11, 13, 16, 41; and psychoanalytic theory, 13, 40. See also masquerade gene trading, 94–95 genocide, 96; in Bosnian conflict, 23, 25, 30; against Serbs, 24. See also Nazi holocaust Giorgio, 144 Glenny, Misha, 29 Goodrich, Peter, 132 Gordimer, Nadine, 108 Gray, Spalding, 59–60, 63–64

191

Greek poets, 120, 121, 134 Guattari, Felix, 89, 91, 96, 97 Gulf War, 13, 32, 43–45, 49, 158 Gvero, General Milan, 28 Gypsies, 15, 133, 141–151; competing accounts of Gypsy identity, 15–16, 141–148; and territorial sovereignty, 15–16, 141–151; traditions, 141, 143–147, 148–150

Haiti, 13, 39–40, 43–51 Hegel, G. W. F., x, 92, 128; Hegelian progressive history, 96, 97 Heidegger, Martin, 26, 27, 117, 123, 134 Hobbes, Thomas, ix, x, xi, xiii, 130, 131 Hodge, Bob, 103, 107–108 holocaust. See American Indian holocaust; Nazi holocaust hospitality, 125–126 human beings, 95, 119–124, 130–131, 136, 166; human bodies, 76; posthuman, 90 human condition, 9, 15, 119 humanitarian intervention, 23; and ontopology, 32 hybridity, 118, 119, 123, 129, 130, 136; Homi Bhabha’s conceptualization of, 102–111; concept of, 14, 100–111; and culture, 99–100, 104–111; of identity, 2, 14, 15, 95, 99–111; and “impurity,” 14, 100–111 hysteria: male hysteria and the U.S. invasion of Panama, 41

identity/identities, 14; as antagonistic, 99–100; boundaries of, 95; collective, xii, 16, 17, 153–160; colonial, 14, 71–84, 99–111; colonized, 14, 71–84, 99–111; critiques of, 1, 89, 93, 94, 135–136; cultural, 99–100, 104–111; and difference, 118, 132, 134–136; Gypsy, 15–16, 141–151; and intersubjectivity, 1, 131–132, 166–167, 169, 170–171; Jewish, 16, 153–160; nonsovereign, 15–16; postcolonial, 14; and poststructuralism, 1, 89, 93, 94; as profane, 99–100; as sacred, 99–100, 107, 108, 110; as sovereign, 14, 15, 16; statesanctioned, 159–160; and territory,

192

INDEX

28, 34, 146; as transient, 148; as a virus, 92, 94. See also hybridity Igbo, 99 Iliad, 125 immigration: Chinese immigrants, 13–14, 57–58, 63–65; immigrant body, 80; immigration laws as power effects, 14, 71–84; immigration laws as surveillance, 78, 79; to Israel, 153–155; regulation of immigrants, 14, 57–58, 71–84, 142–143, 154–155; technologies of, 71, 72, 79; and territoriality, 14, 80–83. See also settlers impersonation, 2, 12, 13; of Asian women, 60–64, of females, 46, 47 impurity, 14, 100–111, 136 intellectual, role of, 9, 16, 102, 159 international relations, discipline of: centrality of state sovereignty, xi-xii, 6, 15–16, 32, 51, 141, 148, 151, 163–173; and postmodernism, 148, 172; and subjectivities, xii, 163–173; and war, 164, 170. See also international relations, theories of international relations, theories of: constructivism, 164–173; critical approaches, 148, 151, 163–173; liberalism, 164–167, 169; realism, xiii, 34, 164–167, 169. See also epistemology interpellation, 4, 6, 172 intersubjectivity, 1, 131–132, 166–167, 169, 170–172 invasion: of Haiti, 13, 39–40, 43–51; of Panama, 41–43, 45–46 Iraq, 32, 44, 45 Irigaray, Luce, 10–11, 13 Israel, state of, 16, 153–160 Israeli identities. See under Jewish identities iteration, 8, 105, 106 Janmohammed, Abdul, 102 Jewish identities: and anti-Semitism, 153; and the formation of Israel, 153–160; Jewish diaspora, 154; as masculine heroism, 16, 155–159; and the Nazi holocaust, 153–155; Zionism, 153–155, 158 justice, 9, 15, 16, 21–34, 119, 120–121;

call to, 15, 122–124, 126–128, 132, 136; distributive justice, 130–132

Kant, Immanuel, x, xi Killing Fields, The, 59 K-tactics, 89 Kristeva, Julia, 160 Kuwait, 32, 44, 45

