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Sexual politics, torture, and secular time

2008; Wiley; Volume: 59; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00176.x

1468-4446

Judith Butler,

Religion and Society Interactions

If one wants to begin with most common of beginnings, namely, with the claim that one would like to be able to consider sexual politics during this time, a certain problem arises. Since, it seems clear that one cannot reference 'this time' without knowing which time, where that time takes hold, and for whom a certain consensus emerges on the issue of what time this is. So if it is not just a matter of differences of interpretation about what time it is, then it would seem that we have already more than one time at work in this time, and that the problem of time will afflict any effort I might make to try and consider some of these major issues now. It might seem odd to begin with a reflection on time when one is trying to speak about sexual politics and cultural politics more broadly. But my suggestion here is that the way in which debates within sexual politics are framed are already imbued with the problem of time, of progress in particular, and in certain notions of what it means to unfold a future of freedom in time. That there is no one time, that the question of what time this is, already divides us, has to do with which histories have turned out to be formative, how they intersect – or fail to intersect with other histories – and so with a question of the how temporality is organized along spatial lines. I'm not suggesting here that we return to a version of cultural difference that depends on cultural wholism. In fact, I oppose any such return. The problem is not that there are different cultures at war with one another, or that there are different modalities of time, each conceived as self-sufficient, that are articulated in different and differentiated cultural locations or that come into confused or brutal contact with one another. Of course, at some level, that could be a valid description, but it would miss an important point, namely, that hegemonic conceptions of progress define themselves over and against a pre-modern temporality that they produce for the purposes of their own self-legitimation. Politically, the questions, what time are we in? are all of us in the same time? and specifically, who has arrived in modernity and who has not? are all raised in the midst of very serious political contestations. The questions cannot be answered through recourse to a simple culturalism. It's my view that sexual politics, rather than operating to the side of this contestation, is in the middle of it, and that very often claims to new or radical sexual freedoms are appropriated precisely by that point of view – usually enunciated from within state power – that would try to define Europe and the sphere of modernity as the privileged site where sexual radicalism can and does take place. Often, but not always, the further claim is made that such a privileged site of radical freedom must be protected against the putative orthodoxies associated with new immigrant communities. Let's let that claim stand for the moment, since it carries with it a host of presuppositions that I'll be trying to understand later in this paper. But let's remember from the outset that this is a suspect formulation, one that is regularly made by a state discourse that seeks to produce distinct notions of sexual minorities and distinct communities of new immigrants within a temporal trajectory that makes Europe and its state apparatus into the avatar of both freedom and modernity. In my view, the problem is not that there are different temporalities in different cultural locations (and that, accordingly, we simply need to broaden our cultural frameworks to become more internally complicated and capacious). That form of pluralism accepts the distinct and wholistic framing for each of these so-called 'communities' and then poses an artificial question about how they might overcome their tensions. Rather, the problem is that certain notions of relevant geopolitical space – including the spatial boundedness of minority communities – are circumscribed by this story of a progressive modernity; certain notions of what 'this time' can and must be are similarly construed on the basis of circumscribing the 'where' of its happening. I should make clear that I am not opposing all notions of 'moving forward' and am certainly not against all versions of 'progress' but only that I am profoundly influenced, if not dislocated, by Walter Benjamin's graphic means for rethinking progress and the time of the 'now', and that that is part of what I am bringing to bear on a consideration of sexual politics. I want to say: a consideration of sexual politics now and, of course, that is true, but perhaps my thesis is simply that there can be no consideration of sexual politics without a critical consideration of the time of the now. My claim will be that thinking through the problem of temporality and politics in this way may well open up a different approach to cultural difference, one that eludes the claims of pluralism and intersectionality alike. The point is not just to become mindful of the temporal and spatial presuppositions of some of our progressive narratives, the ones that inform various parochial, if not structurally racist, political optimisms of various kinds. But rather to show that our understanding of what is happening 'now' is bound up with a certain geo-political restriction on imagining the relevant borders of the world and even a refusal to understand what happens to our notion of time if we take the problem of the border (what crosses the border, and what does not, and the means and mechanisms of that crossing or impasse) to be central to any understanding of contemporary political life. The contemporary map of sexual politics is crossed, I would say, with contentions and antagonisms, ones that define the time of sexual politics as