Balibar - Cosmopolitanism and Secularism

Grey Room 44, Summer 2011, pp. 6–25. © 2011 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7

Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies andProspective InterrogationsÉTIENNE BALIBAR

The conjunction joining the two isms in my title (“Cosmopolitanism andSecularism”) might suggest the complementarity of the two notions or theidea that we should try to build—or rebuild—a discourse combining a def-inition of secularism, even a secularist perspective, with a cosmopolitanperspective. I readily admit that these are positive notions and values,which form part of a civic and democratic understanding of the political.Simultaneously, I have become aware that their combination is profoundlycontradictory and have even become convinced that the two notions, in thecontemporary situation (itself the result of a long history), essentiallyundermine, destruct, or deconstruct the meaning and stability of each other,thus putting the validity of their combination into question. This makesreferring to them as complementary aspects of the democratic project prob-ably more difficult, not less. So, in a sense, what I want to do is to make itmore complicated to associate cosmopolitanism and secularism within asingle problematic, as many of us might be tempted to do for reasons thatmight be either affirmative or negative. In particular, I am trying to workagainst a tendency to which I owe a great many of my civic commitments:a tendency to see cosmopolitanism and secularism as natural componentsof modernity.1

This kind of preoccupation leads me to formulate somewhat convolutedquestions. For example: suppose that in the conditions of contemporarypolitics no “cosmopolitan project” can acquire meaning without involvinga “secular” dimension, so that no such thing as “religious cosmopolitanism”is thinkable; why, then, does a secular (not to say a “secularist”) under-standing of the construction of the cosmopolis add, at least initially, diffi-culties and contradictions to those already contained in the classical ideaof instituting citizenship at a transnational level or granting it with a newtransnational dimension? Why does the explicit characterization of the public sphere as nonreligious or secular, which seemed clear (if not

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universally accepted) at the level of the city or the nation, become confus-ing and possibly self-destructive when we tentatively expand our definitionof the political to the apparently unlimited, nonexclusive space of the“human world”? How could the obstacles contained in such a representa-tion—adding utopia to utopia, as it were—nevertheless figure a path towarddiscussing the political tasks and the kind of political process involved inthe idea of a cosmopolitical horizon for our societies? Conversely, supposethat in at least some regions of the world—or perhaps in all but in a singularway each time—the possibility to ground and implement a secular agendain politics, to vindicate secularism in the regulation of social conflicts orthe development of such public services as education, health care, urban-ism, and so on, no longer existed without referring to a “cosmopolitan” wayof defining the political. Suppose, alternately, that no viable, consistent,progressive, or democratic “secularism” can be less than “cosmopolitan,”so that a secularism defined in purely national terms or subjected to themere imperatives of national unity and national security would instantlybecome contradictory and self-destructive. Why does such a formula not somuch remove obstacles as create them—or, to put it more cautiously, revealthem in a manner that precludes immediate, visible solutions?

What I have in mind, in the first instance, is the fact that secularism andcosmopolitanism, now again hotly debated issues, remain less and less sep-arable. More than ever, there is a need to discuss each of them in terms ofits interference with the other. However, their conjunction produces a ter-rible vacillation in almost every apparent certainty we associate with the“names” secularism and cosmopolitanism—a vacillation so violent that itmay be doubted whether the two terms will survive this trial in a recogniz-able form. I am tempted simply to borrow the marvelous title of Joan Scott’sseminal book on the constitution of Republican citizenship in French constitutional history: Only Paradoxes to Offer.2 Scott’s formulation aptlyindicates what I have elsewhere suggested is the intrinsic property of thedevelopment of citizenship as a historical institution; namely, its antinomiccharacter, its capacity to generate internal contradictions and become self-destructive. I’ve attempted to associate this idea with the notion thatcitizenship, at the same time, has a necessary relation to processes ofdemocratization but nevertheless remains irreducible to “pure” democracy.This represents an extreme shortcut, but I would suggest, along these lines,that cosmopolitanism and secularism are part of a project of democratizingthe accepted forms of “democratic citizenship,” a project that cannot bebrushed aside. At the same time, cosmopolitanism and secularism indicatethe limits of the possibility of expanding citizenship in a democratic manner—limits that, especially in light of the conflictual interdependency

Balibar | Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations 9

of cosmopolitanism and secularism, could prove insurmountable. We haveno certainties, no guarantees on this point. And we will have none in theforeseeable future.

At the risk of seeming terribly parochial or, worse, seeming to demon-strate the extent to which somebody who claims to work in a critical per-spective remains, in fact, a-critically subjected to the representations of hisown nation and tradition, I offer an episode from recent French history toillustrate how I was led to rethink the contradictory articulation of cos-mopolitanism and secularism. The legal and political controversy over thewearing of the so-called Islamic veil or hijab by young Muslim girls inFrench schools and the state’s interdiction in the name of constitutional secularism is widely known outside France. The widespread critique of therationale and the effects of the law—which banned the veil from schools, inpractice forcing girls who wear the hijab to make the alienating choiceeither of being stripped of their most personal garment or being expelledfrom the public educational system—is itself part of the cosmopoliticalmeaning of the event. The quasi-unanimous rejection of the French law—by conservatives and liberals and by intellectuals, activists, and clerics inthe East and the West—is by itself something French exceptionalism maywell be pleased with because the reaction emphasizes the allegedly uniquerelationship between French republicanism and secularism in the eyes ofthe French state. Therefore, the reaction flatters the French people’s owncultural narcissism.

