I don’t know if I will have enough time to say what I want to say, so I will start right away with what is most important : I find no place for myself in the structure and terms of the debate that have been laid out for us over the past few days, indeed, over the past few years.
Before coming to Amsterdam, as I read over the final version of the program for this conference, I began to worry : What is going to happen to queer theory if it has come to the point where it takes as one of its principal enemies, the LGBT movement, which it accuses of all sorts of wrongs, mostly ending in « -ism » : homonationalism, homo-neo-liberalism, homo-colonialism, homo-imperialism… There must, I imagine, be other –isms as well, endless –isms!
I hope I can be forgiven for the vehemence of what I wish to say, but for me there is a great more violence in all those “isms” I have just mentioned. For I deeply believe, I feel very keenly, that it is urgent for us to turn our back on this reduction of theory to a brief litany of slogans that are passed from person to person in order to produce the thrill of feeling radical, to turn our back on the transformation of theory into a set of normative injunctions. There is, after all, more normativity, and even normativism (if you can allow me an “ism” of my own : queer-normativism, always on the verge of becoming a queer-stalinism), in all these accusatory discourses than in the struggle for the right to marry – for marriage is not a norm but a possibility for certain people to live as they see fit, as they choose. It’s high time this kind of circulation of slogans – academic slogans that do not have much to do with politics - was left behind. It runs the risk of quickly transforming what had been critical thinking into a policing of thought, after having also transformed it into a policing of the desires and aspirations of this person or that (“subversive” is “good”; “conformist” is “bad”). We must give up this kind of policing if we want to start thinking again, to be able to produce analyses, to be able to reflect about politics, to participate in politics.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am certainly one of those who has been horrified to see the struggles we have undertaken these past twenty years, and the struggles of others who preceded us and to whom we are indebted, instrumentalized by discourses of the State, by state policies that are meant to stigmatize immigrants, especially those whose beliefs, values, ways of life, manners of dress are linked to Islam. This is all the more horrifying when you consider that these discourses are being promulgated, and these policies established, by people who were hardly known for being pro-feminist or pro-gay beforehand, and who – as far as I can see – haven’t evolved at all in this direction in recent times. That is to say, these policies and discourses are being put forth by people against whom we have been struggling, and who have worked against us and insulted us for quite some time.
And I am horrified to see that certain sectors of the lesbian and gay movement and of the feminist movements have taken up these discourses, have begun repeating them, defining their identity and their struggles in terms of a defense of a threatened national identity, thereby applying to other groups of people that discourse that had previously been applied to them : the discourse of the “internal enemy” that is a danger to the Nation, to society and to culture.
Yet, can I not struggle against homophobia, transphobia..., struggle for sexual freedom, for the right of couples of the same sex to marry in my country where this right has not yet been won, as for the right of transgender people to marry as they would wish, for the right of people with AIDS to be able to legal leave to their partner whatever they want that partner to inherit, or for the simple right to see your partner at the hospital even if the family is opposed to this, and so on…. AND… at the same time struggle against the immigration policies of my government, or of other European governments, against laws directed and enforced against various immigrants. Here is the question: can I struggle at the same time against different forms of domination. Suppose we take it as given that there is no direct or necessary link between the struggle for legal recognition of alternative family forms and the political forces that stigmatize immigrants. I can certainly struggle for the right of same-sex couples to marry, and for the right of immigrants to vote – even while realizing that if immigrants should have the right to vote it is quite probable that many of those who are Muslim, like practicing members of many other religions, will vote against candidates who support the idea of gay marriage. I remember being part of a protest against the war in Iraq and realizing that I was surrounded by people who would have thrown me out of their group had I tried to hold hands with my partner. On the other hand, when I have gone to Gay Pride marches I have doubtless found myself in the company of people who vote for the right, even the extreme right, people who are racist, anti-immigrant. Do I have to choose between these political actions? Should I have gone to neither of them ? Any movement, any position-taking that is meant to confront a problem in public, to intervene in the political field, will inevitably leave to the side other problems, or will construct itself in opposition to other problems. There is no pure politics! There is always a remainder of some kind. This we should know.
I might add that, in the course of this protest against the war in Iraq that I just mentioned, I left the group I was marching with when certain other protestors started chanting “Death to the Jews.” There is, perhaps, another “-ism” to add to the earlier list, antisemitism. Adding it would mean calling into question the oversimplified and overly univocal lines of division that are being set up in that list. There is no shortage of bad “isms”. They are all around us.
