Civic Universalism and Its Internal Exclusions:

The Issue of Anthropological Difference

Etienne Balibar
The initial idea of this lecture is that modernity has brought about a
transformation both in the representation of the universal and the understanding of subjectivity and subject formation, which combines the political and metaphysical aspects of these two notions. I call the new figure
of universality civic universality, or, even better, civic-bourgeois universality, using as a subtext the full range of meanings involved traditionally
in the name burgher (Brger, in German), and I suggest that its main characterwhich precisely accounts for the universality performatively enunciated in such emblematic texts as the classical Declaration of the Rights of
1. This lecture, arising from seminars and classes taught in 2010 and 2011 at the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh, has been progressively adapted through seminars and lectures given at various universities and research centers in 2011: the Department of Philosophy at Essex University (UK); the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht
University (Netherlands); Columbia University in New York; the University of California,
Irvine; the Graduate Student Conference, UCLA Department of Comparative Literature;
the English Department, UC Santa Barbara; and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. I am very grateful to the colleagues and students who, through their interest, criticism, and suggestions, helped improve the initial formulations.
boundary 2 39: 1 (2012)DOI 10.1215/01903659-1506301 2012 by Duke University Press

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Man and of the Citizenis a perfect adequacy between the capacities of

the human and the powers of the citizen. This means that every human is
entitled to accessing citizenship (in the broadest possible sense, not exclusively statist and juridical, and not exclusively national, even if it is in the
national framework that citizenship historically becomes an institution). And
conversely, the rights of the citizen indicate capacities which are deemed to
express the powers of human nature in general. Let us observe here that
this already entails a revolution in the representation of the subject, which
annihilates its subjection to various preestablished authorities, legal and
extralegal, immanent and transcendent, picturing them as so many forms
of inequality and servitude arising from the individuals belonging to communities and social relations. But the story cannot end with these great
emancipatory gestures. It must also include a new process or a new regime
of the becoming-subject of the citizen, or, if you like, his (her?) subjectivation. This process is intimately linked with the realization of the universal
within institutions, in the form of processes of socialization, conferring
upon the subject its capacities to relate to others and perform universal
actions (such as exchanging, owning, learning, working, loving, etc.), and
processes of community-building, which transfer the function of enunciating and implementing universal values upon the communities to which the
subject belongs, such as, precisely, the nation, of which it forms an indivisible part, as Rousseau would say.
But then we may observe that where the claim of the universal is
equality and liberty, plus other subsequent values, the historical reality of
the civic-bourgeois world is more than ever, and perhaps more than before
in some sensitive areas, that of discriminations and hierarchies: subjectivation keeps involving subjection, albeit in new forms and in new spaces.
I submit that such a contradiction is not to be considered only as a gap
between the ideal and the real, but as arising from the universal itself, or
affecting its concept from the inside, because old and new forms of discrimination and oppression have to be not only reiterated or preserved but
reformulated (and, in a sense, generalized) in the bourgeois-civic world,
in order to paradoxically emerge as implications of the universal itself, requisites of its very institution. This means that they have to be located at the
level of what I will call anthropological differences: differences perceived
among humans that are also immediately constitutive of the idea of the
2. See my essay, Citizen Subject, in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo
Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991).

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human. And this involves an extreme violence, latent or manifest, because

it means that the only consistent way to deny citizenship to individuals in a
regime of civic-bourgeois universality is to deny them full humanness, full
membership in the human species. It becomes thus necessary to invent
concepts and representations of the human which will imply more or less
radical exclusions from the political membership, and to express these
exclusions in terms of the very universality of human differences, such
as the difference of the masculine and the feminine, the normal and the
pathological, the adult and the infantile, the intellectual and the manual, the
ethnic differences, et cetera. I also suggest that this antinomy accounts
at least formallyfor a typical double bind to which claims of rights are
exposed in the bourgeois-civic world, namely the necessity of reclaiming
the universal, expressing themselves in the language of liberty and equality
which discriminations and hierarchies contradict, and the antithetic necessity of opposing the universal, looking critically into its definition, to identify the universalistic roots of certain forms of oppression and subjection,
or at least the roots of their legitimation. I propose, therefore, a program
of dialectical investigation of the antinomies of the universal, inasmuch as
they affect the reciprocal relationship between the civic-bourgeois institutions and the subject created by these institutions, also called man in the
modern Euro-American tradition.
From this general statement of purposes, I want now to proceed to
the examination of some typical forms of the construction of the anthropological difference within the realm of civic-bourgeois universalism, or, better
said, I want to summarize some of the lessons that could be drawn from
such an examination, however partial and provisory it is bound to remain,
not only within the material limits of a lecture but more generally because of
the insufficiency of the concepts I have at hand. While doing this, I remain
at a rather general level, which authorizes the search for analogies, and I
rely on a bricolage of materials and questions arising from contemporary
politics and the social sciences, on the one hand, and a reading of philosophical and literary texts, on the other hand.

3. In defining this program, I am trying to combine the legacies of Marx (think of his critique of bourgeois universalism in the early essay On the Jewish Question [1844]) and
Foucault (think of his genealogy of the empirico-transcendental doublet in The Order
of Things [1966]).

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Who Shall Be Judge?