The French official word laïcité and the usual English translation secu-larism are not completely equivalent; nor are they totally external to eachother. The aspect of secularism that laïcité pushes to the extreme is not theequal right of religious denominations in the public realm but the separa-tion of church (and, more generally, religion) from the state or state functions, including education. This emphasis, whose philosophical roots,as I’ve suggested elsewhere, can be traced back to a Hobbesian rather than a Lockeian conception of the “social contract,” does not represent the only possible form of secularism or its mainstream realization. This varia-tion, however, is part of the problem rather than an extrinsic element. We should not be surprised to discover that, although the kind of “extrem-ism” involved in the discourse and practice of laïcité distorts many of theissues involved in the secularizing process of Western societies, suchextremism also reveals some of the deepest contradictions at stake in a dis-cussion of “secularism” in general.

I have been dissatisfied with many of the discourses on the case, includingones from inside and outside the French political tradition. I have stronglydisagreed and I continue to strongly disagree with the French law, in spite

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of its apparent peaceful implementation, which has been greatly helped bythe international conjuncture at the time. The hijab-wearing girls and theirfamilies or advisers in France did not want to become instrumentalized byor assimilated to the fundamentalist preachers or Al Qaeda spokesmen wholoudly supported their resistance from afar. Independent of other circum-stances, I deny that directing at individuals who are supposed to be the victims of religious and/or patriarchal oppression an injunction to abide bythe law or leave the public school (which in practice means surrenderingthem to the absolute power of the family and in some cases the religiouscommunity) can have the least emancipatory effect or educative function.The injunction denies those who are subject to it every possibility of expres-sion, self-determination, and negotiation (or it treats them precisely as sub-jects, in the old sense of subjection, not as virtual citizens). Insofar as thisconspicuous constraint was intended to impose secular obedience onMuslim girls, it was also destined to give satisfaction and grant legitimacyto the racist components of French society. Accordingly, this case seems to be a clear example of what Gayatri Spivak describes as the scenario of“white men liberating brown women from the oppression of brown men.”As such, it eloquently testifies to the continuation of colonial relations andperceptions in the postcolonial era.3

The situation is made less simple, however, by the existence of a counter-scenario whose exact practical importance must be carefully assessed butcannot be entirely denied: “brown men protecting brown women frombeing liberated by white men” (or white women; many of the schoolteach-ers who have strongly opposed allowing the veil in their classrooms arewomen). This was clearly illustrated when some Muslim associations stagedstreet demonstrations where girls wearing veils, sometimes mockingly colored like the Republican flag, protested and marched against the banwhile under the close custody of male Islamic militants who preventedaccess to or conversation with them. How to ignore (politically, as well asethically) this “other side” of the picture?

Joan Scott has published a book on the French controversy and its historical roots, Politics of theVeil, in which she describes the continuitywith which the “indigenous woman” (especially the Muslim woman) hasbeen represented and how this continuity was an integral part of the colo-nial “orientalist” imaginary and is now part of the dominant view of genderrelations among migrant populations in postcolonial France.4 Her thesis ishardly disputable. But in the same analysis she seems to endorse the oppo-sition’s argument that the traditional “modesty” of women is a cultural trait of the Muslim world, one that allows Muslim women to resist the bru-tal exploitation of the female body and its image in Western modernity,


as illustrated by commercials and advertisements. And she combines in a single critical concept of “abstract universalism” capitalist mass con-sumption, of which the sex industry and gender oppression form a part,with the typical neutralization (i.e., denial) of anthropological differences(be they sexual, cultural, or religious) in French republicanism. The result,in my view, is to disallow a more concrete investigation of the contradic-tions and to render the very definition of “abstract universalism” abstractand a-historical.

What I find more satisfactory than reverting to antithetic notions of resis-tance to cultural imperialism or liberation from culturally oppressive traditions is to describe a double-bind situation. In the episodes that con-stituted the conflict over the acceptance or rejection of hijab-wearing girlsin French schools (as in more recent conflicts about the wearing of burkasin French cities, although the social, legal, and political aspects are notexactly the same), these female subjects found themselves caught betweenthe coercive agencies of two rival phallocratic groups (which can, indeed,include women): one speaking the language of religious traditions and religious freedom; the other speaking the language of secular education and the emancipation of women. Yet both of them, in fact, target women’sbodies, making those bodies the stake of their will to power and the repro-duction of their domination, however unequal politically these forces remainand however heterogeneous the social realms in which they exercise their power.

This is where I expect objections to be raised. I know that such a charac-terization is disputable, and I am eager to have it contested and rectified.But before offering a reflection on the uses of the categories culture and religion, which are so insistent in these debates, I want to propose two pre-liminary conclusions.