Lacan, Jacques, 4–5, 41; economy of desire, 10, 41 lack, 5, 6, 7, 13, 15; constitutive, 122; of difference, 22; of phallic power, 13, 40–51; of territory, 15–16 land ownership, 82–83 language: as constitutive, 3, 8; of estrangement, 124–127; and Gypsies, 141–151; and reason, 3, 11; and subjectivity, 2, 4, 5 Latham, Wilfred, 79, 80 Latin America, 71, 96 laughter, 10–11 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 26 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 134 Lewandowski, M., 76–77 liberalism. See under international relations, theories of linguistic signifiers. See signifiers Lisbon Agreement, 33 Locke, x logocentrism, 7, 8

marketization, 96 Martinez, A. B., 76–77 Marxism, 165 masculinity: and desire, 10; and Israeli identity, 16, 155–159; and Jewish identity, 155–159; male subject, 13, 15; the masculinized subject, 10–11, 41; and masquerade, 13, 40–42, 46–51. See also war masquerade, 2, 12, 13, 39–51, 157; concept of, 13, 40; female masquerade, 13, 40, 41–42; male masquerade as a disavowal of the phallus, 13, 40–42, 46–51; and psychoanalytic theory, 40, 41; in U.S. foreign policy, 13, 39–51, 65 master signifier, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15 materialism: hypermaterialism, 89, 97 meaning, 3, 6, 8–11, 13, 15, 92–93

INDEX

Mearsheimer, John, 28 Médecins sans Frontières, 23 migration. See emigration; immigration; movement of peoples Mill, John Stuart, x Mishra, Vijay, 103, 107–108 Mitre, Bartolemé, 73 Mladic, General Ratko, 28 modernity, ix, 2, 6, 14, 90–93, 95, 164; early modern, ix-x, xii movement of peoples, 14, 28, 72, 71–84, 120, 122, 123, 133, 135, 141–151. See also bodies, bodymovement Mulhall, E. T., 79 Mulhall, M. G., 79 music: Gypsy culture and, 149–150 mystical: artifice, 34; sources of authority as, 24–25 McClintock, Anne, 102

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 134 nation: ‘birth’ of, 12, 24; Israeli-Jewish nationhood, 16, 153–160; and territory, 28; white nationhood, 14 nationalism: and communism, 29; ethnic-nationalism in the Bosnian conflict, 23, 28, 31, 33, 34; and Israeli identity, 16, 153–160; and the Israeli state, 153–160; Serbian 28, 107–108 nation-state, 6, 28, 75. See also state sovereignty native, 15, 101, 102, 118, 120–122, 125, 127–128; native resistance, 101, 110; native soil, 27–28, 34 Nazi Holocaust, 143, 153–155 New World Order, 42, 51; disorder, 89–91 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 117; morality of pity, 22, 23 nomads, 133, 142; nomad thought, 94, 96. See also gypsies Nunn, Sam, 39–40, 46–47, 49–50 Okinawa, Japan: rape in, 65 Olaniyan, Tejumola, 99 ontology, 8, 9, 27, 133, 167, 169; of difference, 15; of sovereignty and subjectivity, 12, 15, 51, 117, 119, 122, 133

193

Ontopology, 27–28, 32–34 Operation Just Cause, 45 Organization of American States, 45 Orientalism, 58–66, 101 other, 1, 4, 5, 9, 89–90, 93–96, 101, 102; Aristotelian, 57; otherness, 119, 122, 126–135

Palestine/Palestinians, 153–155 Panama, 41–43, 45–46 Parry, Benita, 101 Patagonia, 14, 82, 83 performativity, 2, 12–14, 32, 51, 172; and authority, 25; as coup de force, 2, 12, 24, 34; and foreign policy, 13; and violence, 12, 14, 24, 29–30. See also masquerade phallic power: and castration anxiety, 42, 43, 46, 51; male masquerade as a disavowal of the phallus, 13, 40–42, 46–51; and U.S. foreign policy, 13, 40–51 phallogocentrism, 1, 10–11 phallus, the: as signifier of the desire of the Other, 41. See also phallic power philosophical realism. See under epistemology pictures, as representations, 4, 11, 12, 14, 17, 167 pity: morality of pity, 22, 23 Plato, 117–120, 127–128, 135; Plato’s Republic, 117–118 politics, 89, 90, 97; body-politic, 91; in Bosnia, 21–34; and desire, 4–5, 10, 13–14, 39–51, 60–66; and ethics, 7–9, 16–17, 21–34; of naming, 12; notions of, x, 1–3, 6–17, 148–151, 163–173; and music, 149–150; Plato’s thought and, 118; and the political, 2, 135; and postcolonialism, 101–111; and postmodernism, 101; of sovereignty, ix-xiii, 1–3, 6–17, 117–120, 128–136, 141, 145, 163–173; and violence, 13–14, 21–34, 153–160 polysemia, 8 pornography: “pornographic imaginary,” 14, 66 post–cold war, 7, 28, 42, 51, 165 postcolonialism, 14, 99–111; and the political, 101–111; postcolonial