a fractious constellation; the story of progress is but one strand within that constellation, and it is one that has, for good reason, come into crisis.1 My interest is to focus on how certain secular conceptions of history and of what is meant by a 'progressive' position within contemporary politics rely on a conception of freedom that is understood to emerge through time, and which is temporally progressive in its structure (Asad 2003; Connolly 2002; Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2004; Mahmood 2005). This link between freedom and temporal progress is often what is being indexed when pundits and public policy representatives refer to concepts like modernity or, indeed, secularism. I don't mean to that say this is all they mean, but I do want to say that a certain conception of freedom is invoked precisely as a rationale and instrument for certain practices of coercion, and this places those of us who have conventionally understood ourselves as advocating a progressive sexual politics in a rather serious bind. In this context, I want to point to a few sites of political debate involving both sexual politics and anti-Islamic practice that suggest that certain ideas of the progress of 'freedom' facilitate a political division between progressive sexual politics and the struggle against racism and the discrimination against religious minorities. One of the issues that follows from such a reconstellation is that a certain version and deployment of 'freedom' can be used as an instrument of bigotry and coercion. This happens most frightfully when women's sexual freedom or the freedom of expression and association for lesbian and gay people is invoked instrumentally to wage cultural assaults on Islam that reaffirm US sovereign violence. Must we rethink freedom and its implication in the narrative of progress, or must we resituate? My point is surely not to abandon freedom as a norm, but to ask about its uses, and to consider how it must be rethought if it is to resist its coercive instrumentalization in the present and have another meaning that might remain useful for a radical democratic politics. In the Netherlands, for instance, new applicants for immigration are asked to look at photos of two men kissing, and asked to report whether those photos are offensive, whether they are understood to express personal liberties, and whether the viewers are willing to live in a democracy that values the rights of gay people to open and free expression.2 Those who are in favour of the new policy claim that acceptance of homosexuality is the same as embracing modernity. We can see in such an instance how modernity is being defined as sexual freedom, and the particular sexual freedom of gay people is understood to exemplify a culturally advanced position as opposed to one that would be deemed pre-modern. It would seem that the Dutch government has made special arrangements for a class of people who are considered presumptively modern. The presumptively modern includes the following groups who are exempted from having to take the test: European Union nationals, asylum-seekers and skilled workers who earn more than €45,000 per year. Also exempt are citizens of the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and Switzerland, where presumably homophobia is not to be found or where, rather, importing impressive income levels clearly preempts concerns over importing homophobia.3 In the Netherlands, of course, this movement has been brewing for some time. The identification of gay politics with cultural and political modernity was effected within European politics by Pym Fortuyn, the gay and overtly anti-Islamic politician who was gunned down by a radical environmentalist in the winter of 2002. A similar conflict was also dramatized in the work and the death of Theo van Gogh, who came to stand not for sexual freedom, but for principles of political and artistic freedom. Of course, I am in favour of such freedoms, but it seems that I must also ask whether such freedoms for which I have struggled, and continue to struggle, are being instrumentalized to establish a specific cultural grounding, secular in a particular sense, that functions as a prerequisite for admission into the polity as an acceptable immigrant. In what follows, I will hope to elaborate further what this cultural grounding is, how it functions as both transcendental condition and teleological aim, and how it complicates any firm distinctions we might have between the secular and the religious. In this instance, a set of cultural norms are being articulated that are considered preconditions of citizenship. We might accept the view that there are always such norms, and even accept that full civic and cultural participation for anyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, be included among such norms. But are such norms not only articulated differentially, but also instrumentally, in order to shore up particular religious and cultural preconditions that affect other sorts of exclusions? One is not free to reject this cultural grounding since it is the basis, even the presumptive prerequisite, of the operative notion of freedom, and freedom is articulated through a set of graphic images, figures that come to stand for what freedom can and must be. And so a certain paradox ensues in which the coerced adoption of certain cultural norms becomes a requisite for entry into a polity that defines itself as the avatar of freedom. Is the Dutch government engaging in civic pedagogy through its defense of lesbian and gay sexual freedom, and would it impose such a test on the right-wing white supremacists, such as Vlaams Blok, who are congregated on its border with Belgium and who have called for a cordon sanitaire around Europe to keep out the non-Europeans? Is it administering tests to lesbian and gay people to make sure they are not offended by the visible practices of Muslim minorities? If the civic integration exam were part of a larger effort to foster cultural understanding