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Etienne BALIBAR

Civic Universalism and Its Internal Exclusions: the Issue of Anthropological Difference

The initial idea of this lecture is that modernity has brought about a transformation

both in the representation of the universal and the understanding of subjectivity and subject-

formation, which strictly combines the political and metaphysical aspects of these two

notions. I call the new figure of universality “civic universality”, or even better “civic-

bourgeois universality”, by using as a subtext the full range of meanings involved

traditionally in the name “burgher”, Bürger in German, and I suggest that its main character,

which precisely accounts for the universality that it performatively enunciates, especially in

such emblematic texts as the Declarations of Rights, is a rigorous adequacy between the

capacities of the human and the powers of the citizen. This means first that every human is

entitled to accessing citizenship (in the broadest possible sense, not exclusively statist and

juridical, and not exclusively national, even if it is in the national framework that citizenship

historically becomes an institution). And conversely the rights of the citizen indicate

capacities which are deemed to express the powers and requisites of human nature in general.

Let us observe here that this entails a revolution in the representation of the subject, which

annihilates the figures of its subjection to various pre-established authorities, legal and extra-

legal, immanent and transcendent, picturing them as so many forms of inequality and

servitude build in the individual’s belonging to communities and social relations. But the

story cannot end with these great emancipatory gestures: it must also include a new process, a

new regime of the becoming subject of the citizen, or if you like his (her?) subjectivation,

which are intimately linked with the realization of the universal within institutions, in the

form of processes of “socialization” conferring upon the subject its capacities to relate to

others in performing universal actions (such as exchanging, owning, learning, working,

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loving, etc.), and processes of “community-building”, which transfer the function of

enunciating and implementing universal values upon the communities to which the subject

belongs, such as precisely the nation, of which it forms an “indivisible part” as Rousseau

would say.

But then we may observe that where the claim of the universal is equality and liberty,

plus other subsequent values, the reality of the civic-bourgeois world is more than ever, and

perhaps more than before in some sensitive areas, that of discriminations and hierarchies:

subjectivation keeps involving subjection, albeit in different forms and in different spaces. I

submit that such a contradiction is not to be considered only as a gap between the ideal and

the real, but as arising from the universal itself, or affecting its concept from the inside,

because old and new forms of discrimination and oppression have to be not only reiterated or

preserved, but reformulated (and, in a sense, “generalized”) in the bourgeois-civic world, in

order to emerge as implications of the universal itself, or as requisites of its very institution.

This means that they have to be located at the level of what I will call anthropological

differences, i.e. differences perceptible among the humans that are also immediately

constitutive of the idea of the human. This involves an extreme violence, latent or manifest,

because it means that the only consistent way to deny citizenship to individuals in a regime of

civic-bourgeois universality is to deny them full humanness, full membership in the human

species. It becomes thus necessary to invent concepts, and representations of the human which

will imply more or less radical exclusions from the political membership, and to express these

exclusions in terms of the very universality of the human differences, such as the difference of

the masculine and the feminine, the normal and the pathological, the adult and the infantile,

the intellectual and the manual, the ethnic differences, etc. I also suggest that this typical

antinomy accounts – at least formally – for a double bind to which claims of rights are

exposed in the bourgeois-civic world, namely the necessity of reclaiming the universal,

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expressing themselves in the very language of liberty and equality which discriminations and

hierarchies contradict, and the antithetic necessity of opposing the universal, looking critically

into its definition, to identify the roots of certain forms of oppression and subjection, or at

least the roots of their legitimation. I propose therefore a program of dialectical investigation

of the antinomies of the universal, inasmuch at they affect the reciprocal relationship between

the civic-bourgeois institutions and the subject created by these institutions, also called “man”

in the modern Euro-American tradition.

From this general statement of purposes, I want now to proceed to the examination of

some typical forms of the construction of the anthropological difference within the realm of

civic-bourgeois universalism, or better said I want to summarize some of the lessons that

could be drawn from such an examination, however partial and provisory it is bound to

remain, not only within the material limits of a lecture, but more generally because of the

insufficiency of the concepts that I have at hand. While doing this I remain at a rather abstract

and formal level, which authorizes the search for analogies, and I rely – as I always did in my

past work – on a bricolage of materials and questions arising from contemporary politics and

the social sciences, on the one hand, and the reading of philosophical and literary texts on the

other hand.

Who shall be Judge?

