Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
Additional services and information for Philosophy & Social Criticism can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://psc.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Article
Sovereignty renounced:
Autoimmunizing and
democratizing Europe
Meyda Yegenoglu
_
_
Istanbul
Bilgi University, Istanbul,
Turkey
Abstract
This article suggests that the historical figuration of Islam as well as the discourse of secularization
has played a fundamental role in the constitution of Islams externality to Europe. The historical
figuration of Islam as Europes enemy is haunting Europe. The European secularist anxiety today,
which insists on the separation between the domains of the private and the public needs to be
understood against the backdrop of this history. If Islams inability to separate the religious and
the political was historically the dominant motif through which Islam was registered as the archenemy, the post-secular, post-Enlightenment period registers Islam as an enemy through a cultural
gesture. Derridas understanding of spectrality and the concept autoimmunity are deployed to
suggest that Islam as a specter haunting Europe undermines the sovereign constitution of a selfidentical Europe, but this haunting needs to be seen as Europes chance for a self-destructive conservation of Europe. European identity has to be rethought and renewed differently and this rethinking
requires that we attend to the present as well as the past and future of Europe, which requires the
opening of Europe to otherness and responsibility to the other. Such a rethinking of Europes history necessitates thinking about colonialism as well the living embodiments of this colonial legacy
today, which are the immigrants.
Keywords
Autoimmunity, colonialism, Europe, haunting, Islam, post-coloniality
The invention and identification of Islam as the enemy of Europe is a prolific process.
Certain features of the enemy disappear and others receive prominence in making the
enemy identifiable and familiar and these are contingent upon the predominant way in
Corresponding author:
Meyda Yegenoglu, _Istanbul Bilgi University, Santral _Istanbul, E-2, 205 _Istanbul, 34360, Turkey.
Email: meyda.yegenoglu@bilgi.edu.tr
_
A version of this article was presented at the Reset-Dialogues Istanbul
Seminars 2013 (The Sources of Political
_
Legitimacy. From the Erosion of the Nation-State to the Rise of Political Islam) that took place at Istanbul
Bilgi
University from May 1622, 2013.
460
which Europe identifies itself in different periods and contexts. The making of the internal enemy takes place through a multitude of social and legal as well as spatial arrangements. Ghassan Hage notes that when racist practices are also conceived as nationalist
practices, we can see how they always assume a national space and an image of the nationalist himself or herself as master or mistress of this national space. Ones imagination of
oneself as the owner of that space is always about claiming an exclusive power to manage and regulate that space.1 The imagination of a sense of European unity and the land
that belongs to European citizens is not independent of the institution of imaginary borders
and frontiers of Europe, which simultaneously creates the stranger or the internal enemy.
What is now first and foremost foreign to European culture is the non-secular ways of life
lived on European soil, exemplified by Muslim immigrant culture.
Yegenoglu
461
that is still identifiable despite its transformation and mutation. It is this figuration of
Islam that is now haunting Europe. Islam functions as an adversary which is recognized
as familiar yet different against whom Europe has become Europe. The enemys mobile
and multiple character is what makes for the interchangeability of or transposition of the
ones who camped on Europes borders into the ones who now leaked through its borders.
A unique spectralization is at work in this metonymic substitution between the Mohammedans of the 18th century and the Muslim immigrants of the 21st century. The constitution of the European subject as sovereign is certainly not independent of this history.
Culturalization of religion
The apparently secular but theologico-political tradition6 states that the separation
between religion and politics is foreign to Islam. It is Islams inability to keep the realms
of politics and religion distinct that makes it the enemy of the political. If Islams inability to separate the religious and the political was earlier the dominant motif through
which Islam was registered as the enemy, the post-secular, post-Enlightenment Europe
registers Islam as an enemy through a gesture that I call cultural. The enemy of secular
Europe that Islam represents now appears as something more than religion: Islam is now
religions becoming cultural. While it was the lack of the theological that made Islam an
external enemy, it is the excess of the religiosity of Islam, that is, its becoming a marker
of cultural identity that now contributes to the making of Islam as the internal enemy of
Europe. Islams excess religiosity can be traced in its becoming culture, becoming a way
of life, shaping and conditioning the Muslim immigrants way of being in the European
public. Islam, through which the displaced immigrants of Europe assert their cultural
belonging, identity and way of life, is regarded as the name of fundamentalization of
an individual faith by being misplaced in the domain of the public.