The first difference I will examine, heavily borrowing from a series
of analyses carried on by Michel Foucault in the early and mid-seventies,
concerns processes of the definition of normality through a simultaneous
negation of its opposites: mental pathologies and criminal behaviors in particular. In his lectures at the Collge de France from 1974 to 1975 (Les
anormaux), as well as in a subsequent lecture from 1978 for the Law and
Psychiatry Symposium in Toronto, called The Dangerous Individual,
which taken together I consider to be one of Foucaults most illuminating
genealogical investigations of the institutions of modernity, he would study
technologies of power which articulate a new field of anthropological knowledge with the governmentality of the emerging industrial society. Indeed,
these technologies never entirely eliminate open violence, but they mainly
rely on scientific disciplines which do not so much state interdictions or try to
terrorize the subjects (as Hobbes would recommend), as try to select, prescribe, and shape the individual conducts. This is a strategy which involves
setting up models of normality, but also having them accepted and recognized by the subjects. Historically, it will become the objective of typically
modern institutions such as scientific medicine and the penal system, but
also the schoolin short, the great apparatuses or equipments of bourgeois society. All these institutions operate through a broad antithesis of
normality and abnormality; they formulate discriminations or judgments
which distinguish among individuals, classify them socially but also morally
(judging their characters), distinguishing different modalities of contradicting the norm (i.e., of destroying normality or deviating from it). To the ageold question always closely associated with the category of sovereignty,
quis judicabit ?, or who shall be judge?, which Hobbes inscribed in the
heart of his Leviathan, they now give the democratic answer: judge shall
4. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collge de France, 19741975, ed. Valerio
Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003).
5. Foucaults lecture is found easily in several collections of his essays, in particular:
Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 19771984, ed. Lawrence D.
Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 12551.
6. Character is a category increasingly used in European languages in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, which becomes central in Kants Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (published in 1798 on the basis of decades of academic teaching),
where he distinguishes five characters: the person, the sex, the people, the race, and the
species (see the edition by Robert B. Louden [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006]).

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be who is normal, or it is the normal majorityeither directly or through

its capable representatives, the maior et sanior pars of old contractualist
theories (Marsilius of Padua), as it werewho in turn ascertain the normalcy of the majority through their rulings.
However, this is where things become complicated and the notion of
the normallogically constituted as negation of its own negationsproves
terribly ambiguous. This is not only because normality can become negated
in different ways and to different degrees: mental pathologies are divided
into idiocy, neuroses, perversions, psychoses, et cetera, and criminal law
distinguishes different crimes or felonies in order to adapt their punishments. Rather, what will destabilize the norm while practically enforcing
it is the fact that incompatible abnormalities are inscribed in a continuity
and may even ultimately become fused. This is a long story, ending with
the institutional alliance of psychiatry and criminal law, which produces a
paradoxical merging of the mad and the criminal as social and psychological types. What especially interested Foucault was a convergence of two
processes, taking place in the early nineteenth century and continuing well
into the twentieth century, on the plane of institutions and power relations
as well as knowledge and anthropological discourse. On one side, we can
follow a developing competition between judges and doctors (progressively
becoming psychiatrists): at stake here is the power struggle between two
corporations or faculties (in the sense in which Kant spoke of the conflict
of faculties) to decide which of them must control the survey and isolation
of great criminals who committed atrocious acts, such as parricides and
infanticides, which evoke the specter of madness and monstrosity. Eventually, the struggle leads to a tight collaboration of the two faculties, in the
framework of the penal procedure. The psychiatrist becomes a judiciary
expert, whose scientific knowledge is necessary both to decide which
criminals can be brought to court and whether they can be punished. The
expert, in a sense, is a judge judging before the judge, who provides a
pre-judgment. Foucault would show that this cooperation is crucial to
transform the crime from simple factual breaking of the law and assault
on the authority of the sovereign into the expression of a deviant personality, thus installing before the crime, as its putative source, a psychological and social figure: the criminal defined as a subject capable of crime,
because he harbors (and hides from others, but above all from himself)
criminal instincts or impulses. On the correlative side of the scientific
disciplines, we observe the invention and the epistemological foundation
of new negative categories: particularly those of perversion and perver-

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sity (an interesting doublet), extracted from moral discourse to become the
other side of normality, that permanently threaten it and could overthrow it.
The notion of the perverse individual increasingly substitutes old notions
of monstrosity, dementia, and monomania, and it leads to a typology
of dangerous individualsdangerous both for society and for themselveswhich calls for an institutional system of defenses. On such bases,
it becomes possible to envisage a continuity of criminality and pathology. A
psychological science transformed into an auxiliary of police and justice will
seek the causes of pathologies and disorders, particularly sexual, which
lead to committing crimes, and should be traceable to the childhood of
the subjects (often considered themselves as victims of perverse assaults
who have become perverse in turn)hence the importance of establishing a preventive discipline within the family (whose typical example was
the rigid interdiction of infantile masturbation). Finally, in what Foucault
calls a process of meta-somatization, it becomes the function of a speculative biology to relate these perversions to processes of degeneracy of
the species, which call for biopolitical defenses, both medical and racial,
eugenic and pedagogic.
The notion of a danger for the species indicates that what is at stake
is a return of the inhuman into the human, or the construction of a human
figure of the inhuman. If it can become an obsession, it is also because a
question crystallizes here which personally concerns the subject as a citizen, particularly when the citizen is potentially a juror in the democratic
institution of the tribunal. For Foucault, the modern criminal trial is a kind
of truth procedure, where the citizens forming the sovereign people (or
some of them, with the help of experts) not only defend their security but
also try to understand who they are, qua humans living in a public and a
private sphere, what they are capable of doingin other terms, how fragile
are the barriers which sometimes protect us from criminal pathology, sometimes dont. It seems to me that this confers also a reflexive function upon
the anthropological difference seen as a deviation from normality which
typically bars access to property, responsibility, and citizenship for certain
individuals. It belongs to a sort of collective or institutional introspection,
always receiving too many simultaneous answers indeed for each of them
to be really convincing.
I may be permitted here to refer to an essay that I had published in
1990 on the occasion of interdisciplinary debates provoked by a draft reform
of the 1810 French Penal Code, part of the great system of bourgeois law
created after the Revolution by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the subsequent

