Translation and Conflict: The Violence of the Universal a conversation

with tienne Balibar

By Jean Birnbaum / 16 February 2017

Jean Birnbaum's interview with tienne Balibar about his new book Des Universals was
first published in Le Monde. Translated by David Broder.

You recently published a book on the question of the universal (Des Universals,
Paris: Galile, 2016). This notion, which seems so familiar, however often remains
rather unclear. If you had to give a definition to a class of 17 year olds, what would
you say?

I would say that it is a value that designates the possibility of being equal without
necessarily being the same, and thus of being citizens without having to be culturally
identical.

Indeed, in our era universalism is often associated with consensus, and first of all
with a bien pensant Left, presumed to be weak and nave Yet in your view
universalism is anything but an idealism.

First of all, my objective is not to uphold a "left-wing position," but to debate

universalism as a philosophical question. Of course, I am on the Left, but the Left itself is
is traversed by all the conflicts inherent to the question of the universal. The universal
does not bring people together, it divides them. Violence is a constant possibility. But I
first of all seek to describe internal conflicts.

What are the main such contradictions?

The first is that universalism is always inscribed in a civilisation, even if it does seek
timeless formulations for itself. It has a site, conditions of existence and a place of
enunciation. It draws a legacy from great intellectual inventions: for example, the
Abrahamic monotheisms, the revolutionary notion of the rights of man and the citizen,
which are the foundation of our democratic culture, multiculturalism as the generalisation
of a certain cosmopolitanism, etc. So I uphold the idea that universalisms are in
competition, which means that it does not make sense to speak of an absolute
universalism.

This is almost a law of history: in constituting itself, a universalism does not entirely
replace another one, because there are still conflicts liable to being reactivated. That is
also the reason why I find Hegel so interesting, so long as we read him upside down: he
constantly worked on the conflicts between universalism, in particular between
Christianity and the Enlightenment, hoping to "transcend" their contradictions.

But what we see today is that religious universalisms are immersed in an interminable
crisis, while the universalism founded on the rights of man has itself also entered into a
profound crisis. A universalism with an unfinished crisis thus faces a universalism whose
crisis is only just beginning. This, among other things, explains the violence of their
confrontation.

For most people, "universalism" is synonymous with bringing people together and
fraternisation. Yet you say that at the heart of universalism there is also exclusion.
What does that mean?

Of course, in theory there is a contradiction between the universalist ideal and exclusion.
The problem is one of understanding how these opposites become two sides of one same
coin. My thesis is that exclusion penetrates into the universal both by means of
community and by means of normality.

When we establish communities whose raison dtre is to promote universalism in

certain forms (empires, churches, nations, markets) we also formulate norms of belonging
to which individuals must conform. If you take Christianitys idea of community, there
are the elect and the damned.

And if you take a modern political community like the one based on the rights of man,
constructed around the idea of the nation, it is not only foreigners, properly speaking,
who are excluded, but so, too, those who are not "real nationals" or who are considered
ill-suited for active citizenship. Of course, all this is the object of a dispute, which does
shift the boundaries. Only recently have there been women electricians, and workers are
still not really electable But the question of racism brings an extra degree of conflict.

Elsewhere I have maintained that modern racism is like the colonial repressed [in the
psychoanalytical sense] being inscribed at the heart of citizenship. It is a dark face of the
republican nation, and one which incessantly returns, thanks to the conflicts over
globalisation. We have the tragic illustration of this in France even today, with a certain
usage of lacit [French state secularism]. With the nation increasingly uncertain as to
what its values and its objectives are, lacit less and less appears as a guarantee of
freedom and equality between citizens, and has instead set to work as an exclusionary
discourse.

Moreover, what all this has in common with religious universalism is that the argument
used to justify exclusion almost always consists of saying that the excluded are the ones
who are refusing universalism, or who are incapable of understanding it correctly: "no
freedom for the enemies of freedom," or those supposed to be its enemies. In that regard
there is a great constant in the West, but so too in the Orient: it is not universalism as such
that is violent and exclusive, but the combination of universalism and the community.
And since, fundamentally, we cannot avoid this latter, we have to find the means of
civilising it. In my view that is a fundamental political task.

