This article was published during the winter of 1995–96, in the international journal Transeuropéennes, in an issue titled “Identities: Questions That Arise.”
In politics, everything plays out within what has been designated the situation, problem, or crisis. We should therefore begin by examining how the identity crisis has been described. The most common description puts two bodies, state and community, into confrontation according to the play of two oppositions: universal versus particular and modern versus archaic. The universalism of the modern state is challenged by the return of the community’s archaic law based on the transmission of specificities, group characteristics, blood, race, ancestral law, and, in the end, relation to a human or divine founder.
Starting with this minimal description, two discourses can be distinguished. On the one hand, universalist discourse asserts that a political community only exists on the basis of law and the nondifferentiation of its subjects. It commands us not to yield on the question of the universal and to attribute difficult times to the persistence of, or a return to, a law of communities. On the other hand, the discourse of the subject tells us that the current crisis results from the violence inflicted by the modern state on the human institution of subjectivity. Enlightened discourse on fundamentalism presents the crisis as an outcome of violence inflicted by the logic of the modern colonial and postcolonial state on the filiation or descent that identifies subjects. There is an order of filiation, and it is not a simple law of exclusive interests. In fact, it lays claim to a universality higher than that of the state. To be able to live together, it is first necessary to live—to inhabit and transmit life, to create descendants.
There is thus a clash, term for term, between the two opposing proposals. One insists that the condition for political community is that the state does not concern itself with subjects. The other responds that the trouble with the political community is that the state does not take sufficient care of its subjects. To this setup, I put forth a third argument, articulated as follows: the political is a certain way of being both at odds with the law of the state and the law of filiation equally. The identity crisis is neither a problem nor a political crisis, but rather the mark of a defection from the political. The identity crisis designates a situation in which nothing exists except a confrontation between the law of state universalism and the law of filiation. Politics exists when there is a third mode of the universal: a universal polemically particularized by specific actors, who are neither subjects of filiation nor parts of the state. Moving beyond the identity crisis is a way to rediscover the political as such.
So what is the political as such? It is the division of the arche. As we know, the word “arche” has two meanings in Greek dictionaries: “origin” and “commandment.” I would argue that arche as a concept contains both meanings; it suggests an identity based on principles of both origin and commandment. The archaic meaning of arche is “the birth that commands,” indicating a natural connection between authority and subjugation. This minimal definition is sufficient to explain how the political was born.
The political is what interrupted the naturalness of domination through a double separation: the separation of birth from itself and of commandment from itself. This double interruption can be summarized in a single word: democracy. Democracy, even before it is a political regime, is the regime of the political. Democracy is precisely the division of birth from itself and the division of commandment from itself. The very word “demos” simultaneously signifies the singling out of the birthplace and the name of a singular subject.
The demos of Athens was first of all a territorial entity, with “deme” referring to a territory of birth and inhabitation. The democratic institution, especially after Cleisthenes’s reforms, transformed this contingent place into one where the contingency of inhabitation robs birth of its power. The fact of place then opposes the naturalness of domination, originating in the place’s founding, in the figure of the local ancestor or god. Demos is place unfounded, the locus of contingent birth, but also the place reconstituted as against the order of birth. By putting three territorially separated demes in the same tribe, Cheisthenes brought about two revolutions in one. He broke the concrete territorial power of the big families and instituted the abstract place of the citizen detached from the order of birth. This is what is expressed in its own way at the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The prosperity of the Athenian city is conditional on no one seeking to discover the burial place of Oedipus, hero par excellence of descent and its woes.
Demos is thus the division of birth. But it is also, by the same token, the division of commandment. By this I mean not only the paradoxical identity of the capacity to command and to be commanded found at the heart of Aristotle’s thought, but also the institution of the community as unequal to itself, as different from both the whole population and the sum of its parts. Demos means two things: community in its entirety and simultaneously as a part, or rather a partition, of that entirety. Demos is the party of the poor, not so much the disadvantaged as those of no account whatsoever, those who don’t belong to the order of the arche, who do not share in the power of name. It is the name of those who have no name, the counting of those who are not counted. Demos is the counting of all who are not counted. Demos names a singular subject. It is a subjective inclusion of the pure interruption of all domination’s logics.
