Also 
J e do not know if I'll have enough time to say what I want to say, so I'm going to essentially immediately: I am not recognized in terms of the debate as they have been proposed during the past two days, such as, more generally, they have been proposed in recent years
Before coming to Amsterdam, looking version final program of this conference, I was seized with anxiety: what will become queer theory, if it came to be regarded as its main enemy now the LGBT movement, accused of all evils that can be broken down into "isms" homo-nationalism, neo-liberalism homo-, homo-colonialism, homo- imperialism ... And I suppose, too, other "isms," many other bad isms ...
In recent years - as in the history of last century - all that is related to the LGBT mobilization has been relentlessly accused speeches by conservatives and homophobes - right and left - to destroy the social norms and symbolic defeat of national unity, to open the door to the mixing of classes and cosmopolitanism and sexual - with the legal recognition of couples same gender - the opportunity to help illegal immigrants to get papers, etc, etc. .. It's hard not to feel uncomfortable seeing the LGBT movement to become the new target of all the denunciations conceivable, but this time on behalf of a look that is a critical radical and a policy that wants anti-oppressive ... I believe deeply, I feel intensely - and forgive me what will appear as a violent, but there are probably a lot more violence in "isms" that I just mentioned - it is urgent to turn our backs on the reduction of theory to a small directory of slogans - slogans also very academic and grossly ideological and have little to do with politics - that each repeated after another to give the vertigo of radicalism, this mutation also normative theory in order (for there are more normative and even if I can use myself of "isms" of the normative - the queer-normativism, which often slips into Stalinism queer - in all these accusers in speech claiming a right to marriage, which is not a standard but an option for some to live as they wish, as they choose). It is time to put aside this kind of sloganisation, which could very quickly transform what was a critical thought in a thought police after having already turned into a policy aspirations and desires of each other ( what is "good" because "subversive," which is "bad" because "conformist"). is the condition to be able to start to think, to produce analysis to reflect on the policy, to participate in politics.
Let me be clear: I am among those who were horrified to see the struggles they have done over the last twenty years, and the battles that others have done before us - and we are in debt to them - manipulated by the state speeches by state measures intended to stigmatize immigrants, especially those whose beliefs, values, lifestyles or ways of dressing are linked to Islam. And even more appalled that these speeches were held and measures taken by people that we had not known particularly pro-feminist or pro-gay before, and which, as far as I could see, not not become members since ... it's much more to say to all those people against whom we fought and we fought, we insulted. Horrified too, that some sectors of the gay and lesbian movement has started rehearsing such discourse and define their identity and their struggle in terms of a defense of national identity threatened applying to other categories and the discourse on the internal enemy that threatens the nation, society and culture they had previously applied.
But: can I fight against homophobia, transphobia ... to fight for sexual freedom and the right to marriage for same-sex couples, in my country where, unlike Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, this law has not yet acquired, for the right as transgender to marry as they wish, for the right of AIDS patients that they can bequeath to their partner what they want to leave him, or simply the right to see him in the hospital if the family otherwise ... and so on. Yes, then I fight for it all ... while fighting against the policies of the government of my country - and European governments - in the field of immigration, against the policies and laws implemented against immigrants? The question really is: can I fight against both forms of domination? Obviously there is no direct link, necessary link between the battle for alternative forms of families can be recognized by the law - and there are probably more here than in subversion calls incantatory subversion, subvert the law because it subverts the norm that the law imposes as standard and normalcy while what is presented as "subversive" which subverts nothing but ratify the order as - and policies that stigmatize immigrants. One does not have the other as an automatic consequence. I can fight for the right marriage of same sex and for voting rights for immigrants, while also knowing that if the immigrants are entitled to vote, it is likely that those who are Muslims will vote, as those who practice of other religions, against candidates who support the idea of gay marriage. I happened to participate in demonstrations against the war in Iraq, and I know that at this moment, I found myself among people who would have made me brutally expelled from the parade if I gave my hand to my partner . Conversely, I happened to go to the Gay Pride, and he is very likely that I hung around people who vote right, and even the extreme right, people who are racist, or that hold discourse against immigrants. Should I choose one or the other of these actions? Or abstain in the two cases? Any movement, any statement that is a problem in the public space in the political field, inevitably leaves aside other problems, or even built against other problems. There is no pure politics! There is no politics without leftovers. We need to know.
