Between East and West: From Singularity to Community

Not so long ago, the founding of a home was a matter of alliance between properties, between names, between common laws. The girl and the boy were given permission to leave the paternal house on condition of perpetuating the patrimony, the titles, the customs. Leaving one’s home, yes, but in order to remain among ourselves.

Marriage was supposed to preserve wealth from all deterioration, customs from all change. Nothing foreign was supposed to alter the intimacy constructed between those of the same group, passed on by the ancestors. The principle task of future spouses came down to bequeathing the heritage to their children. The goal of the family was in fact to guard possessions and to make them proliferate: personal belongings, real estate, cultural and human possessions. This is how it carried out its role toward a society of which it assured a fundamental permanence, authorizing in this way a more secondary historical evolution.

European unanimity on the fact that the family must remain sacrosanct continues to go in this direction. The same goes for the indignant appeal to the inviolability of private life invoked against the request of rights for persons passing into the very interior of a family’s unity: rights for women and children, for example.¹

Is this not wanting to blind oneself to what is already taking place? The family unit has been, for some time, subjected to transformations that have changed its conditions. When it survives, it is at the price of mutations that have modified its meaning. The composition of a natural entity, propped up by legal institutionalization, functions partially now as ideology. There are diverse reasons for this. The faithfulness to just one common law is possible these days only in certain sectors of society, and yet …Wealth and possessions? They seem to have somewhat deserted the family monopoly to become the privilege of industrialists, bankers, and other big businessmen, such as States. The authority of ancestors? Does it not find itself weakened by the rights of love and desire? Not to mention the transformation of ideals, the “fall of idols.”

In short, this fixed base of a traditional society, the family, only survives because of mutations that reshape its norms and values. An example of this might be a couple constituted by a woman and a man of various traditions, even races, surrounded by children, part natural, part adopted, living without economic or geographic stability, in a more or less nomadic and multicultural manner.

Institutions evolve less quickly than reality! And this gap is particularly evident today. It is true that the change has been rapid, and it can be understood that citizens and administrators find themselves somewhat disconcerted by this. Does not the sacrosanct place of safeguarding customs resemble a miniature international site under construction? Is not that which should assure the permanence of the same crossed these days by differences foreign to our customs and our knowledge? Has not the overturning of tradition invaded the very heart of what assured its durability?

The evolution is so abrupt and unforeseen that the most regressive orders seem to want to cover it with a veil or suffocate the evidence of its reality. And, instead of asking how to treat this fundamental socio-cultural innovation, we often worry about diverse forms of integration that sterilize its potentials rather than promoting its fertility.

Looking closely at this, do we not find ourselves faced with laboratories where, in miniature, the historical becoming of humanity is worked out? Cultural elements that children would have learned with difficulty all year long at school are offered to them at home, or with friends, as bits of daily life. If, from the youngest age, diversity is admitted and respected, the child will learn a second language, will familiarize himself or herself with more than one tradition, will be brought up with tolerance toward the stranger.

While public authorities will look into the difficult problem of integration, new families will have initiated the young generations into a cohabitation that is multiracial, multicultural, etc. Does not wanting to integrate mean, in effect, claiming to reduce diversity to a unique model, already obsolete in reality? If the family is the resisting nucleus of social construction, has it not already said “no” to this standardization imposed from above? Has it not already chosen difference as a springboard for survival?

Curiously, that which imposes itself upon us in this age, both from the top and from the bottom, still finds itself frustrated by administrative, legal, and political habits that refuse to be put into question. It is true that this compels a revolution in the way of thinking, the necessity of which few realize. Of which few are able? Except children? And those who desire?

But the evident contradictions of the current world require changing the principles that govern it. The growing entropy of our socio-cultural organizations necessitates the passage to another order. It is not possible, for example, to advocate abandoning national sovereignty for the needs of the construction of the European Union and to claim, elsewhere, to integrate immigrants into a nation. Such inconsistencies come to confront one another sooner or later; which does not contribute to the development, nor even to the maintenance, of a civil community.

How then to treat the problem of the blending that has swept through a Western tradition founded on the logic of identity to self, of the same, of the similar, of the equal?

Thus, a couple formed by a white woman and a black man can, from the fact of its being multiracial, become a site of civic education for the surpassing of instinct, be it innate or acquired, but it can also regress to the level of a human instinctuality by cutting itself off from the surrounding society, which is perceived as rejecting, incapable of recognizing it as such. Recognition cannot mean reducing the two to the same. If difference has nourished desire, why not respect it?