462
Yegenoglu
463
464
figure of Europe does not entail relinquishing or simply disowning the memory of Europe, its tradition, or history; but reconfiguring them so as to exceed any particular European and Eurocentric proclivity of Europe.12
The new Europe that needs to be envisaged invites us to be responsible to the memory
of the Enlightenment while being aware and critical of the colonialist and nationalist
bend of that history. The European experience cannot be embraced without critical
appraisal, as that experience also involves genocide, racism, colonialism, nationalism
and totalitarianism. A critical and responsible relation to the European past is indispensable for a future Europe, for a Europe to come. Derridas suggestion is an invitation to
interrogate, and not simply become heir to Europes past and tradition. By inviting the
development of this critical relation to the European past, Derrida encourages us to
rethink what it means to inherit and what it means to be responsible to the memory of
Europe. Derridas argument is not so much about a developed thesis about Europe but
a final call for it, analogous to messianity without messianism. The critical relation
to the European past involves a certain responsibility to the discourses that we inherit.
For Derrida, one is an heir even before one explicitly assumes or rejects a particular
inheritance and therefore we are what we inherit.13
However, inheritance, for Derrida, is not about being simply faithful to tradition or
developing a nostalgic relation to what we inherit. In that sense, to inherit does not entail
a simple affirmation of what is bequeathed to us. Inheritance also requires that we abide
by the responsibility that comes with it, which includes changing what has been passed
onto us. For this reason, responsibility towards what we inherit involves a task. That is,
responsibility to the tradition and its deconstruction go hand in hand as responsibility
calls not only for the affirmation of what has been inherited but also for the radical transformation of the heritage.14 Hence, inheritance comes with a double command: it
requires that we be loyal to and affirm what we inherit, but at the same time transform
and deconstruct it by not letting that tradition close itself off and thereby allow that tradition to open itself to its heterogeneity, open it up to a relation with alterity.
The double command that comes with responsibility attests to the aporetic nature of
inheritance. Responsibility in the case of Europe, then, involves both claiming the tradition of European discourses, in particular the tradition of Enlightenment, but also transforming that tradition by exposing it to conflicting demands and traditions. This
inexorably implies inventing new ways of imagining Europe. This means not letting one
tradition overrule, overthrow and surpass the other. It is this radical openness and unconditional hospitality to non-European Otherness, this negotiation with more than one
tradition, that characterizes European responsibility. The unconditional receptivity to
non-European demands and injunctions goes hand in hand with being responsible to
what one inherits. For Europe to be able to offer another mondialization, it has to remain
heterogeneous to itself. This requires that Europe does not relinquish or simply disown
its memory, but takes responsibility for that heritage of history.
When one discusses the history of Europe and its memory, one inevitably has to
plunge into the grubby water of the history of colonialism and its convoluted relationship
with racism. That is to say, one has to attend to the ways in which colonialism is remembered and/or forgotten, and how the inventory of racism is peculiarly disavowed as part
of that history. European memory or heritage needs to be discussed in relation to
Yegenoglu
465
colonialism and racism, both at the individual and the collective level. This heritage and
the amnesia that surround colonial history have important implications for the ways in
which race and racism are engaged with in contemporary Europe. The denial of colonialism as part of European history leads Theo Goldberg to suggest how racial denial,
despite the prevalence of racism and racially marked relations, is transformed into a
non-issue in Europe.15 By reducing racism to the Holocaust and making it the only reference point for race and racism, Europe managed the evaporation of the European colonial history and its legacy. Racism and race are recognized as operating only in relation
to Europes internal others. Such a gesture manages the denial of colonialism and racism
as being part of Europe. Colonialism is thought to happen in other lands, in places other
than Europe. Colonialism, in this view, has had little or no effect in the making of Europe itself or of European nation-states. And its targets were solely the indigenous far
removed from European soil.16 Despite this invested and desired historical amnesia,
however, there remains what Goldberg calls the deafening silence in Europe concerning
its colonial legacy.17 Race and racism, as they pertain to colonialism, refuse to remain
silent. To quote Goldberg again:
European racial denial concerns wanting race in the wake of WWI categorically to implode,
to erase itself. This is a wishful evaporation never quite enacted, never satisfied. A desire at
once frustrated and displaced, racist implications always lingering and diffuse, silenced but
assumed, always already returned and haunting, buried and alive. Race in Europe has left
odourless traces but ones suffocating in the wake of their at once denied resinous stench.18
This denied impervious, indiscernible but strong stench emanating from history is
made visible, pervasive and present by the 20 million Muslims who inhabit European
geography. Their post-colonial presence as the legacy of former colonizing practices
is reminding Europeans powerfully that race and racialized colonialism are now haunting Europe. The legacy of the colonial mark of the past upon todays post-colonial Europe is imprinted through the presence of migrants. The day-to-day encounter with the
living embodiments of this history effectively makes it impossible to deny the presence
of such legacy. The denial, which compartmentalizes colonialism in Europes history as
a superfluous episode, is practically made inconsequential by the undeniable presence of
ex-colonial populations, claiming and sharing European space.
