Secularism and cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics

1. Translated by Emiliano Battista. This paper was originally presented at the conference “Misère de la critique/Das Elend der Kritik,” at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, on February 5, 2016. The conference was organized as part of the research project ANR-DFG CActuS (The Actuality of Critique, Social Theory, and Critical Sociology in France and Germany), directed by Gérard Raulet (Université Paris-Sorbonne) and Axel Honneth (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt). For the present publication, I have introduced the necessary bibliographical references for the texts I cite or evoke, but I have not changed the character of the talk, or its oral presentation. I would like to extend my gratitude to the editors of Radical Philosophy for inviting me to publish in the anniversary issue (Radical Philosophy, no. 200, 2016).

2. Georges Politzer, Critique of the Foundations of Psychology: The Psychology of Psychoanalysis (1928), trans. Maurice Apprey (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994).

3. In a collection of essays from 1979 titled Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Koselleck devotes a fundamental essay to the modern concept of “revolution” (“Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution”), an idea that he sees as emblematic of what he calls “futures past.”

4. It was the Saint-Simonians who articulated this distinction, particularly in the fundamental work from 1829, Exposition de la doctrine saint-simonienne. Première année, by A. Bazard and O. Rodrigues, a critical edition of which, by Maurice Halbwachs and Marcel Rivière, appeared in Paris in 1924. Antonio Gramsci makes it a central category of his analyses of hegemony in the Prison Notebooks. But it is in effect common to the entire “sociological tradition.” See Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966).

5. Among other recent interventions by these authors, see Immanuel Wallerstein, “Structural Crisis, or Why Capitalists May No Longer Find Capitalism Rewarding,” in Immanuel Wallerstein et al., Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean Manuel Garrido, “Phraser la mutation: entretien avec Jean-Luc Nancy,” at https://blogs.mediapart.fr/juan-manuel-garrido-wainer/blog/131015/phraser-la-mutation-entretien-avec-jean-luc-nancy

6. See, for example, Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

7. I retain the terminology of the emergence of a “pure capitalism,” with globalization and the integral financialization of the economy. But I also think it may be preferable, or at least useful, to employ the expression “absolute capitalism” (as do, notably, Franco Berardi and Jacques Rancière), because it indicates more clearly the self-referential character of a system in which there is no longer any real exception to the “production of commodities by means of commodities” (Piero Sraffa), and also because it can be pitted against “historical capitalism,” the capitalism that not only operated the great transformation between the beginnings of primitive accumulation and the dismantling of the “social state,” colonization and decolonization, but also provided the framework for the classic configuration of class struggle and the conflict among nations.

8. Immanuel Wallerstein admirably designates this task in the title of his book, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, 2001).

9. For example, one might compare two devastating “death zones”: Syria and the Middle East more generally since the attacks of 9/11 and the American interventions; and West Africa (Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone), contaminated by the Ebola virus and essentially abandoned to its own devices by the World Health Organization.

10. See Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014).

11. See Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

12. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” (1996), in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 63.

13. See the special dossier on “Governance” in Parolechiave no. 56/2, 2016, Carocci editore, Roma.

14. On the history and fluctuations of the notion of the “theologico-political,” see the introduction to Jan Assmann’s Herrschaft und Heil. Politische Theologie in Altägypten, Israel und Europa (Munich: Carl Hansel Verlag, 2000).

15. On the crisis of the “party form” that undergirds and overflows the crisis of the parliamentary system, see Marco Revelli, Finale di partito (Turin: Eunaudi, 2013).

16. Jacques Rancière, “Comment sortir de la haine? Grand entretien avec Jacques Rancière,” Le Nouvel Observateur, February 7, 2016.

17. On the question of inconvertible violence, see my book Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York and Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2015).

18. See, for example, Jean Birnbaum, Un silence religioux. La gauche face au djihadisme (Paris: Seuil, 2016).

19. Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Marx: Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Joseph O’Malley, with Richard A. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 57–58.

20. From this perspective, there is a radical incompatibility between the Marxist tradition and the “sociological tradition” that found its fullest articulation in Durkheim, for whom religion is always, in the last analysis, the source of what Althusser calls “the society effect”—a function that in turn defines it. See Bruno Karsenti, La société en personnes. Etudes durkheimiennes (Paris: Economica, 2006).

21. In this, my position runs against an amalgam that was practiced by the school of reading and interpreting Marx from which I came, and that I helped erect under Althusser’s direction: the amalgam of “humanist” philosophical positions and the anthropological question in general. For more on this, see my essay “Anthropologie philosophique ou ontologie de la relation? Que faire de la Sixième Thèse sur Feuerbach?” [“Philosophical Anthropology or Relational Ontology? What to do with the Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach?”], in La philosophie de Marx, new and enlarged edition (Paris: La Decouverte, 2014).

22. This implication is something Ernst Bloch places particular emphasis on in his great commentary on the “Theses on Feuerbach” from 1953, later incorporated into volume 1 of The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), chap. 19, “Changing the World, or Marx’s Eleven Theses on Feuerbach.”

23. This formulation is to be found in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), a text that codified the principles of “historical materialism” for a century and a half. I have on occasion said that it states precisely that which, in Marx, has become untenable for us. Deep down, though, this had already been suggested, albeit in different ways, by Benjamin in his “Theses on the Concept of History,” and by Althusser’s posthumously published reflections on “aleatory materialism.” That Marx himself did not stick to the evolutionism that informs this formulation is a well-known fact to those readers of his work who stress its permanent refounding and fundamental incompleteness.

24. I think I may have been one of the first, if not the very first, to note that the famous formulation that concludes—or, rather, leaves unfinished—the first volume of Capital (“the expropriation of the expropriators” [Die Expropriateurs werden expropriirt]), beyond its obviously “French” revolutionary associations, contains a messianic reference as well, drawn from the Biblical formula, “they will oppress their oppressors” (Isa. 14:1–4 and 27:7–9). On the “messianic moment” in Marx in 1844, see my book Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). The expression “secular religion,” or “political religion,” refers, in particular, to the work of Eric Voegelin.

25. See my study, “Foucault’s Point of Heresy: ‘Quasi-Transcendentals’ and the Transdisciplinary Function of the Episteme,” in Theory, Culture & Society vol. 32, no. 5–6 (September–November 2015). I also apply this category at length in Citizen Subject.

26. Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).

27. This was suggested to me by the intensity of the controversies about the compatibility or incompatibility of Islam with the “values,” meaning the “norms,” of public and private behavior that are more or less sacralized in the secular West of Christian origin. See Étienne Balibar, Saeculum. Religion, culture, idéologie (Paris: Galilée, 2012) [Part one of this volume].

28. This point is not self-evident, or something we can take for granted. In the introduction to Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), Judith Butler takes me to task for postulating the untranslatability of certain discourses, and for identifying this limit with “the religious,” something that would make the latter, ipso facto, an obstacle to the common political action of those who profess it (or are labeled as such). I recognize that we have to explore this further. What I mean by “untranslatability,” in a Derridean spirit, is not an essential uncommunicability, but the historical impossibility generating the infinite effort directed at transforming or displacing the limit. It is true, however, that the heterogeneity of the two instances (culture and religion) in their intertwining (or permanent overdetermination) is the motivation for the position I am outlining.

29. I am transposing here, to the question of anthropological differences and their religious coding, what Kant says about the “character of the species” in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, where he suggests that one would have to place oneself in the perspective of an extraterrestrial to define the specific difference, the difference that defines the species. But, in practice, this aporia spills over into an endless conflict of interpretations. See Peter Szendy, Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials: Cosmopolitical Philosofictions, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

30. The idea of the “critique of political economy” as the “political economy of labor” that stands opposite and against the “political economy of capital” was revindicated by Marx himself, particularly when he wanted to explain why, after the “decomposition” of the classical school (crowned by Ricardo’s work), there could no longer be another bourgeois economic theory other than a “vulgar” or “apologetic” one. There is an absolute opposition on this point between the Operaismo tradition in Italy—which, since Mario Tronti’s Workers and Capital (1966), has continued to radicalize the identification of labor with the “substance” of value and capital—and the position defended by the German school of Wertkritik (see notably, Robert Kurz, Geld ohne Wert. Grundrisse zu einer Transformation der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie [Berlin: Horlemann Verlag, 2012]), or, in a different way, the position defended by Moishe Postone in Time, Labor, and Social Denomination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (1993). Postone argues that the reduction of capital to labor (a typically “bourgeois” category) is a compromise that the “exoteric Marx” was prepared to make with the labor movements of his time, and their preoccupation with wage-oriented demands. From the philosophical standpoint, the fundamental reference for me on this issue remains Jean-Marie Vincent, Critique du travail. Le Faire et l’agir (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987).

31. See Alys Eve Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). See also my article “Exploitation,” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, at http://www.politicalconcepts.org/balibar-exploitation/

32. See Robert Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Labourers: Transformation of the Social Question (1995) trans. and ed. Richard Boyd (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2003).

33. For more on the “real subsumption” of health under the operations of financial capital, see Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006). On the elaboration of the category of “human capital” by Gary Becker and its interpretation by Foucault, see the critical presentation by Wendy Brown in Undoing the Demos.

34. Over the past few years, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Moulier-Boutang, and others have devoted their energies to discussing the recession of manual labor for the profit of intellectual labor and the emergence of “cognitive capitalism.” I don’t deny that their analyses are interesting, but I do wonder whether—in the spirit of Marx’s “progressivism,” or even, “futurism”—they have not mistaken one aspect of the “division of labor” in the current economy for the very realization of the future of social development.

35. I refer the reader once again to Saskia Sassen’s Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, as well as to the work of more “orthodox” economists, like Pierre-Noël Giraud, L’homme inutile (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2015).

36. See, for example, Danièle Linhart, La Comédie humaine du travail. De la déshumanisation taylorienne à la sur-humanisation managériale (Paris: Èrès, 2015).

1. I borrow this play on words from Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, et al. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5: “Philosophy (and science with it) has somehow managed to intimidate itself with its proclaimed exclusions of a religion from which it never ceased, underhandedly, to draw nourishment, though without really questioning itself about this ‘secularization’ and…about this consequent ‘laicization’ or social generalization of secularity. All this can be said otherwise with another term, that of world. When the world becomes simultaneously worldwide [mondial] and resolutely worldly [mondain]…how and where is inscribed the necessary assertion that the sense of the world must be found outside of the world? [Wittgenstein].”

2. Anis Makdisi Memorial Lecture, delivered on November 12, 2009 at the American University of Beirut (Faculty of Arts and Sciences). I thank Professor Maher Jarrar, Dean Patrick McGreevy, Provost Ahmad Dallal, and Ms. Jean Said Makdisi for their invitation and hospitality. The text of my lecture was published by the university and subsequently reprinted as Etienne Balibar, “Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations,” Gray Room, vol. 1, no. 44 (Summer 2011), 6–25. An early French version of this lecture may be found in Raison publique, no. 14 (June 2011). I thank the editors of both reviews for graciously providing a forum for my work.

3. See Balibar, “Quelle universalité des Lumières?” in Le Bottin des Lumières, ed. Nadine Descendre (Ville de Nancy: Communauté urbaine du Grand Nancy, 2005), 306–11.