The first “difference” that I will examine, borrowing from a series of analyses carried

on by Michel Foucault in the early and mid 70’s, concerns processes of definition of

“normality” through a simultaneous negation of its opposites: mental pathologies and criminal

behaviours in particular. In his lectures at the Collège de France from 1974-75 Les anormaux,

as well as a subsequent lecture from 1978 for the Law and Psychiatry Symposium in Toronto,

called “The dangerous Individual”, which taken together I consider to be one of Foucault’s

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most illuminating genealogical investigations of the institutions of Modernity, he would study

technologies of power which articulate a new field of scientific knowledge with the

“governmentality” of the emerging industrial society. Indeed, these technologies never

entirely eliminate open violence, but they mainly rely on disciplines which do not so much

state interdictions or try to terrorize the subjects, as Hobbes would recommend, than they try

to select, prescribe and shape then individual’s conducts. This is a strategy which involves

setting up models of normality, but also having them accepted and “recognized” by the

subjects. Historically, it will become the objective of typically modern institutions such as

scientific medicine and the penal system, but also the school, in short the great apparatuses or

“equipment” of bourgeois society. All these institutions operate through the broad antithesis

of normality and abnormality, they formulate discriminations or judgments which distinguish

among individuals, classify them socially but also morally (judging their characters),

distinguishing different modalities of “contradicting” the norm, i.e. of destroying normality or

deviating from it. To the age-old question always closely associated to the category of

“sovereignty”: quis judicabit?, or “who shall be judge?”, which Hobbes inscribed in the heart

of his Leviathan, they now give the democratic answer: judge shall be who is “normal”, or it

is the normal majority – either directly or through its “capable” representatives, the maior et

sanior pars of old contractualist theories, who in turn through their rulings ascertain the

“normalcy” of the “majority”.

However this is where things become more complicated, and the notion of normality –

logically constituted as negation of its own negations – proves terribly ambiguous. This is not

only because normality can become negated in different ways and to different degrees: mental

pathologies are divided into idiocy, neuroses, perversions, psychoses, etc., and criminal law

distinguishes different crimes or felonies in order to adapt their punishments. Rather, what

will destabilize the norm while practically enforcing it, is the fact that incompatible

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“abnormalities” are inscribed in a continuity and may even ultimately become fused. This is

a long story, ending with the institutional alliance of psychiatry and criminal law, which

produces a paradoxical merging of the mad and the criminal as social and psychological

types. What especially interested Foucault was a convergence of two correlative processes,

taking place in the early XIXth century and continuing well into the XXth century, on the

plane of institutions and power relations as well as the plane of knowledge and

anthropological discourse. On one side, we can follow a developing competition between

judges and doctors (progressively becoming “psychiatrists”): at stake here is the power

struggle between two corporations or “faculties” (in the very sense in which Kant spoke of the

conflict of faculties), to decide which of them must control the survey and isolation of “great

criminals” who committed atrocious acts, such as parricides and infanticides, which evoke the

spectre of madness and monstrosity. Eventually the struggle leads to a tight collaboration of

the two faculties, in the framework of the penal procedure. The psychiatrist becomes a

judiciary “expert”, whose scientific knowledge is necessary both to decide which criminals

can be brought to court, and whether they can be punished. The expert, in a sense, is a judge

judging before the judge, who provides a “pre-judgment”. Foucault would show that this

cooperation is crucial to transform the “crime” from a simple objective breaking of the law

and an assault on the authority of the sovereign, into the expression of a deviant personality:

therefore installing before the crime, and as its source, a psychological and social figure, “the

criminal”, defined as a subject capable of crime, because he harbours (and hides from others,

but above all from himself) criminal “instincts” or “impulses”. On the correlative side of the

theory or the scientific disciplines, we observe the invention and the epistemological

foundation of new negative categories, particularly that of perversion and perversity, (an

interesting doublet), extracted from moral discourse to become the other side of normality,

that permanently threatens it and could overthrow it. The notion of the “perverse individual”

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increasingly substitutes old notions of “monstrosity”, “dementia” and “monomania”, and it

leads to a typology of “dangerous individuals” – dangerous both for society and for

themselves, which calls for an institutional system of defenses. On such bases it becomes thus

possible to envisage a continuity of criminality and pathology. A psychological science

transformed into an auxiliary of police and justice will seek the causes of pathologies and

disorders, particularly sexual, which lead to commit crimes, and should be traceable to the

childhood of the subjects (often considered themselves as victims of perverse assaults who

have become perverse in turn) - hence the importance of establishing a preventive discipline

within the family (whose typical example was the rigid interdiction of infantile masturbation).

Finally, in what Foucault calls a process of “meta-somatization”, it becomes the function of a

speculative biology to relate these perversions to processes of degeneracy of the species,

which call for biopolitical defences, both medical and racial, eugenic and pedagogic.

The notion of a danger for the species indicates that what is at stake is a return of the

inhuman into the human, or the construction of a human figure of the inhuman. If it can

become an obsession, it is also because a question is crystallized here which personally

concerns the subject as a citizen, particularly when the citizen is potentially a juror in the

“democratic” institution of the tribunal. For Foucault, the modern criminal trial is a kind of

“truth procedure”, where the citizens forming the “sovereign people” (or some of them, with

the help of experts), not only “defend” their security, but also try to understand who they are,

qua humans living in a public and a private sphere, what they are capable of doing, in other

terms how fragile are the barriers which sometimes protect us from criminal pathology,

sometimes don’t. It seems to me that this confers also a reflexive function upon the

anthropological difference seen as a deviation from normality which typically bars access to

property, responsibility and citizenship for certain individuals. It belongs to a sort of

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collective or institutional introspection, always receiving indeed too many simultaneous

answers for each of them to be really convincing.