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law dating 1838, which still governed at the time the irresponsibility of mad
criminals and their subjection to administrative rules of mandatory confinement in lunatic asylums. I was already using those of Foucaults texts available at the time, and I reflected on discursive strategies of bourgeois politics
for making penal responsibility and social deviancy intelligible, not only in
order to protect the society but also to inculcate norms to the social subjects. I attached these strategies to the three typical ideologies of modernity (in the sense proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein) by using a simple
logical typology. To the strategies of liberal politics, I attached the idea
that a subject can be either mad or criminal, but certainly not both (thus
a logical disjunction). To the strategies of conservative politics, I attached
the idea that a subject can be both mad and criminal, thus a logical conjunction, which is periodically reactivated by discourses of social defense
invoking biological and sociological determinisms. Finally to the strategies
of a utopian politics, which can be either anarchist or socialist, I attached
the idea that dangerous subjects are ultimately neither mad nor criminal,
thus a logical simultaneous rejection, because deviancy results from pathogenic and criminogenic social conditions: they would escape the alternative of the normal and the pathological, or rather it would be society itself
which should be measured according to this distinction and which becomes
dangerous for itself (i.e., for its own members). Intellectually, of course, it
is the liberal position, pivotal in the system, which is the most fragile and
the most ambivalent: to stretch apart the mad and the criminal is to open
the possibility of a collective discrimination, which seems essential for
a democratic order whose participants are both fallible and autonomous,
meaning thatas much as possiblethey must protect their own normality
rather than have it imposed by discretionary institutions. But it also means
that normality works inside liberal society as an instrument of exclusion,
7. Etienne Balibar, Crime priv, folie publique, in Le citoyen fou, ed. Nathalie Robatel (Paris: Nouvelle Encyclopdie Diderot, Presses Universitaires de France, 1991). Now
reprinted as chap. 11 in Etienne Balibar, Citoyen Sujet et autres essais danthropologie
philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011).
8. Immanuel Wallerstein, Trois idologies ou une seule? La problmatique de la modernit, in Conservatisme, libralisme, socialisme, special issue, Genses 9, no. 9 (1992):
724.
9. In a recent intervention, Dr. Allen Frances, who had been chairman of the task force
that created the 1994 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV),
loudly expressed his concerns about the excesses of the new version under preparation
(DSM-V), and he did so under the headline Its Not Too Late to Save Normal (see Los
Angeles Times, March 1, 2010).

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to provide subjects with the conviction that they are not abnormal, or they
recognizably differ from those others who are designated as abnormal
by some stigma. This, it seems to me, dovetails with the implicit lesson
drawn by Foucault: power/knowledge instituted by justice and psychiatry
brings about a fundamental uncertainty with respect to the exact nature of
the danger threatening the subjects autonomy. We could also present it
as a double bind affecting anthropological differences in general. They are
not only impossible to dismiss (which means that it is absurd to imagine
humans outside of such differences), they are also impossible to define in
a univocal manner, in the form of lines of demarcation simply separating
classes or groups of humans who are essentially heterogeneous or possess different characters. In this case, what remains forever problematic
is to absolutely define what distinguishes a normal or healthy subject
from a subject who is mentally ill, or an honest subject from a delinquent or a criminal. A fortiori, it is impossible to simply distribute abnormals between the categories of madness and criminalitywhich could
explain why a liberal politics in this matter retains a utopian character and
remains permanently subject to the pressure of a discourse of society to
be defended and collectively obsessed by some kind of perversity looming
below its appearances of civility.
Hoc est corpus tuum?
Having sketched this first model, I can embark on other analyses and
discussions concerning, in particular, the ethnic difference and the sexual
difference. My idea is to examine whether analogous patterns of inevitability and indefinition (or essential indeterminacy) can be found here, and in
which terms they should be expressed. It is also to examine how anthropological differences overlap, how they presuppose each other, which means
that they are never reducible to a single model. Each of them has a specific history, but these histories concur in setting the horizon of the inhuman
human in the framework of civic-bourgeois universality. Ethnic or ethnographic difference was often projected into the non-European realm as an
object of scholarly study and administrative colonial management. But it
also essentially aimed at revealing the indigenous foundations of domestic Western communities. It has an essential link to the institution of the
nation, itself a composition of the universal with its own limitation, therefore
10. Comparisons with Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled
Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963), are indeed striking.

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to the constitution of the citizen as national subject, or the emergence of

what I called in another place homo nationalis. This subject is not so much
the result of processes of normalization (albeit they are still there, even in a
subordinated function) than of processes of identification. Marks of belonging to a given national community, or to a people (ethnos), are retrieved
in the individual and, again, interiorized by him/her as conditions of living
together: sharing the burdens and enjoying the benefits of speaking a
certain common language, belonging to a certain tradition with its symbolic and imaginary references, accepting the duties and sacrifices that it
requests, et cetera. It is clearly the case that both the objective and subjective dimensions of identity formation and identity reproduction are involved
in the anthropological representation of humankind as a single species
consisting of a diversity of ethnic communities. But what particularly interests me here is also the countereffect of such a representation: the emergence of the figure of the stranger as other (or the distinction of us and
them in ethnic terms). And above all, it is the return of the stranger from
within, in the figure of an intruder, out of place, as it were: this internal
other who is both inevitable and subject to the ambivalent affects of repulsion and fascination, likely to be considered either as symptom of an irreducible particularity of the national communities or the uncanny bearer of a
projected universality, the promise of cosmopolitanism.
On account of objective historical tendencies which generalize the
circulation of populations, postcolonial migrations, and constitutions of
diasporas, which destabilize established procedures of reproduction of the
identity of nations, and after more than a century of debates about the primacy of the biological and linguistic factors of human diversity, with their
shifting valorizations of purity and hybridity, what strikes me here is a
dramatic indeterminacy of the languages of race and culture. I shall leave
aside all the necessary and careful discussions of their definitions (which
are always both scientific and institutional, not to say administrative),
and I suggest that a genealogy of these categories, which are used to identify the external and above all the internal other, shows the following: the
racial and the cultural could never become absolutely separated, inasmuch
as they command, precisely, affiliations. As postcolonial theorists have
11. See my essay, Homo nationalis: An Anthropological Sketch of the Nation Form,
in We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004), 1130.
12. See my essay, Racism Revisited: Sources, Relevance, and Aporias of a Modern Concept, PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008): 163039, where I discuss the vacillations of terminology between successive official definitions of race by UNESCO.