Besides, I must say that, during the demonstration against the war in Iraq that I just mentioned, I left the train when some demonstrators began shouting "Death to Jews". There might be another "ism", antisemitism, to add to the previous list, but obviously this one would impose call into question the dividing lines too simple and unambiguous that some delight to install. I fear that there bad "isms" of both sides, the bad "isms" everywhere.
*
J e believe that the impasse we are and who has led the organization of this symposium is that we have a design too homogeneous in political time, say a Hegelian conception of temporality and synthetic, which leads us either to think in terms of convergence of struggles, alliance of minorities, in terms of exclusive choice of a struggle detriment other or against each other. We should perhaps think politics in terms of heterogeneity, that is to say in terms of more or less juxtaposed temporalities: every issue, every movement, every mobilization develops according to its own temporality, specific, and we should rather confront the problems facing us in terms of possible inclusion of oneself as a subject of policy in several temporalities, heterogeneous to each other, even if they occur in simultaneity, and which converge not necessarily or can not converge almost never (of course, I support the convergence when ahead, and I cherish them when they occur, but the intersections, and even intersectionality in one person, have never easy to set and never easy to implement: the tensions and contradictions are still strong, and can also be crippling, and the difference lies in wait forever).
That is to say that we must renounce both think in terms of convergence of struggles to think in terms of choice of exclusive control over others. I wonder if the idea of a Marxist union struggles, a tabulation of the struggles do not haunt the radical thinking of today, and in particular, so probably very paradoxical, queer theory? What we see, for example, lorsqu'est excluded from the scope of radical politics and even emancipatory politics anything that does not give itself the aim to confront capitalism or neo-liberalism and that is then reduced to being an accomplice of neo-liberalism and capitalism (with such categories of thought, women's struggle for the right to contraception and abortion is would be doomed!). Yet one of the lessons we should learn from Foucault deindex thought and practice policies and economic body of the idea of a reversal of the overall system. But deindex thought and practice of the idea that there would be a unique or privileged place of politics, and thus a single actor or an actor's preferred policy, transformed into imaginary figure, mythological, the history, other actors and other struggles are therefore considered secondary, or even always guilty or suspected not to bend their approaches to the precedence of this key actor and fight this page. And if that is committed to the fight against the stigmatization of immigrants, and the struggle for immigrant rights, it would be productive to consider-cons now "immigrants" as the Marxist theory considered yesterday the "workers" that is to say, as the social group to which any policy must necessarily refer, as the perspective from which we look at politics. Either of which could, of course, to suggest that the point of view of one who speaks (and often far above: since the overhang of the academic chair) of the working class or immigrants really gives us the perspective of workers or immigrants themselves. And since I'm talking about workers and immigrants, I want to emphasize how the questions posed here during these two days are similar to those on the tragic issue of voting in the far-right part of the working classes who voted once on the left, but who feel threatened by immigration. I tried to think about this in my recent book: Back in Reims. I insist on the fact that if one ignores the experiences, or the perception people have of their experiences, if we refuse to consider what they say about what they live, if the it ignores their sufferings and their fears, it's a safe bet that the reality denied, or feeling ignored or rejected in this manner will be returned to the social and political scene as a vote for the Far right: and just as we have seen many workers voted for the extreme right in claiming they were accused of racism, we will see, or have already seen, many gays who voted for left or right to vote for the extreme right too, and be inspired by what they are accused. The result will be to push gays to lands where their ideological criticism to be already. Shall I go up assert that the pseudo-thinking and radical nationalist or racist drift are secured to one another within the same ideological paradigm? Opponents are complicit? Additional enemies? In any case, our task is to defeat this ideological framework with entrenched positions, not strengthen it.