The first provisional conclusion is that such seemingly local, evenparochial conflicts are always already cosmopolitical. (With this term,“cosmo-political,” I want to emphasize, successively, the two halves: suchconflicts are cosmo-political, and they are cosmo-political, in the fullestsense.) They involve the whole world, or crystallize elements arising fromworld history and world geography within a specific national microcosm,which by definition is open and unstable. The more you try to enclose sucha microcosm, the more you destabilize it. This is the case with the socialand institutional tensions one finds in the middle of what we might call global suburbs (in the manner in which Saskia Sassen speaks of “globalcities”), where migrations and diasporas have increasingly “normalized”the heterogeneity of cultures and religions, sometimes their clashes, andalways their huge inequalities of power and institutional legitimacy.5

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Generally speaking, the encounter of local and diasporic cultures is a post-colonial phenomenon, in a double sense. The encounter continues thecolony, but it also transposes or “translates” it. The encounter, therefore,transforms the colony, or sometimes reverses it. We ought now, more thanever, to acknowledge that what shapes the social environment in which welive, what makes it a “global world” in particular, is the conflictual legacyof the immediate past, the process of colonization and decolonization.There is clearly no global society (combining a global civil society and aglobal political system of states) that is not the result of a process of “glob-alization.” But the process of globalization, which has been occurring forseveral centuries, has not simply been “capitalist” in the abstract sense ofthe term—a mere process of commodification and accumulation. It hasbeen capitalist in the concrete political form of colonization. What iscosmo-political must therefore also be cosmo-political in that the “politi-cal” is inseparable from historical and social “conflict.” But the debate overthe hijab shows more—if we turn our attention to the necessary interven-tion of religious discourses, or discourses labeled “religious,” and the“counter-discourse” of laïcité and state secularism, which itself has a tendency to become sacralized; that is, a tendency to appropriate some of the most typical characteristics of “religious” discourse (not any religiousdiscourse, but, rather, monotheistic religious discourse; specificallyChristian—and, especially, Pauline—religious discourse).6

My tentative formula here, which I nonetheless want to insist on asstrongly as possible, would be: there is no such thing as a purely “religiousconflict.” In today’s world, a conflict that pits religious representations andallegiances against one another, or against their “secular” antithesis, isalways already entirely political. Perhaps that was always the case, but themodalities have changed, especially since the relativization of nationalboundaries and sovereignties and the increasing importance of migrationsmade “particularism”—that is, the assignment of religious discourses to theplace of the particular—impossible. Instead, the secular discourse of “pub-lic reason” came to occupy the place of the universal. What we have to dealwith are conflictual universalities, which may explain why a dichotomy of the private and the public realms based on the distinction of religiousmembership and legal citizenship proves increasingly difficult to project.A “public” discourse and institution that derives its legitimacy from anational (and nationalist) tradition is not more universal or universalisticthan a transnational religious discourse. At least its greater degree of uni-versality cannot be asserted a priori; it must be proved and experienced,especially in terms of its emancipatory power. Whenever the religious dif-ference becomes conflictual (and we must always investigate the practical


circumstances that crystallize the conflict), this conflict is virtually a cosmopolitical one. This also explains the paradoxical relationship betweenthe neighboring notions of “cosmo-politics” and “cosmo-politanism.” Thereality and visibility of cosmopolitics, as a highly conflictual form of politics,neither prepares for a cosmopolitan era nor simply destroys its possibility.Cosmopolitics opens the field to competition between alternative cosmo -politanisms, themselves conflictual, just as, as I will attempt to show, itforces us to consider alternative secularisms.

My second provisional conclusion refers to something called “multi-culturalism,” which was among the varieties of “cosmopolitanism” thatseemed likely to be implemented at the institutional level. Multiculturalismis (or was) both an important and an ambiguous idea. Indeed (and this iscrucial in my view), the term has never been understood in the same wayby all sides. The differences are huge and obvious between a multicultural-ism based on the idea of mutually external “cultures”—corresponding tomutually exclusive communities or allegiances, whose coexistence shouldbe organized in the form of an institutional pluralism whereby the culturaltradition of the community represents the ultimate framework of socializa-tion for the individual, her or his point of entry into the public sphere (saythe “multiculturalism” of Charles Taylor)—and a multiculturalism basedon the representation of a continuous process of interference or “hybridiza-tion” of cultures whereby the adaptive and “translating” capacities of indi-viduals or groups, in the broad sense, form the ultimate agency of historicaltransformation and subjectivization (say the “multiculturalism” of HomiBhabha and Stuart Hall). Among the modern, postcolonial nations, thereception of one or another of these conceptions of “multiculturalism” hasbeen extremely diverse, depending in particular on the historical imaginaryof each nation’s nationalism and exceptionalism. France was one of theleast receptive places, by whichever measure. But, generally speaking, theso-called return of the religious has produced the dissociation and crisis of the idea of a “multicultural” cosmopolitical agenda, or cosmopolitanismas multiculturalism.7 I am not thinking here—or not only—of nationalist or exclusivist xenophobic discourses, which—contrary to every historicallesson—declare the homogeneity of culture within certain sovereignboundaries to be the condition for the survival of any existing political com-munity. Rather, I am thinking of discourses that explain to us that theagenda of a “multicultural constitution” grossly underestimates the vio-lence of potential conflicts between religious allegiances, precisely becausethey are not conflicts among particularisms but are conflicts of rival uni-versalities. The lesson to be drawn, we are told, is that the multiculturalproject tries in vain to relocate on the “cultural” terrain that which should

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be treated primarily in terms of a civic differend among religious discourses(if not entirely in theological terms) and therefore treated not so much in the anthropological language of cultures as in the moral and political language of “tolerance” or “interfaith dialogue.” All the more because, onthe global level, no preestablished “last instance” or “supreme court” regu-lates this kind of differend. So the mediation should come from the partic-ipants themselves as they see and identify themselves—that is, as “religiouscommunities.”