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shown, a cultural element was always involved in the alleged biological

classification of races, inasmuch as it was indiscernible from a representation of hierarchies, relationships of inferiority and superiority among pure
and hybrid races, based on the antithesis of barbarity and civilization.
But a racial element was also (and remains) involved in the classification
of cultures, in debates about culturalism and multiculturalism, at least in a
metaphorical sensebut what is not metaphoric in the representation of
race?or, to follow the indications of Paul Gilroy, in the substitution of the
color line by the culture lines.
Over the years, I have tried to investigate the symbolic structure of
this racial element, and the reasons for its permanent reiteration, through
the tentative definition of what, after Derrida, I called a genealogical
scheme, which is dominant as soon as heritage or transmission of properties from one generation to another (and over the succession of generations) is invoked to account for the reproduction of identities. The genealogical scheme is at stake in the semantic derivations and displacements
from descent to degeneracy, from ancestry to genetics, inheritance to heredity, translation to tradition, et cetera. Clearly, it is profoundly destabilized by contemporary phenomena of transnationalization,
but it appears also as recourse against what is perceived as a threat produced by globalization to collective identities and individual rootedness in
a national tradition.
However, I maintain that in their very substitutability, which produces such disturbing ideological formations as racism without races, or
ecologies of cultural diversity, the categories of race and culture remain
profoundly dissymmetric, in spite of the fact that both involve a tension
of the universal and the particular. Drawing inspiration in particular from
Frantz Fanons work Black Skin, White Masks (1952), I submit that there is
a residue of unexchangeable difference, which coincides with the empirical body, or the inscription of identities in the plasticity of a bodily object
of desire and repulsion. This matter of the difference is highly sexualized
and accompanied by various ways of marking the distinction of the somatic
and the spiritual, for example, the color, which for that reason forms a last
13. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
14. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (New York: Verso Paperback, 2006), 105.
See Etienne Balibar, The Genealogical Scheme: Race or Culture?, Trans-Scripts: A Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences 1 (2011): 19, available at http://www.humanities
.uci.edu/collective/hctr/trans-scripts/2011_01_launch.pdf.

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refuge for the inexplicability of the human. It also provides, as we know,

powerful resources for performative reversals of the name race, which
combine a political and an aesthetic dimension. It is around the spectral
character of this bodyat the same time highly visual and made invisible
(Ralph Ellison)that Fanon had organized his phenomenology of internal
exclusion of the racial other, particularly the ex-slave, but also (retrieving
a key category from W. E. B. Du Bois) his analysis of colonial and postcolonial double consciousness. All these elements of a dialectical understanding of the ambivalence of color (Blackness, Whiteness) as a cultural marker of race inscribed in the lived experience of contrasting bodies
result, as we know, in a powerful enunciation of the universal from within its
extreme negation. We seem to find here something which is at least analogous to the pattern of uncertainty of the definition of the norm, albeit in the
realm of identification. The metaphoric designation of the internal stranger
as a foreign body or an intruder within the community, if it is a metaphor
at all, appears therefore as one that crystallizes the combination of self and
other at the heart of any subjective identity but also allegorizes its permanent potential of racial violence and political creativity.
One Is Two, and Two Is One
As for sexual difference, it is the most obvious (and most obviously
universalistic) candidate to the status of a constitutive anthropological difference but also in a sense the most enigmatic of all (and the one which, in
the framework of philosophical, legal, moral, and religious debates, intensified by the feminist critique of male domination and the critique of heterosexist norms, has been undergoing the most radical metamorphoses in
the last period). Because I want to keep a direct link with the becomingsubject of the citizen and the antinomies of civic universalism, I notice here
that the various aspects of oppression against women and queer sexualities that we criticize and combatranging from domestic exploitation of
womens services and reproductive function to massive exclusion from the
dominant positions in science and politics, the relegation of feminine sexuality to the passive side, and the localization of sexualities which are not
straight in the domain of perversionscertainly trace back to an immemorial past, in particular a combination of patriarchic structures and religious
codifications of legitimate sex. In Modern Times, however, their traditional
15. See Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

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understanding should undergo a revolution in order to resist the claim of

equality (particularly the equality of genders) that was involved in the declaration of civic universalism and manifested itself immediately in the emergence of feminism. This revolution against the revolution relies, it seems
to me, on the typically bourgeois introduction of a supplement of naturality
in the representation of the feminine, from which its contradictory relationship to the universal should derive, or a tendency to represent the feminine
as the bearer (and the residue) of nature within universality, qua conventional or institutional construction of the political assimilated to masculine
virtue or virility (etymologically the same word). But, on the background of
innumerable and pervasive power structures (not only the domestic structure but the structure of unequal access to public speech in a language
whose semantic and rhetoric are, so to speak, appropriated by the masculine), the exclusion also relies on a symbolic double inscription of the masculine, which allows it to function at the same time as generic (or neutral)
and specific (or marked), or as the part and the whole. I call it, therefore, the synecdoche of the masculine, which structures the discourse of
civic-bourgeois universality even today. That this supplement of naturalism
is resisted in every possible manner by women (but also frequently appropriated and sublimated by them) is no objection to this, on the contrary.
One of the clearest testimonies of the intimate violence of the struggle, the
antithetic tendencies of subjectivation, and the creative resources that it
contains, was illustrated by the feminine Victorian novel, as proclaimed by
Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas), showing that the dividing line of the public and the private sphere, or the political and the domestic, on which the
sexual contract is based, is in fact never fully tenable but always reiterated by the power institutions of bourgeois society.
16. Lets not forget here that modern feminism is typically a universalistic movement, if
there is one, whose founding figures (such as Olympe De Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft) both vindicated the revolutionary concept of rights and opposed its restrictive
inscription in the Constitution through the distinction of active and passive citizens.
Subsequent internal contradictions of feminist discourse on this issue are thus like differences within the enunciation of the difference itself.
17. It is the very opposite of what Jacques Rancire (in Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998]) considers to be the essence
of democracy, namely, the emergence of a voice which claims a share for the shareless,
the part of those who have no part.
18. See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Armstrong and Carole Pateman (The Sexual
Contract [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988]), in their quasi-simultaneous