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Well, if we have reached this impasse, an impasse which has led to the organization of a conference such as this one, I wonder whether it is not because our way of conceiving of the time of politics is too homogeneous. We could say it is a Hegelian and synthetic way of conceiving of temporality which leads us either to think in terms of the convergence of struggles, the alliance of different minorities, or to think in terms of an exclusive choice of one kind of struggle to the detriment of others, or even in opposition to others. Perhaps we should instead think of politics in terms of heterogeneity, that is in terms of temporalities that are juxtaposed to different degrees : each question, each movement, each mobilization develops according to its own specific temporality. So when it comes to the issue of facing up to the political problems that confront us, it’s more a question of one’s possible inscription, as a subject of politics, in a number of different temporalities, each one heterogeneous to the others even if they produce themselves in a certain simultaneity, none of them necessarily converging, or only converging extremely rarely. Of course, I support all convergences, all alliances when they can happen, I cherish them when they do happen… but intersections, and even intersectionality in one single person, are not easy tasks to deal with. That is, we should give up not only thinking in terms of the necessary convergence of different struggles, we should also give up thinking in terms of exclusive choices that work to the detriment of other choices. I can’t help wondering if the Marxist idea of the union of struggles, the totalization of different struggles, isn’t haunting the radical thought of today, notably, and in a way that is doubtless very paradoxical, queer theory. This effect of haunting can be seen, for example, when someone chooses to exclude from the field of radical politics any effort that doesn’t have as its goal to combat capitalism or neoliberalism, all such efforts being reduced to a form of complicity with neoliberalism and capitalism.
And yet one of the lessons Michel Foucault is supposed to have taught us is how to detach both political thought and political practice both from purely economic processes and from the idea of a global overturning of some system. The lesson was also about learning to detach thought and practice from the idea that there is a single unique domain of politics, a privileged political sphere, and, corollarily that there could be a specific political actor, a privileged agent of politics – somehow transformed into an imaginary, mythological figure of history, with other actors, agents, and struggles being reduced to secondary status, or even rendered guilty or suspect if they do not yield in their efforts to the primacy of that privileged actor or the privileged struggle.
However committed we may be to the struggle against the stigmatization of immigrants, and to the struggle for the rights of immigrants, it would be counter-productive today to think of “immigrants” the way in the past Marxist theory thought of “workers” – that is, as the social group to which any and all politics had necessarily to refer, as the point of view from which politics had to be regarded. There is, of course, the danger of mistaking the point of view of the (academic) person who speaks of the working class or speaks of immigrants for the point of view of those workers or immigrants themselves.
And since I am speaking of workers and immigrants, I’d like to recall to what an extent the questions that have been being posed here over the last two days are analogous to those posed about the difficult problem of the voting shift to the extreme right of a certain part of the popular classes who used to vote for the left, but who have felt themselves threatened by immigration. This is a problem I was trying to think through in my recent book, Retour à Reims, where I emphasized the fact that if lived experiences are not taken into account, or if the perception that individuals have of their lived experiences is not taken into account, if one does not take seriously what people say about the lives they are living, how they suffer and what they are afraid of, it is a relatively sure thing that that denied reality, those ignored or repressed feelings, will come back onto the social and political scene in the form of a vote for the extreme right. So, just as we saw numerous workers vote for the extreme right and also assert the very racism that they had been accused of harboring, so we may see many gay and lesbian people shifting to the right as well, taking on the qualities imputed to them. The result will thus be to push these people in the direction of the very ideological regions they are already accused of inhabiting. Might I even go so far as to claim that certain kinds of pseudo-radical thought and this nationalist and racist drift are somehow mutually reinforcing within a shared ideological paradigm ? Are, let’s say, complementary enemies? In any case, our work should be to undo this ideological framework with its fixed positions, not to consolidate it.
Is it nevertheless possible to think at once about all the multiple modes of domination and of resistance? Dominations based on class, or race, or status within a given nation, or the domination of one sex over the other or over the others, of one sexuality over another or others, and so on? Is this possible even while knowing that one can be on the side of the dominators and the perpetuation of domination in one area while at the same time being on the side of the dominated in another, and vice versa? I am tempted, not in order to offer a unified theory, or to unify politics, but in order to try to think about what might constitute the common point to different forms of domination, to propose that we build our reflection around the question of borders and boundaries : for example the boundary (and it is simultaneously a cultural, social, political, and legal boundary) that separates nationals from non-nationals within a single nation, and also from the children of those non-nationals – children who are considered as not really belonging to the country in which they live even when they are by law nationals of this country in which they are born. Or, for example, the boundary (also a historical, political, and legal one) which separates those individuals, couples, and families that are considered “legitimate” from those who are considered “illegitimate” or “pathological” and who suffer from legal and social forms of discrimination, due notably to the homophobic categories of religious, political, psychiatric or psychoanalytic discourses regarding the ways sexual difference is supposedly the foundation of the symbolic order and the social order. Such boundaries and borders are numerous, both around us, and also in us. Our work is, even if we cannot do away with them entirely, at least to attenuate their sharpness and their violence. That is, we should be working to undo legal, political, or psychic borders as they have been fashioned by the State, or by the thought of the State – both the State as Nation, and also the State as the defender of the reproduction of the heteronormative family order. And yet at the same time we should be making use of the State in another of its historical functions, that of guaranteeing freedoms and rights to individuals and to groups. To struggle against the State as it sets up borders while promoting the State as the guarantor of the universality of rights (those rights which are meant to be constantly redefined and reinvented through new claims and new struggles) : this is the double game through which we can and must construct our problematics and our actions.
This politics of borders – I mean the struggle against borders – cannot help but lead to a multiplication of those visible, perceptible, borders, one felt as limitations and therefore as struggles against oppression and for emancipation that must be taken up. There is no point in regretting this. Let’s get to work!