You go quite far in this idea, for example when you state that universalism and
racism have "one same source"

Careful, now: I do not say that universalism as such is racist, or that racism is the form of
universalism within which we live. It is simply that I do not want people to believe that
these two things have nothing to do with each other. That is why we have to learn to think
philosophically about the impurity of the institutions within which we live.

The common source of these two opposites, namely universalism and racism, is the idea
of the human species that was fashioned by bourgeois modernity, of which Kant is a
representative par excellence. How could Kant be both the theorist of unconditional
respect for the human person, and the theorist of cultural inequality among races? That is
where the deepest contradiction the enigma, even lies. Yet this has to do, first of all,
with the way in which we define progress. It does not simply consist of setting a horizon
for humanity in general, but also of setting up certain characteristics of gender,
nationality or education as norms of humanity itself.

While it has its different variants, this is a discourse common to both the French and
American revolutionary movements of the eighteenth century and the social
emancipation movements of the nineteenth century. They provided the basis for our lives
today. But what is fundamental, in my view, is that such a universalism also allows for
resistance. In the eighteenth century Frances Olympe de Gouges and Britains Mary
Wollstonecraft founded political feminism by proclaiming that identifying the universal
with a masculine norm contradicted its postulate of equal freedom and access to rights for
all.

So we can challenge universalism in the name of its own principles, as a whole section of
anti-colonialist discourse did. Look at Toussaint Louverture and Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du
Bois and Aim Csaire. That is the other side of the tension that works away at every
universalism: it can justify discrimination, but it also makes possible revolt and
insurrection.

In your fine essay Saeculum. Culture, religion, idologie (Paris: Galile, 2012) you
note that the most violent clashes are not the ones opposing a universalism to a
particularism, but rather those that oppose rival universalisms. From this point of
view, jihadism is itself an extremely aggressive universalism. Try going along to
discuss democratic universalism and its contradictions in Raqqa!

It is true, the spaces of freedom have closed down In all these countries falling under
dictatorship, it is impossible to think and debate without risking ones life, or ones
freedom. The emails that I am receiving from Turkey at the moment often leave me
unable to get to sleep. But that is where I think we have to draw some distinctions:
Islamic State is a local variant of jihadism, which itself is something distinct from
Muslim fundamentalism in general. And even less should fundamentalism be confused
with Islam itself, for this latter is deeply divided between different traditionalisms and
varieties of modernism.

As in different times, we can see the ideological resources that a dictatorship can draw
from reference to the absolute; but it is Islam that is universalist, not the Islamic State.
And it is Islamic State that is barbaric, not Islam. But Islamic State is a real problem for
Islam. People are so on edge, so sensitive on this question, that it is very difficult to make
oneself understood. After the January 2015 attacks I wrote a column for Libration,
which I got a lot of criticism for. It included this phrase: "Our fate is in the hands of
Muslims."

To my mind, that did not mean saying "Muslims, you must urgently modernise, or else
you are screwed and us, too!" It meant that if the resistance did not come from Islam
itself, things would get worse, and in an irreversible way. It was not a means of pushing
the responsibility onto the other who, besides, is also a part of we ourselves. But it is
true that each person occupies a certain place and thus finds themselves constrained to
speak a certain language.

Personally, of course, I have a tendency to accord a certain privilege to the worldly

[sculier], and some objected to that. But how can I do otherwise? I am not going to
transform into a Muslim or a Catholic; I was a communist, as you know, and that is a
very educational religious experience That is why I also wrote that we have to invent a
sort of generalised heresy, making both religious and worldly discourse capable of
transgressing their own prohibitions.

You have written a lot about Europe (Europe, crise et fin: Paris, Le Bord de leau,
2016) and do not hesitate to speak of "We, Europeans." What is your reaction when
you hear Jean-Luc Mlenchon proclaim that France is a "universalist nation"?

If I could challenge him, I would tell him that I could indeed accept such a discourse, on
condition that it is the equivalent of noblesse oblige that is to say, a Rpublique oblige.
Republicanism demands a certain universalism, which can no longer rest on the
identification of the nation with the Republic. To stay republican, France would have to
transcend itself, formulating the idea of an extension of citizenship beyond its borders. So
this is a case of "French people, encore un effort"

As for Europe, the whole question is whether we can indeed resolve French peoples
problems in the absence of a continental ensemble. I am convinced that this is not the
case, even though Europe does do the worst things, as in Greece. Any programme
dependent on the abandonment of the European project is doomed to fall into
chauvinism, if not outright Trumpism.