Some contemporary anthropological discourses will reverse the pattern,I am aware, and invoke the “return of the religious” as an argument againstthe very use of the category “religion.” This argument has different versions.One, almost entirely negative or deconstructive, was proposed in a cautiousmanner by Jacques Derrida when he submitted that the term religion, withits Roman and Christian background, is strictly speaking untranslatable andtherefore imposes a Christian stamp on the very claims of recognition thatare raised by non-Christian faiths, such as Judaism and Islam, when theyask to become recognized as “equals” in the “religious” realm (whoseboundaries are in turn drawn by a “secular” agency that excepts itselffrom the confrontation).8 That did not prevent Derrida, all the same, frompicturing the violence of the conflict around the national appropriation ofthe city of Jerusalem and its sacred places as not only a colonial phenome-non but, above all, as an intensification of the rival representations con-cerning the sites and contents of revelation offered by the three greatMediterranean monotheisms.

Another formulation, which has quite different sources and intentions,was put forward by Talal Asad in his essays (including some harsh critiquesof French secularism) on the genealogies of religion and the secular. Asadargues that “religion” is a purely Christian category used to impose thedomination of the church over practices and creeds that, by themselves, arenot “religious.”9 He adds that the dominant notions of secularism haveinherited—should we say, tautologically, “secularized”?—this theologicalnotion. His argument ought to be taken very seriously if only because itstresses the fact that there is no process of recognition without an institu-tional pattern of representation, and there is no representation without acode of representation, which is either dominant or dominated. The “secu-lar”—or the antithesis of the secular and the religious (an essential compo-nent of secularism)—is one such code, a dominant code in certain societieswhere it is both institutionally organized and intellectually elaborated, inparticular through the discipline called “history of religions” (various partsof the world are now debating whether this discipline should be introducedin educational programs). This is also the question of what Jacques Rancière


calls le partage du sensible, or the distribution of the perceptible, whichnecessarily excludes as it includes, or “totalizes,” the world in a compre-hensive representation. The problem, as we know, comes from the fact thatthe “code” for the representation of the differences is not enunciated fromoutside, from some absolutely universal or objective theoretical place; it isenunciated from within the conflict itself. This problem should be related,of course, to more general democratic issues concerning representation. Inthe wake of Edward Said, we have discussed for some time the antithesis ofbeing represented in a theoretical discourse—in the case of “subalterns” orsimply “the people”—and representing oneself, therefore presenting one-self in a claim of emancipation that is not only juridical but also discursiveand figurative. This was at the heart of the controversy over “Orientalism,”a controversy clearly not finished and even now undergoing new develop-ments in Europe. For example, the highest authorities of the CatholicChurch and some prominent intellectuals have embarked on an effort todemonstrate the Christian “roots” of European identity and the uniquenessof Christianity’s relationship to “reason.”10

But if we take seriously the idea of alternative conceptions of cosmopoli-tanism—conceptions based on a deconstruction or internal critique of whathas been institutionalized as secularism in the national framework and asan element of the nation’s sovereignty—we will have to consider anotherproblem, which is the problem of the “code” and the regime of translationin which the collective historical subjects (re)present themselves to oneanother (and for one another)—usually through the mediation of certain discourses and certain “organic intellectuals.” The critique of the “religioussecular code” inherited from Christianity (and, before that, from pre-Christian Rome) suggested by Asad and others is useful here, but is it suffi-cient? Is it consistent? Is it not, I cannot help wondering, also aporetic? Foralmost inevitably, the critique ends with recourse to the alternative “anthro-pological” category of culture.11 But the category of “culture” (as well as thecategories of “society” and “politics”) is no less Eurocentric and “Western”than the categories of religion and secularism; it is the product of a dis-course arising from that great prototype of a power-knowledge apparatus,the Academy.