There are certainly a performativity of political discourse, of political action: there is no reality more true than another, and therefore no more true than another fight. These are the speeches, theory, mobilizations which show the categories and divisions of social and political world, and organize the reality of the social world. And so the power appears when resistance emerges. And in this sense - in this sense only, of course - I'd say that the resistance above power. The multiplication of outbreaks of multidrug resistance without doubt the powers. But it is not for us to reunite these powers by imagining that the resistance is or should be, and it is not for us to say what is the real struggle and what are the secondary struggles, struggles or bad. It belongs rather to place ourselves on the points of friction and confrontation, the confrontation lines. But it is highly likely that each resistance is a power in itself the potentiality or updating a new power which precludes further resistance. This implies that we must necessarily criticize the moves we support: for example a radical critique of homophobia that exists in populations that are supported when they are fighting for their rights, and criticize the racism and nationalism of those who were also supports Moreover, when they fight also for their rights and freedoms. Without having to choose between either of these battles, and thus without having to shut one or the other of these criticisms. As Edward Said rightly said to define the role of intellectuals vis-vis the struggles they are involved: "No support without criticism, no criticism without support." If are several fights where there are several supporters, and if there are several supporters, there are several criticisms.
Can we still think together the multiplicity of modes of domination and resistance: class domination, domination of race or status within a nation, domination of one sex over another or others , sexuality over another or others, etc.. ? Knowing we may be on the side of the dominant and the perpetuation of domination in one area while being dominated in the side of another, and vice versa. I am tempted not to unify the theory, not to unify policy, but to try to think what may be the point common to various forms of domination, to propose to articulate the thinking around the question of borders: that, for example, both cultural, social political and legal, between, within the same country, the nationals of the nation and non-nationals of that nation, and children of these, always regarded as not truly national, even when they have the birthright citizenship of the country where they live. Either that, also historical, political, legal between individuals, couples, families who are considered "legitimate" those considered "illegitimate" or "pathological" and who are discriminated against legal or social, to name, including categories of homophobic discourse psychiatrico psychoanalytic-on sexual difference as the foundation of the symbolic order and social order. Borders are numerous: around us, and also in us. Our task is, if not succeed in erasing, at least to diminish its sharpness, and violence. ... That is to say that we must work to undo legal boundaries, political or psychological as they are shaped by the state, by the thought of the state - the state as a nation, but also the state as defender of the reproduction of the order heteronormative family - and at the same time we must rely on the state in another of its historic function, that of guaranteeing rights and freedoms of individuals and groups. Fighting the state as founder of the border while promoting an idea of the state as guarantor of universality of rights, seems to be the dual challenge from which we can build our problems and actions.
This political border - I mean, the fight against borders - course that will lead to an increase in visible boundaries, perceived, experienced as limitations and therefore battles to fight against oppression and for empowerment ... Do not regret it! Fighting ...
I do not know if I Will Have Enough Time to Say What I Want to Say, so I Will Start Right Away With What is MOST important I find myself no place for In The structure and Terms of Motions That Have Been Laid Out for us over the Past Few Days, Indeed, over the Past Few Years.
Before coming to Amsterdam, as I read over the final version of the program for this conference, I began to worry : What is going to happen to queer theory if it has come to the point where it takes as one of its principal enemies, the LGBT movement, which it accuses of all sorts of wrongs, mostly ending in « -ism » : homonationalism, homo-neo-liberalism, homo-colonialism, homo-imperialism… There must, I imagine, be other –isms as well, endless –isms!
I hope I can be forgiven for the vehemence of what I wish to say, but for me there is a great more violence in all those “isms” I have just mentioned. For I deeply believe, I feel very keenly, that it is urgent for us to turn our back on this reduction of theory to a brief litany of slogans that are passed from person to person in order to produce the thrill of feeling radical, to turn our back on the transformation of theory into a set of normative injunctions. There is, after all, more normativity, and even normativism (if you can allow me an “ism” of my own : queer-normativism, always on the verge of becoming a queer-stalinism), in all these accusatory discourses than in the struggle for the right to marry – for marriage is not a norm but a possibility for certain people to live as they see fit, as they choose. It’s high time this kind of circulation of slogans – academic slogans that do not have much to do with politics - was left behind. It runs the risk of quickly transforming what had been critical thinking into a policing of thought, after having also transformed it into a policing of the desires and aspirations of this person or that (“subversive” is “good”; “conformist” is “bad”). We must give up this kind of policing if we want to start thinking again, to be able to produce analyses, to be able to reflect about politics, to participate in politics.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am certainly one of those who has been horrified to see the struggles we have undertaken these past twenty years, and the struggles of others who preceded us and to whom we are indebted, instrumentalized by discourses of the State, by state policies that are meant to stigmatize immigrants, especially those whose beliefs, values, ways of life, manners of dress are linked to Islam. This is all the more horrifying when you consider that these discourses are being promulgated, and these policies established, by people who were hardly known for being pro-feminist or pro-gay beforehand, and who – as far as I can see – haven’t evolved at all in this direction in recent times. That is to say, these policies and discourses are being put forth by people against whom we have been struggling, and who have worked against us and insulted us for quite some time.