When I say that, people like my friend Chantal Mouffe descend upon me and ask me
"But what planet are you living on? National identity is the only framework that allows
for the defence of the popular classes against an untamed capitalism!" I think that they
are wrong, but of course, we need to prove that. That is my point of honour: I do not want
to renounce either social critique or internationalism.

The original thing for a figure of the post-Marxist Left such as yourself is that
you equally energetically reject both hardening identitarianism and what you call
"hybridism without borders." For you, no universalism is possible without a
consciousness of identity; every universalism is somehow rooted

Of course; after all, we are human subjects, who cannot live without asking "who am I?"
No one can live without identity, or change it at random. But the imposition of a single
identity has never been possible without violence. In my opinion, the American theorist
Judith Butler is right on this point that is, if we do not confuse what she says with the
conventional variants of queer or postmodern discourse saying that we can incessantly
change identity, at random. And fundamentally this is an insurmountable contradiction.
We can only try and rearrange it.

The philosopher Vincent Descombes has aptly shown that the notion of identity is
paradoxical, because while we attribute identity to individuals, identity itself looks for
belonging. But I will add: one speaks of ones own identity, or what sets one in relation
with others, either to affirm what we have in common or, conversely, to distinguish
oneself, or even to withdraw from the common. The one does not go without the other.

The fresh difficulty, today, is that we now participate in multiple communities, whose
recognition criteria are not interchangeable. That is why I am exploring a path toward
pluralising the universal, without toning it down or upending it with a mere sum of
particularisms. This consists of constructing general strategies for translation between
languages, cultures and identities; a translation with a social significance and not only a
philological or literary one.

Translation and conflict are the two dialectical poles, if you will, of my work on the
violence of the universal. I believe that being nothing determinate is no life, and I
recognise that it is not easy to be several things at once. But it is not impossible. We need
as many of us as possible to be able to achieve this and not as an experience of the
dispossession of the self. The cosmopolitanism we need requires a certain form of
identitarian malaise, which I will venture to call an active, or acting one.

tienne Balibar and his nuances

Under a Paris rooftop, two utility rooms have been joined together. Outside, the
Montsouris park. Inside, a mass of books, a computer buried in papers, and family
pictures on the walls: a fine portrait of Jeanne, and the grandchildrens drawings ("Happy
birthday, tienne"). tienne Balibar welcomes me wedged into his armchair, attentive
and considerate but with his eyelids closed, his tomcat keeping watch. Across the two
hours the interview lasts for, he smiles oddly and does not open his eyes. His absent
expression seems to declare: my ideas are inside me, you will not get to them that way.

His friend Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) said "I dont know where to put myself," and the
philosopher shares with him one same way of conjugating an absolute hospitality with
infinite disorder. They also share one same persuasion that uncertainty is a power,
perhaps the only power for whoever claims to think. When our disoriented era is thirsty
for simple speech, tienne Balibar does not choose to make things easy: for his
radicalism is a nuanced one. His political reflection is reluctant to cut any question short;
it prefers to display the flaws and dig into the contradictions that work away at the
discourse of emancipation from within; to prowl around keywords and well-worn terms
like equality, rights, citizenship, borders, universal, violence, civility

Wrong-footed

Balibar is rather isolated among figures on the post-Marxist Left, where complexity
rarely triumphs. A student of Louis Althusser and a former member of the French
Communist Party (from which he was expelled in 1981) he has often taken public
stances, for instance in support of sans-papiers or the Palestinians. But looking more
closely, whatever the matter in question Balibar is rarely where you would expect him, to
be catching his comrades (or his supposed comrades) wrong-footed

This freedom is also fed by the academics intensive visits to the United States, where he
teaches. He has established himself as one of the few French intellectuals to be translated
and discussed in that country. Whether or not you agree with the positions he takes, in
this philosopher both difficult and generous, widely reading and citing others you
will find resources for thinking and acting, eyes wide open