I may be permitted here to refer to an essay that I had published in 1990 on the

occasion of interdisciplinary debates provoked by a draft reform of the 1810 French Penal

Code, part of the great system of bourgeois law created after the Revolution by Napoleon

Bonaparte, and the subsequent law dating 1838 which still governed the irresponsibility of

mad criminals and their subjection to administrative rules of mandatory confinement in

lunatic asylums. I was already using those of Foucault’s texts available at the time, and I

reflected on discursive strategies of bourgeois politics for making penal responsibility and

social “deviancy” intelligible, not only in order to protect the society but also to inculcate

norms to the social subjects. I attached these strategies to the three typical “ideologies” of

modernity (in the sense proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein) by using a simple logical

typology. To the strategies of liberal politics, I attached the idea that a subject can be either

mad or criminal, but certainly not both (thus a logical disjunction). To the strategies of

conservative politics, I attached the idea that a subject can be both mad and criminal, thus a

logical conjunction, which is periodically reactivated by discourses of “social defence”

invoking biological and sociological determinisms. Finally to the strategies of a utopian

politics, which can be either anarchist or socialist, I attached the idea that “dangerous”

subjects are ultimately neither mad nor criminal, thus a logical simultaneous rejection,

because deviancy results from pathogenic and criminogenic social conditions: they would

evade the alternative of the normal and the pathological, or rather it would be society itself

which can be measured according to this distinction, and which becomes dangerous for itself

(i.e. for its own members). Intellectually, of course, it is the liberal position, pivotal in the

system, which is the most fragile, and the most ambivalent: to stretch apart the mad and the

criminal is to open the possibility of a collective “discrimination”, which seems essential for a

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democratic order whose participants are both fallible and autonomous, meaning that – as

much as possible – they must protect their own normality rather than having it imposed by

discretionary institutions. But it also means that “normality” works inside the liberal society

as an instrument of exclusion, to provide the subjects with the conviction that they are not

abnormal, or they recognizably differ from those “others” who are designated as abnormal by

some stigma. This, it seems to me, dovetails with the implicit lesson drawn by Foucault:

power-knowledge instituted by justice and psychiatry brings about a fundamental uncertainty

with respect to the exact nature of the “danger” threatening the subject’s autonomy. We could

also present it as a double bind affecting anthropological differences in general. They are not

only impossible to dismiss (which means that it is absurd to imagine humans outside of such

differences), they are also impossible to define in a univocal manner, in the form of lines of

demarcation simply separating classes or groups of humans who are essentially

heterogeneous or possess different “characters”. In this case what remains forever problematic

is to absolutely define what distinguishes a “normal” or “healthy” subject from a subject who

is “mentally ill”, or an “honest subject” from a “delinquent” or a “criminal”. A fortiori it is

impossible to simply distribute “abnormals” between the categories of madness and

criminality, which could explain why a liberal politics in this matter retains a utopian

character and remains permanently subject to the pressure of a notion of a “society to be

defended” and collective obsessions of perversity looming below its appearances of civility.

Hoc est corpus tuum?

Having sketched this first model, I can embark on other analyses and discussions,

concerning in particular the ethnic difference and the sexual difference. My idea is to examine

whether analogous patterns of inevitability and indefinition (or essential indeterminacy) can

be found here, and in which terms they should be expressed. It is also to examine how

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anthropological differences overlap, how they presuppose each other, which means that they

are never reducible to a single model. Each of them has a specific history, but these histories

concur in setting the horizon of the inhuman human in the framework of civic-bourgeois

universality. The ethnic difference was often projected into the non-European realm as an

object of ethnographic scholarly study and administrative colonial management. But it also

essentially aimed at reflecting the indigenous foundations of domestic western communities.

It has an essential link to the institution of the nation, itself a crystallization of the universal

and its restriction, therefore to the constitution of the citizen as national subject, or the

emergence of what I called in another place homo nationalis. This subject is not so much the

result of processes of normalization (albeit they are still there, even in a subordinated

function) than of processes of identification. Marks of belonging to a given national

community, or a “people” (ethnos), are retrieved in the individual, and, again, interiorized by

him/her as conditions of living together, sharing the burdens and enjoying the benefits of

speaking a certain common language, belonging to a certain tradition with its symbolic and

imaginary references, accepting the duties and sacrifices that it requests, etc. It is clearly the

case that the objective and subjective dimensions of identity-formation and identity-

reproduction are involved in the anthropological representation of “humankind” as a single

species which consists of a diversity of ethnic communities. But what particularly interests me

here is also the counter-effect of such a representation, namely the emergence of the figure of

the stranger as other (or the distinction of the “us” and the “them” in ethnic terms), and above

all it is the return of the stranger from within, in the figure of an intruder, “out of place” as it

were: this internal other who is both inevitable and subject to the ambivalent affects of

repulsion and fascination, and is likely to be considered either as symptom of an irreducible

particularity of the national communities or the uncanny bearer of a projected universality, or

the promises of cosmopolitanism.

