Meyda Yegenoglu

Department of Sociology
Middle East Technical University
meyda@metu.edu.tr

 

The increasing political presence of refugees and immigrants in post-Cold war Europe has generated considerable debate about the nature of multicultural society. The demand for the recognition of cultural, racial, and ethnic differences has come to occupy a central place in the forms of post-national politics emergent today. Yet, a closer examination of the juridico-political regulations developed in response to these demands reveals a troubling tendency: cultural/racial difference is translated into an understanding of cultural diversity that treats minorities, to use David Bennett’s term, as “add-ons” (5) to the existing nation form. Thus the question becomes whether such an “additive model” (5) is capable of inducing a radical transformation in the concept of the sovereign position of the national self. This essay addresses the limitations of this procedural multiculturalist valorization and argues that the liberal imperative to tolerate and respect cultural difference is far from displacing the sovereignty of the host society in question. In discussing these limitations, I will situate liberal multiculturalism in the context of today’s capitalist globalization.

 

When we examine the policies and programs through which the culturally different is valorized today, it becomes clear that liberalism has become the regulative principle in many metropolitan countries. Yet it is far from clear whether such a liberal valorization and the granting of legal rights to non-normative citizens, the ethnically and racially “different,” will prove to be a counter-hegemonic political force. Is the legal codification of respect for identities in their particularity adequate for reinventing a democratic political space? If such politicization does not flourish in particularist liberal multiculturalism, then we need to be vigilant about what is being left intact. In fact, we need to take our vigilance one step further and question the ways in which such codification regulates the destabilizing force of the political and entails its repudiation, suspension, limitation, or foreclosure.

 

We are witnessing an increasing proliferation of literature trying to understand the new economic, political, and cultural arrangements that are inaugurated by global capital. The accelerating rate of the international division of labor, the extended capacity of multinational production, the development and concentration of global financial and banking services and culture industries, the rapid development in telecommunications, and the growth of a global mass culture have led many to talk about a process by which the world is now becoming a single and unified space. Globalization, according to the advocates of this position, marks the beginning of a process whereby difference is dissolved within the logic of sameness and cultural homogenization. Consequently we are reminded of the hazards and shortcomings of limiting our inquiries with nations and nation-states, for the sovereignty of nation-states has been declared to be undermined in the age of cultural, economic, social homogeneity, and integration.

 

On the other side of the debate, there are those who emphasize the impossibility of envisioning a unified global culture. For example, in “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Arjun Appadurai suggests that when forces are brought from various metropoles into different societies they tend to become indigenized in some way. To understand the complexity of the process of globalization, he suggests that we examine the fundamental disjunctures between economy, politics, and culture. For Appadurai the global cultural flows occur in and through the disjunctures between five “scapes”: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. Such disjunctures and flows point not only to the fluid and irregular nature of international capital but also constitute the building blocks of the replacement of Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” with “imagined worlds.”

 

Those who, like Appadurai, are critical of the global homogenization argument suggest that the globalized world is a contested and contradictory space. These critics point to the increasing proliferation of ethnic and racial struggle to argue that the homogenizing pressure of globalization paradoxically produces cultural heterogeneity. It is the encounter of the local with the global that is deemed to force the recognition of alternative histories, traditions, and cultures that have hitherto remained silent under the ruins of the project of modernity and colonialism. For example, Ulf Hannerz, in “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” points out that cultural differences now exist not between cultures but within cultures and suggests that world culture implies a reorganization of diversity rather than a replication of uniformity. It is no longer possible to talk about the homogenization of systems of meaning; between the different regions of the globe there are now flows of meanings, people, and goods. The globe can be imagined as a homogenized unity only when localities are discarded and when power relations among its constituting parts are ignored.

 

Thus globalization increasingly reveals the limits of Western modernity: various ethnic and racial minorities, their traditions, memories, myths, and symbols are now woven together in the increasingly dense web of metropolitan culture. In an attempt to understand how particularity and difference are articulated in this global culture, Stuart Hall, in “The Local and the Global,” questions attributing a singular and unitary logic to capital. The notion of the global which is capable of getting hold of and neutralizing everybody and everything and thereby contains all marginality in an uncontradictory and uncontested space does not accurately capture the specificity of this decentralized and de-centered form of globalization. Hall suggests that with the accelerating rate of migration, older unitary cultural formations are now breaking down. The emergent form of globalization simultaneously valorizes the local and the global. Hall does not deny the homogenizing form of this new cultural representation, but he argues that it is a peculiar form of homogenization–one that simultaneously absorbs and recognizes difference. This form of global homogenization does not obliterate difference but rather works in and through difference. While capital is spreading globally, it works through specificity. Although the growing global culture is now located in the West and speaks English, it is increasingly invaded by other languages and accents. It is therefore forced to negotiate and incorporate a difference that it formerly tried to conquer. In a paradoxical turn, as minorities reclaim representation for themselves, marginality has been turned into a powerful space. The identities that have hitherto been excluded now signal the emergence of new subjects, new ethnicities, and new communities, and they have acquired the means to speak for themselves. Although Hall acknowledges that resorting to such localities by retreating into exclusivist and defensive enclaves might become dangerous and can lead to forms of fundamentalism, he nevertheless thinks that ethnicity is the necessary position of enunciation from which the formerly excluded marginality speaks and grounds itself.