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It being obviously impossible to discuss all the aspects of this structure, I want to concentrate now on a particular aspect which is also, I
believe, extremely revelatory, namely the discussion around the issue of
binarism in the understanding of the sexual relation as it was developed
in the psychoanalytical tradition and its critiques. A return to the reading of Sigmund Freuds theory of bisexuality and the metamorphoses of
the Oedipus complex, intimately interdependent, cannot be avoided here,
although it would require a very detailed discussion to remain immune to
simplistic evaluations, because it displays the logical constraints of what is
ultimately a political structure affecting the construction of subjectivities.
Clearly, Freuds theory of sexual difference and the relation of the sexes
as a libidinal relation, structured in the unconscious but not confined to the
realm of sexuality in the narrow sense, was always already political in its
implications and references. It plainly displays the paradoxes of parity,
as certain French feminist discourse would call it later, in other terms, the
constitution of a Human essence, where, in permanence, one is two, and
two is one. Freuds discourse was certainly imbued with numerous prejudices concerning the difference of the masculine and the feminine, which
he strives to explain along the lines of the Oedipal scenario. And we know
that this led him to periodically return to the issue of the feminine sexuality,
which in a strangely colonial metaphor he would call a dark continent,
struggling with the idea that feminine desire is entirely dissymmetric from
masculine desire, while at the same time maintaining that there is only one
libido, or one structure of the constitution of the desiring subject, which
could only become alternatively realized in a direct or inverted manner.
Interestingly, Freud continuously and uneasily resisted both the temptation of essential binarism and that of radical pluralism, to which many of his
followers, either male or female, oriented themselves. This is not without
books, use the same expression to show the reverse side of the social contract instituting the political in the bourgeois era, albeit with strong nuances. See also Genevive
Fraisses Two Governments (Les deux gouvernements: la famille et la Cit [Paris: Gallimard, 2000]).
19. On the history of the French debates about parity, see Joan Wallach Scott, Parit!
Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005). I take here the category in a descriptive and logical sense.
20. Freuds expression the dark continent (to picture feminine sexuality from the point of
view of men, including psychoanalysts) was used (in English) in his essay from 1926, Die
Frage der Laienanalyse (The question of lay analysis); it was apparently borrowed from
the title of a famous report on adventures in Africa (looking for the sources of the Nile) by
Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent (1878).

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analogy to what, a moment ago, I called the liberal position on the issue of
normality and abnormality. But it is also striking that Freud equally repudiated biological and sociological determinisms, and presented the structural
combination of choices which confront the subject in the course of his/
her acquisition of a definite personality, in terms of a superposition of two
completely open alternatives: a choice of identity between masculine and
feminine identifications, equally possible for boys and girls, and a choice of
object or modality of love between the homosexual and the heterosexual,
none of which is more natural than the other. This structure, both coercive
and indeterminate, is precisely the unconscious.
Freud certainly does not deny that there is a normative element
herehe does not even want to challenge it as an element of (bourgeois)
socialization and civilizationbut he certainly paves the way for a critical
discussion of the transformations of this element that other discourses preclude. I find it illuminating to callusing the structuralist jargonthe system of redoubled binarisms, involving both identity and normality, whereby
the antithesis of masculinity and femininity is supported or corrected by the
antithesis of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and conversely, a symbolic order. But it must be observed right away that the psychic constraint
to which this order subjects the subject is correlated to and, as it were,
caught between two elements of radical contingency: one is the historical
contingency of the type of family and family norms, where the positions of
parents imagined as incarnations of the sexes and providing models of
identification are instituted but also permanently challenged. Families are
battlefields. The other element is the contingency of the correspondence
and the noncorrespondence between the sexual difference as an anatomy
and the sexual difference as a psychic structure of desiring subjects. This
would show, in my opinion, that the Freudian discourse is not so much a
way of reiterating and imposing a social norm attributing unequal capacities to subjects, for them to become the bearers of the universal (e.g., citizens), than a way of problematizing, theoretically and clinically, the structures which make universal norms efficient, in the form of constructions of
singular identities.
From there it becomes possible to throw a renewed light on the
debate once launched by Jacques Lacan, with his theorization of the
impossibility of the sexual relation, and especially the last version he gave
in a suggestive but also cryptic manner in the 19721973 seminar Encore
(let us note in passing, practically the same year as Foucaults course on
the abnormalsthese are all aftereffects of the 1968 cultural revolu-

Balibar/Civic Universalism221

tion), in the form of an algebraic table called the formulas of sexuation.