1. Sécularisme is the term that, after reflection, I have translated to the English “secularism,” although the French word has a partisan connotation that its English cognate does not. The term laïcité, left untranslated here, is best reserved for an essentially French historical variant of secularism, as will appear. Thus the distinction between secularism and laïcité, mandated by the problematic of a confrontation of the “West” with its other, is not quite coextensive with the standard sociological distinction between sécularisation and laïcité. The latter distinction is mandated, rather, by intra-European comparisons between regions dominated by the Protestant tradition (where processes of political “modernization” are said to run from civil society to the state) and regions dominated by the Catholic tradition (where such processes are said to run in the other direction). See Jean Baubérot, Laïcité 1905–2005: Entre passion et raison (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004), and Emile Poulat, Notre laïcité publique (Paris: Berg International, 2003), especially 300ff. See also Marc de Launay, “Sécularisation/Profanation,” in Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Seuil/Le Robert, 2004), 1118ff.

2. If it is not too much to point out, with a grain of salt, the existence of an etymological guiding thread, let us note that, in the Greco-Latin tradition handed down by the church, saeculum, treated as an equivalent for the Greek word eon, is the “world” or even “the time of the world,” whereas kosmos (translated into Latin as mundus, but also as universum) is identified with the “creation” that God entrusted to man. St. Paul opposes “the wisdom of this world” (sophia tou kosmou) to “the wisdom/knowledge of God” (sophialgnôsis theou) in 1 Cor. 1:6–24. German language, making use of the two senses of the adjective weltlich, preserves, better than French or English, the symmetry between Weltweisheit (popular or ordinary philosophy) and Weltbürgertum (world citizenship), which Kant discusses in The Critique of Pure Reason. The Marxian watchword of a “secularization-realization of philosophy” (Verweltlichung or Verwirklichung) thus appears as a way of bringing philosophy back to its profane origins, inseparable from its cosmopolitical function, and, simultaneously, as an internal critique of its capture by theological discourse. In a very interesting essay, Jan N. Bremmer sketches a history of the transfer of the words “century” (siècle), “secular,” and “secularization” from Latin to French, German, and English (Bremmer, “Secularization: Notes Toward a Genealogy,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries [New York: Fordham University Press, 2008], 432–37). Laïcité has an altogether different etymology: it comes from the Old Greek word laos, which designates the community of citizen-warriors. The Septuagint appropriated laos to translate the distinction between the “chosen people” (’am) and the “nations” (goyim); the church later used the word to distinguish the mass of ordinary believers from the “clergy” (kleros). Finally, laos was turned against the church by the post-revolutionary discourse of the French Republic. See Etienne Balibar, Simone Bonnafous, and Pierre Fiala, eds., “Laïc, laïque, laïcité,” in Mots: Les langages du politique, no. 27 (June 1991).

3. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

4. See Balibar, “The Antinomy of Citizenship,” in Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–32.

1. Still useful on this point is the investigation conducted by Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Le Foulard et la République (Paris: La Découverte, 1995).

2. See chapter 2, note 1.

3. Henri Pena-Ruiz, Qu’est-ce que la laïcité? (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 11–12.

4. See Jean Baubérot, Laïcité 1905–2005: Entre passion et raison (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 185. Baubérot mentions the term catho-laïcité, attributing it to Jean-Paul Willaime (1993). It was in fact used earlier in Edgar Morin, “Le trou noir de la laïcité,” in Le Débat, no. 58 (January 1990), 35–38. See also Pierre Fiala, ed., “Les termes de la laïcité: Différenciation morphologique et conflits sémantiques,” in Mots: Les langages du politique, no. 27 (June 1991).

5. “France is an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It ensures the equality before the law of all citizens, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It respects all beliefs.” (Constitution of the Fifth Republic, Article 2, which has become Article 1 with the dissolution of the “community” uniting France and its former overseas territories). The meaning-effect of the set of the republic’s four attributes (brought together for the first time in 1946)—its indivisible, secular, democratic, and social character, all attributes that, doubtless not accidentally, evoke the attributes of the church according to what is known as the Nicene Creed: unam, sanctam, catholicam, and apostolicam Ecclesiam—is at the center of discussions of the addenda that specify, limit or, in the opinion of some, contradict the intention indicated by the title of this article, “On Sovereignty.” “It respects all beliefs,” which echoes Article 1 of the Law of 1905 on the separation of church and state, is one such addendum. There is no need to dwell on its importance from the standpoint of a “liberal” conception of laïcité, or, again, its considerable moral and political ambiguity (since, strictly speaking, the subjective wording of this article does not make it possible to exclude either sects or racist, denialist ideologies, except to “keep the peace”). The same holds for the very controversial 2003 addendum that says that France, while remaining “indivisible,” “shall be organized on a decentralized basis.” As for the formula “without distinction of origin, race, or religion,” it, too, has been taken from the 1946 Constitution, whose preamble declares that “each human being, without distinction of race, religion, or creed, possesses sacred and inalienable rights.” At a conference held in the French senate, Professor Jean-Jacques Israel pointed out that, when this article was being drawn up, the formula that was ultimately settled on replaced another that spoke of “sex, religion, and beliefs,” although it is impossible to say how and why the substitution occurred (Israel, “La non-discrimination raciale dans les textes constitutionnels français: présence ou absence,” in Mots, no. 33 (December 1992): “Sans distinction de…race,” 343–50.

6. I have taken a stand on this question on several occasions. See Etienne Balibar, “Le symbole ou la vérité,” in Libération, November 3, 1989; “Dissonances within Laïcité: The New ‘Headscarf Affair,’” in Balibar, Equaliberty: Political Essays, trans. James Ingram [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014], 209–32); “Secularism has Become Another Religion,” interview, Tehelka, March 25, 2009. On the controversy surrounding the Law of March 15, 2004, see Françoise Lorcerie, ed., La Politisation du voile en France, en Europe et dans le Monde arabe (Paris: Harmattan, 2005). The fact that no open resistance to this political constraint materialized, contrary to what some had predicted, may be explained in the international conjuncture: the girls wearing the veil, or their friends and family, did not wish to be co-opted by the fundamentalists that vociferously supported their “cause” from outside and called for symbolic or even violent reprisals at a time when Islamophobic currents in French public opinion and French politics were trying to make these girls out to be representatives of the “Movement Against France” (l’Anti-France).

7. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak coined this phrase to capture the spirit in which the colonial administration and Western “Indianologists” reconstructed the rite (sati) in which Hindu widows immolated themselves on their deceased husbands’ graves; the Westerners’ intention was to turn the rite into a symbol of the barbarous native customs that colonization had made it its mission to root out. See Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 232ff.

8. Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

9. The same comparison was drawn, to different ends, by the Guadeloupean philosopher Jacky Dahomay, who later resigned from the Haut Conseil à l’Intégration at the same time Edouard Glissant did (December 2008).

10. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 171–72. I cite at length because no French publisher has been willing to issue a translation of Scott’s book, notwithstanding her reputation as an eminent scholar.

11. Ibid., 170–71. In many respects, Scott’s thesis reverses the one argued in Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987 [1975]). Mernissi contrasts the representations of an “active” feminine sexuality in Islam to the West’s representations of it as “passive,” linking the veiling of women to a territorialization of the masculine and the feminine, whose potential excesses must be checked by assigning them separate domains. On the circumstances in which the veil has been fetishized by both colonialism, which makes it a symbol of indigenous women’s oppression, and the anticolonialist movements for which it symbolizes resistance to the West, see Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 144–68; and Monique Gadant, “Femmes alibi,” in Les Temps modernes, no. 580 (January–February 1995): “Algérie: La Guerre des frères,” 221–32. Note that in Koranic Arabic, hijab designates both the veil and seclusion (first imposed on women by the Prophet). Here we should keep in mind the distinction between the different types of veils and their uses, often ignored by a Western public opinion that interprets them as equivalent signifiers, referring to a single theological signified. As has been shown by studies such as Nilüfer Göle, Musulmanes et modernes: Voile et civilisation en Turquie, trans. J. Riegel (Paris: La Découverte, 2003), that which, in certain contexts, betokens strict segregation and an extreme form of archaism corresponds, in others, to modernization and relative emancipation: “It is plainly a question of the new visibility of women in public life, even if it is hidden beneath the veil, and, as well, a question of their attempt to escape from the traditional life that awaits them if they accept their fate” (ibid., 148).

1. Etienne Balibar, “Sujets ou citoyens: Pour l’égalité,” in Les Frontières de la démocratie (Paris: La Découverte, 1992), 42–71.

2. Georges Canguilhem, “What is a Scientific Ideology?” [1969], in Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).

3. I borrow the idea of “competing universalities” from Judith Butler, who of course takes her inspiration from Hegel. See her contribution to Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000).

4. Etienne Tassin has very clearly brought out the importance of this distinction in Tassin, Un monde commun: Pour une cosmo-politique des conflits (Paris: Seuil, 2003). See also Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

5. Obviously, something altogether different is involved when the heads of the British, French, and German governments suddenly declare, in unison, that “multiculturalism has failed.” Practically speaking, this means that they have endorsed the widespread and growing representation of the immigrant as a “foreign body” that one must either assimilate by doing away with what makes for his singularity, or eliminate, should assimilation prove impossible. (Note added in 2011.)

6. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Modern Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004 [1994]); Stuart Hall, Identités et cultures (anthology), trans. P. Chanial and M. Preziosi (Paris: Amsterdam, 2008). For a comparative overview, see Francesco Fistetti, Théories du multiculturalisme: Un parcours entre philosophie et sciences sociales (Paris: La Découverte, 2009). For a philosophical discussion of the question, see Emanuela Fornari, Linee di confine: Filosofia e Postcolonialismo (Turino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2011). W. E. B. DuBois’s category “double consciousness” plays a central role in Franz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks, 2nd ed., trans. Richard Philcox [New York: Grove Press, 2008]).

7. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory, trans. Simon Lee (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), dates the “return of the religious” to the 1970s. Régis Debray, God, an Itinerary, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Verso, 2004) identifies it as the communitarian reaction or resistance on the part of an “esprit de corps” to the progress of a utilitarian, homogenizing globalization. The terminology of a “return of the sacred” is utilized by, notably, the Indian philosopher Ashis Nandy; see “The Return of the Sacred: The Language of Religion and the Fear of Democracy in a Post-Secular World,” in Regimes of Despair (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

8. As everyone knows, this is the perspective lurking behind the notion of the “clash of civilizations” given wide currency by Samuel Huntington. See Marc Crépon’s critique in La Guerre des civilisations: La culture de la peur, II (Paris: Galilée, 2010), and my own reconsideration, “Eclaircissements (VIII). Le ‘Choc des civilisations’ et Carl Schmitt: Une Coïncidence?” in Etienne Balibar, L’Europe, l’Amérique, la Guerre (Paris: La Découverte, 2003).

9. A famous poem written by Louis Aragon during the German Occupation (1943), la Rose et le Réséda (the rose and the mignonette), declared that “celui qui croyait au ciel” and “celui qui n’y croyait pas,” the believer and the atheist could fight the same patriotic resistance.

1. See Lila Abu-Lughod’s emblematic essay, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others,” American Anthropologist, vol. 104, no. 3 (September 2002), 783–90.

2. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Gil Anidjar, ed., Acts of Religion (London: Routledge, 2001), 72–73. On the non-equivalence between “religion” and dîn, see Mohammed Ali Amir-Moezzi, “Religion,” in Dictionnaire du Coran, ed. Mohammed Ali Amir-Moezzi (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2007), 741ff. On the non-equivalence between “religion” and dharma, see Lakshmi Kapani, “Spécificités de la religion hindoue,” in Le Fait religieux, ed. Jean Delumeau (Paris: Fayard, 1993), 374ff. On the Chinese state’s search for something equivalent to “religion” (and “superstition”), see Vincent Goossaert, “L’invention des ‘religions’ en Chine moderne,” in La Pensée en Chine aujourd’hui, ed. Anne Cheng (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 185ff.