194

INDEX

identity, 14; postcolonial subject, 107; and psychoanalytic theory, 102; theories of, 101–111; use of theory in postcolonial studies, 102. See also colonization post-Copernican, 3 postmodernism: and international relations, 148, 172; and the political, 101; postmodern subject, 1–4 poststructuralism, 92, 168; critiques of identity, 1, 89, 93, 94 Powell, Colin, 39–40, 46–47, 49 power relations, 75, 80; and bodies, 16; and body-movement, 71–84, 163–173; disciplinary power, 163–173; and sovereignty, 14, 16, 122, 163, 171; and the state, 171 Predator 2, 2, 90 Priam, 125, 126 promise: Promised Land, 158; of justice to come, 34 psychoanalytic theory: and masquerade, 40, 41; in non-western context, 102; in postcolonial studies, 102; and the reification of gender categories, 13, 40; and subject formation, 167–168 purity: of cultures, 99–111; of identity, 2, 99–111

racial containment: apartheid, 108; and constructions of Asian sexuality, 13–14, 57–66; desire for, 13–14; ethnic-cleansing, 28, 32, 107; ethnicconflict, 23, 28–31, 34; and sexual consumption/subjugation, 13–14; slavery, 77, 91. See also genocide; immigration; racism racism: anti-Semitism, 153; toward Asians, 57–66; toward Chinese immigrants, 57–66; and difference, 15, 92; European racism, 93; toward Gypsies, 142–143, 145, 150; toward Palestinian Arabs, 153–154, 159 rape, 31, 46; in Okinawa, 65 rationalism. See under epistemology realism. See under international relations, theories of reason, 11, 26–27; and language, 3, 11; and subjectivity, 3 refugees, 14, 120, 123, 133. See also asylum-seekers

regulation, of immigrant flows. See under immigration Republic, The. See under Plato resistance: to identitarianism, 94; to narratives of sovereignty, 17; native, 101, 110; and subjectivity, 16, 102 rhizomatics, 89, 96, 97 Rimbaud, Arthur, 94, 96 Roca, General Julio, 82 Romani/Romanys, 144. See also Gypsies Rosas, General Juan Manuel de, 73 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, x, 126

Safire, William, 45 Said, Edward W., 101, 159 Sarajevo, 22, 23. See also Bosnian conflict Sarmiento, Domingo, 73 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 3 schizoanalysis, 89 Schmitt, Carl, 118, 128–131 scud missiles, 158 semiotics. See signifiers Serbia: genocide against, 24; Serbian nationalism, 28, 107–108; Serbian territory, 13, 24, 28; “symbolic community,” 24. See also Bosnian conflict settlers/settler-bodies, 71–84, 103. See also immigration sex shows, 13, 59 sexualities: Asian sexuality and U.S. sovereignty, 13–14, 57–66; of dominant culture males, and fantasy, 14, 60; 60–66; reification of, 13, 40; and sovereignty, 14, 51 signifiers: linguistic, 3; master, 3, 6–7, 8, 9, 10, 13 slavery. See under racial containment social order: production of, 5–7, 13, 15; and sovereignty, 5; and subjectivity, 4–6 Socrates, 117, 118 South Africa, 108 sovereignty: and community, ix-xii, 6, 12, 15–16, 23, 33, 120–124, 130– 134, 163; masculine sovereignty, 10; as master signifier, 3, 6–10, 13, 15; and the modern state, ix-xiii, 6, 16, 24, 25, 29, 82; ontology of, 12, 15,

INDEX

51, 117, 119, 122, 133; politics of, ix-xiii, 1–3, 6–17, 117–120, 128–136, 141, 145, 163–173; and sexuality, 14, 51; and social order, 5; sovereign identities, 14–16; as strategy of power, 14, 16, 163, 171; and subjectivity, ix-xiii, 1–4, 10–17, 172–173; and territoriality, 14, 15–16, 28, 32, 82, 130, 141, 145–148. See also state sovereignty Soviet Union, 29 space, 72, 75, 82; bounded, 80; political, 119; smooth, 94 spatiality/spatio-temporal, xii, 72; spatial boundaries, 13; spatial regulation, 71–84 Spivak, Gayatri, 101 state sovereignty, 117, 128–130, 133; boundaries of, xi-xiii, 6, 13, 14, 16, 21, 23; critical approaches to, 15–16, 117, 148, 151, 163–173; and humanitarian intervention, 23; and international relations, xi-xiii, 6, 15–16, 32, 51, 141, 148, 151, 163–173. See also sovereignty Statelessness, Convention on the Reduction of, 133 strangers, 15, 16, 117–136; as enemies, 16, 128–130; and sovereignty, 117, 122–124 subject, the, x, 1–2; Cartesian, 1–4; colonial, 104; colonized, 14, 80; and desire, 4–5, 10; female, 10–11; formation of, 1–5, 10–11, 167–172; fragmented, 1–4, 5, 8; human, 4, 8; male subject, 13; masculinized, 10–11; postcolonial, 107; postmodern, 1–4; poststructuralist, 4; and psychoanalytic theory, 167–168; sovereign, 117, 121–131, 135–136; as split, 1–5, 104–107, 169–170; unitary, xi, xiii, 170; white western male, 15, 89, 93 subjectivity, 169–173; European, 94; feminine, 10–11; and international relations, xii, 163–173; and language, 2, 4, 5; and notions of the political, 1–4, 163; ontology of, 15; and reason, 3, 4; and social order, 4–6; sovereignty and, ix-xiii, 1–4, 10–17, 172–173