I admit that in my understanding of this theory I am influenced by the interpretation proposed by Joan Copjec, even if my conclusions are not exactly
the same as hers. She pushes to the extreme some striking characteristics of the Lacanian scheme: its staunch defense of the binary form of
the sexual difference, but also its totally formal character, which makes it a
representation of the ultimate determination of identification not by psychological or social experiences but by the pure power of the signifier, or the
law, under which the experiences must become subsumed, because
unconsciouslythey must be thought, and there is no other thinking than
the one structured by discourse. According to Lacan, a discourse is always
also an institution, therefore it is always already political. Along these lines,
one may remark that the two halves of the Lacanian algebraic schemethe
one that formalizes the dilemma of masculinity, and the one that formalizes
the dilemma of femininity, being torn between the universal impossibility not
to be subjected to masculine phallic jouissance and the impossibility for
21. It is hard to understand Lacans allusions, puns, and cryptic formulas in this text
if it is not seen as a response to feminist critics of psychoanalysis, but especially to
reformulations of the question of sexual difference proposed by female psychoanalysts
influenced by Lacan, or members of his school, in the critical conjuncture after 1968,
which destabilized every discourse of the Master. Three names are probably of special importance here: Antoinette Fouque (founder of the Mouvement de Libration des
Femmes [MLF] with Monique Wittig in 1970 and later claiming exclusive ownership of its
acronym); Michle Montrelay (who has published, since 1970, articles on femininity and
the pleasure of the organ, later to be collected in her book Lombre et le nom [1977];
she became a leading figure of the internal opposition to Lacan and especially to Lacans
son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, which eventually led to the dissolution of the school in
1980, immediately preceding Lacans death); and Luce Irigaray (who was eliminated from
the Dpartement de psychanalyse at University of Vincennes, officially Lacanian and
controlled by the same Miller, after she published Speculum of the Other Woman in 1974;
it is my supposition that Lacan was aware of Irigarays propositions on feminine jouissance as irreducible to masculine jouissance, which she developed in her teaching at the
Dpartement when he taught his own seminar in 19721973). On Lacans seminar and
its relation to previous moments of his work, see Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and
the cole freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton,
1985), which proposes a number of clarifying interpretations and a partial translation of
the seminar Encore, differing from (and in some cases better than) the complete translation by Bruce Fink in the series of Lacans seminars in English, On Feminine Sexuality:
The Limits of Love and Knowledge, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. 20, Encore 1972
1973 (New York: Norton, 1998).
22. See Joan Copjec, Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason, in Read My Desire: Lacan
against the Historicists (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

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everything in feminine jouissance to become subsumed under this law

are logically completely identical. There is nothing substantial that distinguishes the masculine from the feminine, it is a pure and completely indifferent choice between the all and the not all (i.e., completeness and
incompleteness, or finitude and infinity), albeit situated within the limits of
a coercive order, which is open for any x (i.e., any of us would-be sexual
subjects). It resides only in the possibility of defining contradictory attitudes
with respect to the phallic function (equally deceptive, in fact): one which
pretends to be its owner, and one which underlines its incompleteness. As
a consequence, Lacans universalism, strongly emphasized by Copjec, who
associates it with a typically modern (I will dare to say civic) understanding of the formation of the subject as located at the same level as the law,
embodies very contradictory predicates. One might say that it destroys
or deconstructs the obscure notion of bisexuality only to transfer it onto a
symbolic plane. It is even more strongly committed than any other postFreudian variety of psychoanalytic discourse to the idea that there is only
one sexuality, even if one with two doors of entry, and this single sexuality
(which we may also call the human relation, named sex) is defined primarily in terms of the masculine phallic function. But to be One is not to
be The Same (as immediately illustrated by the contradiction of tout and
pas tout). And since he defines this function as a pure signifier, he would
deprive the individual men, the males, of any ownership, any right of possession over the function itself that is not a fiction, except for the ridiculous
fact that they are physical bearers of an organimaginarily compared to a
sword or a scepterwhich can be erected, at least for some time, and for
the even more ridiculous fantasies of power that are built around that bearing. This is indeed Lacans anarchist side.
If we now move to Judith Butler (and I am thinking in particular of
the more recent essays collected in her book Undoing Gender [2004]),
we will notice a reversal of this description which destroys the privileges
of binarism as completely as possible, in the wake of a lesbian and queer
discourse which sees the representation of a gender limited to two possibilities and only two as a sign of the fact that the normative structure of
heterosexism has retroacted on the determination of the genders themselves, or, if you like, the possibilities of sexed identification. It is widely
23. Other translation: whole and not whole, instead of all and not all. They are like
a holistic and a nominalist interpretation (the French does not choose).
24. For that reason, probably, Lacans discourse is liable to totally antagonistic interpretations and uses, which is possibly what he sought to obtain in the course of his confrontation with feminism.

Balibar/Civic Universalism223

supposed (especially in France) that Butler belongs to a relativist and culturalist epistemology of sex (or sex constructed as gender), which is constantly attacked by universalists, even compared to a consumers ethics
of sex, whereby the subject is one who is free to choose among an infinite
multiplicity of sexual practices, object choices, and identifications, and to
seek their social recognition as equal opportunities. This claim is apparently supported by the fact that, together with other representatives of the
transgender movement, Butler has gone as far as insisting that the body
is not immune to the effects of multiple sexual choices and orientations. On
the contrary, the bodys visibility and sensitivity become shaped and constructed historically and socially by the consequences of ones choices.
However, I would submit that Butler is a universalist herself, both in her
elaboration of a politics of differences based on the hypothetic combination
of liberty and equality (or a nonnormative universalism, a universalism
without coercive norms from whence to derive injunctions and violence
against the deviant bodies and behaviors), and in her absolute awareness of the fact that vindications of rights for minorities cannot not refer to
the language of civic universalism. And I would submit that Butler is, in an
important sense, a Lacanian herself, albeit in a heretic manner, turning
Lacan against Lacan, as it were. This comes from the fact that she pushes
to the extreme the idea (itself deriving from Freud) that there is no pleasure
that is better or more normal than any other, and that desire relates to any
object (objet petit a, in Lacanian jargon) provided it becomes a support for
fantasies. In a sense, there is no better illustration than her claim of equality
for the Lacanian ethical principal of not giving up on ones desire. But she
completely appropriates the trope that desire is the desire of the Other, or
that it is from the other, in a relation of address and lack, that I receive my
subject identity: which means that I unconsciously conform my conduct and
my own body in dependency on the way I construct the identity of the Other
whom I love, and to whom, in her quasi-Rousseauist language, I am passionately attached. Again, this is a figure of absolute multiplicity, of there
being always more than one or two sexes. But this is not Butlers last word.
In a sense, binarism, or the Law of Twoness, reenters inevitably the pattern, from both angles: with the fact that anatomy, if not a fate, as Freud
had written once, is a matter of the experience with which we endlessly
struggle in a melancholic way, albeit not a divide after which we should
become politically and socially classified; on the other side, through her
25. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); see also Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).