Are we then left in a complete circle, which can produce only skepti-cism? I see, albeit very hesitantly, an alternative possibility, one based noton a choice between the language of “culture” and the language of “reli-gion” or a reduction of one term to the other but on a critical use of the conceptual duality itself in order to identify certain differences, elusive butcrucial, that are at stake in the political conflicts with either “cultural” or“religious” content. For me this is also a way to reintroduce, or rehabilitate,

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an old-fashioned category: ideology. I attempt to reintroduce the “Marxist”category of “ideology” here as a formal and heuristic instrument, not toreduce everything to ideology and disqualify it but to complicate the“semantic demarcation” of “culture” and “religion” and also to displacethat demarcation. This is, in fact, a circular movement: I want to seewhether the category of “ideology” can benefit from use as a mediating con-cept articulating a “cultural” dimension (by which I refer to the pragmaticbut also the imaginary realm of society) and a “religious” dimension (whichI consider essentially symbolic or attached to the collective unconscious). Ialso want to see what clarification of debates involving “religion” and “culture” could arise from their being considered opposite “poles” of ideo-logical processes. Formally speaking, such a duality is not, I would suggest,only a logical construction but also a dynamic pattern: “cultural processes”of generalization, routinization, and hybridization alter and even destroyover the long run religious models of life, subjectivity, and community, just as “religious symbols” associated with rituals, beliefs, imperatives, revelations, myths, and dogmas crystallize cultural differences. Religioussymbolism limits the flexibility of cultures or in some cases ignites theirinternal tensions and transforms them into political oppositions. Culturalhabits and imaginaries travel only with people, whereas religious ritualsand symbolisms can be adopted outside their place of origin. You can con-vert to a belief but not to a culture, which you can only adapt or adapt tomore or less completely.

Reviving a nondogmatic version of the category of ideology would alsobe fruitful because such a category maintains a constitutive relationshipwith a representation of its own “outside.” You cannot speak of ideology if you believe that ideology is everything. In this sense “culture” and “religion,” or, better put, the “religious dimension” and “cultural aspect” ofideology do not exhaust the range of causes that account for their own com-bination. The “equation” would not be on the order of “culture + religion =ideology” but rather “culture + religion + X = ideology.”

What is this X? A Marxist would say that it is “economy”; a Durkheimiansociologist would say that it is “society” inasmuch as it includes processesand factors (such as the “division of labor”) irreducible to either religion orculture; a Foucauldian would say X is “power” or “power relations”; aWeberian would say that it is “domination”; and so on. This considerationof a supplement irreducible to either “culture” or “religion” might be worthremembering when we discuss political issues that tend to become reducedeither to cultural transformations or to consequences of the action of religious forces (or to a distorted synthesis of both, such as the “clash of civilizations”). Indeed, not only do culture and religion not automatically


converge, but their combined effects are always “overdetermined” by economic-social processes and power relations that are neither cultural norreligious. This is the “absent cause” that acts on “another scene” and with-out which culture or religion would perform nothing, or nothing specific.

If we remained with a simple, or “absolute,” self-sufficient articulationof the cultural and the religious, we would ultimately become torn betweenthe classical discourses of the unilateral reduction either of the “religious”to the “cultural” or the reverse. Both reductions correspond to grand narra-tives of our theoretical tradition—narratives from which we keep learningand which, I admit, encapsulate part of the problem. A strong version of areduction of the religious to the cultural can be found in the work of CliffordGeertz with his definition of “religion” as a cultural system that in a per-formative manner confers “an aura of factuality” upon conceptions of the“general order of existence” from which motivations derive in humanbeings.12 From this point of view, culture is clearly universal and religionparticular—not only because religion as a “system of symbols” is consid-ered one aspect of culture among others but, perhaps more decisively in thecurrent conjuncture, because it is at the level of culture and specific cul-tures that a comparative study of the differences among societies or humancommunities can be envisaged and carried on in a meaningful manner.Cultures, not religions or religious systems, “meet” and influence, attract,or repel one another through the intermediary of their individual and col-lective bearers. In this sense culture, for Geertz and his followers, is con-crete, whereas religion is abstract.

An example of the symmetric reduction—that of the cultural to the reli-gious—can be drawn from Max Weber’s program of a comparative study ofreligions.13 Weber not only insists on the fact that religious ethics areattached to the existence of economic differences and antithetic cultural“roles”; he strongly suggests that religious “singularities” are ultimatelyrooted in irreducible axioms, which represent so many incompatible waysof dealing with the symbolic relationship between the worldly and the oth-erworldly; for example, the issues of purity/impurity and redemption/evil(or “sin”). “Religion,” or the religious question, here becomes universalized,and cultures are historical effects of the adaptation of religious axioms tohistorical circumstances.

Following a quasi-Hegelian pattern of dialectical reasoning, I wouldargue that each of these antagonistic points of view is “true”—or, rather, istrue in its negative relationship to the other. From this I would like to derivea methodological consequence: we are not certain of the exact meaning ofthe categories “culture” and “religion”; yet, paradoxically, even if the termsof the opposition are not clear and possibly refer to practices and processes

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that are materially “the same,” we need an ever-more-formal, differentialpolarity of the “religious” and the “cultural.” Such a polarity should work as a critical instrument to problematize irreducible notions of “com-munity” and the incorporation of individuals/subjects into communities,to establish reciprocities, and to frame collective destinies (social or asocial)in situations that are always singular. A distinction between the “religious”and the “cultural” dimensions of ideology in this sense is, in my view, an instrument against the indiscriminate use of the category “community”that plagues debates about communitarianism and universalism. The “community” as such is probably neither religious nor cultural; it takes shapes against others, in a historical process that is essentially political, even cosmopolitical, through a combination of cultural and reli-gious determinations plus X, the “material” processes of economy andpower relations.