3. Jacques Derrida, “Above All, No Journalists!” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 56–93.

4. Régis Debray, Les Communions humaines: Pour en finir avec “la religion” (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 59–60.

5. Ibid., 115–16. A series of exchanges took place between Derrida and Debray; Hent de Vries evokes it in the preface to his anthology Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 92–94. These exchanges bore, notably, on the distinction between “cult” and “culture,” and derived another between “religious teaching” and “teaching religion” from it.

6. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). Asad radically criticizes French-style laïcité in “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence Eugene Sullivan, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 494–526, an essay that ought to be translated into French. Asad, one of the leading lights of the American “new anthropology,” is the son of Mohammed Asad (Leopold Weiss), an Austrian-Polish Jew who converted to Islam in 1926 and went on to became one of the founders of Pakistan.

7. See Asad, Formations of the Secular, 191ff.

8. Besides the 1978 Orientalism, see Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage, 1997 [1981]).

9. I have in mind the now famous “Würzburg speech” delivered by Benoît XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) on September 12, 2006, “Faith, Reason, and the University: Memories and Reflections,” http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html. This idea is all the more absurd in that philosophical and scientific rationalism, invented by the Greeks, returned to the Christian West by way of medieval Arab thought. See Philippe Büttgen et al., Les Grecs, les Arabes et nous: Enquête sur l’Islamophobie savante (Paris: Fayard, 2009).

10. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 78. Let us be fair to Asad: in the framework of a problematic that might be described as “critical culturalism,” the accent in his work lies less on totality or identity than on the regimes of reference to tradition—as both “discursive regime” and “form of life” in Wittgenstein’s sense—and on the models of “self-governance” (Foucault) that such a problematic provides. That is why analysis of the conflict between the various types of “reform” by means of which tradition reflects on itself (whether to regenerate itself or modify itself) holds a central place in Asad.

11. It is hard to avoid a sense that the critiques aimed at the category of religion (and, consequently, at a “secularism” supposed to be its inverted image), when they are leveled by specialists in Judaism or Islam, reflect not only a distance taken from Eurocentrism, but also the pursuit of a quarrel internal to the monotheistic tradition and its successive revelations. This is manifest in Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), which takes its inspiration from both Asad and Derrida. The very term “monotheism” is part of the problem (see Etienne Balibar: “Note sur l’origine et les usages du terme monothéisme,” Critique, no. 704–705 (January-February 2006), chapter 10 of this volume; Thomas Römer, “Les monothéismes en question,” in Enquête sur le Dieu unique (Paris: Bayard/Le Monde de la Bible, 2010), 11–15. On the constitution in Europe, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, of a historical and philological discipline correlative with the universalization of the category “religion,” see Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

1. On the construction of the concept of ideology and the alternatives it contains within it, see Nestor Capdevila, Le Concept d’idéologie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2004). Capdevila treats the concept of ideology as “essentially controversial” and, consequently, open-ended, even beyond the various uses to which Marxism puts it. I am reversing the tendency to describe processes of “ideologization” as effects of a degradation of the religious and attempting to lay the groundwork for a project comparable to the one that authors of Marxist inspiration have, following Carl Mannheim, carried out with the dichotomy ideology/utopia. See Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, A Study in Elective Affinity, trans. Hope Heaney (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).

2. Not only does a description of this sort not require us to restrict “the religious phenomenon” to the field of belief; it may also allow us to account adequately for the bodily inscription of religious practice (observable in asceticism as well as in rites or taboos), which institutionalizes the short circuit between law and the gesture. See Mohammed Hocine Benkheira, Islam et interdits alimentaires: Juguler l’animalité (Paris: Presses universitaires françaises, 2000). Benkheira centers his analysis of “Islam as a religious system” on an Islamic politics of the body, the essential aspect of which, legally codified in the fikh (“Muslims live in the world as jurists”), is not belief, but individual and collective ritual, a translation into practice of the distinction between the licit and the illicit. Compare this with Jean Robelin’s reflections in Robelin, Maïmonide et le langage religieux (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991), especially 153ff.: “La religion, institution de la culture.”

3. Judg. 12:5–6. See Jacques Derrida, Shibboleth, trans. Joshua Wilner and Thomas Dutoit, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005) [Perspectives in Continental Philosophy], 1–64.

4. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–125. See Talal Asad’s commentary in Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1993), 27–54. See also Bruno Karsenti: “In the long term, then, indications are that a kind of inversion has come about. It seems that there has been a shift from a universal religion exercising its domination and penetrating every culture in the imperial context of the “first modernity” to a universal culture in which religion concentrates, and expresses better than any other type of phenomenon…the irreducible particularity subsisting in the life of concrete societies. Religion, the hard core of whatever is specific to a culture, would appear to belong, for reasons of principle, to the realm of the non-universalizable. What universality do we mean, however, when we invoke culture in order to include religion in it? After all, culture, too, can be reduced to a localized conceptual creation, the invention of a type of society at a determinate moment of its history. In a word, it too…can be considered relative. Is this to say that the claim to universality, while changing motives, has not really changed bearers—that the religion of the imperial West has merely yielded to a new type of ethnocentrism, centered on forms of progress of the human spirit as unified by the concept of culture, itself an appanage of the West’s, but a West that is now ‘enlightened’? The part of illusion this vision contains is well known.” (Karsenti, “Structuralism and Religion,” in Faire des sciences sociales, ed. Isabelle Thireau et al. [Paris: EHESS, 2012]). On the connection between “anthropological” and “humanistic” concepts of culture, see Terence Turner, “Human Rights, Human Difference: Anthropology’s Contribution to an Emancipatory Cultural Politics,” Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 53, no. 3 (1997): 273–91. (I thank Olivier Remaud for calling this important text to my attention.) See also the unjustly neglected analyses in Edmond Ortigues, Religions du livre, religions de la coutume (Paris: Sycomore, 1981). For Karsenti, who is endeavoring to rehabilitate these analyses, the distinction between the two types of “religion” has to be interpreted as the index of a gradual differentiation within the underlying phenomenon of “symbolic transmission.”

5. Max Weber, “Intermediate Reflections: Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions,” trans. and ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, in From Max Weber, ed. Gerth and Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946 [1915]), 323–59. I here use both the standard English translation of the Weberian category of Veralltäglichung, “routinization,” as well as “reduction to the level of daily life.” The former is closer to the literal meaning of the German word, while the latter better brings out the change in normative modality associated with Weber’s comparison of the three types of “legitimation of domination.” See my lecture to Pierre Macherey’s study group: https://f-origin.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/165/files/2017/09/03-11-2004_Balibar.pdf as well as Frédéric Keck’s comments: https://f-origin.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/165/files/2017/09/03-11-2004_kecknotebalibar.pdf.

6. Louis Althusser, “Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?” trans. Grahame Lock, in Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left, 1976), 187.

1. See Etienne Balibar, “The Ill-Being of the Subject,” in Citizen Subject, Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 173–302. I would have been unable to undertake this reversal of perspectives without Jacques Derrida’s critique of the theme of “ontological difference” in Heidegger: Derrida, “Geschlecht I: Ontological Difference, Sexual Difference,” in Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 2, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenburg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7–26. Other texts were also of decisive importance here, especially Claude Levi-Strauss, “Cosmopolitanism and Schizophrenia,” in Levi-Strauss, The View From Afar, trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 177–85, and Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004). For a different argument (inspired by Bataille, Lacan, and Deligny) that is nevertheless comparable as far as its critical effects on the idea of a human condition are concerned, see Bertrand Ogilvie, “Anthropologie du propre à rien,” in Ogilvie, Le passant ordinaire, no. 38 (January-March 2002) and Ogilvie, La Seconde Nature du politique: Essai d’anthropologie négative (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012).

2. This is shown, in particular, by Gershom Scholem’s work on Jewish messianism: Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1995), and Sabbatai Sevi, The Mystical Messiah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

3. This does not mean that the culture that distributes social roles constitutes an incontestable determinism: every culture, even if it is based on an organization of spheres of activity and a status hierarchy, contains possibilities of reversal and play. That point is one of the themes of a book that has modified the relations between feminism and anthropology: Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). It is also the point at which these two discourses encounter the problematic of “power” in Foucault’s sense: see Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity: An Interview,” in Ethics. Subjectivity and Truth: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow and N. Rose (New York: New Press, 1998), 163–174.

4. I borrow this phrase from Leszek Kolakowski, “La revanche du sacré dans la culture profane,” Revue du MAUSS, no. 22: “Qu’est-ce que le religieux?” 2003 (1973): 57. Bataille’s terminology—“excess,” “expenditure,” the “accursed share”—points in the same general direction, while accentuating the register of the ambiguous (already present in the Roman notion of the “sacred,” on which Girogio Agamben bases his problematization of homo sacer).

5. See Michael Löwy, The War of the Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (London: Verso, 1996). Because of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s early denunciation of the conquest and the oppression of American Indians, liberation theology has adopted him as one of its own. His work and action do indeed constitute a privileged object of reflection about the possibilities of subversion, even radical subversion, inherent in the Christian theology of the incarnation. Yet Las Casas is precisely not a “revolutionary.” See Nestor Capdevila, Las Casas: Une politique de l’humanité (Paris: Le Cerf, 1998).

6. On the generalization of the masculine-feminine distinction in the “Medina surats” of the Koran, see Denis Gril, “Femme,” in M. A. Amir-Moezzi, Dictionnaire du Coran, 338ff. Fethi Benslama undertakes an undoubtedly debatable, yet very suggestive psychoanalytical interpretation of the relationship between the scheme of genealogical transmission and the ambiguousness of the role of the feminine in Islam, particularly as revealed by the figure of Hagar, the wife “cast out” by Abraham, from whom the Arabs and the Prophet himself are supposed to have descended (Fethi Benslama, trans. Robert Bononno, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Islam [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009]). There is no avoiding the comparison, although it is by no means easy to make, with other figures of originary repression in the Western monotheisms, particularly the virginity of the Mother of the Savior, which would seem to introduce a “matriarchal” element into Christianity, but at the price of accentuating the prohibition of the “fleshly.” See Marina Warner, Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage, 1983).

7. See Reza Azlan’s commentary on Armina Wadud, Qur’an and Women: Reading the Sacred Text from a Women’s Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), in Azlan, No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (New York: Random House, 2005), 73ff. See also Margot Badran, “Islamic Feminism: What’s in a Name?” Al-Ahram (January 2002): 17–23; Badran, “Exploring Islamic Feminism,” Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University, November 30, 2000. My understanding of the relationship between sharî’a and fikh is based on Dictionnaire du Coran, ed. M. A. Amir-Moezzi (Paris: Bouquins), 818ff.

8. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). What makes Mahmood’s study fascinating is her depiction of the way women appropriate a function of interpreting the law that is traditionally an exclusively male prerogative; this leads them not to “reverse” the socially institutionalized relations of dependency prescribed by the Koran, but to come forward, vis-à-vis their husbands, as the spokeswomen of a higher authority (God) in order to demand that the men respect it more conscientiously than they would if left to their own devices. (Women thus make themselves, as it were, their guardians’ guardians.) This is also women’s way of “exercising governance,” as best they can, in a situation in which being single or being repudiated by one’s husband is tantamount to social death. We have here a dialectic that Mahmood seeks radically to distinguish from a problematic of “resistance” or “emancipation,” but that nonetheless confers a subversive function on religious tradition (within certain political limits).

9. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, ed., Religion et écologie (Paris: Le Cerf, 1993); Isabelle Stengers, Au temps des catastrophes: Résister à la barbarie qui vient (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2009).

1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

2. See the work of André Tosel, especially Scénarios de la mondialisation culturelle, vols. 1 and 2 (Paris: Kimé, 2011), and Iain Chambers’s interesting “The ‘Unseen Order’: Religion, Secularism and Hegemony,” in The Postcolonial Gramsci, ed. Neelam Srivasta and Baidik Bhattacharya (Oxford: Routledge, 2011).

3. Slavoj Žižek overstates his case, but touches on a fundamental question when he writes: “This ecology of fear has every chance of developing into the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing declining religion: it takes over the old religion’s fundamental function, that of having an unquestionable authority which can impose limits.” Žižek, “Unbehagen in der Natur,” in In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 439.

4. I here borrow Bruce Robbins’s formulation in “Said and Secularism,” in Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid, ed. Mina Karavanta and Nina Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 140–57.

5. On this point, see especially Giacomo Marramao, Dopo il Leviatano: Individuo e comunità (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000); Marramao, Potere e secolarizzazione: Le categorie del tempo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2005).

6. Etienne Balibar, “Strangers and Enemies: Further Reflections on the Aporias of Transnational Citizenship,” Globalization Working Papers, 06/4, McMaster University, March 16, 2006: http://www.globalautonomy.ca/global1/article.jsp?index=RA_Balibar_Strangers.xml. See also Balibar, Violence and Civility (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

7. Ghislaine Glasson-Deschaumes and Rada Ivekovic, eds., “Sur l’expérience de l’exil et son pouvoir critique,” Transeuropéennes, no. 22 (Spring–Summer 2002): Traduire, entre les cultures. See also Edward Said, Convergences: Inventories of the Present, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

8. One finds a somewhat different idea in Jan Assmann, “Translating Gods: Religion as a Factor of Cultural (Un)Translatability,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 139–49. Assmann opposes, from this standpoint, the “monotheisms” to the “polytheisms,” bringing them into relation with two types of empires. This distinction itself may be regarded as an ideal type. However, there is an underlying tension between two types of problematics: those that (as in Assmann, or, in a different way, in Ortigues) insist on the ambiguity of the notion of religion, and the one I am sketching here, in which the religious as such represents the untranslatable, while cultures are susceptible, if not of mutual translation, then at least of mutual interpretation and comprehension.

9. I am using the word differend in the sense Jean-François Lyotard gives it in Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): a juxtaposition of sentences from different regimes that thwarts the continuity and reciprocity of dialogue, thus constantly requiring us to invent another “sentence.”

10. Fredric Jameson, “The Vanishing Mediator, or Max Weber as Storyteller” (1973), in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986, vol. 2: Syntax of History (London: Routledge, 1988), 3–34.

11. On the confrontations between moral discourses, with specific reference to the conflicts generated by decolonization, see Hans Schelkshorn, Diskurs und Befreiung: Studien zur philosophischen Ethik von Karl-Otto Apel und Enrique Dussel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). For a more profound consideration of the intercultural as an alternative to neoliberal globalization, see Raul Fornet-Betancourt, La philosophie interculturelle: Penser autrement le monde, preface by Fred Poché (Paris: Atelier/Editions ouvrières, 2011).

12. Frédéric Brahami, Le Travail du scepticisme: Montaigne, Bayle, Hume (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001).

13. Warren Montag, “Lucretius Hebraizant: Spinoza’s Reading of Ecclesiastes,” in European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 20, no. 1 (March 2012), 109–29. See also Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

1. See Nilüfer Göle’s very good remarks on this in her article, “La laïcité républicaine et l’Islam public,” in Pouvoirs. Revue française d’études constitutionnelles et politiques, no. 115 (November 2005): 73–86. She relates this confrontation (in the case of France and Turkey) to a “didactic secularism” (Ernest Gellner): “Comparing the two Republics also highlights the fundamental importance of the law…. The law is the vector which changes practices, as shown by the Turkish civil code breaking with the religious law, the shar’ia…. The law does not arise from negotiating with the society, but it appears as a didactic instrument to change mores, social and cultural habits….” (79).

2. A discussion continues about whether globalization, which reverses the hierarchy between commodity universalism and civic universalism in the public space, produces a development or a degeneracy of the juridical norm that is applicable to persons and their “intercourse.” On this point, see Giacomo Marramao, Dopo il Leviatano (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000), and Mireille Delmas-Marty, Le relatif et l’universel (Les forces imaginantes du droit, I) (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004).

3. In my essay, “The Ill-Being of the Subject,” in Citizen Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), I tried to demonstrate that civic-bourgeois universalism—as expressed in the discourse of human rights that directly communicates with a program of the secularization of the world—does not suppress the discriminating function of anthropological differences, even if it reproduces in its own language the eschatological promise of their overcoming.

4. Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, famously called “femininity” an “eternal irony of the community.” How not to add that “masculinity,” as an eternal vanity, or incurable paranoia of the individual, seems to pertain to every religion or culture, with no monopoly?

5. I am referring to Bruno Karsenti, Moïse et l’idée de peuple. La vérité historique selon Freud (Paris: Cerf, 2012); and Geneviève Fraisse, Muse de la raison. La démocratie exclusive et la différence des sexes (Paris: Alinéa, 1989).

6. Bertrand Ogilvie, La seconde nature du politique. Essai d’anthropologie négative (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012).

7. See interesting analyzes on this point by Jean Robelin, focusing on “religious coding of bodies,” in “Corps et sacré” in Noesis, no. 12 (2007): 207–24.

8. Etienne Balibar, Equaliberty. Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

1. For example, Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent undertaking, Disenclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), two chapters of which are titled, respectively, “Atheism and Monotheism” and “The Deconstruction of Monotheism.” Nancy asks, among other things, in what sense the “self-interpretive” nature of Christianity privileges it when it comes to deconstructing monotheism in general without prejudice to the pluralism constituting it.

2. Le Coran, trans. Denise Masson (Paris: Folio-Gallimard, 1967), cxi; Le Coran, ed. and trad. Jacques Berque (Paris: Sinbad, 1990). The shirk, opposed to the tawhîd, is thus occasionally translated as “associationism” rather than “polytheism.” See Ibn ‘Arabi, La Profession de foi, trans. R. Deladrière (Paris: Sinbad, 1995), 83. [Translator’s Note: I have here cited from The Koran (the Quran), trans. E. H. Palmer (Oxford University Press, 1951), 20, 80, and 17, respectively. One passage cited here is not to be found in Palmer’s translation at or near where it is supposed to be].

3. See Reza Aslan, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (New York: Random House, 2005), 214–16.

4. Deutero-Isaiah is a striking exception (Isa. 41–43). See Françoise Smyth-Florentin, “Du monothéisme biblique: Émergence et alentours,” in Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, vol. 59, no. 1 (January-March 1985): 5–16.

5. Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary Mole (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).

6. Roger Arnaldez, “Philon d’Alexandrie,” in Dictionnaire des philosophes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984).

7. Jean Trouillard, “Procession néoplatonicienne et création judéo-chrétienne,” in Néoplatonisme: Mélanges offertejs à Jean Trouillard, Les Cahiers de Fontenay, no. 19 (March 1981): 8.

8. H. D. Saffrey and L. G. Westerink, Introduction to Proclus, Théologie platonicienne, Book III (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, Budé, 1978), lxxi. Proclus takes the concept of theologia from Aristotle, distinguishing it from theomuthia. See Victor Goldschmidt, Questions platoniciennes (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 144ff., and Luc Brisson, Introduction à la philosophie du mythe, vol. 1: Sauver les mythes (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 121–45.

9. Endre von Ivanka, “Le problème des ‘noms de Dieu’ et de l’ineffabilité divine selon le pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite,” in L’analyse du langage théologique: Le nom de Dieu. Actes du colloque organisé par le Centre international d’études philosophiques de Rome, Rome, 5–11 janvier 1969, ed. Enrico Castelli (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1969), 201–206.

10. See, for example, Adolf von Harnack, Mission et expansion du christianisme aux trois premiers siècles, trans. Joseph Hoffman, preface by Michel Tardieu (Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 2004), 48ff.; The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, ed. and trans. James Moffatt (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2009 [ New York: Putnam, 1905]).

11. “Well then, about eating this consecrated food: of course, as you say, ‘a false god has no existence in the real world (ouden eidôlon en kosmôi). There is no god but one’ (ouden theos heteros ei mè heis). For indeed, if there be so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’—yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom all being comes, towards whom we move (heis theos ho patèr ex’hou ta panta kai hèmeis eis auton); and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came to be, and we through him (heis kurios Ièsous Khristos di’hou ta panta kai hèmeis di’autou)” (1 Cor. 8:4–6, New English Bible).

12. Philippe Borgeaud, Aux origines de l’histoire des religions (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 51.

13. Erik Peterson, Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem, in Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 1: Theologische Traktate (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 1994), 23–81.

14. “All men love and fear this unique God, who decreed, in the very period in which he wished to reveal Himself to us, the unity of this empire, with the result that the same laws that are subjected to the unique God impose themselves everywhere.” (Subiecto would appear to be a misreading of subiectae.)

15. Peterson, Der Monotheismus, 55–56.

16. Peterson was contested on this point by Carl Schmitt in part 2 of his Political Theology, which was belatedly in 1969 a response to what he saw as a complete refutation of his own viewpoint (see Carl Schmitt, Théologie politique [Paris: Gallimard, 1988], 83–166); Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), and Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of any Political Theology, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge-Malden: Polity, 2008). Jan Assmann discusses this confrontation in the introduction to Herrschaft und Heil: Politische Theologie in Altägypten, Israel und Europa (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2000), which focuses on the evolution and significance of the concept of “political theology.”

17. Roger Arnaldez (À la croisée des trois monothéismes: Une communauté de pensée au Moyen-âge [Paris: Albin Michel, 1993]) suggests another angle that should be explored so as not to create a false impression of exhaustiveness. It concerns the exchange of the arguments that Jews, Christians, and Muslims directed against the dualism of the Mazdeans and, later, the Manicheans, an exchange that did not lead to mutual recognition under a common name. Admittedly, this debate bore on human freedom rather than divine monarchy. But are they separable?

18. Francis Schmidt, “Naissance des polythéismes, 1624–1757,” in Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, vol. 59, no. 1 (January–March 1985). See also “La discussion sur l’origine de l’idolâtrie aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” in Rencontres de l’École du Louvre: L’idolâtrie (La Documentation française, 1990).

19. Ralph Cudworth, D. D., The True Intellectual System of the Universe: The First Part; wherein, All the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; and Its Impossibility Demonstrated (London: Fromann Verlag, 1964, and Thoemmes Press, 1995). Chapter 4 (pp. 192–632) discusses the question of polytheism, the question as to whether the idea of a unitary God underlies paganism, the relations between Platonism and the theology of the Trinity, and so on.

20. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. A. Wayne Colver (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1976), 61.

21. As Philippe Borgeaud reminds us (Aux origines de l’histoire, 65ff), students of the Bible are happy to ascribe the emergence of the prophetic tradition and, consequently, the birth of “true monotheism” (as distinct from the henotheism of the ancient Hebrews) to this encounter between the two religions during the Babylonian exile.

22. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth, Great Britain: Penguin, 1994).

23. Edgar Quinet, Le Christianisme et la Révolution française (Paris: Fayard, 1984), 118.

24. Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, in L’absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romantisme allemand, trans. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 53–54; The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard (New York: SUNY, 1988). See the whole dossier of the controversy in Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels ältestes Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus, eds. Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984).

25. One of the rare commentaries on this formula is to be found in Françoise Dastur, “La poésie comme origine: Hölderlin et Heidegger,” in À la naissance des choses: Art, poésie et philosophie (Paris: Encre marine, 2005), 144–45. Dastur sets the text in relation with Hölderlin’s essay “On Religion” and discerns a critique of Kant’s theory of the sublime in it. These symmetries reflect the spirit of the times, but nowhere do they reach the same conceptual intensity. Witness the sentence that Fichte cites in his 1799 Réponse juridique à l’accusation d’athéisme: “Religion can consist in polytheism just as well as in monotheism, in anthropomorphism just as well as in spiritualism” (Querelle de l’athéisme suivie de divers textes sur la religion, ed. Jean-Charles Goddard [Paris: Vrin, 1993], 100).

26. See the book published by Citizen Dupuis in Year Three of the Revolution (1795): Origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle, which proposes to integrate a Christianity purged of its superstitions into a religion of “God the Universe,” of which the ancient mythologies of the heavenly bodies are supposed to have had a premonition.

27. The Critique of Pure Reason appeared in 1788 and Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone in 1793. Robespierre instituted the Cult of the Supreme Being in 1794.

28. I have consulted Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, von Dr. Friedrich Creuzer, Professor der Althen Literatur zu Heidelberg, Erster Theil…Zweite völlig umbearbeitete Ausgabe, Leipzig und Darmstadt, 1819, and Religions de l’Antiquité, considérées principalement dans leurs formes symboliques et mythologiques, ouvrage traduit de l’allemand du Dr. Creuzer, refondu en partie, complété et développé par J. D. Guigniaut…Tome Premier, Première partie, Paris, MDCCCXXV. For an attempt to put Creuzer’s work in perspective, see Christoph Jamme, Introduction à la philosophie du mythe, vol. 2: Époque moderne et contemporaine, trad. A. Pernet (Paris: Vrin, 1995); Einführung in die Philosophie des Mythos, vol. 2: Neuzeit und Gegenwart (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991).

29. Georg-Friedrich Creuzer and Gottfried Hermann, Briefe über Homer und Hesiodus, vorzüglich über die Theogonie (Heidelberg: August Ostwald, 1818).

30. Ernest Renan, “Des religions de l’antiquité et de leurs derniers historiens” (1853), in Études d’histoire religieuse (1857) (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 35–78; Studies of Religious History, trans. O. B. Frothingham (New York: Carleton, 1864), [trans. note: probably p. 62 to around p. 100. The book is available on line, see www.archive.org]

31. It may be asked, with regard to what follows, whether we do not have hints of a fourth approach (it might be called projective) to the constitution of the notion of “monotheism” in post-revolutionary Europe, which was also the Europe of the emancipation of the Jews and the beginnings of European colonization of the Islamic world. This approach would discern monotheism above all in the “Eastern” other, equivocally associating Islam with Judaism via the reference to a “Semitism” that is either idealized or made to serve as a negative foil. This very clearly holds for Renan after 1850, but the phenomenon would have to be documented for the preceding period, particularly in the English-speaking countries.

32. Following the publication of this essay in French, my colleague Jean-François Courtine signaled to me a single exception, all the more remarkable, to this exclusion: in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences from 1830 (par. 573), Hegel names “monotheism” to characterize the Hindu religion of Brahma. This reference is repeated in his account of Bafhavad Gîta (in the Philosophy of Religion), both times with a reference to the essay by Thomas Colebrooke: “On the Vedas, or the Sacred Writings of the Hindus,” in Asiatic Researches, vol. 8 (1808) by the Asiatic Society of Calcutta.

33. F. W. J. Schelling, Les divinités de Samothrace, trans. Samuel Jankélévitch, in Les âges du monde (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1949), 212; The Deities of Samothrace, ed. and trans. Robert J. Brown (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977). In contrast, the question of monotheism plays no role in Schelling’s 1809 treatise On the Essence of Human Freedom, which bases its treatment of the division of the idea of God on the alternative between Good and Evil (he occasionally calls the latter “the inverted God” [der umgekehrte Gott]).

34. La philosophie de la mythologie de Schelling d’après Charles Secrétan (Munich 1835–36) et Henri-Frédéric Amiel (Berlin 1845–46), ed. L. Pareyson and M. Pagano (Milan: Mursia Editore, 1991).

35. F. W. J. Schelling, Der Monotheismus, Erste Vorlesung, S.W., XII, 13. See A. Pernet’s translation, Le Monothéisme, with an introduction by Xavier Tilliette (Paris: Vrin, 1992), 27–28.

36. In The Education of Mankind (1780), Lessing posits (in paragraph 1) that “revelation is to mankind what education is to the individual.”

37. Xavier Tilliette has observed that Schelling, while taking up the Paulinian theme of kenosis, goes on to make a strange substitution here: “Paganism is the Revelation’s veritable Old Testament…. Paradoxically, the Biblical Revelation appears to be superfluous…. It is easier to understand the embarrassment into which Judaism plunged Schelling when one knows that, for him, Christ is not the Jewish Messiah, but the ‘Light of the pagans,’ Lumen gentium” (L’Absolu et la philosophie: Essais sur Schelling [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1987]), 247.

38. According to the equivalence posited in 1709 by the inventor of this notion. See John Toland, Pantheisticon, eds. O. Nicastro and M. Iofrida (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1996), 20–21; Pantheisticon: A Modern English Translation, trans. Jason Cooper (Lulu Press, 2014).

39. On Schelling’s combination of the themes of the humanization of God (or “anthropomorphism”), Being as Potentiality, and the God who is always still to come, see Jean-François Courtine, Extase de la Raison: Essais sur Schelling (Paris: Galilée, 1990), 203–59.

40. F. W. J. Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey (New York: SUNY, 2008).

41. One is struck by the fact that Schleiermacher uses “polytheism” only once and never uses “monotheism” in Reden über die Religion (1799), in which he introduces concepts that were to enjoy phenomenal success (such as “virtuosity” and “holy melancholy”). Schleiermacher’s transition from Judaism to Christianity is organized around the idea of prophecy, while his definition of religious sentiment as an intuition of the infinite nature of the universe is marked by unmistakably pantheistic accents. This fact seems to me to substantiate the hypothesis that Creuzer and Schelling influenced Schleiermacher’s adoption of a “new” terminology.

42. Schleiermacher Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 7, part 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 49.

43. Jan Assmann, Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais: Schillers Ballade und ihre griechischen und ägyptischen Hintergründe (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1999); Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008).

44. Schleiermacher Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 13, part 2, 514–32. The line that runs from here to the question that Peterson asked himself in 1935, in a completely different conjuncture, to be sure, would seem to be a straight one.

45. De la religion considéré dans sa source, ses formes, et ses développements (1824–1825), after Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, vol. 1 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 273. In a posthumous book, Du polythéisme romain considéré dans ses rapports avec la philosophie grecque et la religion chrétienne (1833), Constant systematically opposes polytheism and theism (he says of theism that the religion of the Hebrews “gave the world the signal”).

46. See Alfonso M. Iacono, Le fétichisme: Histoire d’un concept (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992). De Brosses’s text has recently been translated into English; see The Returns of Fetishism, ed. Rosalind C. Morris and Daniel H. Leonard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

47. Doctrine saint-simonienne: Exposition (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1854), 313–28. This is one of the rare editions containing the two years of the Course taught by Bazard and Olinde Rodriguès.

48. Profoundly influenced by Freemasonry, the Saint-Simonians also saw Lessing as an intellectual ancestor, and translated his The Education of Mankind into French in 1832.

49. Georges Canguilhem demonstrates this in “Histoire des religions et histoire des sciences dans la théorie du fétichisme chez Auguste Comte,” in Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Paris: Vrin, 1968).

50. Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, fifty-fourth lecture, new edition (Paris: Hermann, 1975), vol. 2, 332.

52. Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 53e leçon; Comte, Système de politique positive ou Traité de sociologie instituant la Religion de l’Humanité (Paris: 1929 [1853]), vol. 3, 240. Comte discusses Buddhism as a “subversive” religion in the same text.

53. Comte, Système, 471. We should, however, note Comte’s vacillation over Islam from one text to the other, as well as the ambiguity of his formulations on Islam.

54. Comte, Système, vol. 1, 244

55. See Marc Augé, Génie du paganisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).

56. The work of Stanislas Breton, from Unicité et monothéisme (1981) through Philosophie et mystique (1996) to L’avenir du christianisme (1999) provides a striking illustration of this point. Henri Corbin, too, sets out from the Neoplatonist heritage when he distinguishes, after Ibn ‘Arabi, what he calls the esoteric or ontological tawhîd from the exoteric or theological tawhîd (Le paradoxe du monothéisme [Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1981]).

57. Jan Assmann, Moses der Ägypter: Entzifferung einer Gedächtnisspur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1998); Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Assmann, Die Mosaische Unterscheidung, oder der Preis des Monotheismus (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003); The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

1. First published (in French) in Agenda de la Pensée Contemporaine, no. 9 (Hiver, 2007). English translation in Human Architecture, Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, vol. 7, no. 2 (Spring 2009), 123–34. Review essay of the following three books: Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Idith Zertal, La nation et la mort. La Shoah dans le discours et la politique d’Israël, translated from the English by Marc Saint-Upéry (Paris: La Découverte, 2004), Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge, 2005); Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté. Judaïsme, sionisme et pensée bi-nationale, trans. Catherine Neuve-Eglise (Paris: La Fabrique, 2007), preface by Carlo Ginzburg.

2. Regarding my own hypotheses on this matter, see the article I wrote with Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond: “Guerre en Orient ou paix en Méditerranée?” in Le Monde, August 19, 2006; the non-abridged version is available at http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3232,36–804577,0.html. English translation: “A Mediterranean Way for Peace in the Middle-East,” in Radical Philosophy, November 2006.

3. The translation of this work was refused by an important French publisher. Jacqueline Rose, professor at the University of London, is also the author of The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, (Virago, 1991); the collective work Why War: Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); On Not Being Able to Sleep: Essays on Psychoanalysis in the Modern World (London: Chatto, 2003); and an introduction to the new English translation of Freud’s essays on “mass psychology” (London: Penguin Classics, 2004).

4. See in particular Gershom Scholem, Le messianisme juif. Essais sur la spiritualité du judaïsme (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1974), in which one finds the essay on “redemption through sin”; and Sabbataï Tsevi, le messie mystique 1626–1676 (Lagrave, France: Verdier, 1990). The most complete presentation in French of the intellectual career of Scholem is that of David Biale, Gershom Scholem. Cabale et contre-histoire (Paris: Editions de l’éclat, 2001).