about religious and sexual norms for a diverse Dutch population, one that included new pedagogies and funding for public arts projects dedicated to this purpose, we might then understand cultural 'integration' in a different sense, but certainly not if it is administered coercively. In this case, though, the question raised is: does the exam become the means for testing tolerance or does it carry out an assault against religious minorities, part of a broader effort on the part of the state to demand coercively that they rid themselves of their traditional religious beliefs and practices in order to gain entry into the Netherlands? Is this a liberal defense of my freedom for which I should be pleased, or is my 'freedom' freedom, or is my freedom being used as an instrument of coercion, one that seeks to keep Europe white, pure, and 'secular' in ways that do not interrogate the violence that underwrites that very project? Certainly, I want to be able to kiss in public – don't get me wrong. But do I want to require that everyone watch and approve before they acquire rights of citizenship? I think not. If the prerequisites of the polity require either cultural homogeneity or a model of cultural pluralism, then either way, the solution is figured as assimilation to a set of cultural norms that are understood as internally self-sufficient and self-standing. These norms are not in conflict, open to dispute, in contact with other norms, contested or disrupted in a field in which a number of norms converge – or fail to converge – in an ongoing way. The presumption is that culture is a uniform and binding groundwork of norms, and not an open field of contestation, temporally dynamic; this groundwork only functions if it is uniform or integrated, and that desideratum is required, even forcibly, for something called modernity to emerge and take hold. Of course, we can already see that this very specific sense of modernity entails an immunization against contestation, that it is maintained through a dogmatic grounding, and that already we are introduced to a kind of dogmatism that belongs to a particular secular formation. Within this framework the freedom of personal expression, broadly construed, relies upon the suppression of a mobile and contestatory understanding of cultural difference, and that the issue makes clear how state violence invests in cultural homogeneity as it applies its exclusionary policies to rationalize state policies towards Islamic immigrants. I do not traffic in theories of modernity because the concept strikes me as too large, they are, in my view, for the most part too general and sketchy to be useful, and people from different disciplines mean very different things by them; I merely note the way they function in these arguments, and restrict my comments to those kinds of uses. It makes sense to trace the discursive uses of modernity – which is something other than supplying a theory. In this regard, it seems to function neither as a signifier of cultural multiplicity nor of normative schemes that are dynamically or critically in flux, and certainly not as a model of cultural contact, translation, convergence or divergence. To the extent that both artistic expression and sexual freedom are understood as ultimate signs of this developmental version of modernity, and are conceived as rights that are supported by a particular formation of secularism, we are asked to disarticulate struggles for sexual freedom from struggles against racism and anti-Islamic sentiment. There is presumably no solidarity among such efforts within a framework such as the one I have just outlined, though we could, of course, point to existing coalitions that defy this logic. Indeed, according to this view, the struggles for sexual expression depend upon the restriction and foreclosure of rights of religious expression (if we are to stay within the liberal framework), and so we can see something of an antinomy within the discourse of liberal rights itself. But it seems to me that something more fundamental is occurring, namely, that liberal freedoms are understood to rely upon a hegemonic culture, one that is called 'modernity' and relies on a certain progressive account of increasing freedoms. This uncritical domain of 'culture' that functions as a precondition for liberal freedom in turn becomes the cultural basis for sanctioning forms of cultural and religious hatred and abjection. My point is not to trade sexual freedoms for religious ones, but, rather, to question the framework that assumes that there can be no political analysis that tries to analyse homophobia and racism in ways that move beyond this antinomy of liberalism. At stake is whether or not there can be a convergence or alliance between such struggles or whether the struggle against homophobia must contradict the struggle against cultural and religious racisms. If that framework of mutual exclusion holds – one that is derived, I would suggest, from a restrictive idea of personal liberty that is bound up with a restrictive conception of progress – then it would appear that there are no points of cultural contact between sexual progressives and religious minorities that are not encounters of violence and exclusion. But if, in the place of a liberal conception of personal freedom, we focus on the critique of state violence and the elaboration of its coercive mechanisms, we may well arrive at an alternative political framework, one that implies not only another sense of modernity, but also of the time, the 'now', in which we live. It was Thomas Friedman who claimed in The New York Times that Islam has not yet achieved modernity, suggesting that Islam is somehow in a childish state of cultural development and that the norm of adulthood is represented more adequately by critics such as himself.4 In this sense, then, Islam is conceived as not of this time or our time, but as another time, one that only anachronistically emerged in this time. But is not such a view precisely the refusal to think