In fact, all attraction is founded upon a difference, an “unknown” of the desiring subject, beginning with what pushes the boy and the girl, the man and the woman toward each other. Would not the conviviality between citizens be better if it involved discussing our taste for what differs from the self? Why exclude from the composition of the unity of society this leavening agent of connection?

To be sure, society has need of a minimum of shared rules. But they are not impossible to discover.

Civil community is based on the family entity, this in its turn being founded upon the union of man and woman. The duality of the sexes cuts across all races, all cultures, all traditions. It is therefore possible to organize a society starting from this difference. It presents the double advantage of being globally shared and of being able to join together the most elemental aspect of the natural with the most spiritual aspect of the cultural.

I am not referring here to a bad use of sexual difference, which leaves woman the guardian of the natural pole in a unity of which man secures the cultural pole. I am thinking of a relation between the sexes in which woman and man each have a different subjectivity, based notably on both a relational identity of their own and a relation to language of their own.²

If the desire between woman and man comes to accord with a civil status, while respecting the difference(s) between them, the relation between the genders can serve as a relational paradigm for the refoundation of a family in the strict sense and, more generally, for a mixed society, in all senses of the term. Managing to respect the other of sexual difference, without reducing the two to the one, to the same, to the similar … represents a universal way for attaining the respect of other differences.

But the appeal to great sentiments is not enough for passing from the respect reserved for the same to respect toward the other. Something must change in the way of thinking, which escapes simple good will. The modifications to carry out are, moreover, multiple and complex. And the rhythm at which they can be fulfilled differs from one individual to another, from one socio-cultural sector to another.

It is a question therefore of defining an objective framework thanks to which such mutations can be realized without destructuring civil community. This historical evolution seems to be capable of taking place in a peaceful and fruitful manner starting from the formulation of additional legislation guaranteeing the rights of persons as such.

The current French Civil Code deals above all with guarantees relative to the property of citizens, the body itself forming part of the register of a “good” the protection of which the State ought to assure. While saying much about relations to property, the law has not been very explicit about its role as regards the defense of the identity and the dignity of citizens, of their access to the symbolic world, of the relations between them. All these aspects of citizenship, which do not come directly under the realm of “having” but have more of a relation to “being,” are still largely unknown to our lawmakers. While they are sometimes perceived when it is a matter of intervening in the territory of others, as testified by certain articles of the Charter of Human Rights, they seem to remain ignored when we are implicated. And we are ready to confuse the other with ourselves, notably inside our borders, in order to not question our legal codes, in order to not approach the irreducible core of the human being, which mixing requires us to consider outside of our cultural customs.

The generalized mixing in our age puts before us two possible strategies: either to go further in the reduction of the other to the same, or to recognize difference as a fundamental character of the living. The first way leads us to a neutralizing reduction that borders on the ghostly; it corresponds, unfortunately, to our customs, particularly our legal ones. The second way brings us to a consistency, including a carnal consistency, that calls for a new cultural elaboration. We are still lacking a culture of between-sexes, of between-races, of between-traditions, etc. Globalization has never been as concretely present to us, but the subjective and objective means to assume this historical reality are still to be worked out.

The gathering together of men and women who until now lived far away from one another, unknown to one another, leads to better realizing the complexity of human identity, the multiplicity of its subjective facets, its relational aspirations and difficulties, its need for objective contexts in order to develop individually and to live together in peace.

In this global coexistence, we are discovering a particularly evident fact: the conception of our traditional culture needs to be rethought. The West has founded the rational on the domination of the natural world. Belonging to a human nature is conceived here as a necessary evil that it is important to transform into abstract categories as soon as possible: linguistic rules, philosophical concepts, scientific criteria, legal norms, religious dogmas, etc. It is by distancing itself from a sensibility still linked to nature that human subjectivity is thought to be cultivated at the social level. Poets, mystics, women, children, “savages” would remain marginalized under the supervision of a dominating world unacquainted with the corporeal, with affect, with the living as such. From this perspective, all that evokes nature must be restricted, educated, distorted by neuter uses that reduce its singularities.

This conception of reality and of its possible elaboration in the world cannot withstand the coming of the global, including its coming among us. A nature, irreducible to our customs and to our restrictions, reappears everywhere, and challenges us to welcome it democratically.

How to do this without taking into consideration differences of age, of sex, differences of race, not to mention their diverse symbolic constructions, varying from one culture to another? There is no lack of work if we are to avoid, in this, all authoritarianism, all totalitarianism! All the more so since it implies the changing of mentalities. Where we have learned to control nature, it would be a matter of learning to respect it. Where the ideal has been presented to us as the absorption of the whole in an absolute, it would be a matter of recognizing the merit of insurmountable limits. Where respect for the same stretched, vertically, from the son to the Father-God and, horizontally, to the universal community of men, it would be important from now on to know how to intertwine love of the same and love of the other, faithfulness to self and becoming with the other, a safeguard of the identical and the similar for the meeting with the different.