This leads me to a final hypothesis (perhaps the most important, in myeyes, but one that I can hardly do more than indicate here): cultural or reli-gious determinations undoubtedly have a common “object” or rule upon acommon “materiality,” which however is so elusive that they take it or con-struct it in opposite manners. What is this common “disjunctive” object?We could say simply that it is “the human.” I would attempt to avoid thetautology looming behind this indeterminate reference by saying that it isthe “anthropological difference” as such, a category I coined some years agoto indicate differences that are at the same time unavoidable (impossible todeny) and impossible to locate in a univocal or “final” manner—differenceswhose exact location and content remains, for that reason, problematic. The sexual difference (the masculine and the feminine as pure opposition,preceding the attribution of gender roles and functions in the family, whatever its social content, which is always arbitrary) is an obvious exam-ple of such a difference; it is primordial. Other “differences” include thenormal and the pathological, the human and the inhuman, the mental andthe organism.

We might be tempted to claim, because such “differences” require at thesame time fixation and displacement, normalization and perturbation, that“culture” is what normalizes or “routinizes” them, as Weber would say, and“religion” is what destabilizes and sublimates them in a revolutionary ormystical way.14 However, this is still a mechanistic division of labor andtherefore only an allegorical indication that the opposite tasks cannot be performed by the same “ideological” systems. Thus, while I try to keepsomething from the idea of an essential polarity of the “religious” and the“cultural,” using for this purpose the alternative attempts of anthropologistsand historians at reducing one to the other, my tendency is to push the


opposition toward a complete (ideal) antagonism, with cultural evolutions,transformations, “inventions of traditions” on one side and religiousprocesses or moments of “reform” and “revolution” on the other side. I dothis for political reasons, in particular, because I want to emphasize the roleof religious symbols—however decisive they are in building and sacraliz-ing cultural hegemonies, structures, and models of power—in “radicaliz-ing” or pushing to the extremes the anthropological differences and thecorresponding distributions of roles and practices whose normalization isthe essential function of “culture.” Pushing to the extremes is sacralizing,absolutizing, idealizing, sublimating, or, conversely, “in-defining,” or “de-constructing” through mythical representations or mystical notions oftranscendence. I want to suggest that it is crucial (and will continue to becrucial) for us in the future to observe the coming of religious revolutions(in the sense of revolutionary transformations of religious traditions them-selves) which cannot remain without political effects. “Liberation theology”is one example.15 “Islamic feminism” could be an equally important exam-ple if it concentrates on its core objective of challenging from the inside thecultural structures of domination that have since the original revelation orshortly thereafter been fused with the theological premises of Koranicmonotheism.16 Also crucial will be the observation of the emergence anddevelopment of new religions, which will be “religious” in a new sense ofthe term. They might emerge out of the new “culture” created by capitalistglobalization and the extremities that it reveals or reactivates: one thinks,particularly, of an ecological consciousness that may, and perhaps must,take the form of a renewed religion of nature—a pantheism or polytheism—linking “care for life” and community-feeling between “human and nonhuman animals,” but also exploring the enigmas of hybrid “life” ororganic bodies and artificial machines.17

The hypothesis of “new religions” leads me to my last hypothesis, thatof a new “secularism.” However, whereas the first hypothesis remains aconjecture, the second is in my eyes a political and philosophical impera-tive whose forms and means of realization call for urgent discussion andelaboration.

The first, and most significant, reason for this urgency is globalizationitself. Or rather it is the combination of globalization with an emergingawareness of the risks and interests associated with globalization’s impacton the society of “all human beings.” In this sense the question of secular-ism in the global age is not very different from the question of universalismand universality in the current conjuncture. Can we say that these planetaryrisks and interests are “common”? If so, which language will allow us to sayso? This is the great ideological question.

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I agree with those who have proposed that we use the term planetarityinstead of cosmopolitanism for the material constraint that, one way oranother, must be formulated in a political language reaching every inhabi-tant of the planet.18 The idea of a community of interests of human groupsand individuals (and perhaps, beyond them, living individuals) that shouldprevail over ruthless competition—in order to avoid mutual destruction—and create a “civilization” of the postmodern age, in which “communities”overlap everywhere, sharing and exploiting the same environment, is notabsurd. But it is an idea that must become “universalized” and pass from amoral, ideal horizon to a reconstruction of the political; in Gramscianterms, it has to become “common sense.” We suspect (and one need not calloneself a Marxist to suggest this) that the realization of this idea willbecome possible only through harsh conflict in which the immediate inter-ests of the dominant and the dominated will sharply diverge, potentiallyleading to extreme violence. The capacity to address these conflicts and, soto speak, “fight” them in a “civilized” manner does not depend on the emer-gence of a new religion, even if religious components of planetarism are notto be excluded, especially because of the “apocalyptic” dimensions of eco-logical threats.19 Rather, the capacity to address these conflicts depends ona new political articulation of socialism, internationalism, multicultural-ism, and secularism, which I call, after Bruce Robbins, the “secularizationof secularism”—a reflective and self-critical form of what had been called“secularism” and institutionalized in different ways under that name.20 In asecularism itself “secularized,” states and both national and internationallegal systems must play an important role, but they cannot remain the deci-sive agents. States and legal systems are culturally determined, bound toreproduce cultural hegemonies or simply to limit them and, even more pro-foundly, are built on the transformation—the “determinate negations,” asHegel would say—of theological discourses of sovereignty and authority.The idea of secularism either as a strict separation of the religious and thepolitical along the same lines as the division of the private and publicspheres (if this is at all possible) or as equal protection of religious affilia-tions and practices by the state and the law, which would therefore repre-sent a “neutral” arbitrator, becomes progressively reintegrated in a religiousframework and desecularized as it takes the form of a state monopoly oflegitimate interpretation of the law. This is pure “Hobbesian political the-ology,” the substitution of the “Mortal God” for the “Immortal One”—andwhether “mortal” and “immortal” are completely separated symbols, atleast in a Christian environment, is not certain.