of this time not as one time, as one story, developing unilinearly, but rather as a convergence of histories that have not always been thought together, and whose convergence or lack thereof presents a set of quandaries that might be said to be definitive of our time? A similar dynamic is to be found in France where questions of sexual politics converge in some unhappy ways with anti-immigration politics. Of course, there are profound differences as well. In contemporary France, the culture that is publicly defended against new immigrant communities draws only selectively on normative ideals that structure debates on sexual politics. For instance, dominant French opinion draws upon rights of contract that have been extended through new sexual politics at the same time that it limits those very rights of contract when they threaten to disrupt patrilineal kinship and its links to masculinist norms of nationhood. Ideas of 'culture' and of 'laïcité' (or secularism) work differently, and one sees how a certain kind of ostensibly progressive sexual politics is sanctioned, again, as the logical culmination of a secular realization of freedom at the same time that the very same conception of secular freedoms operates as a norm to exclude or to minimize the possibility of ethnic and religious communities from North Africa, Turkey, and the Middle East from attaining full rights of civic and legal membership and participation. Indeed, the situation is even more complex, since the idea of culture, bound up with a conception of symbolic law, is regarded as founding the freedom to enter into free associations, but is also invoked to limit the freedom of lesbian and gay people from adopting children or gaining access to reproductive technology, thus avowing the rights of contract, but refusing challenges to the norms of kinship. The arguments that secured the legislative victory for the PACS, those legal partnerships into which any two people, regardless of gender, may enter, are based on an extension of those rights to form contracts on the basis of one's own volition (Borillo, Fassin and Iacub 2004). And yet, once the cultural preconditions of that freedom are abrogated, the law intervenes to maintain – or even mandate – that cultural integrity. One can rather quickly conclude, on the basis of a variety of opinions published in French journals and newspapers, that there is a widely held belief that, for instance, gay and lesbian parenting runs the risk of producing a psychotic child. The extraordinary support among French republicans for the PACS has depended from the start on the separation of the PACS from any rights to adoption or to parenting structures outside the heterosexual norm. In the newspapers and throughout public discourse, social psychologists argue that lesbian or gay parenting – and this would include single-mother parenting as well – threatens to undermine the very framework that a child requires in order (a) to know and understand sexual difference and (b) to gain an orientation in the cultural world. The presumption is that if a child has no father, that child will not come to understand masculinity in the culture, and, if it is a boy child, that child will have no way to embody or incorporate his own masculinity. This argument assumes many things, but chief among them is the idea that the institution of fatherhood is the sole or major cultural instrument for the reproduction of masculinity. Even if we were to accept the problematic normative claim that a boy child ought to be reproducing masculinity (and there are very good reasons to question this assumption), any child has access to a range of masculinities that are embodied and transmitted through a variety of cultural means. The 'adult world', as Jean Laplanche puts it in an effort to formulate a psychoanalytic alternative to the Oedipal triad, impresses its cultural markers on the child from any number of directions, and the child, whether boy or girl, must fathom and reckon with those norms. But in France, as you may know, the notion of a 'framework of orientation'– called 'le repère'– is understood to be uniquely transmitted by the father. And this symbolic function is ostensibly threatened or even destroyed by the presence of two fathers, of an intermittent father, or of no father at all. One has to struggle not to get lured into this fight on these terms, since the fight misconstrues the issue at stake. But if one were to get lured into the fight, one could, of course, make the rejoinder that masculinity can certainly be embodied and communicated by a parent of another gender. However, if I argue that way, I concede the premise that the parent is and must be the unique cultural site for the communication and reproduction of gender, and that would be a foolish point to concede. After all, why accept the idea that without a single embodied referent for masculinity, there can be no cultural orientation as such? Such a position makes the singular masculinity of the father into the transcendental condition of culture rather than rethinks masculinity and fatherhood as a set of disarticulated, variable and variably significant cultural practices. To understand this debate, it is important to remember that lines of patrilineality in France are secured in the civil code through rights of filiation. To the extent that heterosexual marriage maintains its monopoly on reproduction, it does so precisely through privileging the biological father as the representative of national culture.5 Thus, the debates on sexual politics invariably become bound up with the politics of new immigrant communities, since both rely on foundational ideas of culture that precondition the allocation of basic legal entitlements. If we understand these ideas of culture as secular, then it seems to me that we may well not have a sufficient vocabulary for understanding the traditions from which these ideas of culture are formed – and by which they continue to be informed – or for the force by which they are