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description of the desire for the feminine thateven in the form of parodyinhabits the self-identification of one subject in the butch-femme
lesbian couple. It would seem, thus, that the distinction of the masculine
and the feminine is returning, neither as norm or law but much more joyously, as an open pattern of fantasy and imagination. This allows her to
write in a touching manner, apropos butches, that they/we are fatally
attracted to the feminine. Taken together, Lacan and Butler, after Freud,
seem to testify, once again, that the anthropological difference (here, the
binary difference), albeit never substantial, and therefore never localized in
the form of a distribution of individuals among classes with no overlapping
or residue, is also not something that a subject can avoid, especially when
it comes to discussing which effects it carries for the subject to enter, in a
passive or active manner, the realization of the universal.

This was a long presentationalbeit still very schematicof the

phenomenology of anthropological differences in their relation to the civicbourgeois notions of universality and, conversely, the patterns of subjectivation which govern the establishment of relations (relations of power, relations of membership and reciprocity, relations as such [i.e., as modes
of relating to others]), albeit still a very defective one. To conclude, I want
to propose a couple of philosophical remarks relating to the institution
of the universal. As differences which can be neither ignored nor stabilized, neither eliminated from the representation of the human nor identified with it, anthropological differences account for an extremely odd and
unstable pattern of relationships between inclusion and exclusion (in the
society, in the community, ultimately in the human genre). To be sure, there
are lasting and violent processes of exclusion which we can associate with
anthropological differences, because they either derive (or seem to derive)
from them, or become legitimated in their name. Race, sex, the pathological, but also the infantile, or manual, unskilled labor, separately or taken
together, account for the fact that some beings who are at the same time
human and less than human, or imperfectly human, become protected,
cared for, or minorized, but also punished, segregated, relegated, barred
from access to associations, professions, exchanges, communities, and
recognitions, which are so many instances of the institution of bourgeois
citizenship in the general sense. But already Foucault, who did so much
26. Butler, Undoing Gender, 197.

Balibar/Civic Universalism225

to draw our attention to the function of segregation in modern history and

its structuring of crucial institutions or establishments such as the hospital,
the prison, the barrack, even the school, insisted on the fact that there are
different modalities of exclusion. And he tended increasingly to privilege
the figure of an exclusion which works as an inclusion (for instance, in the
modality of continuous surveillance, panoptic monitoring of individuals,
which makes it possible to segregate them while not pushing them into a
physically separated space, beyond a borderline or inside a camp). And
I personally insisted in other essays on the importance and the multiple
identities of a figure which, in general, but also in a literal sense, we can
call the foreign body, or the body who is essentially out of place, because
it emerges inside a space where it should not be normally, or ideally.
The strange neighbor or the disturbingly integrated stranger who remains a
stranger, racially and culturally other(ed) within a nation-state, is the clearest example today, and it can take many different forms. But metaphorically,
at least, the abnormal is also a foreign body in the moral realm, and the
sexual transgressor who escapes the codes of binarism, while produced by
them and reacting to them, is another example. All these examples allow us
to better understand that, for anybody, to be a foreign body in a social
place creates an uneasy relationship to oneself or ones body, as well as to
other bodies.
This leads me to suggest, without going further, that the main form
taken by exclusion within civic-bourgeois universalism is precisely inclusion.
This is fully consistent with the fact that, at least in an intensive manner,
civic universalism has no exterior. Nobody remains outside it. Everybody
(every body) is or will become included. It is true also of other universalisms
(monotheistic universalisms, for instance), and above all it is true of the universal market (which always recuperates its own dissidents or fugitives).
But civic-bourgeois universalism builds specific institutions to define, control, and make visible the foreign body. And as a consequence, the foreign
body will incarnate the most contradictory situation with respect to the definition of the human: it is the nonhuman, or the monster, against which
one has to strive in order to become human; in the extreme, it features
the return or the intrusion of the inhuman into the human. But on the other
hand, the foreign body, with her otherness, is the absolute human, it is the
27. See Etienne Balibar, Election/Selection, keynote delivered at the conference
tRACEs: Race, Deconstruction, and Critical Theory, University of California, Irvine, April
1011, 2003 (forthcoming in the proceedings of the conference, ed. Kim Furumoto, Duke
University Press).

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arch-human: no being is more human, or to put it in Kantian terms, more

clearly embodying the destination of the human, than a criminal, a madman, a stranger, a racial and cultural other, a jealous or hysteric woman, a
gay or a transgender subject, et cetera. But taken together (and they certainly do not form a tout, an all or a whole), all these singularities are the
majority, the quasi-totality of mankind. They push the bearers of the model
of the human (or the characters of the human essence) toward the margins, the place of the exception from which it distinguished itself in the
modality of a negation of the negation (as convincingly argued by Erving
Goffman). This circle forms the absolute collapse of any simple, positive
form of humanism, but it also marks the aporia of the question, which language to substitute for that of humanism? Antihumanism will do only if it
is understood as expressing a contradiction or a resistance from inside.
This takes me to my last point, even more briefly, regarding subjection and subjectivation, and their relationship to the civic-bourgeois universal. I have just evoked, in oblique terms, the Kantian notion of the transcendental subject as incarnation, and interiorization, of the universal within an
individual subjectivity (which, in Kants philosophy, takes the privileged form
of an individual consciousness). It is clear that this philosophical figure
bears a strong correspondence with the emergence and political assertion
of civic universalism as an institution based on individual property, responsibility, and reasoning, transforming the vertical relationship to God into an
immanent relationship to the law, which individual subjects should be permanently responsible for implementing. If not the only philosophical elaboration of the modern idea of a subject who is also a citizen, it is certainly
a very powerful one. Foucault, in The Order of Things (1966), rephrased it
critically in terms of the empirical-transcendental doublet, insisting that
such anthropological categories as life, language, and labor form quasitranscendentals through which the subject becomes the bearer of the universal not in a purely abstract but in a concrete (or more concrete) manner: like attributes in a Spinozistic sense, they form the sites where the
anthropological differences must be located in order to become perceived,
known, experienced, and regulated. However, all these formulations (even
Foucaults) seem to remain indebted to an exclusively individualistic
scheme of the articulation of the subject and the universal. They bracket
the fact that the human (as was abundantly illustrated by our discussion)
essentially qualifies the subject when he/she enters into social relations,
oras Marx famously proposed in the sixth thesis on Feuerbachthe
human essence (das menschliche Wesen, which could also be translated