5. See Scholem, Le messianisme juif, 27.

8. Ibid., 139ff., and Sabbataï Tsevi.

9. On the subject of the “neutralization of messianism” in Scholem, see Biale, Gershom Scholem, 132ff.

10. Most of the political interventions by Scholem between 1916 and 1974 are translated in the collection Le prix d’Israël (Paris: Editions de l’Eclat, 2003). The letter to Rosenzweig, unknown for a long time, also plays a central role in the much more critical analyses of Raz-Krakotzkin, who stresses that it is through a “typically messianic interpretation of the situation” that Scholem “warns against the messianic danger hidden by secularization (laicisation)” (Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté, 133). Raz-Krakotzkin’s “ambivalent” relationship, according to Carlo Ginzburg, with the work and personality of Scholem, is influenced by the critiques by the new generation of Kabbalah specialists of his “national” conception of older messianism (see Moshe Idel, Messianisme et mystique, [Paris: Cerf, 1994]).

11. See in particular the exchange with Shalom Lappin in the online journal Dissent, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya_article/a-question-of-zion-a-reply-to-shalom-lappin.

12. Rose refers here to the key article by Edward Said (to whose memory her book is dedicated), “Zionism from the point of view of its victims” (1979).

13. This formula was used by the socialist leader Shmuel Yavne’eli in 1918, quoted by Rose (Question of Zion, 150). The theme of “national shame” is also analyzed by Zertal. It is incorporated by Raz-Krakotzkin into a much more general framework of the abjection of the “exiled” Jew, a notoriously insistent element in the formation of the Israeli national character.

14. Before 1933, Scholem too identified with this current. He wrote: “I am, in this respect, a religious Ahad-Haamist.” See Le prix d’Israël, 163. See also Biale, Gershom Scholem, 40ff. and 171–75.

15. Rose, Question of Zion, 96ff.

16. Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Author of many studies of the history of the state of Israel and emigration to Palestine, Zertal was professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Interdisciplinary Center of Herzliya. She currently teaches in Basel. Her most recent work, written with Akiva Eldar, is The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007 (New York: Nation Books, 2007).

17. On the institution of the “exclusive link” between the memory of the Shoah and the site of Jerusalem by the Yad Vashem law, and its relation to other policies regarding “places of memory,” see Zertal, La nation et la mort, 120. On the reticence of certain Shoah survivors, see 130ff.

18. This point is particularly important regarding the Nasser regime’s propaganda in the days preceding the Israeli attack of June 1967, presented as a case of legitimate preventive defense. See Zertal, La nation et la mort, 166.

19. Ibid., 144ff., in particular concerning the contacts established by the Grand Mufti Hadj Amin Al-Husseini.

20. Sociologists of Luhmannian inspiration would employ here the category of “Selbstthematisierung” or “self-characterization.” See Ulrich Bielefeld, Nation und Gesellschaft. Selbstthematisierungen in Frankreich und Deutschland (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003).

21. On “the long processus of banalization of the Shoah,” see Zertal, Nation et mort, 88, 156, etc.

22. In the extended version of the mythical narrative, which ties modern episodes to antiquity (the destruction of the Second Temple, the revolt of Bar Kochba and the battle of Massada), this chain makes it possible to legitimate the idea of a national and territorial identity that goes back a millennium, in which the diaspora represents little more than a “nonhistory” or a tragic parenthesis prior to reconquest. Raz-Krakotzkin discusses the fiction of the revolt of Bar Kokhba and its opposition to the rabbinic tradition in Exil et souveraineté, 100ff.

23. Zertal, La nation et la mort, 36ff. Following others, Zertal stresses the fact that the most prominent surviving leader of the revolt of the Warsaw ghetto, Marek Edelman, always opposed this transfiguration of the insurrection into an episode of “Zionist” heroism, and more generally the idea that the creation of the state of Israel represented not only an historical consequence, but the very “meaning,” revealed a posteriori, of the Shoah (see 47ff.).

24. This occurred in particular as a result of a 1950 law “against war criminals and the authors of crimes against humanity” present in Israel itself: see Zertal, La nation et la mort, 83ff. In practice, the law targeted Jews, themselves Shoah survivors (such as former kapos and room supervisors in the concentration camps) but ended up exonerating notables who had negotiated with the Nazis in the name of the Judenräte of central Europe. The law resulted in the scandal of the Kastner trial (1952), for which Ben Gurion conceived the Eichmann trial as a symbolic reparation (112ff.).

25. According to Zertal, who follows Arendt on this point, but also other historians (including the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was quite sympathetic to Israeli objectives), the trial was conceived strictly in this perspective.

26. Zertal, La nation et la mort, 268–69 (“L’ange de la mort d’Auschwitz”). Let us recall that Edward Said, who swam against the current in his own camp, called for the Palestinians and Arabs to take this psychology into account and, beyond this, to make of the Jewish genocide and the rights it entailed (which did not include in his view the right to dispossess others) one of the conditions for the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. See The Question of Palestine (London: Vintage, 1981); The Politics of Dispossession (London: Vintage, 1994).

27. Her controversy with Scholem attests to this. This controversy turned on “love for Israel” vs. “love for the Jewish people” (Ahavat Israel), to which she counterposes not the “love of humanity” but that of individuals and friends. See Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove, 1978), 240–251, as well as Scholem, Fidélité et utopie. Essais sur le judaïsme contemporain (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1978), 213–28. On Arendt’s conception of the “Jewish question” before and after the Eichmann trial, see Martine Leibovici, Hannah Arendt, une Juive. Expérience, politique et histoire, preface by Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1998).

28. The author is senior lecturer in history of Judaism at the University of Beersheva. Several of his previous publications are about Catholic censorship and the transformations of Jewish thought it brought about in classical Europe.

29. The close exchanges between Scholem and Benjamin on theology and the philosophy of history, (up to the “Theses” of 1940, submitted to Arendt and published by her) are the subject of a book by Eric Jacobson: Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). See also Michael Löwy, Avertissement d’incendie. Une lecture des thèses “Sur le concept d’histoire” (Paris: Editions de l’Eclat, 2001).

30. Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté, 209.

31. This is tantamount to criticizing the notion, inscribed in the Israeli constitution, of a state which is “democratic” because it is “Jewish” (and for Jews exclusively). This idea of the “land of exile” is tied to a “secular” elaboration of the religious tradition for which the land of Israel does not constitute the place or the instrument of salvation but rather that place where the Jews attempt to continue to “live in exile,” as long as all of humanity is not yet liberated from slavery or oppression. It converges with the critique of statism in Benjamin and the opposition pointed out by Arendt between the position of the “parvenu” and that of the “pariah.” See Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté, 199–201.

32. This is so because it actually reaches the point of preferring self-destruction to the sharing of the land: see the passage on the “Samson option” and the taboo on naming the Israeli nuclear weapon, Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté, 152ff.

33. Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté, 45ff., 197ff.

34. Ibid., 196–203 (with reference to Baruch Kurzweill and Yeshayahou Leibowitz). The nationalist religious parties are indeed in the forefront of the colonization of the occupied territories.

35. Raz-Krakotzkin speaks of “forced de-Arabization,” 83. He draws in particular on the work of Gil Anidjar, philosopher and historian, who studied with Derrida and is author of “Our Place in Al-Andalous”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and most recently, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Israeli suppression of the Judeo-Arab element at the heart of its own historic identity is the obverse side of the fantasized discourse of “Christian” Europe, which placed the Jew and the Arab, at least since the Renaissance, in the position of absolute enemies, both internal and external, forming a single enemy at a deeper level.

36. See in particular chapters 1 (“La négation de l’exil dans la conscience sioniste”) and 2 (“Le retour à l’histoire”). Scholem discusses in particular the relations between Jewish messianism and Christian millenarism in Sabbataï Tsevi, 105ff.

37. See in particular chapter 7: “Arendt, Benjamin, Scholem et le binationalisme.”

38. This responsibility is carefully distinguished from culpability: see 206ff.

39. One will find, I believe, an idea of this sort implicit in certain recent writings by Jean-Claude Milner: see his Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, (Lagrave, France: Verdier, 2003), in particular § 55, 97ff.: “In truth, there is only one real obstacle [to the expansion of European “peace,” synonym of “unlimited society”]…and that is the existence of a state named Israel. For Israel presents itself as a limited whole, in the form of a nation-state, claiming secure and recognized borders. Such language is reputed to be intrinsically warlike…”.

40. Raz-Krakotzkin, Exil et souveraineté, 111, 199. This formula is all the more striking to me since during the period of perestroika, when the French communist philosopher Lucien Sève (a long time personal friend and theoretical opponent of Althusser on “theoretical humanism”), with whom I was commenting the events, asked me in a falsely naïve way (and with real anxiety) what I thought of the U.S.S.R., I replied exactly that: “It’s a state like any other…”

1. This chapter was originally a paper presented at the international conference “Laïcité/Secularization,” in the Maison Française of Columbia University, New York, November 12, 2005. It has been updated and revised for inclusion in this book.

2. I will return to the etymology of “laïque” (adjective) and “laïcité” (noun), which are important to recall. See “Laïc, laïque, laïcité,” a special issue of the journal Mots, no. 27 (June 1991), eds. Simone Bonnafous, Etienne Balibar, and Pierre Fiala. In modern English, “laïcité” is usually translated (at the risk of confusion) as “secularism” except when an author wants to draw attention to the specific character of the French doctrine and institution. In German, the neologism Laizität has been coined to this effect. Latin languages copy the French: laicità in Italian, laicidad in Spanish (which is inscribed in the 1917 Mexican Constitution). More interesting is the fact that Turkish has transcribed the French (laiklik) to mark the antireligious character of the secular state (and army) created by Atatürk, producing a violent opposition that is triumphant today. In 2005, the French senate adopted a Déclaration universelle de la laïcité, which—surprisingly—has been endorsed by representatives of twenty-nine countries (including the United States and the United Kingdom).

3. I have attempted to discuss this dialectical problem—now the subject of a grand querelle in philosophy—in my book Des Universels. Essais et conferences (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2016).

4. The Treatises of Westphalia (1648) that instituted the Ius Publicum Europaeum, or the international order and the balance of power between independent nation-states (most of them kingdoms or empires at the time), also involved a “sovereign” right of states to control the public exercise of religion in their territories (Ius circa sacra), and led to the division of populations among state religions (or the religion of each sovereign): cujus regio ejus religio.

5. Historians conventionally identify the establishment of laïcité in France with the “law of separation of church and state,” passed in 1905 by the Third Republic, which put an end to a century of fluctuations between clerical and anticlerical policies. In 1946, after the end of World War II and the collapse of the Vichy Regime that had again heavily favored interventions of the Catholic Church in public affairs, laïcité was incorporated in the Constitution of the Fourth Republic as a defining principle, together with national indivisibility, democracy, and social welfare. “Separation” of course contained an echo of the idea of the “wall of separation” claimed by the American colony of Rhode Island in the seventeenth century, but it referred to a distance rather than a “wall.”

6. Although addressing a similar issue and drawing on the important research of Jean-Paul Willaime, I differ on the conclusions: whereas I suggest that laïcité is a consequence of the failure of the “Rousseauist” project, Willaime claims that it forms its deferred realization: see Willaime, “La religion civile à la française,” in Autres Temps. Les cahiers du christianisme social, no. 6 (1985); “La religion civile à la française et ses métamorphoses,” in Social Compass 40(4), 1993.

7. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci pays extensive attention to the differences between the Italian situation, in which the “modernization” of the state was prevented by the position of the Catholic Church as a “sovereign enclave” within the nation, and the French situation, where the state becomes the instrument of the “passive revolution” operated by the bourgeoisie through the transformation of Jacobinism into a republican common sense, in spite of the resistances of the “Catholic party,” supporting successive monarchic and bonapartist restorations (see André Tosel, Etudier Gramsci, [Paris: Editions Kimé, 2016]); for readers of Italian: Fabio Frosini, La religione dell’uomo moderno. Politica e verità nei «Quaderni del carcere» di Antonio Gramsci (Rome: Carocci, 2010).

