Reinventing Community

Identity and Difference in Late Twentieth-century Philosophy and Literature in French

Jane Hiddlestone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351195737
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"During recent years critics have increasingly expressed their loss of faith in existing cultural and political collective frameworks, drawing attention instead to irreducible singularity and to radical incommensurability between diverse positions or groups. Hiddleston analyses and challenges this trend, bringing together political, theoretical and literary analysis and juxtaposing the works of critical theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard and Nancy with literature by writers of North African immigrant origin. She presents a critique of those writers who underline the absence of communal identification, proposes a new emphasis on relational networks interconnecting diverse cultural groups, and argues for a more subtle understanding of the complex interplay of the singular and the collective in contemporary French writing."

Chapter 1
The Deconstruction of Community

Une fois qu'on a bien marqué que le commun n'était pas le commun d'une communauté donnée mais le pôle ou la fin d'un appel ('appel à franchir la distance, appel à mourir en commun par la séparation'), la question reste entière de ce qu'on appelle ainsi, de ce qu'on appelle l'appel et de ce qui s'appelle 'commun'.

JACQUES DERRIDA¹

In the extended discussion of friendship and democracy that constitutes Politiques de l'amitié, Jacques Derrida wonders how to conceive the interaction between singular beings without having recourse to the notion of the 'in-common'. Observing that the motif of communality implies a set of requirements or restrictions—the desire to define the other within the community with reference to the concerns of an identifiable self—Derrida questions the appropriateness of the notion of'le commun' and suggests that the description of human relations requires another sort of terminology. If 'le commun' implies resemblance, normativity or indeed fraternity between certain types of 'masculine' positions, then the various forms of sharing and interaction that characterize the social world in a wider sense need to be conveyed using a looser conception of the collective frame. Moreover, there is no community of essential subjects or individuals, but each being is continually self-singularizing, resisting the imposition of a specific identity framework. The challenge remains, Derrida concludes, to reinvent this relation between singularity and collectivity so as to take into account processes of differentiation both within and between beings residing in a shared space.

The series of questions with which Derrida ends Politiques evokes a complicated contemporary debate.² A range of discourses seems at the present time to be involved in this reinterpretation of the singular and the collective, and they all struggle to reconcile a sense of manifold cultural differences with some conception of a wider framework or linking structure. Commentaries on 'multiculturalismi' and diversity testify to a recent re-evaluation of communal organization, and they focus on the ways in which frontiers are being traversed while reinforcing the presence of different groups within the nation-state. Certain commentators advocate the necessity of a new mode of thinking that will question both the hegemonic political power of the sovereign state and the cultural unification that at times the nation has been seen to imply. This issue is particularly thorny in France, since traditional visions of the 'universal' secular republic are being challenged by the increased self-affirmation of minority groups, giving rise to a large degree of uncertainty and controversy regarding 'the immigrant question'. Philosophers such as Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy participate in these forms of debate by interrogating the meaning of certain underlying concepts, commenting not only on political and cultural shifts but also on the deeper philosophical implications of these shifts. Given that commentators are increasingly describing the heterogeneous nature of culture and society, Derrida and Nancy demand a re-evaluation of the very notion of community, and they reinterpret the fundamental representational models upon which sociological and political thinkers construct their hypotheses.

I want to read these contemporary philosophies in order to identify the problems inherent in the discourse of community at the present, and to locate a new understanding of the relation between the singular and any shared framework. The chapter starts by establishing the context of the debate, and examines a number of contemporary socio-political discourses on community. These reveal the current uncertainty regarding conceptions of communal unity and ethnic diversity within the French Republic. I shall then analyse works by Derrida and Nancy in order to consider the ways in which they can be seen to contribute to this debate, and to identify the political implications of their thought. Derrida and Nancy suggest that community is always devoid of any essence, and they comment on tensions in the current climate and on the conflict between diverse singular positions and any normative frame. For the most part, they emphasize alterity and incompatibility within an 'unworked', deconstructed communal frame. Moving on from Derrida and from Nancy's initial conclusions, I then hope to read Nancy's 'Le Communisme littéraire' irt order to evolve a mode of thinking that helps to 'reinvent community' or the notion of communal interaction in the aftermath of its philosophical deconstruction. Parts of Nancy's work seem to value conjunction as much as separation, and Nancy moves away from Derrida's philosophy of the aporia between the singular and the collective by refiguring the latter as a flexible series of relations. Working with rather than against Derrida, and inheriting the spirit of further questioning from Derrida's achievements, Nancy offers a way of building new sorts of community out of the ruins of the old. His thinking also functions in a politically constructive way in this context, unsettling the impossible disjunction between the universal and various particularities, and showing how singular perspectives can also be seen to intersect with one another within a wider, interactive forum.