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On account of objective historical tendencies which generalize the circulation of

populations, of post-colonial migrations and constitutions of diasporas, which destabilize

established procedures of reproduction of the identity of nations, and of more than a century

of debates about the primacy of the biological and linguistic factors of human diversity, with

their alternate valorisations of “purity” and “hybridity”, what strikes me here is a dramatic

indeterminacy of the languages of race and culture. Leaving aside all the necessary and

careful discussions of their definitions (which are always both “scientific” and “institutional”,

not to say administrative), I would submit that a genealogy of these categories used to identify

the external, and above all the internal other, shows that the racial and the cultural could

never become absolutely separated, inasmuch as they command, precisely, “affiliations”. As

“postcolonial” theorists particularly have shown, a cultural element was always involved in

the alleged biological classification of races, inasmuch particularly as it was indiscernible

from a representation of hierarchies, relationships of inferiority and superiority among “pure”

and “hybrid” races, based on the antithesis of barbarity and civilization. But a “racial”

element was also (and remains) involved in the classification of cultures, in all the debates

about culturalism and multi-culturalism, at least in a metaphorical sense - but what is not

metaphoric in the representation of “race”? – Or, to follow the indications of Paul Gilroy, in

the substitution of the “colour line” by the “culture lines”.

Over the years I tried to investigate the symbolic structure of this racial element, and

the reasons for its permanent reiteration, through the tentative definition of what, after

Derrida, I called a “genealogical scheme”, which is dominant as soon as a heritage or a

transmission of “properties” from one generation to another generation (and over the

succession of generations) is invoked to account for the reproduction of identities. The

genealogical scheme is at stake in the semantic derivations and displacements from “descent”

to “degeneracy”, from “ancestry” to “genetics”, “inheritance” to “heredity”, “translation” to

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“tradition”, etc. Clearly it is profoundly destabilized by the contemporary phenomena of

transnationalisation, but it appears also as the recourse against what is perceived as a threat to

collective identities and individual rootedness produced by globalization.

However, I maintain that in their very substitutability, which produces such disturbing

ideological formations as“racism without races”, or“ecology of cultural diversity”, and in

spite of the fact that both of them involve a tension of the universal and the particular, the

categories of race and culture remain profoundly dissymmetric. Drawing inspiration in

particular from Fanon’s incisive and tragic essay, Black skin, white masks (1952), I submit

that there is a “residue” of unexchangeable difference, which is in particular the empirical

body, or the inscription of identities in the materiality and the plasticity of a bodily object of

desire and repulsion, both highly sexualized and accompanied by various ways of instituting

the distinction of the somatic and the spiritual, e.g. the “colour”, which for that reason forms a

last refuge for the inexplicability of the “human”. It also provides, as we know, powerful

resources for the performative “reversals” of the name “race”, which combine a political and

an aesthetic dimension. It is around the “spectral” character of this body at the same time

highly visual and made invisible (Ralph Ellison), that Fanon had organized his

phenomenology of internal exclusion of the racial other, particularly the ex-slave, but also

(retrieving a key category from Du Bois), his analysis of colonial and postcolonial “double

consciousness”, and his dialectical understanding of the powerful enunciation of the universal

from within the extremities of its negation. We seem to find here something which is at least

analogous to the pattern of uncertainty of the definition of the norm, albeit in the realm of

identification. The metaphoric designation of the internal stranger as a “foreign body” or an

“intruder” within the community, if it is a metaphor at all, appears therefore as one that

crystallizes the combination of self and other at the heart of any subjective identity, but also

allegorizes its permanent potential of racial violence and political creativity.

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One is Two, and Two is One

As for sexual difference, it is the most obvious (and most obviously universalistic)

candidate to the status of a constitutive “anthropological difference”, but also in a sense the

most enigmatic of all (and the one which, in the framework of philosophical, legal, moral and

religious debates, intensified by the feminist critique of male domination and the not identical

critique of “heterosexist norms”, has been undergoing the most radical metamorphoses in the

last period). Because I want to keep a direct link with the general problem of the becoming

subject of the citizen and the antinomies of civic universalism, I notice here that the various

aspects of oppression against women and queer sexualities that we criticize and combat -

ranging from domestic exploitation of women’s services and reproductive function to their

massive exclusion from the dominant positions in science and politics, to the relegation of

feminine sexuality to the “passive” side, and the localisation of sexualities which are not

straight in the domain of perversions – certainly trace back to an immemorial past, in

particular a combination of patriarchic structures and religious regulations of legitimate sex.

In Modern Times however their understanding should undergo a revolution in order to resist

the revolutionary claim of equality (particularly the equality of genders) that was involved in

the declaration of civic universalism, and manifested itself immediately in the emergence of

feminism. Let’s not forget here that modern feminism is typically a universalistic movement,

if there is one, but also that, as civic universalism itself, it is increasingly riddled – without

any predictable end – with internal contradictions which are like differences within the

enunciation of the difference itself. This revolution against the revolution relies, it seems to

me, on the typically bourgeois introduction of a supplement of naturality in the representation

of the “feminine”, from which its contradictory relationship to the universal should derive, or