8. See Ernst Kantorowicz: The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957); Julia R. Lupton and Graham Hammill eds., Political Theology and Early Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011).

9. A remarkable recent critical edition and commentary of Marx’s essay was provided by Daniel Bensaid: Karl Marx, Sur la Question juive (Paris: La fabrique, 2006).

10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, book 1, chapter 6. See my essay “Apories rousseauistes,” in L’anthropologie et le politique selon Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Etudes réunies par Michèle Cohen-Halimi (Les Cahiers Philosophiques de Strasbourg, Tome 13, 2002). “Civil Religion” is introduced in the penultimate chapter of the (unfinished) work: IV, 8.

11. Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of ‘Political Reason’” (the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at Stanford University, October 10 and 16, 1979).

12. The much disputed phrase: “on les forcera d’être libres” (“In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free,” Social Contract, 1, 7, in G. D. H. Cole’s translation). This is clearly a transposition of the church’s use of compelle eos intrare (Luke 14:23).

13. See Balibar, Equaliberty. Political Essays, trans. James Ingram (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

14. “Article 6—The law is the expression of the general will. All the citizens have the right of contributing personally or through their representatives to its formation. It must be the same for all, either that it protects, or that it punishes. All the citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally admissible to all public dignities, places and employments, according to their capacity and without distinction other than that of their virtues and of their talents.”

15. See the classic essay by Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus, (Winter 1967), vol. 96, no. 1, 1–21; also, Philippe Portier, “La religion en France et aux Etats-Unis. Retour sur une comparaison tocquevillienne,” Social Compass (June 2010), 180–93.

16. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Pro Patria Mori in Medieval Political Thought, The American Historical Review, vol. 56, no. 3 (April 1951), 472–92.

17. Jean Baubérot, Vers un nouveau pacte laïque? (Paris: Seuil, 1990).

18. John Locke (1632–1704) published A Letter Concerning Toleration in 1689 (first in Latin, then English), the same year that the British Parliament (which had been preceded by the colony of Maryland) published the Act of Toleration. On ambivalent effects of the idea of “tolerance,” see Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

19. See Baubérot, Vers un nouveau pacte laïque? and Patrick Weil, Politiques de la laïcité au XXe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2007).

20. The Third Republic, installed after the collapse of the Second Empire in 1871, was unable to establish a formal “Constitution” because of its internal conflicts. It only adopted a set of “constitutional laws” regulating the administration and separation of powers (1875).

21. The legal disposition of this “separation” now has unexpected (some would say: perverse) consequences. The state and public corporations are prohibited from subsidizing “churches,” in the sense of denominations; but the churches as buildings have mostly become properties of the towns where they are located: their maintenance and reparations are therefore paid for with public money. On the other hand, the towns are prohibited from subsidizing the construction of mosques for the Muslim communities in France, which face not only racist prejudices, but financial and legal obstacles. When Muslim associations resort to funding from Arab (more generally Islamic) countries, they are immediately suspected of offering a point of entry for an Islamic “fifth column” within national territory.

22. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).

23. Emile Poulat, Notre laïcité publique (Paris: Berg International, 2003); Jean Baubérot, Histoire de la laïcité en France (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2013); Jacqueline Lalouette, ed., L’État et les cultes 1789–1905–2005 (Paris: La Découverte, 2005). A major new contribution, discussing the longue durée of the question of “laïcité” in France, has now been published: Philippe Portier, L’Etat et les religions en France, une sociologie historique de la laïcité (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016). Antithetic views can be found (in their best formulation) in Claude Nicolet, Histoire, Nation, République, (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2000); and Catherine Kintzler, Penser la laïcité, (Paris: Minerve, 2014).

24. The “Vendée,” Victor Hugo’s last and most extraordinary novel: Quatre-Vingt Treize (written after the Paris Commune in 1872, published in 1874) is just about that.

25. See Balibar, Equaliberty.

26. The best recent discussion of Gramsci’s elaboration of “hegemony” (in French) is: Fabio Frosini, “Hégémonie: une approche génétique,” Actuel Marx, 2015, vol.1, no. 57 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).

27. An interesting collection of essays combining Foucault and Gramsci to theorize resistances to power is Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment, ed. David Krebs, (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016).

28. This is the key element in Weber’s definition of legitimate power, which leads to the “paradoxical” definition of democracy as “illegitimate domination” (in Die Stadt, a posthumous essay translated into English as The City [The Free Press, 1958]), i.e., a political regime in which obedience and disobedience are equally possible therefore normalizes conflict (see a great commentary by Catherine Colliot-Thélène in her Etudes Wébériennes. Rationalités, histoires, droits [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001]).

29. See works by Poulat (Notre laïcité publique, 2003) and Baubérot (Histoire de la laïcité en France, 2013), already quoted. On the importance of Jaurès, who represented socialism in this compromise, and famously identified democracy and laïcité in a mass meeting at Castres in 1904, distancing himself from “workerist” anticléricalisme, see Antoine Casanova, Jean Jaurès. Laïcité et République sociale (Paris: Editions Le cherche midi, 2005).

30. The seminal essay by Comte is “Considérations sur le pouvoir spirituel” from 1825; see Auguste Comte, Du pouvoir spirituel (Paris: Livre de Poche Collection Pluriel, 1978), with an introduction by Pierre Arnaud. Essential commentaries are provided by Pierre Macherey in his magnum opus: Études de “philosophie française.” De Sieyes à Barni (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2013).

31. This is in part the object of the great study on the origins of the welfare state (with particular emphasis on the French case): Robert Castel, Les métamorphoses de la question sociale. Une chronique du salariat (Paris: Fayard, 1995). English translation: From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers. Transformations of the Social Question (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003).

32. Michel Wieviorka, La Diversité: rapport à la Ministre de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2008).

33. Zay was arrested by the Vichy government, and murdered by fascist militias in 1944. On the educational reform of the Popular Front in the spirit of laïcité, see Antoine Prost, Du changement dans l’École—Les Réformes de l’éducation de 1936 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2013).

34. See Bruno Karsenti, Politique de l’esprit: Auguste Comte et la naissance de la science sociale (Paris: Hermann, 2006).

35. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (1651), chapter 42, “Of Power Ecclesiastical.” This distinction of course has a long and complex history until our times (which includes Gramsci’s distinction between “dictatorship” and “hegemony,” and above all Althusser’s distinction between “repressive state apparatus” and “ideological state apparatus”).

36. This is a stunning history of semantic “translations”: laos is an archaic term in classical Greek (mainly used in Homer, where it names the “people” or “assembly” of the warriors, as opposed to their “kings”). It was “resuscitated” by the Septuagint, the group of Hellenistic Jewish scholars who translated the Hebraic Bible into Greek, therefore preparing for its universalist reading: they needed a Greek name for ‘ham (the “elect” people of God) that would be neither demos nor ethnos (which they reserved for the “nations,” ethne, in Latin nationes or gentes). In Christianity, laos is transferred to the church as “assembly” of the faithful, which is the “New Israel.” Once Latinized and transformed into adjective, laicus (as opposed to clericus, from the Greek klèros) becomes the name of the ordinary believers, who are not priests (in progressive versions of Catholicism, the hierarchic relation tends to be inverted: the “clerics” are viewed as servants, not masters of their flock). In modern French, an orthographic distinction is observed: laic keeps the religious, ecclesiastic meaning, whereas laïque refers to laïcité, which of course has no ecclesiastic equivalent (except perhaps…to the church itself, as an antonym), and to its institutions (such as école laïque) or its own supporters (not to say believers). Founding fathers of laïcité were still aware of the symmetry and made use of it: see for example the classical treatise by Ferdinand Buisson (an active “dreyfusard” and Nobel Peace Prize winner): La foi laïque, 1912. Contemporary thinkers prefer to speak of “laIcité interieure” to name the conviction of a supporter or “activist” of laïcité (e.g., Claude Nicolet). See my additional entry on “demos, ethnos, laos” for the Dictionary of Untranslatables, eds. B. Cassin, E. Apter, J. Lezra, and M. Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).

37. See Balibar, “Homo nationalis: An Anthropological Sketch of the Nation-Form,” in We, the People of Europe?, trans. James Swenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

38. See my contribution to the Conference at Cerisy in 1994 on “Violence et politique: La violence des intellectuels,” in Lignes, no. 25(1995), Editions Hazan.

39. See the works by Buisson (La foi laïque,1912) and Nicolet (Histoire, Nation, République, 2000) already mentioned.

40. See Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot, eds., Histoire des femmes en Occident. Volume 4, le XIXe siècle, (Paris: Plon, 1991); and Michelle Perrot, “La laïcité, un atout pour les femmes,” in Valeurs mutualistes, no. 231 (May 2004).

41. Geneviève Fraisse, Les deux gouvernements: la famille et la cité (Paris: Gallimard, collection Folio-Essais, 2001).

42. See Joan Wallach Scott, Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

43. About colonies, see in particular La France en terre d’islam. Empire colonial et religions, XIXe-XXe siècles, (Paris: Belin, 2016).

44. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Ideological Tensions of Capitalism: Universalism vs. Racism and Sexism,” reprinted in The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press, 2000), 344, etc.

45. See Balibar, “Sujets ou Citoyens. Pour l’égalité,” in Les Temps Modernes, no. 452 (1984).

46. Among recent new work on Fanon, see (in French), Seloua Luste Boulbina, L’Afrique et ses fantômes. Ecrire l’après (Paris: Présence africaine, 2015); Matthieu Renault, Frantz Fanon. De l’anticolonialisme à la critique postcoloniale (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2011).

47. Derrida’s uses of this typically “deconstructive” category are scattered among his works beginning with Eperons. Les styles de Nietzsche (1978) and Donner le temps (1991).

48. See Balibar, Des Universels, quoted.

49. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). However, the expression was invented by his predecessor, Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981).

50. Catherine Kintzler, Condorcet, l’instruction publique et la naissance du citoyen, préface de J. C. Milner, third édition, revue et augmentée (Paris: Minerve, 2015). Condorcet did apparently invent the notion of the “civilizing mission” of Europe with respect to “Barbarian” peoples, legitimizing colonization. See Bertrand Binoche, La Raison sans l’Histoire. Echantillons pour une histoire comparée des philosophies de l’Histoire (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2007).

1. A reference to the novel Soumission (Submission), released a few hours before the attack on Charlie Hebdo, whose intentions remain ambiguous, but which was widely perceived as a denunciation of the way Muslims are “seizing power” in Europe.

2. The reference is to an article by Edgar Morin, “La France frappée au coeur de sa nature laïque et de sa liberté,” in Le Monde, January 8, 2015.

3. Among other circumstances, I want to recall a public discussion with Talal Asad and Mohamed Amer-Meziane at Columbia University, New York, on November 14, 2016, titled “Beyond the Secular State? Secularism, Empire, Hegemony.”

4. Fethi Benslama: La guerre des subjectivités en Islam (Fécamp, France: Editions Lignes, 2014).

1. “Freedom of expression” and “free speech” are closely related but not completely equivalent phrases. Fundamental documents, to begin with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, use complex formulas which amount to defining a general right of expression or explain the first in terms of the second: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The French tradition quite generally uses liberté d’expression, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has the apparently redundant formula: “right to freedom of opinion and expression,” indicating that it is the “free” or independent opinion/expression that must be kept “free” or immune of constraints and interdictions.