The Socio-Political Context

The theoretical deconstruction of the concept of the 'in common' takes place against the background of a set of socio-political discourses describing a transformation in perceptions of communal organization in France. These discourses imply that an appropriate new conception of collective identity remains to be identified. It should be noted that contemporary ideas on the nature of the French Republic originated in the Jacobin thinking of the 1789 Revolution and its aftermath. It is this period that saw the invention of the modern nation-state in France, a state that would amalgamate into a totalized, almost mythical whole the territory and its unified people.³ This gesture was accompanied by the discourse of the One and Indivisible Republic, which advocates the integration of people of diverse origins into a unified nation, equal and free, participating in a reasoned social contract. The Jacobins, led by the rhetoric of revolutionaries such as Robespierre, upheld indivisible national sovereignty and equality among citizens, which in turn were assured by the uniformity and centralization of the law. The club, which became the very matrix of revolutionary thinking, sought to institute a republican democracy through the search for universal consensus.

Most importantly, the nation is not, for the Jacobins, an ethnic Volk, but a body of French citizens who made and obey the law, and who participate in the national community by an act of will. Belonging to the Republic is determined by adherence to the contract rather than by the ties of blood or soil, and republican thinkers promoted universal emancipation and equality within the centralized state. That the republican community is not organic but created, however, means that a belief in cultural unity is perceived to be all the more important. Modern proponents of the dominant ideology in France have argued, therefore, that immigrants should be assimilated, and that they should be rendered—both culturally and politically—French. According to this perspective, immigrants can attain French nationality provided that a number of conditions are fulfilled; but French remains the sole language of the Republic, and French culture and history are taught in schools rather than the cultures of immigrant groups. The rational, secular and unified vision of the French Republic is seen to include (and assimilate) immigrants of non-French origin.

This ideology advocates a form of political homogeneity that organizes and unifies citizens from different backgrounds. However, some commentators feel that the French political conception of citizenship is at times accompanied by a desire for cultural unity that fails actively to recognize diverse dialects, practices and beliefs. Ethnic minorities exist in France, but it is felt that they have few particular rights as communities. The French Republic is keenly aware of the existence of manifold immigrants within its territory, but, according to Azouz Begag, the actual concept of an 'ethnic minority' barely exists in French discourse.⁴ The Republic welcomes immigrants on the condition that any person of non-French origin seeking to live in France will be integrated into the centralized state as an individual rather than as a member of any cultural community with particular customs or attitudes. The French state recognizes its diverse citizens without drawing attention to the specificity of certain cultures. In discussions of immigration in France, the vocabulary centres on holistic concepts such as 'intégration' rather than on the British concepts of 'race relations' or 'equal opportunities', which reflect a sense of the fragmentation of cultural identity within the nation.⁵

The republican ideology of the integration of differences is accompanied by the particular ethic of the French secular state. In France the concept of'laïcité' rules that religion and state are separate; the state is neutral and religion is consigned to the private sphere. As Dominique Schnapper points out, laïcité is supposed to signify an overarching neutral culture that transcends the diversity of particular religious affiliations.⁶ This logic, as it was applied to the educational system by Jules Ferry at the end of the nineteenth century, means that schools are a neutral forum where individuals come into contact with one another while leaving their own particular religious beliefs or customs behind. Initially, then, laïcitié was seen to promote the participation of different groups in a wider, centralized but nonessential community. At times, however, it seems evident that the state must inevitably have some part in deciding the nature of its relations with religious institutions; the secular state is perhaps not as neutral as it might appear, but favours certain sorts of practice. In addition, the concept has on occasion been distorted and interpreted in a particularly dogmatic way, leading to a failure to recognize the practices of diverse cultures. Although during the nineteenth century the institution of laïcité was initially thought to promote acceptance in a society that had hitherto not officially tolerated foreign cultures, at the present it has led in some instances to a new uniformity that masks or represses the diversity it set out to encompass.