If problems such as the regulation of identity conflicts, communitarianhatreds, or simple incommunicability—which threatens a necessary


“planetarism” of the age of globalization with internal collapse ab initio—can be resolved with the help and active collaboration of states, suprana-tional agencies, and new transnational forms of legal rules, but not as a legalinitiative, it still remains to be seen along which lines the processes of cul-tural communication and neutralization of religious antagonisms or secu-larization will work. As I have argued elsewhere, what seems to form thecondition of effective multiculturalism—the one that is right now every-where in danger because of a murderous combination of postcolonial racediscriminations, intense nationalism, and defensive reactions against theprofaning of communitarian traditions—is a relativization and a civiliza-tion of the figure of the “stranger” that would take him or her away from theassimilation with an enemy.21 Therefore, effective multiculturalism is alsoclosely associated with cross-cultural processes of hybridization and mul-tiple affiliations, which make life uneasy for “diasporic” individuals andgroups—because such processes are linked with the melancholy of exile—but which form the material condition for the development of translationprocesses among distant cultural universes. This is crucial. The neutraliza-tion of religious conflicts, however, does not work in this manner, because itis predicated not on social change, transition, and communication, howeverdifficult they can be, but on incompatibility and choice—what Weber calleda “War of the Gods.” (Not every religion has gods, and the “war” is not necessarily violent; it becomes such only when overdetermined by othermaterial causes—or when overdetermining them.) Among religious axiomsor creeds a “conflict of universalities” inevitably exists. Translationprocesses can occur among religious universes, but these translationsinvolve precisely the fact that such universes are not purely religious. The“religious” as such is a point of untranslatability.

I tend, therefore, to believe that the religious conflict that cannot besolved by legal or statist means—or institutionally displaced in the form ofa conflict between what is particularized as “religion” and what forms a “civil religion” but bears a different name (e.g., “secularism” or, better, laïcité)—and also cannot be reduced to mere cultural differences, must be treated as a differend.22 That is, it must be formulated as such in the firstplace—as an irreconcilable juxtaposition of choices about the human andthe inhuman, the intrinsic divisions of the human, and so on. Then it mustbe “mediated” by the introduction of an additional element or discourse,which cannot be counted as another choice of the same kind (i.e., a newreligion) but must appear “heretic” from the point of view of any and allreligions. Thus, in order for the various religious discourses to becomemutually compatible in the same public space or enter into a “free” conversation, the introduction or intervention of an additional a-religious

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element is needed. Without this element there will be no possibility ofmediating between the opposite religious axiomatics or having their inter-pretations agree on certain practical rules or moral and social principles.More profoundly, there would be no discursive space in which their differ-ences could be presented as such in a comparative manner and presentedto one another in a nonhegemonic manner. But this additional element,both bringing religions together and assessing their conflict, which I amtempted to call, after Fredric Jameson, the “vanishing mediator” of the conversation between antagonistic religious discourses, must have a para-doxical character; indeed, it must embody a series of contradictions.23

The additional element is always already there but perhaps unnamed, orcalled by the wrong names, and therefore to some extent unrecognizable or subject to permanent misrecognition. The element is not universalmorality or scientific knowledge or human rights or toleration or cos-mopolitanism or planetarism or naturalism, although it shares with themsome practical objectives. It is not “atheism” or “agnosticism” or “skepti-cism,” although it certainly involves the same negative dimension (but theseterms each relate the negation exclusively to a particular form of religiousattitude; for example, “atheism” relates to religions with a god but not toreligions without a god). It can be called secularism for historical reasonsbut only on the condition of a radical critique of existing institutions andconceptions of the secular, which are both culturally and politically deter-mined and remain exclusive.

This element, which I wish to call the “vanishing mediator” of religiousdifferends, can exist only if it comes from inside the religious discourses,revealing the contradictions within their axiomatics. But it must also“expropriate” them of their own singularity and disturb their certainty ofbeing uniquely “true” and “just,” while not preventing them from seekingtruth or justice along their own “path.” In this sense, the element is essen-tially heretic or forms the impossible “common heresy” of all the religiousdiscourses—but in a relation to be determined with each religion’s own specific historical “heretic movements.”