The political in general is contingent on this polemical institution of the community. It requires very specific subjects who are not real parts of the community or state, nor social groups, ethnic communities, diverse minorities (or majorities), but rather polemical bodies that reinscribe the gap between a political community and any community of the arche. There are two main kinds of arche community. One favors the principle of origin and functions according to a logic of differences. The other favors the principle of commandment and establishes a logic of the neutralization of difference. There is the arche of difference upheld, which legitimizes itself through the original presence of characteristics that justify domination. There is also the arche of difference erased, which imposes the principle of commandment, as incorporated in the universal law of the state, over differential titles to domination. Each of these communities presents itself as the negation of the other. In general, a political subject is a subject who retraces the difference of the political from each of the two modes of the community of arche. It is a subject who brings the two into confrontation in order to redivide them. For example, the proletarian subject, in classic terms, is a subject that simultaneously expresses inequality—that is, difference erased by the logic of state universalism—and equality—or indifference denied by the logic of industrial feudalism. This is not only, to use Marx’s reductionist schema, the opposition of the universal lie of the state to the specific reality of industrial feudalism, but a double division: the difference between the particular self and universal self. The proletarian subject was able to practice this double separation as long as he held himself separate from the naturalness of work and from the identity of a social group characterized by the law of its unity.
Let us express the general principle: a political subject is an agent of the division of the arche, insofar as he is an agent of disidentification. His name does not express his identity. It is a singular noun for the operation that redivides the arche through a new mode of counting the uncounted and including the excluded. A political subject participates in a mode of subjectivity that maintains a gap between two identities: the subject of a system of articulation (the “we” of political statements), and the name of a particularized universal. This subject could be called: people, citizen, patriot, proletarian, woman. It could be a more particularized subject, impossible to separate from its articulation (“damned of the earth,” “German Jews”). All of these subjects are animated by the division of the arche, by the relationship of the state universal to the order of birth (it bears remembering that “proletarian” is a name related to birth, proletarians originally being those who can only reproduce life, without transmitting power).
With this, we can return to our starting point. The identity crisis is the erasure of subjects of the political, of those who measure the order of the state against the order of birth, and who build—by bringing these two orders into confrontation—particular cases of universality. We are thus forced to think about the archaic moment in which we find ourselves, with all its generality. There is a tendency to identify the archaic with one end of the political spectrum, characterized by the return of ethnicity and xenophobia, fanaticism and fundamentalism. This may lead one to assume a partitioning of two worlds—one of rational consensus, and another of lingering or renewed archaisms, ethnic and religious war. However, it is important to grasp the complementary nature of these two worlds and modes of archaism. What, in fact, is consensus? It is not simply a reasonable agreement between parties, a dialogue of interests on the basis of the rule of law and so forth. Consensus is, in the first place, the fiction of a community without politics—that is, without the division of the arche. It is the identification of a political people with the sum of its population composed of precisely countable groups, subgroups, and individuals. Opposing any means of accounting for the uncounted, the community of consensus is identical to the sum of its parts, with each part a body of an actual group, with its interests, rights, and opinions. In the end, the consensual community is a summation of individuals, each one internalizing the law of the community. Identity is the exact overlapping of the law of the production of wealth with the law of the production of individualities. The individual—the subject of law identical to the subject who produces and consumes wealth—is a microcosm. The state community is the macrocosm. In sum, the law of consensus is also a law of identity. It is the law of the state that refuses to acknowledge any but presentable identities taken into account by the community. Ultimately, consensus is the state commandment assimilated into a force of individuation—into life as the immediate identity of the biological and the legal, and life as the right to one’s own pleasure.
With the help of several bioethicist committees, the state arche devoured the principle of birth. Except it is not the first to have done so. This beautiful identity of law and enjoyment already has a name. It is properly called capitalism. Wealth has always presented itself as the reconciliation of the two figures of the arche. Antiquity understood this well. The political is, in essence and not by accident, the opposition of rich and poor. However, these two parties do not identify as social groups with contending interests. They are, more fundamentally, two opposing ways of dealing with the division of the arche. On one hand, there is the polemical mode of democratic subjectification; on the other, there is the oligarchic mode, in which differences are absorbed into the rule of wealth, which, in its way, equalizes them.
The opposition of socialism and capitalism has obscured the more fundamental struggle defining the political, or its absence: the struggle between democracy and capitalism. We can see the impact of this cover-up in the current division of the world. What it expresses is not an opposition between countries of politics and those of ethnicity or religion, but the double figure of the law of identity. On one side is the world in which the two powers of the arche—state law and law of the community—clash. On the other, there is the world in which both are absorbed and equalized in the standardizing principle of wealth. I believe there is thus a double illusion. The first is the idea of the triumph of the enlightened state over its enemy. The second is the compromise of the state with the other principle, with religion, the Law of the Father or of the community. In the last of these, the enlightened state takes backwardness—that is, in the end, the order of birth and filiation in general—into account. Sometimes compromise surpasses itself by returning to the shared origin of the two orders. Then the right of the state and human rights are reinscribed in the prior order of law, debt, and the Other. These solutions seem to me to remain within the play of the two partners. If we are to withdraw from identitarianism, headway must be made in the political. The political means the confrontation by specific actors of the two powers of the arche and their double division. It means acts by in-between subjects. To drive back the One of identitarianism, it is not enough to assert the Two (or the multiple) of difference. For the political to address the afflictions of birth and filiation, it must be a three-way game.