It is a new agenda, for which we lack the training. Cultural fertility would no longer be tied to the improvement of a single subject in relation, whether as accomplice or rival, with its peers. It would result from listening and the effects of mixing, difference revealing itself there as a source, not only of natural fertility between man and woman, but also of spiritual and symbolic productions the novel character of which would be proportional to the situations with which we are confronted daily.

The most interesting situation is probably that of families where diverse types of blending [mixité] intersect. The resistance to belonging to a natural identity appears there in the horizontal axis that joins the sexes and in the vertical axis that links together generations. These two axes appear as the only universals, and are thus able to restore in their economy the dimension of race.

Paradoxically, these fundamental coordinates come up against obstacles that are their symbolic by-products. Common law, in effect, comes down for the most part to rules concerning customs in relations between the sexes and between generations. The variations between these rules may be explained by nonhomogeneous relations of subordination of one tradition to the other. Discovering an order not founded on subjection, for a democratic coexistence in mixing, would offer a way of approaching problems of cultural mixing.

If the woman and the man are considered as individuals of equivalent dignity and worth, some differences in customary and legal norms can find a common platform. For example, the differences between marriage codes most often express variable degrees of oppression of the woman by the man, whether it be a matter of the legal age of marriage, of access to property for each spouse, of respective parental status, or of polygamy, of the right to divorce the spouse, of sexual norms ranging from the obligation imposed upon the woman to follow her husband to the most atrocious bodily mutilations.

The right to cultural and legal identity for each of the two sexes can solve such divergences that indicate degrees of slavery or emancipation more than real diversities. Rethinking the irreducible components of masculine identity and of feminine identity in their aspects that are liable to a legal formulation is necessary as a preliminary step for acceding to a generalized mixing. The task is not impossible. It suffices to be attentive to the contents of the demands that are voiced from certain quarters in order to understand that they come down to rights to objectively decree and enforce laws. For women, the operation is particularly necessary because they are emerging from an age-old patriarchal tutelage that leaves them without legal identity, particularly in the family context.

But the human individual cannot be reduced to an economic entity, and the efforts of our societies toward a greater equality between the sexes at this level, apart from the fact that they are insufficient and sometimes more virtual than real, do not exhaust the legislative needs of women: the right to human dignity, including dignity in the sexual domain in the strict sense, the right to the free and responsible choice of maternity, the right to a valorizing language, religion, culture, etc.

These rights, relative to the civil protection of a specifically feminine “being,” are still lacking. The family unit, conceived as a whole in which the man, the woman, and the children give up their legal singularity in order to form a unity founded on an exclusively natural blending [mixité], is, to a great extent, the cause of this. But it is also, today, the reason for an evolution. Besides the refusal of a good number of women to secure the undifferentiated natural pole in the couple, the family, or society, cultural blending [mixité] reinforces the need for legal self-rule by each member of a family in which natural identity is sometimes complex and diversely taken over by cultural belonging.

In order for mixing not to become a cause of regression but a factor of progress, it is fitting to protect it against all instinct of possession, of submission, against all residue of animality in the human. The generalized diversity of our age must push for the creation of links between nature and culture that a simple sexual difference did not seem to require. Marriage between a white woman and a black man, between a Catholic woman and a Muslim man, will either become an extraordinary seed for growth for our civilizations, or it will lead to instinctual resurgences absent from our traditions, privileging customs in which the power of some over others emerges more virulently than in our own. Unless it brings about a still more imperious submission of individuals to economic transactions that neutralize human specificity?

From this point of view, mixed families represent a key place for the construction of our future societies. They will then either testify to a decline of human consciousness, to an economic fate that leaves us in a cultural ill-being and impotence, or they will participate in a more or less tranquil world revolution. The demands of crossed blending [mixité] disturb our mental habits, our common laws, our legislative criteria. They compel us to transformations of desire, of thinking, to civil forms of meeting and cohesion of which we have hardly an idea.

How thus to realize them? By refusing to subject the respect of the other to the assertion of the same, the present or future to the past. By accepting that the development of a civilization does not inevitably consist of the accumulation of goods, of products, of knowledge inside an unchanged horizon. Some ages demand the change of the horizon itself. This is true of our age. We have to let go of our models of identity founded upon equality or similarity if we are to put ourselves to the test of differences that require rights that are equivalent but not reducible to the same, to the equal, to the one. Political agendas, like educational ones, need new formations, perspectives, words, and logics in order not to take the ideals of the past for progressive generosity.