The problematic nature of this issue is exemplified by the adverse reactions and ideologies circulating around the practice of Islam in France. From the point of view of some interpretations of the unified and secular state, certain aspects of Islam conflict with the French ideology of assimilation. If laïcité describes the dissociation of church and state, what people perceive to be the Islamic understanding of religion as a public issue is incommensurable with this French ethic. This apparent incompatibility has led to a certain controversy with regard to everyday practices. In a famous case in 1989, three girls in Creil were excluded from school for wearing headscarves; this incident gave rise to a tense debate over the question of toleration and also provoked reactions against the existence of different religions and cultures in France.⁷ Some continue to see the exhibition of religious allegiance as contrary to the tenets of laïcité, arguing that the veil constitutes an unacceptable form of proselytism. Many people perceive that public, republican schools should be a place where pupils could forget their cultural background and where they should be encouraged to think beyond their own identity and origins. The problem is clearly a complicated one: laïcité was conceived in the name of equality and toleration rather than as an attempt to silence or flatten difference. In the case of the headscarf, however, the model of laïcité has been misinterpreted to signify the active repression of another cultural practice that is perhaps in reality not as harmful, or as all-encompassing, as it seems. Many girls choose to wear the headscarf in France, not necessarily perceiving it as a symbol of subordination; and proponents of laïcité seem to want to suppress that freedom of choice in an excessively dogmatic way. The clash between the secular republican community and Islamic culture is perceived by some to be insurmountable.

The plethora of protests sparked by the initial 'affaire des foulards' testifies to a gradual transformation in the position of immigrants in France since the early 1980s, revealing a new uncertainty regarding their identity and status. After the French put a halt on the recruitment of workers and allowed family regroupment in 1974, the community of mainly male 'transient' guest-workers became a more diverse and settled immigrant population. As a result, if immigrants had so far been seen merely as a workforce, the 1980s marked a shift in attitude towards an understanding of immigrant populations as a cultural phenomenon. Islam, for example, has become the second largest religion in France: mosques and Islamic associations have burgeoned. The generation of workers that arrived in France in the 1960s has settled more permanently in the Republic with their wives and children; they demand to be thought of not as a transitory workforce but as a specific cultural group residing in France for the long term. The controversy of the headscarf affair in part gives expression to a sense of unease in the face of this reconfiguration of the French community.

Despite the consequent need for a loosening of conceptions of nationality and citizenship, however, French political debate regarding the position of immigrants has instead taken on a more anxious and urgent tone. As in much of Europe, immigration policy is no longer solely the concern of right-wing National Front politicians such as Le Pen, but has become a major point of political contention. Discourses defending the unity of the Republic have become more fraught and more virulent in the face of cultural change in the Hexagon, and even left-wing politicians have been compelled to take a tougher stance with regard to immigration. In 1993 the nationality code was revised, with tighter rules regarding the accordance of French citizenship and with the onus shifted onto the immigrant to 'prove' his or her commitment to Frenchness.⁸ After 1945, French citizenship was attributed to individuals born in France of non-citizen parents at the age of majority, provided that they had lived in France for the preceding five years (and that they had had no involvement in crime). But the 1993 reform required that those same individuals file formal requests to become French. Young people of immigrant origin would have to 'manifest their will' for French citizenship some time between the ages of 16 and 24. Furthermore, parents would no longer be able to obtain French citizenship for their minor children born in France. In effect, individuals of immigrant origin were defined as 'foreign' until they could prove themselves to be French. At the same time, Charles Pasqua, the Minister of the Interior, proposed the aim of 'zero immigration'. Although the laws were loosened again in 1997—8, the rhetoric of voluntarism is still present in the case of minors, and a good deal of consensus remains regarding the need to reinforce French national identity and to demarcate its borders. The renewed popularity of Le Pen's discourse promoting reinforced security, and his unprecedented success in the first round of the 2002 elections, testify to this continued sense of anxiety and unease.

In the face of these debates, many theorists and critics pinpoint the inadequacy of existing conceptions of the national community, demanding a change in people's understanding of the republican ideology of unity. Sociological thinkers have begun to re-evaluate the underlying notion of a centralized community, struggling to re-imagine the place of diverse ethnic and cultural particularities with the wider framework. The challenge remains to rethink the French integrative ethic while also allowing for increased recognition of diverse cultural specificities. Dominique Schnapper proposes an adaptation of the most useful aspects of French universalism in order to accommodate increasingly affirmative and pronounced cultural differences.⁹ She argues that the universalist principle can be useful in that it warns against the dissemination of different cultures into self-enclosed ghettos, yet at the same time such a principle risks degenerating int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Deconstruction of Community
• 2 Communities of Difference
• 3 The Identity of the French Language and the Language of French Identity
• 4 Cultural Oppositions in 'First-Generation' Immigrant Literature
• 5 Leïla Sebbar between Exile and Polyphony
• 6 Resistance and Subversion in 'Beur' Literature
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index