is what makes the issue of universal compulsory education so controversial: liberals insist that children should be given the right to remain part of their particular community, but on condition that they are given a choice. But for, say, Amish children to really have a free choice of which way of life to choose, either their parents’ life or that of the “English,” they would have to be properly informed on all the options, educated in them, and the only way to do that would be to extract them from their embeddedness in the Amish community, in other words, to effectively render them “English.” This also clearly demonstrates the limitations of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women wearing a veil: it is deemed acceptable if it is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands or family. However, the moment a woman wears a veil as the result of her free individual choice, the meaning of her act changes completely: it is no longer a sign of her direct substantial belongingness to the Muslim community, but an expression of her idiosyncratic individuality, of her spiritual quest and her protest against the vulgarity of the commodification of sexuality, or else a political gesture of protest against the West. A choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality of the choice itself: it is one thing to wear a veil because of one’s immediate immersion in a tradition; it is quite another to refuse to wear a veil; and yet another to wear one not out of a sense of belonging, but as an ethico-political choice. This is why, in our secular societies based on “choice,” people who maintain a substantial religious belonging are in a subordinate position: even if they are allowed to practice their beliefs, these beliefs are “tolerated” as their idiosyncratic personal choice or opinion; the moment they present them publicly as what they really are for them, they are accused of “fundamentalism.” What this means is that the “subject of free choice” (in the Western “tolerant” multicultural sense) can only emerge as the result of an extremely violent process of being torn away from one’s particular lifeworld, of being cut off from one’s roots.
Western secular law not only promotes laws that are different from those of religious legal systems, it also relies on a different formal mode of how subjects relate to legal regulations. This is what is missed in the simple reduction of the gap that separates liberal universalism from particular substantial ethnic identities to a gap between two particularities (“liberal universalism is an illusion, a mask concealing its own particularity which it imposes onto others as universal”): the universalism of a Western liberal society does not reside in the fact that its values (human rights, etc.) are universal in the sense of holding for all cultures, but in a much more radical sense, for individuals relate to themselves as “universal,” they participate in the universal dimension directly, by-passing their particular social position. The problem with particular laws for particular ethnic or religious groups is that not all people experience themselves as belonging to a particular ethnic or religious community—so that aside from people belonging to such groups, there should be “universal” individuals who just belong to the realm of state law. Apart from apples, pears, and grapes, there should be a place for fruit as such.
The catch here is that of the freedom of choice given to you if you make the right choice: others should be tolerated only if they accept our society. As Ahmed explains:
this involves a reading of the other as abusing our multicultural love: as if to say, we gave our love to you, and you abused our love by living apart from us, so now you must become British. There is a threat implied here: become us, become like us (and support democracy and give up the burqa, so we can see your face and communicate with you like the ordinary people we are) or go away . . . Migrants enter the national consciousness as ungrateful. Ironically then racism becomes attributed to the failure of migrants to receive our love. The monocultural hegemony involves the fantasy that multiculturalism is the hegemony. The best description of today’s hegemony is “liberal monoculturalism” in which common values are read as under threat by the support for the other’s difference, as a form of support that supports the fantasy of the nation as being respectful at the same time as it allows the withdrawal of this so-called respect. The speech act that declares liberal multiculturalism as hegemonic is thus the hegemonic position.
If we formulate the problem in these terms, the alternative appears as follows: either “true” multiculturalism, or else drop the universal claim as such. Both solutions are wrong, for the simple reason that they are not different at all, but ultimately coincide: “true” multiculturalism would be the utopia of a neutral universal legal frame enabling each particular culture to assert its identity. The thing to do is to change the entire field, introducing a totally different Universal, that of an antagonistic struggle which, rather than taking place between particular communities, splits each community from within, so that the “trans-cultural” link between communities is one of a shared struggle.
1 We should here reject the underlying premise of Harry Frankfurt’s critical analysis of bullshit: ideology is precisely what remains when we make the gesture of “cutting the bullshit” (no wonder that, when asked in an interview to name a politician not prone to bullshitting, Frankfurt named John McCain).
2 Sometimes, critique of ideology is just a matter of displacing the accent. Fox News’s Glenn Beck, the infamous Groucho Marx of the populist Right, deserves his reputation for provoking laughter—but not where he intends to do so. The dramaturgy of his typical routine begins with a violently satiric presentation of his opponents and their arguments, accompanied by a grimacing worthy of Jim Carrey; this part, which is supposed to make us laugh, is then followed by a “serious” sentimental moral message. But we should simply postpone our laughter to this concluding moment: it is the stupidity of the final “serious” point which is laughable, not the acerbic satire whose vulgarity should merely embarrass any decent thinking person.
3 It would have been interesting to reread Marcel Proust against the background of this topic of unwritten customs: the problem of his In Search of Lost Time is “How is aristocracy possible in democratic times, once the external marks of hierarchy are abolished?”, and his reply is: through the complex network of unwritten informal habits (gestures, tastes) by means of which those who are “in” recognize “their own,” and identify those who just pretend to belong to the inner circle and are to be ostracized. I owe this reference to Proust to Mladen Dolar.
4 Pascal Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la pénitence, Paris: Grasset 2006, p. 53.
5 Poems of Paul Celan, New York: Persea Books 2002, p. 319.
6 See Igal Halfin, Stalinist Confessions, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2009.
7 Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, Berkeley: University of California Press 2003, pp. 22, 207.
8 Ibid., pp. 252–4.
9 “Sexual Energy Ecstasy,” quoted in ibid., p. 253.
10 I rely here on the reflections of Robert Pfaller.
11 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, New York: Penguin Books 2009, p. 62.
12 Jonathan Clements, The First Emperor of China, Chalford: Suton Publishing 2006, p. 16.
13 A truly radical revolutionary subject should drop this reference to Heaven: there is no Heaven, no higher cosmic Law which would justify our acts. So when Mao Zedong said “There is great disorder under heaven, and the situation is excellent,” he thereby made a point which can be precisely rendered in Lacanian terms: the inconsistency of the big Other opens up the space for the act.
14 Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2000, p. 161.
15 Ibid., p. 153.
16 Clements, The First Emperor of China, p. 34.
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