However, the manner in which the questions of colonial inheritance are dealt with has
great significance in terms of its ethico-political implications. Responsibility to the colonial heritage calls for a new relationship with the neo-colonial present. Colonialism, as it
was lived then, and through its continuing legacies in the present, is the means by which
we need to establish a different relationship to present-day Europe; it requires a responsible awareness of its genocidal and colonialist crimes.19 It is such a critical and responsible relation to the European past, memory and heritage, not a simple inheritance of that
past or a simple evasion of that past with a guilty liberal conscience, which can open up
the condition of the possibility of a Europe-to-come, to use Derridas phrase. Such a
responsible relation to the colonial past and heritage goes hand in hand with its deconstruction. Placing todays post-colonial immigrants at the very center of our analysis of
Europe implies that the colonial past did not come to a clean end and that we do not have
466
an uncontaminated present. The colonial past is not simply to be found in the dusty
archives, but is here and haunts us in the suburban spaces of postmodern European
metropolises, in the multifarious forms of contemporary racism, in the collective fantasies and borders set between the comfort zones of middle-class domestic interiors and the
shabby shanty towns of second- and third-generation post-colonial migrants. Colonialism thus refuses to disappear and fade away in the abyss of the past. Its alwaysalready present nature can be seen in the way colonialism is re-experienced and
re-remembered. Hence contrary to the European collective desire for the story of the
colonial past to be closed off and consigned to another chapter in history, thus deflecting
and denying it as an essential part of its national history, the new Europe demands that
we establish a critical relation with this past and underline the intertwined nature of the
colonial past and todays racism. This would be an attempt not to repeat the dogmas of
the previous constitution of European identity in sovereign terms, but to transform that
tradition by exposing it to conflicting demands, injunctions and traditions. This is a gesture that yields Europe to heterogeneity and opens it to a future. By opening European
history to otherness and difference, our critical appraisal can contribute to the interruption of a unified and sovereign sense of Europe based upon the phantasm of an omnipotent, self-sufficient and self-identical European subject. The post-colonial immigrant is
the specter that haunts Europe. Rather than being a repressed or hidden secret whose
knowledge has to be deciphered, the undaunted presence of the past by way of the excolonial immigrants indicates a productive ethical opening in the phantasm of purity
of Europe and a deconstructive gesture toward an opening of European sovereignty to
counter-sovereignties. The post-colonial migrants distressing presence in the midst of
peaceful European life is in fact a reminder that the suppressed and forgotten colonial
violence is indeed something very familiar.
Growing enthusiasm about the concept of hospitality should be seen an attempt to
understand the nature of the encounter between immigrants, exiles, foreigners, refuges,
and other displaced populations. Guest is the predominant motif through which these
groups are portrayed which also led to an exploration of a series of other terms related
to it, such what does to welcome and receive mean, conditional and unconditional hospitality, hostility, home, ownership and dispossession.
