Preface
France’s next election campaign,1 they tell us, will come down to “cultural identity.”
It will turn on such questions as: Shouldn’t we defend France’s “cultural identity” against the self-segregation of various communities?2 and Where do we draw the line between tolerance and assimilation, acceptance of differences and identitarian demands?
This is a debate that is occurring throughout Europe and, more generally, concerns the relationship between cultures within the schema of globalization.
But I think it starts with a conceptual error. It cannot be a matter of culture-isolating “differences” but of divides [écarts] that keep cultures apart but also face to face, in tension, and thereby promote a common [du commun] between them. This is a matter not of identity, as cultures by their nature shift and transform, but of fecundities, or what I will call resources.
Rather than defend any French cultural identity, as anything of the sort would be impossible to identify, I will defend French (European) cultural resources – “defend” meaning not so much protect as exploit. Resources arise in a language just as they do within a tradition, in a certain milieu and landscape. Once we understand this such resources become available to all and no longer belong [n’appartiennent pas]. Resources are not exclusive, in the manner of “values”; they are not to be “extolled” or “preached.” We deploy them or do not, activate them or let them fall into escheat. For this each of us bears responsibility.
A conceptual shift of this kind requires us to head upstream and redefine three rival terms – the universal, the uniform, the common – to draw them out of their equivocalness. In like manner, it will behoove us to head downstream and rethink the “dia-logue” of cultures: dia from divide [écart] and progress [cheminement],3 logos from the common of the intelligible. For it is the common of the intelligible that yields the human.
Should we confuse our concepts we will bog down in a false debate, head straight away for an impasse.
Notes
1 1. This book was written prior to the 2017 French presidential election – Ed.
2 2. A sociological phenomenon known in France as communautarisme. [All notes by the translator unless otherwise specified.]
3 3. I.e., progress in the sense of heading down a path.
I The universal, the uniform, the common
We should specify our terms on entering this debate, lest we flounder about. There are three rivals: the universal, the uniform, and the common. These are easily conflated, but we must also strip each of its attendant equivocality. Sitting atop our triangle is the universal, for which we must distinguish two meanings, or else fail to understand both the reasons for its trenchancy and its societal import. One meaning of the universal we will call weak, a matter of observation, limited to experience. Such-and-such, as we have been able observe until now, has always been as it seems. This is the general sense. It poses no problem and is in no way striking. But the universal has a strong meaning as well: that of strict or rigorous universality. We in Europe have made this sort of universality into a requirement of thought. We presume from the start, before seeking any confirmation from experience, or even dispensing with confirmation altogether, that such-and-such must be so. Not only has it always seemed so, but it cannot be otherwise. This sort of “universal” is not general; it is necessary. It is universal not in fact but ineluctably (a priori). It is not comparative but absolute, not so much extensive as imperative. It was on this strong, rigorous universality that the Greeks founded the possibility of science, and that seventeenth-century Europe, effecting a transference from mathematics to physics (Newton), conceived “universal laws of nature” – to spectacular and well-known effect.
Hence the question that has divided modernity: is the rigorous sort of universality – to which science owes its power, which imposes logical necessity on natural phenomena, and mathematics on physics – applicable to behavior as well? Is it equally pertinent in the domain of ethics? Is our behavior subject to the absolute necessity of moral, “categorical” (Kantian) imperatives, like the a priori necessity that has rewarded physics with its inarguable success? Or must we follow Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in the separate domain of morality, in the (secret) recess of our inner experience, and claim for ourselves the opposite of the universal: the individual or the singular? In the sphere of subjects, and of society more generally, the universal as a term remains equivocal. The question is therefore all the more pressing. When we speak of “universal history”1 (or of a “universal exposition”2) we mean universal in the sense of a totality or generality, not of necessity. But does the same apply when we speak of the universal rights of man? Is the necessity we accord to the rights of man not ascribed in principle? What legitimacy does this necessity have? Is it not improperly imposed?
A pressing question, as we have since undergone a significant experience – indeed, one of the decisive experiences of our time. As we have now discovered in our encounters with other cultures, the requirement of universality that has carried science along, and that classical morality has demanded, is anything but universal. It is in fact quite singular – that is, the opposite of universal – because, at least when taken to the European extreme of necessity, peculiar to the cultural history of Europe. To begin with, how should we translate “universal” outside of Europe? With this question the requirement of universality, which we had comfortably stowed within the credo of our certainties, among the most obvious of our precepts, once again becomes salient. It emerges before our eyes from its banality. It reappears as an inventive, audacious, even adventurous thing. And, we find, it takes on outside Europe a fascinating strangeness.
The notion of the uniform is itself equivocal. One might believe it the accomplishment and realization of the universal. But it is in fact the universal’s reverse – or, I would say, its perversion. For the uniform derives not from reason, like the universal, but from production: it is merely standard and stereotype. It proceeds not from necessity but from convenience. The uniform is, after all, cheaper to produce. Whereas the universal is “turned toward the One,” toward its ideal end, the uniform is but a repetition of the one, identically “formed” and no longer inventive. Today the perils of confusing the uniform with the universal are increasing, because with globalization we see the same things reproduced and distributed throughout the world. Because we see only them, because they have come to saturate the landscape, we are tempted to ascribe to these uniform things the legitimacy of the universal – a necessity of principle – when in fact they result from a mere extension of the market, and their reason for being is purely economic. Ways of life, objects and goods, discourse and opinion are becoming uniform all around the planet, through the explosion in technology and media, but this does not make them universal. Even if ubiquitous they would lack a need to be [devoir être].
Whereas the universal relates to logic, and the uniform to economics, the common is of political dimension. The common is what is shared. On its foundations the Greeks erected their concept of the Polis. Unlike the uniform, the common is not the similar. This is a crucial distinction today. Under globalization’s imposed regime of uniformity we are tempted to reduce the common to the similar: that is, to engage in assimilation. We must instead promote the common that is not the similar. Only this manner of common is productive. This is the common that I will be calling for, because only a common that is not the similar is effective. Or, as Braque said, “the common is true, the similar false. Trouillebert,” as he went on to illustrate, “resembles Corot, but they have nothing in common.” This is indeed the crux of the matter today, whatever the scale at which we consider the