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a tendency to represent the feminine as the bearer (and the residue) of “nature” within

universality, qua conventional or institutional construction of the political. But, on the

background of innumerable and pervasive power structures (not only the domestic structure,

but the structure of unequal access to public speech in a language whose semantic and rhetoric

are so to speak appropriated by the masculine), it also relies on a symbolic double inscription

of the masculine, which allows it to function at the same time as generic (or neutral) and

specific (or “marked”), or as the part and the whole. I call it therefore the synecdoche of the

masculine, which structures the discourse of civic-bourgeois universality until today. That this

supplement of naturalism is resisted in every possible manner by women (but also frequently

appropriated and sublimated by them) is no objection to this, on the contrary. One of the

clearest testimonies of the intimate violence of the struggle, the antithetic tendencies of

subjectivation, and the creative resources that it contains, was illustrated by feminine

Victorian novel, as proclaimed by Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas), showing that the

“dividing line” of the public and the private sphere, or the political and the domestic, on

which the “sexual contract” is based, is in fact never fully tenable, but always reiterated by the

power institutions of bourgeois society.

It being obviously impossible to discuss all the aspects of this structure, I want to

concentrate now for a minute on a particular aspect which is also, I believe, extremely

revelatory, namely the discussion around the issue of binarism in the understanding of the

sexual relation as it was developed in the psychoanalytical tradition and its critiques. A return

to the reading of Freud’s theory of “bisexuality” and the metamorphoses of the Oedipus

complex, intimately interdependent, cannot be avoided here, although it would require a very

detailed discussion to remain immune of simplistic evaluations, because it displays the logical

constraints of what is ultimately a political structure affecting the very construction of

subjectivities. Clearly Freud’s theory of the sexual difference and the relation of the sexes as a

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libidinal relation, essentially structured in the unconscious, but not confined to the realm of

sexuality in the narrow sense, was always already political in its implications and references.

It plainly displays the paradoxes of “parity”, as certain French feminist discourse would call it

(whatever its shortcomings), in other terms the constitution of a “Human essence” where, in

permanence, one is two, and two is one. Freud’s discourse was certainly imbued with

numerous prejudices concerning the difference of the masculine and the feminine which he

strives to explain along the lines of the “Oedipal scenario”. And we know that this led him to

continuously return to the issue of the feminine sexuality, which in a strangely colonial

metaphor he would call a “dark continent”, struggling with the idea that feminine desire is

entirely dissymmetric from masculine desire, while at the same time maintaining that there is

only one libido, or one structure of the constitution of the desiring subject, which could only

become alternatively realized in a “direct” or “inverted” manner. Interestingly, Freud

continuously and uneasily resisted both the temptation of essential binarism, and that of

radical pluralism, to which many of his followers, either male or female, oriented themselves.

This is not without analogy with what, a moment ago, I called the “liberal” position on the

issue if the normal and the abnormal. But it is also striking that Freud repudiated equally

biological and sociological determinisms, and presented the structural combination of

“choices” which confront the subject in the course of his/her acquisition of a definite

personality, in terms of a superposition of two completely open alternatives: a “choice of

identity” between masculine and feminine identifications equally possible for boys and girls,

and a “choice of object” or modality of love between the homosexual and the heterosexual,

none of which is more “natural” than the other. This structure, both coercive and

indeterminate, is precisely “the unconscious”.

Freud does certainly not deny that there is a normative element here, he does not even

want to challenge it as an element of socialization and civilization, but he certainly paves the

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way for a discussion of the transformations of this element. I find it illuminating to call the

redoubled binarisms, involving both identity and normality, whereby the antithesis of

masculinity and femininity is supported or collected by the antithesis of heterosexuality and

homosexuality and conversely, a symbolic order in the structuralist jargon. But it has to be

observed right away that the psychic constraint to which this “order” subjects the subject is

correlated to and, as it were, caught between two elements of radical contingency: one is the

historical contingency of the type of family and family norms where the positions of “parents”

imagined as incarnations of the sexes and providing models of identification are instituted, but

also permanently challenged. Families are battlefields. The other element is the contingency

of the correspondence and the non-correspondence between the sexual difference as an

anatomy and the sexual difference as a psychic structure of desiring subjects. This would

show, in my opinion, that the Freudian discourse is not so much a way of reiterating and

imposing a norm attributing unequal capacities to subjects for them to become the bearers of

the universal, than a way of problematizing, theoretically and clinically, the structures which

make universal norms efficient in the form of constructions of singular identities.

From there it becomes possible to throw a renewed light on the debate once launched

by Lacan with his theorization of the “impossibility of the sexual relation”, and especially the

last version that he gave in a suggestive but also cryptic manner in the 1972-1973 seminar

“Encore” (let us note in passing, practically the same year as Foucault’s course on “the

abnormals”: these are all after-effects of the ’68 “cultural revolution”), in the form of an

algebraic table called the “formulas of sexuation”. I admit that in my understanding of this

theory I am influenced by the interpretation proposed by Joan Copjec, even if my conclusions

are not exactly the same as hers. She pushes to the extreme two striking characteristics of the

Lacanian scheme: its staunch defence of the binary form of the sexual difference, but also its

totally formal character, which makes it a representation of the ultimate determination of