And I am horrified to see that certain sectors of the lesbian and gay movement and of the feminist movements have taken up these discourses, have begun repeating them, defining their identity and their struggles in terms of a defense of a threatened national identity, thereby applying to other groups of people that discourse that had previously been applied to them : the discourse of the “internal enemy” that is a danger to the Nation, to society and to culture.
Yet, can I not struggle against homophobia, transphobia..., struggle for sexual freedom, for the right of couples of the same sex to marry in my country where this right has not yet been won, as for the right of transgender people to marry as they would wish, for the right of people with AIDS to be able to legal leave to their partner whatever they want that partner to inherit, or for the simple right to see your partner at the hospital even if the family is opposed to this, and so on…. AND… at the same time struggle against the immigration policies of my government, or of other European governments, against laws directed and enforced against various immigrants. Here is the question: can I struggle at the same time against different forms of domination. Suppose we take it as given that there is no direct or necessary link between the struggle for legal recognition of alternative family forms and the political forces that stigmatize immigrants. I can certainly struggle for the right of same-sex couples to marry, and for the right of immigrants to vote – even while realizing that if immigrants should have the right to vote it is quite probable that many of those who are Muslim, like practicing members of many other religions, will vote against candidates who support the idea of gay marriage. I remember being part of a protest against the war in Iraq and realizing that I was surrounded by people who would have thrown me out of their group had I tried to hold hands with my partner. On the other hand, when I have gone to Gay Pride marches I have doubtless found myself in the company of people who vote for the right, even the extreme right, people who are racist, anti-immigrant. Do I have to choose between these political actions? Should I have gone to neither of them ? Any movement, any position-taking that is meant to confront a problem in public, to intervene in the political field, will inevitably leave to the side other problems, or will construct itself in opposition to other problems. There is no pure politics! There is always a remainder of some kind. This we should know.
I might add that, in the course of this protest against the war in Iraq that I just mentioned, I left the group I was marching with when certain other protestors started chanting “Death to the Jews.” There is, perhaps, another “-ism” to add to the earlier list, antisemitism. Adding it would mean calling into question the oversimplified and overly univocal lines of division that are being set up in that list. There is no shortage of bad “isms”. They are all around us.
*
Well, if we have reached this impasse, an impasse which has led to the organization of a conference such as this one, I wonder whether it is not because our way of conceiving of the time of politics is too homogeneous. We could say it is a Hegelian and synthetic way of conceiving of temporality which leads us either to think in terms of the convergence of struggles, the alliance of different minorities, or to think in terms of an exclusive choice of one kind of struggle to the detriment of others, or even in opposition to others. Perhaps we should instead think of politics in terms of heterogeneity, that is in terms of temporalities that are juxtaposed to different degrees : each question, each movement, each mobilization develops according to its own specific temporality. So when it comes to the issue of facing up to the political problems that confront us, it’s more a question of one’s possible inscription, as a subject of politics, in a number of different temporalities, each one heterogeneous to the others even if they produce themselves in a certain simultaneity, none of them necessarily converging, or only converging extremely rarely. Of course, I support all convergences, all alliances when they can happen, I cherish them when they do happen… but intersections, and even intersectionality in one single person, are not easy tasks to deal with. That is, we should give up not only thinking in terms of the necessary convergence of different struggles, we should also give up thinking in terms of exclusive choices that work to the detriment of other choices. I can’t help wondering if the Marxist idea of the union of struggles, the totalization of different struggles, isn’t haunting the radical thought of today, notably, and in a way that is doubtless very paradoxical, queer theory. This effect of haunting can be seen, for example, when someone chooses to exclude from the field of radical politics any effort that doesn’t have as its goal to combat capitalism or neoliberalism, all such efforts being reduced to a form of complicity with neoliberalism and capitalism.