Finally, this element is public or performs an essentially “public” func-tion. However, although it is public and “publicizes” the religious issue, thevanishing mediator cannot become identified with any legal instance or anyinstitution that regulates conduct. More generally, it is not a normativeelement—it does not express an “imperative” in Kantian language, all theless so because the normative or imperative element of culture itself bearsthe irreducible trace of religious constructions of the human and theirinscription in the soul or the self or in the sacred rituals of prohibition andprescription. But the element is not essentially or purely “cognitive” either,


however important it is for any secularism to stress the importance ofknowledge and understanding natural laws. Rather, it is “performative” and in the first instance performs its own parrhesia, or truth enunciation,against all theologies and mythologies that exercise power. It is thereforefairly possible that this element does not really exist, except as a philo-sophical fiction.

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NotesThis paper was first delivered as the Anis Makdisi Memorial Lecture on November 12, 2009,at the American University of Beirut. It is given here in a slightly revised version, which willalso appear in Arabic. The author expresses his gratitude to the university, the Anis MakdisiProgram in Literature, and especially its current director, Maher Jarrar, for kindly authorizingits publication here.

1. This tendency can lead some of our contemporaries to challenge the validity of cos-mopolitanism and secularism, denouncing them for belonging to the hegemonic discourseused to justify a Eurocentric and European modernization of the world, specifically theimposition on the rest of the world of Europe’s anthropological and constitutional assump-tions during and after the formal colonial era.

2. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

3. Spivak’s famous description was coined to summarize the spirit of Western scholarsand colonial administrations who transformed the (allegedly traditional) rite of sati(self-immolation of Hindu widows) into a symbol of the barbarity of customs that the colonial process had a mission to eradicate. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique ofPostcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1999), 232.

4. Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2007).

5. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001).

6. The symmetry between the religious literalism that claims the veil as a Koranic obligationand the secular “fetishism” of the thing (e.g., French professors who “read” their student’sveils as a “declaration” rejecting their lessons in advance) is striking.

7. In place of “return of the religious,” Ashis Nandy uses the phrase “return of the sacred.”See Ashis Nandy, “The Return of the Sacred: The Language of Religion and the Fear ofDemocracy in a Post-Secular World” (Mahesh Chandra Regmi Lecture, Kathmandu, 2007),http://soscbaha.org/details/downloads/Return-of-the-Sacred.pdf.

8. Jacques Derrida, Surtout pas de journalistes! (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 2004), 36.9. Talal Asad, “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” in Political Theologies: Public

Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence Eugene Sullivan (NewYork: Fordham University Press, 2006), 494–526; and Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

10. This idea is enthusiastically endorsed by some critics of “Western domination” in thenon-European world (or, rather, by intellectuals who claim to speak in its name). See PhilippeBuettgen, Alain de Libera, Marwan Rashed, et al., Les Grecs, les Arabes et nous: Enquête surl’islamophobie savante (Paris: Fayard, 2009).

11. Asad, though well aware of the traps hidden in the dominant uses of “culture,” the“translation of cultures,” and so on, and though a protagonist of their critique, nonethelessconstructs a discourse that must name the stage on which historical transformations andconflicts take place as a realm of culturally diversified practices and representations.

12. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures


(New York: Basic Books, 1973), 90.13. Max Weber, “Considération intermédiaire: Théorie des degrés et des orientations du

refus religieux du monde” (1915), in Sociologie des religions, trans. Jean-Pierre Grossein(Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 410–60. The text was originally published in German as“Zwischenbetrachtung: Theorie der Stufen und Richtungen religiöser Weltablehnung.”

14. See Edward Said on the “revolutionary” character of religion as opposed to its socialand institutional use, in Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How WeSee the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 57. See also Maxime Rodinson,“Islam and the Modern Economic Revolution,” in Marxism and the Muslim World, trans.Jean Matthews (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), which inspired Said.

15. See Michael Löwy, The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (London:Verso, 1996).

16. See Margot Badran, “Islamic Feminism: What’s in a Name?” Al-Ahram WeeklyOnline, 17–23 January 2002, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/569/cu1.htm; and MargotBadran, “Exploring Islamic Feminism” (lecture given as part of the Middle East Program,Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 30 November 2000).

17. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York:Routledge, 1991).

18. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2003).

19. See Slavoj Žižek, “Unbehagen in der Natur,” in In Defense of Lost Causes (London:Verso, 2008), 420–62.

20. Bruce Robbins, “Said and Secularism,” in Edward Said and Jacques Derrida:Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid, ed. Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 140–57.

21. See Étienne Balibar, “Strangers as Enemies: Further Reflections on the Aporias ofTrans-national Citizenship” (paper presented at the Institute on Globalization and theHuman Condition, McMaster University, 2006), http://www.globalautonomy.ca/global1/article.jsp?index=RA_Balibar_Strangers.xml.

22. I use the term in the sense offered by Lyotard: encounter of heterogeneous phrases.Jean-François Lyotard, Le différend (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983); or, in English, TheDifferend: Phrases in Dispute, ed. Georges Van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1988).

23. Fredric Jameson, “The Vanishing Mediator, or Max Weber as Storyteller” (1973), inSyntax of History, vol. 2 of The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971–1986 (London: Routledge,1988), 3–34.

Balibar - Cosmopolitanism and Secularism

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