are nevertheless one another’s equals. The Future of Difference is our attempt to counteract this violence, which is as epistemic as it is lethal, for it is the language of disaster, which, as Maurice Blanchot put it many years ago in The Writing of the Disaster, ‘ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact’.28
‘When time stops, truth can be declared.’
– Joan Wallach Scott1
The night of New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne, it is supposed, simply ‘speaks for itself’. ‘Cologne’ – the incident – has become an epochal signifier. All of us claim to know exactly what transpired that night. Now, when we speak of ‘Cologne’, we are invoking an event generally understood to have a clear, well-defined shape. We all know, don’t we, that women were sexually harassed en masse on the streets of a German metropolis. Furthermore, the harassment was carried out by non-German men, that much seems certain: by migrants or foreigners. Some would even confirm it was carried out specifically by ‘Nafris’, the North Rhine-Westphalia Police Department’s internal designation and radio shorthand for ‘criminals of North African descent’.2
Yet, at the same time, ‘Cologne’ is the name for an infamously ill-understood occurrence: a cipher freighted with resonances, circulating persistently through time and space, generating fresh meanings. It is a node in which, to borrow a formula from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the event itself merges and coalesces together with our speech about the event, becoming a discourse: a ‘differential system of positions’ made up of a mix of linguistic and non-linguistic elements.3 Ultimately, what happened on the night in question remains uncertain. But this uncertainty is precisely why ‘Cologne’, as a blank surface, has lent itself so well to projections – projections such as those encouraged by Zeitmagazin’s editorship when, in June 2016, it simply printed the loaded question: ‘What REALLY happened?’.4 ‘Cologne’, then, is simultaneously an empty signifier and one brimming with meaning.5 It can act as a disciplining power, and it even transforms prevalent discourses retroactively.
Predictably, in this moment, we are hearing proclamations on all sides of the inevitable collapse of the (supposedly naive and misguided) Willkommenskultur in Germany. Didn’t Cologne prove plainly that these individuals ‘we’ had hitherto welcomed in were neither willing nor able to respect ‘our’ values? (Our values, by the way, means equality between men and women.) Cologne is supposed to have definitively laid bare the fact that Germany’s excessive tolerance vis-à-vis men from ‘the Arab world’ (whatever that is) poses a danger and a threat to ‘our’ liberal, egalitarian, Western consensus. And particularly to ‘our’ women.
In other words, ‘Cologne’ has come to stand for the assertion that certain migrants cannot be integrated – they do not want to integrate themselves – simply because, in the end, there are insuperable differences between the cultures in question. Furthermore, Cologne establishes (or so it would appear) the need for comprehensive CCTV surveillance. It can be deemed responsible for the resurgence of populist political parties and for the erosion of civil society across Germany. Finally, Cologne seems to have secured a far greater degree of cultural receptivity to feminist concerns, although this new regard for feminism is intimately entangled with the culturalization of social inequalities, that is to say, with new forms of racism.
Paradoxically, we are seeing the mobilization of feminism and women’s rights by nationalist, nativist, xenophobic and populist parties and platforms – as well as by right-wing governments such as Hungary’s, Denmark’s or Poland’s – in justification of Islamophobic and anti-migrant policies. ‘Cologne’, in this sense, epitomizes the ambiguous inter-imbrications that exist in our present moment between racism, sexism and feminism. It symbolizes the urgent necessity of grappling uncompromisingly with these three terms, teasing out their differences and, perhaps, inherent entanglements.
In this book, we seek to do just that. We ask: How did this notion of an ‘incompatibility’ – between Islam and feminism, feminists and migrants, Germanness and sexism – come into being? What role has Cologne played here? What is the nature of the cultural fight this cipher mediates – sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly? And how is it that Cologne became what Jacques Lacan calls a ‘point de capiton’, a quilting point of signification in which the normal ambiguity of linguistic reference is stopped? Because that is exactly what Cologne now is: a privileged signifier; a static fixture within a xenophobic security discourse; a matter on which everyone supposedly agrees, even if elsewhere – about other matters – there can still be discussion and uncertainty.
The initial impetus to dwell with these questions came from our perception that Cologne had much to do with the rapid and radical polarization of public speech in Germany. We wanted to find out if our hunch was right and get a handle on the phenomenon, if so. At the time of writing, even those preconceptions about the event ‘Cologne’ now seem somewhat problematic – that is, they have become problematic in our eyes. But the book that follows tries to treat this difficulty as a challenge and an opportunity. It seeks to advance the (feminist) enlightenment of the present, in a time of increasing discursive nebulousness. Committed to a politics of intersectionality, informed by sociological insights, we argue against the narrowing of the window of political debate in the hope of contributing to the revival of ‘debate culture’ worthy of the name. Our goal is, in the first instance, to determine what our attitude should be vis-àvis the aforementioned phenomenon and all the questions it raises. We do not ask after the ‘objective truth’ of the night in Cologne. Our text is neither a piece of reportage nor a properly academic study. Rather, it is an explicitly speculative reflection on what ‘Cologne’ stands for in the political domain of the Federal Republic of Germany. We certainly do not pretend to have exhausted the topic, nor to have avoided any glaring gaps.
One such gap, a troubling one, is the fact that we, too, have largely ignored the experience of those who were subjected to sexualized violence on the New Year’s Eve in question. This omission comes down to our being primarily concerned with the tenor of public conversation about ‘Cologne’ and the question of the social and epochal shifts reflected therein. Once again, ‘the women’ had to be deemed irrelevant. This, of course, reproduces the social treatment of sexualized violence generally – and that it does so is not something we wish to downplay.
How are the voices of those who have survived sexual abuse – domestic, public or military sexual violence – to be made audible? This is a hugely important question. And although we do not explicitly pursue it here, we believe our text has something to contribute to the articulation of conditions of possibility for this audibleness. We firmly believe these voices deserve more of a platform, more care, and more attention generally – far more than the structure of this book allows. What follows simply pursues a different question, namely that of the violent, fundamentalizing logic of differentiation: the logic we call ‘other and rule’.
By ‘fundamentalizing’, we mean those discourses that routinely close down meaning itself through generalization and authoritarian reductionism: speech which tries to immunize itself against ambiguity and self-reflection. We are designating – to take up Lacan’s terminology again – those ‘quilting points’ in language where something has been firmly anchored as though through multi-layered tissue. In the context of Cologne, this involved setting up (implicitly, at least), a priori, the essential valences of groups of people, and the alleged ‘reality’ of their relating. By pre-establishing such commonsense knowledge, the mechanism generates useful shortcuts for reading causality into events: the actions of any given player can easily be extrapolated from the type. Basically, discursive fundamentalization is all about shoring up fixed cultural identities and their intrinsic connection to specific values – for example, the assertion that freedom, democracy, equality and enlightenment are exclusively Western values, and