2. “Subjective right” means a right attached to the individual person as inalienable property (John Locke’s “property in one’s person,” including “life, liberty, and estates”), even if it is granted by some “objective” legal order, and subject to limitations of use which prove necessary to make one’s right compatible with the right of others (Kant’s definition of the law as “what prevents from preventing liberty”). The classical “declarations of rights” of the American and French revolutions enumerate fundamental subjective rights and impose their constitutionalization as foundations of republican citizenship. The indisputable importance of subjective rights (including habeas corpus and freedom of conscience/speech) arises from their capacity to impose limits on the arbitrary power of authorities over individuals. Their limitation, as I argue here, arises from the fact that they make it impossible to positively define a right or empowerment inherent in collective action or interaction (except through the legal fiction transforming collective subjects into “corporate” individuals or persons, very often an instrument of monopolistic power relations).

3. “Public good” is an ancient notion of political philosophy, attached to the representation of the “city” as a community of its own citizens, whose limitations (exclusion of women, children, servants and wage laborers, aliens, colonized people) become progressively (albeit never entirely) transgressed with the modern democratization of citizenship and the collective struggles it involves. It becomes associated with the idea of “public service” or “public obligations” in the constitutions of twentieth-century “social states,” especially in the fields of education, health, welfare, albeit with inequalities nationally and internationally, and a more or less reversible achievement. Interestingly, in parallel with a renewed interest for the use, conservation, and destruction of the “commons,” contemporary economists and political theorists have started to expand the definition of a “public good” as a thing or service that can only become used collectively (or remains “indivisible” by its very nature), applying it to the issue of information at a national and transnational level: see Chantal Peyer and Urs Jäggi, L’information est un bien public, report for “Pain pour le prochain” before the UN World Summit on the Information Society (Switzerland, 2003): https://www.kirchen.ch/ecouter-entendre/actualite/IMG/information_bien_public.pdf.

4. Jürgen Habermas introduced the pragmatic concept of the “ideal speech situation” (ISS) in the early 1970s, as a “rhetorical” counterpart to his definition of the public sphere (öffentlichkeit) that makes democratic institutions possible. The fact that he later shifted to a more formalistic theory of “communicative action” does not make it less interesting. The ISS is defined by the following rules: 1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse. 2a. Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever. 2b. Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse. 2c. Everyone is allowed to express their attitudes, desires and needs without any hesitation. 3. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as laid down in (1) and (2).

5. Of course, I am borrowing the expression that was coined by John Rawls, who made it the cornerstone of his resurrection of social contract foundations for political theory, opening a new moment in the history of the discipline and liberalism in general (A Theory of Justice, 1971). In Rawls, the veil of ignorance is a theoretical fiction which incorporates the ideal neutralization of differences, interests, inequalities, and power situations and must be imagined at the origin to ground the political and economic order on “fair” rules of distribution. This can include the distribution of knowledge itself, of course. In my inverted use, the veil of ignorance is very real, and it is continuously produced by the fact that power unevenly distributed (through class distinctions, monopoly of “symbolic capital,” construction of internal enemies, etc.) generates misperception of the other and isolation from the social relations as they actually work.

6. The murderous attack on the Charlie Hebdo journal in Paris on January 7, 2015, perpetrated by members of Al-Qaeda, killing ten members of its editorial staff, was the origin of the reflections condensed in the current “Theses.” See chapter 20, “Three Words for the Dead and for the Living.” The terrorists invoked the reproduction by the French satiric journal (as did others in the world, including the “Muslim world”) of the Danish cartoons in Jyllands-Posten (2005), including one that represented the Prophet Muhammad carrying a bomb. Mass demonstrations expressing outrage and occasionally seeking revenge were in part (but in part only) prompted by Danish imams who toured Islamic countries with a selection of the most offensive publications. The Western press, the politicians, and intellectuals sometimes expressed reservations (especially from religious denominations), but generally they defended “free speech,” blaming the conflict on the intolerance of Muslims.

7. In a later commentary of the chain of events, one of the editors of Jyllands-Posten (a conservative journal) explained that they were trying to make it clear that Muslim citizens in the Danish society were “our equals” and therefore should be treated as equals, including satirically (see interview of Flemming Rose in Libération, November 27, 2015).

8. This distinction is specifically emphasized by Saba Mahmood in her contribution to the collective volume Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech, by Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Mahmood Mamdani suggests a different distinction: “Bigotry, however, is not blasphemy. Blasphemy is the practice of questioning a tradition from the inside, bigotry is an assault on that tradition from the outside. If blasphemy is an attempt to speak truth to power, bigotry is the reverse: an attempt by power to instrumentalize truth. A defining feature of the cartoon debate is that bigotry is being mistaken for blasphemy” (“On Blasphemy, Bigotry and the Politics of Culture Talk,” in Waiting for the Barbarians, A Tribute to Edward W. Said, eds. Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Başak Ertür [London: Verso, 2008]). Both are trying to disentangle the fact that “blasphemy” in the cartoon controversy was at times vindicated on both sides.

9. “Nomos of the Earth” (involving a double play on words: law/distribution of the land/the planet) is the title (and central concept) of Carl Schmitt’s postwar work (1950) on Ius Publicum Europaeum and international law, advocating a distribution of geopolitical influence into a limited number of “zones of influence” (Grossraum) modeled on the U.S. Monroe Doctrine. Deliberately or not, Samuel Huntington’s notion of the “clash of civilizations” seems to be aiming at a revival of this scheme in the postcolonial and postsocialist world.

10. “Victims are not obliged to remain victims. In other words, power is not fixed and unified. Butler has of course insisted time and again that those who are empowered in one place may well be weak and victimized in another, and vice versa. The complexly intertwined histories of class, race, gender, and sexuality ought to have made that clear.” (Robbins, Power Talking, 2016).

11. “Fearless speech” (the title of his Berkeley lectures in 1983) was analyzed by Foucault as a modern version of ancient parrêsia, the capacity to criticize opinions and mores in public. It forms the guiding thread of his last courses at the Collège de France. In the namesake volume (The Reith Lectures: Speaking Truth to Power, London, 1993), drawing on earlier works by Foucault, Edward Said associated it with a general idea of the intellectual function as “speaking truth to power,” which I am trying to expand beyond the professional and cultural limits of its definition.

1. December 2, 2015 and June 12, 2016, respectively.

2. The first law (loi Stasi), banning veils for girls in high schools, was passed in 2004 after a national debate. A second law, banning burkas and other “full-body covering,” was passed in 2010, because burkas concealed the face from identification. According to official sources, reported anti-Semitic actions (including insults, threats, injuries, murders, vandalism of religious buildings, etc.) rose by 80 percent in 2015–2016, while similar Islamophobic actions rose by 280 percent.

3. One of the most widely reproduced videos shows local police officers at Nice forcing a middle-aged woman to undress (although she is not exactly wearing a burkini): https://fr.sputniknews.com/france/201608241027429039-burkini-plage-nice/.

4. See http://www.conseil-etat.fr/Decisions-Avis-Publications/Decisions/Selection-des-decisions-faisant-l-objet-d-une-communication-particuliere/CE-ordonnance-du-26-aout-2016-Ligue-des-droits-de-l-homme-et-autres-association-de-defense-des-droits-de-l-homme-collectif-contre-l-islamophobie-en-France.

5. See https://www.facebook.com/notes/manuel-valls/assumons-le-d%C3%A9bat-sur-le-burkini/1125932284153781).

6. This essay is an adaptation of my article, published in the French journal Libération, on August 30, 2106, titled Laïcité ou identité? A longer version is included in the collective volume Usages et mésusages politiques de la laïcité, ed. Christine Delory-Momberger and Béatrice Mabilon-Bonfils (Editions de l’Aube, La Tour d’Aigues, 2016). In adapting my longer piece, I was helped by two translations of the Libération article that have appeared on the web: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2823-etienne-balibar-laicite-or-identity, and https://darkprecursor.net/2016/08/30/etienne-balibar-laicite-or-identity-english-translation/.

7. This is an (ironic) reference to Rousseau’s famous phrase in The Social Contract, book 1, chapter 7, “The Sovereign”:

8. I borrow the idea of a “genealogy of secularism” from Talal Asad, while disagreeing on several points (not all…) of the application he makes to the case of French laïcité in his important essay, “Trying to Understand French Secularism,” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).

9. See Régis Debray: “Etes-vous démocrate ou républicain?” The very influential essay was originally published in Le Nouvel Observateur on November 30, 1989, and was republished by the same journal on April 28, 2015: http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/politique/20150428.OBS8077/etes-vous-democrate-ou-republicain-par-regis-debray.html.

10. The Law of Separation of Church and State was passed in 1905 after decades of confrontation between the Catholic party and the Secularist party, with a “liberal” force (where some Protestant intellectuals and some Socialist leaders like Aristide Briand and Jean Jaurès had a strong influence) imposing a clear divide between the private and public realms. See my essay in this volume “What Future for Laïcité?” (chapter 12) with references to contemporary historians.

11. See Gérard Noiriel’s intervention before the Commission of the French National Assembly on March 25, 2011, at http://ldh-toulon.net/le-modele-francais-d-immigration.html; also Emmanuelle Saada, “Entre ‘assimilation’ et ‘décivilisation’: l’imitation et le projet colonial républicain,” in Terrain. Revue d’ethnologie de l’Europe, no. 44 (March 2005) « Imitation et anthropologie ».

12. Let us not forget, however, that in practice “laïcité” as a legal system was not implemented in the colonies, but only in the metropolis, because it concerned rights and duties of the citizens, not the subjects of the empire. This is also a contemporary mutation, which creates a double bind: “assimilation” is now requested to apply to those whom one wants to exclude from citizenship, of which they would be unworthy or for which they would remain unfit. See Achi Raberh, “1905: quand l’islam était (déjà) la seconde religion de France,” in Multitudes 59. Été 2015, Décoloniser la laïcité?

13. Quoted by Jean Baubérot, La laïcité falsifiée, rev. ed., (Paris: La Découverte, 2014), 59. Georges Clemenceau (nicknamed “The Tiger” after leading the patriotic effort during World War I) had been a prominent leader of the “secularist” party at the time of the “separation” (Parti Radical), taking sides against the most extreme anticlerical wing. He is also (in)famous in the Labor Movement for his bloody suppression of strikes in the same years as minister of the interior. Clemenceau is frequently invoked as a model by former Prime Minister Manuel Valls (a right-wing Socialist).

14. Here is an interesting example (writing extensively and in excellent French, apparently located in Yemen) which specifically targets the “acculturation of French Muslims”: l’Observatoire des Islamologues de France at www.islamologues-de-france.com.

15. “We are at war” is a quotation from the French president after the November 2015 attacks, repeated after the July 2016 attack.

16. “La France aux Français”: this nationalist slogan was introduced during the anti-Semitic campaign at the time of the Dreyfus Affair and became the motto of the newspaper La Libre Parole, created by Edouard Drumont, a founder of French modern anti-Semitism (and a deputy of Algiers). It was periodically resurrected, notably by the Vichy regime, which outlawed foreigners and deported Jews to Nazi Germany during the Holocaust. See Pierre Birnbaum, “La France aux Français”: histoire des haines nationalistes (Paris: Seuil, 2006).