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identification not by psychological or social experiences, but by the pure power of the

signifier, or “the law”, under which the experiences must become subsumed, because –

unconsciously – they must be thought, and there is no other thought that the one structured by

discourse. According to Lacan a discourse is always also an institution, therefore it is always

already political. Along these lines, one may remark that the two halves of the Lacanian

algebraic scheme – the one that formalizes the dilemma of masculinity, and the one that

formalizes the dilemma of femininity, being torn between the universal impossibility not to be

subjected to “masculine” phallic jouissance, and the impossibility for everything (“all” or

“whole”, depending on the translation) in “feminine jouissance” to become subsumed under

this law, are logically completely identical. There is nothing substantial that distinguishes the

masculine from the feminine, it is a pure and completely indifferent “choice” between the

“all” and the “not-all”, i.e. completeness and incompleteness, or finitude and infinity), albeit

situated within the limits of a coercive order, which is open for any “x”, i.e. any of “us”,

would be sexual subjects, and which resides only in the possibility of defining contradictory

attitudes with respect to the phallic function (equally deceptive, in fact): one which pretends

to be its owner, and one which underlines its incompleteness. As a consequence, Lacan’s

universalism, strongly emphasized by Copjec who associates it with a typically modern (I will

dare to say, “civic”) understanding of the formation of the subject as located at the same level

as the law, or obeying its own (unconscious) law, embodies very contradictory predicates.

One might say that it destroys or deconstructs the obscure notion of bisexuality only to

transfer it onto a “symbolic” plane. It is even more strongly committed than any other post-

Freudian variety of psychoanalytic discourse to the idea (should we say the ideology?) that

there is only one sexuality, even if one with two “doors of entry”, and this single sexuality

(which we may also call the human relation, named “sex”) is defined primarily in terms of the

“masculine” phallic function. But to be “One” is not to be “The Same” (as immediately

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illustrated by the contradiction of “tout” and “pas tout”). And since he defines this function as

a pure signifier, he would deprive the individual men, the males, of any “ownership”, any

“right of possession” over the function itself that is not a fiction, except for the ridiculous fact

that they are the physical bearers of an organ – imaginarily compared to a sword or a sceptre -

which can be erected, at least for some time, and for the even more ridiculous fantasies of

power that are built around that bearing. This is indeed Lacan’s anarchist side.

If we now move to Butler (and I am thinking in particular of the more recent essays

collected in her book Undoing Gender in 2004), we will notice a reversal of this description

which destroys the privileges of binarism ad completely as possible, in the wake of a lesbian

and queer discourse which sees the representation of a gender limited to two possibilities and

only two as a sign of the fact that the normative structure of “heterosexism” has retroacted on

the determination of the genders themselves, or if you like the possibilities of sexed

identification. It is widely supposed (especially in France) that Butler belongs to a relativist

and culturalist epistemology of sex (or sex constructed as gender), which is constantly

attacked by universalists, even compared to a consumer’s ethics of sex, whereby the subject is

one who is free to choose among an infinite multiplicity of sexual practices, object choices,

and identifications, and seek their social recognition as equal opportunities. This claim is

apparently supported by the fact that, together with others representatives of the “transgender”

movement, Butler has gone as far as insisting that the body is not immune of the effects of

multiple sexual choices and orientations. On the contrary the body’s visibility and sensitivity

become shaped and constructed historically and socially by the consequences of one’s

choices. However I would submit that Butler is a universalist herself, both in her elaboration

of a politics of differences based on the hypothetic combination of liberty and equality (or a

“non-normative” universalism, or a universalism “without coercive norms” whence to derive

injunctions and violence against the “deviant” bodies and behaviours), and in her absolute

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awareness of the fact that vindications of rights for the minorities cannot not refer to the

language of civic universalism. And I would submit that Butler is in an important sense a

“Lacanian” herself, albeit in a “heretic manner”, turning Lacan against Lacan as it were. This

comes from the fact that she pushes to the extreme the idea (itself deriving from Freud) that

there is no pleasure that is better or more normal than any other, and that desire relates to any

object (“objet petit a” in the Lacanian jargon) provided it becomes a support for phantasies.

And she completely appropriates the trope that “desire is the desire of the Other”, or that it is

from the other, in a relation of address and lack, that I receive my subject-identity: which

means that I unconsciously conform my conduct and my own body in dependency on the way

I construct the identity of the Other whom I love, and to whom, in her language, I am

“passionately attached”. Again, this is a figure of absolute multiplicity, of there being always

more than one or two sexes. But this is not Butler’s last word. In a sense “binarism” or the

Law of Twoness re-enters inevitably the pattern, from both angles: on one side, with the fact

that anatomy, if not a “fate” as Freud had written once, is a “matter” of the experience with

which we endlessly struggle in a melancholic way, albeit not a divide after which we should

become politically and socially classified; on the other side, through her description of the

“desire for the feminine” that – even in the form of parody – inhabits the self-identification of

one subject in the “butch-femme” lesbian couple. It would seem thus that the distinction of

the masculine and the feminine is returning, neither as norm or law, but much more joyously,

as an open pattern of fantasy and imagination. This allows her to write in a touching manner,

à propos “butches”, that “they/we are fatally attracted to the feminine” (Undoing Gender,

page 197). Taken together, Lacan and Butler, after Freud, seem to testify, once again, that the

anthropological difference (here, the binary difference), albeit never substantial, and therefore

never localized in the form of a distribution of individuals among classes with no overlapping

or residue, is also not something that a subject can avoid, especially when it comes to

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discussing which effects it carries for it to enter, in a “passive” or “active” manner, the realm

of the universal and its realization.