surveillance, 78, 79 Swimming to Cambodia, 59 symbolic order, 2, 4–10, 13, 15, 91, 172

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technologizing, 9 temporality. See time territoriality, 72; and Argentina, 80–83; and Bosnian conflict, 27–28, 34; and Gypsies, 15–16, 141–151; and identity, 28, 34, 146; and immigration, 14, 80–83; and nation, 28; and ontopology, 27–28, 32–34; and political community, ix, 15–16; and sovereignty, 14–16, 28, 32, 82, 130, 141, 145–148 time, 90; nonlinear notions of, 1, 5, 12, 31; in postcolonial studies, 102, 105; retroactive operation of, 5, 12, 16, 133–134 tradition: Homi Bhabha’s understanding of, 106; Gypsy, 141, 143–147, 148–150; western philosophical, 117–118, 129 transvestitism. See under cross-dressing trauma, 9 travel accounts, 71, 76, 79 travelers, 14, 145. See also Gypsies tribalism. See ethnic conflict

United Nations: and Bosnia, 33; and Gulf War, 42–45; and Haiti, 39, 43–45; UN General Assembly Resolution 1514, 146; UN Security Council Resolution 940, 44, 45 United States: attitudes toward Asians, 57–66; and Chinese immigrants, 13–14, 57–58, 63–65; and claims to sovereign subjectivity, 13–14, 40, 51, 57; and constructions of Asian sexuality, 13, 57–66 U.S. foreign policy, 13, 96; toward Bosnia, 29, 33; and the Caribbean, 39–51; and cross-dressing, 13, 39–51; as desire, 39–51, 65; and the Gulf War, 13, 32, 43–45, 49; and Haiti, 13, 39–40, 43–51; and Latin America, 96; as male hysteria, 41; as masquerade, 39–51; and Panama, 41–43, 45–46; and phallic power, 13, 40–51

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INDEX

Vance-Owen proposals, 33 victims: and the Bosnian conflict, 21–22; Jews as, 154 Vietnam war, 43, 170; post-Vietnam syndrome, 90 violence, 7; against bodies, 16, 31, 155–160; in the Bosnian conflict, 21–34; as constitutive act, 12–14, 24–27, 29–31; and founding moment, 6, 12–13, 24–27; of logocentrism, 7; relationship to the political, 13–14, 21–34, 153–160; and war, 16, 156–158. See also performativity

Wales, 14 Walker, R. B. J., 163 Walzer, Michael, 122, 124, 128, 130–132, 134 war, 16, 44–45; and international relations, discipline of, 164, 170; and Israeli identity, 153–160; and loyalty

to the state, 153–160; and masculine identity, 155–158; and violence, 16, 153–160 Welsh settlers, 82 Wendt, Alexander, 166–168 western philosophical tradition, 117–118, 129 White Man Face, 15, 93, 95, 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 4, 8 wladfa, 14 World Romany Congress (WRC), 149, 150 xenogenesis, 94

Young, Robert, 109, 110 Yugoslavia, 21, 28–30, 33, 45, 143, 150. See also Bosnian conflict

Zionism. See under Jewish identities ˇ zek, Slavoj, 5, 7–9, 11, 22 Ziˇ

About the Book

This provocative analysis of notions of subject and identity in international relations goes beyond discussions of identity politics to argue that sovereignty and subjectivity implicate each other, together constituting the political. The authors consider how specific pictures of the subject and of political space still capture our desires; they also examine the links those pictures have with power, the state, and the status quo. Their juxtaposition of theoretical analyses, empirical studies, and personal accounts provides a challenging exploration of the political impact of identity as produced through practice, the legacy of modernity, and the intimate but often invisible relationship of self to other.

Jenny Edkins is lecturer in the Department of International Politics, University of Wales Aberystwyth. Nalini Persram is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology, University of Essex. Véronique Pin-Fat is lecturer in international relations at the University of Manchester.

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