maintained. It here becomes clear that the theories of psychological development that produce the patrilineal conditions of national culture constitute the 'norms of adulthood' that precondition the substantive rights of citizenship. Thus, Ségolène Royal, the 2006 Socialist party presidential nominee of France, can join Nicolas Sarkozy, the successful candidate, in arguing that les émeutes, the 2005 riots, in the banlieue were the direct consequence of a deterioration in family structures, represented by new immigrant communities.6 The theme of a certain childishness re-emerges in this context as well, such that we are to understand the political expressions of Islamic minorities as failures of psycho-cultural development. These kinds of arguments parallel the parent/child relation that Thomas Friedman articulated in relation to secular modernity, where the 'parent' figured as a fully developed adult. Anachronistic Islam is figured here as the child who suffers permanently from thwarted development. Family politics, even the heterosexual ordering of the family, function to secure the temporal sequence that establishes French culture at the forefront of modernity. This version of modernity involves an odd situation in which an intractable developmental law sets limits on volitional freedom, but the contract form extends freedom almost limitlessly. In other words, contracts can be extended to any pair of consenting adults – the legal achievement of the PACS that has become relatively normalized for both straight and lesbian/gay couples. But such partnerships have to be rigorously separated from kinship that, by definition, precedes and limits the contract form. These norms of kinship are referenced by the term, l'ordre symbolique, which actually functions in public discourse, and it is this order that has to be protected, underwriting contract relations as it must be immunized against a full saturation by contract relations. Whether or not such an order is unambiguously secular is, in my view, another question, an open question, but there are many reasons to question whether it transmits and maintains certain theological notions, predominantly Catholic. This becomes explicitly clear, for instance, in its defense by the work of anthropologist Francoise Heritier who argues, on Catholic grounds, that the symbolic order is both theologically derived and a prerequisite of psycho-social development. The refusal to grant legal recognition for gay parenting works in tandem with anti-Islamic state policies to support a cultural order, l'ordre symbolique, that keeps heterosexual normativity tied to a racist conception of culture. This order, conceived as pervasively paternal and nationalist, is equally, if differently, threatened by those kinship arrangements understood to be operative in new immigrant communities that fail to uphold the patriarchal and marital basis of the family, which in turn produces the intelligible parameters of culture and the possibility of a 'knowing orientation' within that culture. Of course, what is most peculiar about this critique of the absent father in the banlieue is not only that it can be found among socialists and their right wing foes, but that it fails to recognize that contemporary immigration law is itself partially responsible for reforging kinship ties in certain ways. After all, the French government has been willing to separate children from parents, to keep families from reunifying, and to maintain inadequate social services for new immigrant communities. Indeed, some critics have gone so far as to argue that social services constitute the emasculation of the state itself. One can see one such view articulated, for instance, by Michel Schneider, a psychoanalyst who registers his views on cultural affairs, and who has publicly maintained that the state must step in to take the place of the absent father, not through welfare benefits (itself conceived as a maternal deformation of the state), but through the imposition of law, discipline, and uncompromising modes of punishment and imprisonment (Scheider 2005). In his view, this is the only way to secure the cultural foundations of citizenship, that is, the cultural foundations that are required for the exercise of a certain conception of freedom. Thus, the state policies that create extreme class differentials, pervasive racism in employment practices, efforts to separate families in order to save children from Islamic formations, and efforts to sequester the banlieue as intensified sites of racialized poverty, are exonerated and effaced through such explanations. Anti-racist demonstrations such as those that happened in 2005 took aim at property, and not persons, and yet they were widely interpreted as the violent and arelational acts of young men whose family structures were lacking firm paternal authority.7 A certain prohibitive 'no' was absent from the family and the culture, and the state thus acts as a compensatory paternal authority in such a situation. That the state then develops a host of rationales for regulating family and school in the banlieue is further proof that the state responds to such insurgency through consolidating and augmenting its power in relation to biopolitics and kinship arrangements at every level. Thus, we might conclude that at a basic level, the entitlement to a notion of freedom that is based on contract is limited by those freedoms that might extend the contract too far, that is, to the point of disrupting the cultural preconditions of contract itself. In other words, disruptions in family formation or in kinship arrangements that do not support the lines of patrilineality and the corollary norms of citizenship rationalize state prohibitions and regulations that augment state power in the image of the father, that missing adult, that cultural fetish which signifies a maturity that is based upon violence. The rules that define culture as supported by the heterosexual family clearly are also those that set the prerequisites for entering