*

This was a long presentation – albeit still very schematic - of the phenomenology of

anthropological differences in their relation to the civic-bourgeois notions of universality and,

conversely, the patterns of subjectivation which govern the establishment of relations

(relations of power, relations of membership and reciprocity, “relations” as such, i.e. as

relating to others), albeit still a very defective one. To conclude even more schematically I

want to propose a couple of philosophical remarks, relating to the institution of the universal.

As differences which can neither become ignored nor localized, neither eliminated from the

representation of the “human” nor identified with it, anthropological differences account for

an extremely odd and unstable pattern of relationships between inclusion and exclusion (in

the society, in the community, ultimately in the human genre). To be sure, there are lasting

and violent processes of exclusion which we can associate with anthropological differences,

because they either derive (or seem to derive) from them, or become legitimated in their

language. Race, sex, the pathological, but also the infantile, or manual”unskilled” labour,

separately or taken together, account for the fact that some beings who are at the same time

human and less than human, or imperfectly human, become punished, segregated, relegated,

barred from access to associations, professions, exchanges, communities and recognitions,

which are so many instances of the institution of bourgeois citizenship in the general sense.

But already Foucault, who did so much to draw our attention to the function of segregation in

modern history and its structuring crucial institutions or establishments such as the hospital,

the prison, the barrack, even the school, insisted on the fact that there are different modalities

of exclusion. And he tended increasingly to privilege the figure of an exclusion which works

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as an inclusion (for instance in the modality of continuous surveillance, “panoptic”

monitoring of individuals, which allows it to segregate them while not pushing them into a

physically separated space, beyond a borderline or inside a “camp”). And I personally insisted

in other essays on the importance and the multiple identities of a figure which, in general, but

also in a literal sense, we can call the foreign body, or the “body” who is essentially out of

place, i.e. emerges inside a space where it should not be “normally”, “ideally”. The strange

neighbour or the disturbingly integrated stranger who remains a stranger, racially and

culturally other(ed) within a nation-state, are the clearest examples today, and they can take

many different forms. But metaphorically at least the abnormal is also a foreign body in the

moral realm, and the sexual transgressor, who escapes the codes of binarism, while produced

by them and reacting to them, is another example. They allow us to understand or ask how to

be a foreign body in a social place involves for anybody entertaining an uneasy relationship to

one’s body as well as to other bodies.

This leads me to suggesting, without going further, that the main form taken by

exclusion within civic-bourgeois universalism is precisely inclusion. This is fully consistent

with the fact that, at least in an intensive manner, civic universalism has no exterior. Nobody

remains outside it. Everybody (every body…) is or will become included. It is true also of

other universalisms (religious universalisms for instance) and above all it is true of the

universal market. But civic-bourgeois universalism builds specific institutions to define,

control, and make visible the foreign body. And as a consequence the foreign body will

incarnate the most contradictory situation with respect to the definition of the human: it is the

non-human, against which one has to strive in order to become human; in the extremities it

features the return or the intrusion of the inhuman into the human. But on the other hand, the

foreign body with her otherness is the absolute human, it is the arch-human: nothing, no

being, is more human, or to put it in Kantian terms, more clearly embodying the “destination”

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of the human than a criminal, a madman or a madwoman, a stranger, a racial and cultural

other, a jealous or hysteric woman, a gay or a transgender subject, etc. But taken together (and

they certainly do not form a tout, an “all” or a “whole”), all these singularities are the

majority, the quasi-totality of mankind. They push the bearers of the model of the human (or

the characters of the human “essence”) towards the margins, the place of the “exception” from

which it distinguished itself. This circle forms the absolute collapse of any simple, positive

form of “humanism”, but it also marks the aporia of the question which language to substitute

for that of humanism. “Anti-humanism” will do only if it is understood as expressing a

contradiction or a resistance from inside.

This takes me to my last point, even more briefly, on the side of subjection and

subjectivation and their relationship to the civic-bourgeois universal. I have just evoked, in

oblique terms, the Kantian notion of the transcendental subject as incarnation, and

interiorization, of the universal within an individual subjectivity (which, in Kant’s analysis,

takes the privileged form of an individual consciousness). It is clear that this philosophical

figure bears a strong correspondence with the emergence and political assertion of civic

universalism as an institution based on individual property, responsibility and reasoning,

transforming the vertical relationship to God into an immanent relationship to the law, which

individual subjects should be permanently in charge of implementing. If not the only

philosophical elaboration of the modern idea of a subject who is also a citizen, it is certainly a

very powerful one. Foucault in The order of things rephrased it critically in terms of the