For hospitality to be hospitable and capable of welcoming the other, it needs to be
extended without the imposition of any condition to a guest who is unexpected or unanticipated. For hospitality to be a hospitable welcome, it should be hospitality of visitation
not of invitation.20 In that sense, hospitality needs to be extended without being conditioned. Such an unconditional welcoming or hospitality raises a number of important
issues that pertain to home, ownership and proprietorship and the other concerns of subjectivity, ipseity and sovereignty. Uunconditional hospitality can exist only as unconstrained and hence entails a restructuring of the relationship between the host and
master of the house and the guest. Such a restructuring implies a deconstruction of the
at-homeness of the sovereignty of the host. This requires that the ownership and control
of the house are relinquished and that the home becomes hospitable to its owner. This
would turn the host (owner) into a guest received or welcomed in his own home and thus
transform owner into tenant. When there is unconditional hospitable welcoming, then
there is no at-homeness from which the subject is able to welcome the other.
Yegenoglu
467
Given that absolute hospitality implies a radical dispossession of the home, it also
implies loss of sovereignty. The loss of sovereignty not only pertains to the land that one
inhabits but also concerns the very concept of subjectivity. The welcome offered to the
other entails the subordination or putting the sovereignty of the subject into question and
involves an interruption of the self as other. The responsibility to the other, the subjects
being a host, is about putting the subjects being in question. This means that the welcoming subject can no longer retain its sovereignty. The welcoming that is offered to the
quest entails that the self is interrupted as ipseity, authority, mastery, and thus indissoluble sovereignty contradicts with absolute hospitality. In relinquishing sovereignty, the
host and hostess give up possession of their subjectivity; he is no longer in possession of
himself, she of herself.
Even though one cannot deduce a political program from unconditional hospitality
and even though unconditional hospitality cannot be reduced to a legal formulation that
the conditional hospitality implies, the two are nevertheless indissociable. For Derrida,
democracy is the possible happening of something impossible, and needs to be thought
as something to come [a` venir]. Speaking of democracy, Derrida states: It is not something that is certain to happen tomorrow. Not the democracy (national, international,
state or trans-state) of the future, but a democracy that must have the structure of a promise and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now.21
The happening as a miracle and lasting more than an instant implies the necessity that
the politics of hospitality has to be immanent to the present and requires the transformation of the present conditions of conditional hospitality, and yet will never be capable of
exhausting all the possibilities of unconditional hospitality.
Notes
1. Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (New
York and London: Routledge, 2000).
2. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
3. Gil Anidjar, Secularism and the Theologico-Political: An Interview with Gil Anidjar,
conducted by Nerman Shaik, Asia Source (28 January 2008), accessible @: http://www.asia
source.org/news/special_reports/anidjar1.cfm
4. For a keen analysis of the history of world religions see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of
World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2005).
5. See Gil Andijar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press; 2003).
6. For a discussion of this tradition see Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans.
P. A. Brault and M. Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
7. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New
International, trans. P. Kamuff (New York and London: Routledge, 1994).
8. For a discussion of autoimmunity in Derridas writing see Michael Naas, One Nation . . .
Indivisible: Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of
God, Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006): 1544.
9. Derrida, Rogues.
468
10. Jacques Derrida, Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of
Reason Alone, in G. Anidjar (ed.) Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002).
11. See Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Todays Europe, trans. P.-A. Brault
and M. B. Naas (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992)
12. ibid.
13. Rodolphe Gashe, European Memories: Jan Patocka and Jacques Derrida on Responsibility,
in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (eds) Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 13557.
14. ibid.: 151.
15. Theo Goldberg, Racial Europeanization, Ethnic and Racial Studies 29(2) (March 2006):
33164.
16. ibid.: 336.
17. ibid.: 337.
18. ibid.: 334.
19. Jacques Derrida, A Europe of Hope, trans. P. DeArmitt, J. Malle and K. Saghafi, Epoche
10(2) (Spring 2006): 40712 (410).
20. See Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E.
Wellbery, trans. P.-A. Blunt and M. Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1999); Paul Patton and Jacques Derrida, A Discussion with Jacques Derrida, Theory and
Event 5 (2001): 125; Jacques Derrida, Hostipitality, trans. B. Stocker with F. Morlock.
Angelaki, 5(3) (December 2000): 318.
21. Derrida, The Other Heading: 78.