And yet one of the lessons Michel Foucault is supposed to have taught us is how to detach both political thought and political practice both from purely economic processes and from the idea of a global overturning of some system. The lesson was also about learning to detach thought and practice from the idea that there is a single unique domain of politics, a privileged political sphere, and, corollarily that there could be a specific political actor, a privileged agent of politics – somehow transformed into an imaginary, mythological figure of history, with other actors, agents, and struggles being reduced to secondary status, or even rendered guilty or suspect if they do not yield in their efforts to the primacy of that privileged actor or the privileged struggle.
However committed we may be to the struggle against the stigmatization of immigrants, and to the struggle for the rights of immigrants, it would be counter-productive today to think of “immigrants” the way in the past Marxist theory thought of “workers” – that is, as the social group to which any and all politics had necessarily to refer, as the point of view from which politics had to be regarded. There is, of course, the danger of mistaking the point of view of the (academic) person who speaks of the working class or speaks of immigrants for the point of view of those workers or immigrants themselves.
And since I am speaking of workers and immigrants, I’d like to recall to what an extent the questions that have been being posed here over the last two days are analogous to those posed about the difficult problem of the voting shift to the extreme right of a certain part of the popular classes who used to vote for the left, but who have felt themselves threatened by immigration. This is a problem I was trying to think through in my recent book, Retour à Reims , where I emphasized the fact that if lived experiences are not taken into account, or if the perception that individuals have of their lived experiences is not taken into account, if one does not take seriously what people say about the lives they are living, how they suffer and what they are afraid of, it is a relatively sure thing that that denied reality, those ignored or repressed feelings, will come back onto the social and political scene in the form of a vote for the extreme right. So, just as we saw numerous workers vote for the extreme right and also assert the very racism that they had been accused of harboring, so we may see many gay and lesbian people shifting to the right as well, taking on the qualities imputed to them. The result will thus be to push these people in the direction of the very ideological regions they are already accused of inhabiting. Might I even go so far as to claim that certain kinds of pseudo-radical thought and this nationalist and racist drift are somehow mutually reinforcing within a shared ideological paradigm ? Are, let’s say, complementary enemies? In any case, our work should be to undo this ideological framework with its fixed positions, not to consolidate it.
Is it nevertheless possible to think at once about all the multiple modes of domination and of resistance? Dominations based on class, or race, or status within a given nation, or the domination of one sex over the other or over the others, of one sexuality over another or others, and so on? Is this possible even while knowing that one can be on the side of the dominators and the perpetuation of domination in one area while at the same time being on the side of the dominated in another, and vice versa? I am tempted, not in order to offer a unified theory, or to unify politics, but in order to try to think about what might constitute the common point to different forms of domination, to propose that we build our reflection around the question of borders and boundaries : for example the boundary (and it is simultaneously a cultural, social, political, and legal boundary) that separates nationals from non-nationals within a single nation, and also from the children of those non-nationals – children who are considered as not really belonging to the country in which they live even when they are by law nationals of this country in which they are born. Or, for example, the boundary (also a historical, political, and legal one) which separates those individuals, couples, and families that are considered “legitimate” from those who are considered “illegitimate” or “pathological” and who suffer from legal and social forms of discrimination, due notably to the homophobic categories of religious, political, psychiatric or psychoanalytic discourses regarding the ways sexual difference is supposedly the foundation of the symbolic order and the social order. Such boundaries and borders are numerous, both around us, and also in us. Our work is, even if we cannot do away with them entirely, at least to attenuate their sharpness and their violence. That is, we should be working to undo legal, political, or psychic borders as they have been fashioned by the State, or by the thought of the State – both the State as Nation, and also the State as the defender of the reproduction of the heteronormative family order. And yet at the same time we should be making use of the State in another of its historical functions, that of guaranteeing freedoms and rights to individuals and to groups. To struggle against the State as it sets up borders while promoting the State as the guarantor of the universality of rights (those rights which are meant to be constantly redefined and reinvented through new claims and new struggles) : this is the double game through which we can and must construct our problematics and our actions.
This politics of borders – I mean the struggle against borders – cannot help but lead to a multiplication of those visible, perceptible, borders, one felt as limitations Therefor and have for Struggle Against Oppression and Emancipation That Must Be taken up. There is No point in regretting this. Let's get to work!