“empirical-transcendental doublet”, insisting that such anthropological categories as life,

language, labour, form “quasi-transcendentals” through which the subject becomes the bearer

of the universal not in a purely abstract but in a concrete (or more concrete) manner : like

“attributes” in a Spinozistic sense, they form the “sites” where the anthropological differences

must be located in order to become perceived, known, experienced, and regulated. However

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all these formulations (even Foucault’s) seem to remain indebted to an exclusively

“individualistic” scheme of the articulation of the subject and the universal. They bracket the

fact that the human (as was abundantly illustrated by our discussion) essentially qualifies the

subject when he/she enters into social relations, or – as Marx famously proposed in the 6th of

the “Theses on Feuerbach” – the “human essence” (das menschliche Wesen, which could also

be translated simply as “the human being”) is no longer conceived as an abstraction, or an

idea of the universal, “inhabiting” the self-consciousness of the isolated individual, but more

extensively, as a “complete set of social relations”(das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen

Verhältnisse). Reciprocally, in spite of his rumination of the notion of “alienation” or

“estrangement” (Entfremdung), Marx did not really pay attention to the anthropological

differences that we have just discussed, nor, accordingly, to the problems of “normality” and

“normalization”, “identity” and “identification”, sameness and otherness. What happens, we

may ask, if, keeping in mind that historically “man” is always a relational figure, we start

taking into account the anthropological differences not as contingent or empirical phenomena

affecting the universal from outside or limiting the possibilities of its implementation, but as

intrinsic contradictions of the universal, which at the same time relate it to itself, and open a

gap – sometimes an abyss of inhumanity – within this transindividual relation?

Even there Kant provides a useful guiding thread: in fact he did not ignore the

anthropological differences, but he suppressed them, or he pushed them back into the realm of

what he tellingly called the “pathological”. The pathological is not the empirical, simply other

than pure reason, it is the empirical simulacrum which imitates reason, particularly inasmuch

as its intrinsic link with freedom of choice is concerned, and therefore threatens it with

intrinsic perversion. In many respects it is precisely for him the body, which is me, affects my

identity, and is not purely me. But we must go one (or several) steps further. We must not

only take into consideration the idea of a divided or split subject, a subject with a reverse side

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(which is the unconscious, or the ideology, the inevitable misrecognition involved in any

recognition). We must reach the idea of what – this time borrowing from Locke - I would like

to call the uneasy subject, or the subject affected with uneasiness concerning her own

humanness. It is not enough to say that anthropological differences are “constitutive of the

human”, with universalism permanently facing the dilemma of eliminating them or

integrating them. It is necessary to say that, in their very multiplicity, they are the conditions

for the emergence of a subject relating to other subjects, albeit not in the form of a simple

recognition of the other, but in the form of a question about what it means to see others as

humans and be seen by them as human, with the corresponding “rights” (or the corresponding

“right to have rights”, Arendt would have said). But if this condition, or this site, is impossible

to locate, or continuously changes place and configuration, the subject will not “inhabit” it in

a static form, not even in the form of a classical dilemma of the kind “to be or not to be”, to be

Man or to be Woman (homme ou femme? C’est la question), to be sane or insane, etc. it will

traverse it as a stranger, in a quest to locate the differences that one has to simply assume in

order to belong to the societies and communities which universally structure the human. This

is uneasy. I call it the irreducible uneasiness of the subject. But we may also ask the question:

isn’t this uneasiness what recreates and supports a dialectics of insurrection and constitution

which forms the never ending “substance” of universal citizenship?

I must leave this question largely open. In Spinozistic terms (after Kant, Marx, and

Locke, why not also borrow something from Spinoza?); it would be the question of the

conatus, the “endeavour” that allows for a transition from passivity to activity, isolation to

community, from the becoming subject of the citizen (or his constructing himself within the

institutions which can never include individuals within the range of individuality without also

excluding from it, as I just tried to show) to the becoming citizen of the subject. My

formulations work in the direction, not only of picturing this becoming as an infinite process;

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or task, always to start again, but also of showing that it displays the very dialectics of

universality, in its civic-bourgeois form. A dialectics, to be sure, requires of contradictions

which set it in motion: in this case clearly the various contradictions arising from the fact that

a political institution based on universal and equal access to the freedoms and capacities

called “human rights”, also constantly suppresses, or limits, or denies these rights for various

categories. The power of this contradiction, its capacity to “make history”, is indeed

illustrated by the development of various emancipatory movements, be they movements of

“majorities” or “minorities” (and sometimes this very distinction is unclear, as in the case of

feminism…). But in some sense, this is also the lesson that I want to draw, such a power of

the contradiction remains abstract and impotent. What empowers the power of challenging the

institution of universality in its own terms is not simply the contradiction, it is the difference,

more precisely it is the anthropological difference in its singular forms, because the

anthropological difference is not only the site of uneasy identification and normalization, it is

also the site – no less uneasy – of displacement, de-identification and alternative normativity

(what Foucault sometimes called “counter-conducts”). In short, my proposition is to define

the conatus of the subject-citizen in terms and anthropological differences permanently

overdetermining and empowering the political conflict of inclusion and exclusion – which

defines the dialectics of universality.