Balibar/Civic Universalism227

simply as the human being) is no longer conceived as an abstraction, or

an idea of the universal, inhabiting the self-consciousness of the isolated
individual, but, more extensively, as a complete set of social relations (das
Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhltnisse). Conversely, in spite of his
long rumination of the notion of alienation, or estrangement (Entfremdung), Marx did not really pay attention to the anthropological differences
that we have just discussed, nor, accordingly, to the subjective problems of
normality and normalization, identity and identification, sameness
and otherness. What happens, we may ask, if, keeping in mind that historically man is always a relational figure, we start taking into account
the anthropological differences not as contingent or empirical phenomena
affecting the universal from outside or merely limiting the empirical possibilities of its implementation, but as intrinsic contradictions, which at the same
time relate the universal to itself, and open a gapsometimes an abyss of
inhumanitywithin this transindividual relation called the human?
Even there, Kantthe arch-civic-bourgeois thinkerprovides a
useful guiding thread: in fact, he did not ignore the anthropological differences but suppressed them, or he pushed them back into the realm of what
he tellingly called the pathological. The pathological is not the empirical, simply other than pure reason, but it is the empirical simulacrum which
imitates reason, particularly inasmuch as its intrinsic link with freedom of
choice is concerned, and therefore threatens it with intrinsic perversion. In
many respects, for him it coincides with the body, my body which is me,
which defines my identity, and is not purely me. But we must go one (or
several) steps further. We must not only take into consideration the idea
of a divided or split subject, a subject with a reverse side (which is the
unconscious, or the ideology, the inevitable misrecognition involved in any
recognition). We must reach the idea of whatthis time borrowing from
John LockeI would like to call the uneasy subject, or the subject affected
with uneasiness concerning her own humanness. It is not enough to say
that anthropological differences are constitutive of the human, with universalism permanently facing the dilemma of eliminating them or integrat28. See my commentary on the sixth thesis on Feuerbach by Marx in The Philosophy of
Marx (New York: Verso, 1995), 2733, where I speak of an ontology of relation.
29. The category of the pathological is mainly used by Kant in his Critique of Practical
Reason (1788) and his Metaphysics of Morals (1797).
30. See my essay on Locke, My Self and My Own: One and the Same?, in Accelerating
Possession: Global Futures of Property and Personhood, ed. Bill Maurer and Gabrielle
Schwab (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

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ing them. It is necessary to say that, in their very multiplicity, they are conditions for the emergence of a subject relating to other subjects, albeit not
in the form of a simple recognition of the other but in the form of a question about what it means to see others as humans and be seen by them
as human, with the corresponding rights (or the corresponding right to
have rights, Hannah Arendt would have said). But if this condition, or this
site, is impossible to locate, or continuously changes place and configuration, the subject will not inhabit it in a static form, not even in the form
of a classical dilemma of the kind to be or not to be, to be Man or to be
Woman (homme ou femme? Cest la question), to be sane or insane, et
cetera. It will traverse it as a stranger, in a quest with no end to locate the
differences that one has to simply assume in order to belong to political
societies and communities. This is uneasy. I call it the irreducible uneasiness of the subject. But we may also ask the question, isnt this uneasiness
what re-creates and supports a dialectics of insurrection and constitution
which forms the never-ending substance of universal citizenship?
I must leave this question largely open. In Spinozistic terms, it would
be the question of the conatus, the endeavor that allows for a transition
from passivity to activity, isolation to community, from the becoming-subject
of the citizen to the becoming-citizen of the subject. My formulations work
in the direction not only of picturing this becoming as an infinite process,
or task, always to start again, but also of showing that it simply displays
the dialectics of universality, in its civic-bourgeois form. A dialectics, to be
sure, requires contradictions which set it in motion: in this case, clearly
the contradictions arising from the fact that a political institution based on
universal and equal access to the freedoms and capacities called human
rights also constantly suppresses, or limits, or denies these rights for various excluded categories. The power of this contradiction, its capacity to
make history, is indeed illustrated by the development of various emancipatory movements, be they movements of majorities or minorities (and
sometimes this very distinction is unclear, as in the case of feminism). But
in some sense, and this is also the lesson that I want to draw, such a power
of the contradiction remains abstract and impotent. What empowers the
power of challenging the institution of universality in its own terms is not
simply the contradiction, it is the difference: more precisely, it is the anthropological difference in its singular forms, because the anthropological differ31. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1976), see esp. The Perplexities of the Rights of Man, 290304.

Balibar/Civic Universalism229

ence is not only the site of uneasy identification and normalization, it is also
the siteno less uneasyof displacement, de-identification, and alternative normativity (what Foucault sometimes called counterconducts). In
short, my proposition is to picture the conatus of the subject-citizen in terms
of anthropological differences permanently overdetermining and empowering the political conflict of inclusion and exclusionwhich historically institutes universality.

32. Michel Foucault, Scurit, Territoire, Population, Cours au Collge de France, 1977
1978 (Paris: GallimardLe Seuil, 2004), in particular, the lecture from March 1, 1978.