valid. After all, the “formal freedom” of the bourgeois sets in motion processes of altogether “material” political demands and practices, from trade unions to feminism.
Rancière rightly emphasizes the radical ambiguity of the Marxist notion of the gap between formal democracy, with its discourse of the rights of man and political freedom, and the economic reality of exploitation and domination. This gap between the “appearance” of equality-freedom and the social reality of economic and cultural differences can be interpreted in the standard symptomatic way, namely that the form of universal rights, equality, freedom, and democracy is just a necessary, but illusory expression of its concrete social content, the universe of exploitation and class domination. Or it can be interpreted in the much more subversive sense of a tension in which the “appearance” of égaliberté is precisely not a “mere appearance,” but has a power of its own. This power allows it to set in motion the process of the re-articulation of actual socio-economic relations by way of their progressive “politicization”: why shouldn’t women also vote? Why shouldn’t conditions at the workplace also be of public political concern? And on we could go. If bourgeois freedom is merely formal and does not disturb the true relations of power, why, then, did the Stalinist regime not permit it? What was it so afraid of? In the opposition between form and content, the form possesses an autonomy of its own—one could almost say: a content of its own.
To return to Ahmed: how, then, does multiculturalism as fantasy function?
In such a fantasy, racism is “officially prohibited.” This is true. We are “supposed” to be for racial equality, tolerance and diversity, and we are not “allowed” to express hatred towards others, or to incite racist hatred. I would argue that this prohibition against racism is imaginary, and that it conceals everyday forms of racism, and involves a certain desire for racism. Take Big Brother and the Jade Goody story. You could argue that Big Brother’s exposure of racism functions as evidence that political correctness is hegemonic: you are not allowed to be racist towards others. But that would be a misreading. What was at stake was the desire to locate racism in the body of Jade Goody, who comes to stand for the ignorance of the white working classes, as a way of showing that “we” (Channel 4 and its well-meaning liberal viewers) are not racist like that. When anti-racism becomes an ego ideal you know you are in trouble.
The prohibition of racist speech should not then be taken literally: rather, it is a way of imagining “us” as beyond racism, as being good multicultural subjects who are not like that. By saying racism is over there—“Look, there it is! in the located body of the racist”—other forms of racism remain unnamed, what we could call civil racism. We might even say that the desire for racism is an articulation of a wider unnamed racism that accumulates force by not being named, or by operating under the sign of civility.
The best example one can imagine of this was the presidential election in France in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the second round: reacting to this racist and chauvinist threat, the entirety of “democratic France” closed ranks behind Jacques Chirac, who was re-elected with an overwhelming majority of 80 percent. No wonder everyone felt good after this display of French anti-racism, no wonder people “loved to hate” Le Pen; by way of clearly locating racism in him and his party, general “civil racism” was rendered invisible.
Similarly, in Slovenia recently, a big problem arose with a Roma family who were camping close to a small town. When a man was killed in the camp, the townspeople started to protest, demanding that the Roma be moved from the camp (which they had occupied illegally) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc. Predictably, Slovenian liberals condemned them as racists, locating racism in this isolated small town, though the liberals, living comfortably in the big cities, had no contact with the Roma other than meeting their representatives in front of the TV cameras. When the TV reporters interviewed the “racists” from the town, it became clear they were a group of people frightened by the constant fighting and shooting in the Roma camp, by the theft of animals from their farms, and by other forms of minor harassment. It is all too easy to say (as did the liberals) that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of centuries of exclusion and mistreatment, that the townspeople should be more receptive to the Roma, and so on and so forth. What nobody was prepared to do vis-à-vis the local “racists” was offer concrete solutions for the very real problems the Roma camp evidently posed for them.
One of the most irritating liberal-tolerant strategies is that of distinguishing between Islam as a great religion of spiritual peace and compassion and its fundamentalist-terrorist abuse—whenever Bush or Netanyahu or Sharon announced a new phase in the War on Terror, they never forgot to include this mantra. (One is almost tempted to counter it by claiming that, as with all religions, Islam is, in itself, a rather stupid and inconsistent construction, and that what makes it truly great are its possible political uses.) This is liberal-tolerant racism at its purest: this kind of “respect” for the Other is the very form of the appearance of its opposite, of patronizing disrespect. The very term “tolerance” is here indicative: one “tolerates” something one does not approve of, but cannot abolish, either because one is not strong enough to do so or because one is benevolent enough to allow the Other to retain its illusions—in this way, a secular liberal “tolerates” religion, a permissive parent “tolerates” his children’s excesses, and so on.
Where I disagree with Ahmed is in her supposition that the underlying injunction of liberal tolerance is monocultural—“Be like us, become British!” On the contrary, I claim that the injunction is one of cultural apartheid: others should not come too close to us, we should protect our “way of life.” The demand “Become like us!” is a superego demand, a demand which counts on the other’s inability to really become like us, so that we can then gleefully “deplore” their failure. (Recall how, in apartheid South Africa, the official regime’s ideology was multiculturalist: apartheid was needed so that all the diverse African tribes would not get drowned in white civilization.) The truly unbearable fact for a multiculturalist liberal is an Other who really does become like us, while retaining their own specific features.47
Furthermore, Ahmed passes too easily between forms of racism which should be distinguished. In a kind of spectral analysis, one can identify at least three different modes of contemporary racism. First, there is the old-fashioned unabashed rejection of the Other (despotic, barbarian, orthodox, Muslim, corrupt, oriental . . .) on behalf of authentic values (Western, civilized, democratic, Christian . . .). Then there is the “reflexive” politically correct racism: the multiculturalist perception of, for example, the Balkans as the terrain of ethnic horror and intolerance, of primitive irrational bellicose passions, as opposed to the post-national liberal-democratic process of solving conflicts through rational negotiation, compromise, and mutual respect. Here racism is, as it were, elevated to the second power: it is attributed to the Other, while we occupy the convenient position of a neutral benevolent observer, righteously dismayed at the horrors going on down there. Finally, there is reversed racism, which celebrates the exotic authenticity of the Balkan Other, as in the notion of the Serbs who, in contrast to the inhibited, anemic Western Europeans, still exhibit a prodigious lust for life.
Ahmed further claims that racists themselves present themselves as a “threatened minority” whose free speech must be protected:
[They] use the prohibition as evidence that racism is a minority position which has to be defended against the multicultural hegemony. Racism can then be articulated as a minority position, a refusal of orthodoxy. In this perverse logic, racism can then be embraced as a form of free speech. We have articulated a new discourse of freedom: as the freedom to be offensive, in which racism becomes an offense that restores our freedom: the story goes, we have worried too much about offending the other, we must get beyond this restriction, which sustains the fantasy that “that” was the worry in the first place. Note here that the other, especially the Muslim subject who is represented as easily offended, becomes the one who causes injury, insofar as it is the Muslim other’s “offendability” that is read
