I publish here the French text of my speech (delivered in English) at the "Concluding Panel" symposium "Sexual Nationalism ", held in Amsterdam from 26 to 28 January 2001 (for the English version, see above : Borders, Politics and Temporality ).
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.
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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 ...
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