 

As is clear from this brief review of current critical discourse, one of the characterizing features of the debate on globalization is the opposition between homogenization and heterogenization or between universalization and particularization. Moreover, the particular or different is presumed to be endowed with some resistive and liberative capacity in the face of the universalizing tendency of global capital. I would suggest that this is a misleading opposition as it identifies globalization with universalization¹ and consequently locates the counter-hegemonic political struggle against the global force of capital in the affirmation of particular identities. In “A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism,” Slavoj Zizek rightly points out that it is deeply misleading to posit the rising globalization in opposition to particular identities since the true opposition is between globalization and universalism. For him, the new world is global but not universal; it is an order, which, rather than negating the particular, allocates each and every particular a place.² Therefore, what is threatened by globalization is not particularity but universality itself. Universalism, for Zizek, is the “properly political domain” as it implies “universalizing one’s particular fate as representative of global injustice” (1007). If we want to go beyond the rather simplistic praising of the particular, one of the tasks that awaits us is to develop a conceptual framework that will allow us to rethink globalization and the apparent counter-tendency of valorization of particular identities as a double gesture of capital. What needs to be questioned is whether the particular that is valorized in multiculturalist politics constitutes a destabilizing political force in the wake of global abstraction of transnational capitalism which now operates completely divorced from its specific origins in Europe, as Dirlik argues in “The Global in the Local,” and whose immanent logic remains indifferent to the boundaries of the nation-state, as Zizek suggests in “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.”

 

The decentering of capitalism, its deterritorialization and abstraction, implies the difficulty of pointing to any nation or region as the center of global capitalism. This has led many to emphasize the qualitatively different nature of global capitalism from its earlier forms. For Dirlik, this qualitative difference of global capitalism can be discerned in the authentic global abstraction capitalism has achieved, in the decentering and production of networks of urban formations without a clearly definable center–a network which is then relinked via transnational corporations (30). Likewise, in “Ambiguous Universality,” Etienne Balibar delineates the transformations created in the geographical and geopolitical pattern of the world and points to the multiplication of centers, which form a network rather than a “core” area (52). Similarly, Zizek suggests that the final moment of capitalism entails the cutting of the umbilical cord of global companies with their mother-nation. It is thus no longer possible to pin down a colonizing agency as in the case of traditional imperialist colonialism. The paradox of this form of colonization resides in the fact that it takes place without a colonizing nation-state, as the colonizing agents now become the global companies themselves (“Multiculturalism” 43-52). Dirlik finds the concern with the local in the wake of global capitalism ironic for the following reason: while disorganizing earlier forms and reconfiguring global relations, global capitalism enhances an awareness of the local so as to be able to render the local manipulable in its hands, pointing to it as the site of resistance to capital (35). Therefore the privileging of the local without the recognition of this context and the concomitant ideological criticism of global capitalism voiced from the presumably resistive site of the local falls prey to the ideological legitimization of the structures which are indeed the very production of global capitalism. For Dirlik, the limitations of such criticism stem from the fact that global capitalism leaves no local that is not already worked over, continually disorganized, reconstituted, or assimilated as part of its universalizing and homogenizing operations (37).

 

What do we make of the growing liberal multiculturalist dictum to respect and tolerate the racially, culturally, and ethnically different in the wake of the tendency of capital for global abstraction? Can these two trends be regarded as contradictory? In other words, does multiculturalist tolerance for difference, which not only acknowledges the value of each and every group’s cultural characteristics but also tries to amend the wrong each one of them is subjected to through various juridical and legal procedures, signal the emergence of a counter-political force against the global hegemony of capital?

 

Slavoj Zizek, in his reading of the three different meanings of universality distinguished by Balibar, sees multiculturalist tolerance, respect and protection of human rights, democracy, and so forth as the hegemonic fiction of the real universality of today’s globalization. (“Multiculturalism” 41). The concrete universality of global order is supplanted by allowing each particular lifestyle to flourish in its particularity. For Zizek, the modern era, whose predominant form of concrete universality is the nation-state, worked by seizing the individual directly, restraining his or her freedom as the citizen of a nation-state. Against the de-nationalization of the ethnic into the national of the modern period, the intensification of global market forces entails the ethnicization of the national and renewed reconstitution of ethnic roots. Respect and tolerance for the ethnically different is a reaction to the universal dimension of the world market and hence occurs against its background and on its very terrain (42). Multiculturalism, in Zizek’s formulation, is the form of the appearance of universality in its exact mirror opposite and is therefore the ideal form of the ideology of global capitalism. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Gayatri Spivak also points to the bond between liberal multiculturalism and global capitalism. She suggests that “liberal multiculturalism is determined by the demands of contemporary transnational capitalisms” (397) which secure the means of gaining the consent of developing nations in the financialization of the globe.

 

Perhaps the originality of Zizek’s argument does not lie in the link he establishes between multiculturalism and the interests of global capitalism. Spivak, Jameson, Dirlik and Hall, in their different ways, have developed similar arguments. But there is more to Zizek’s formulation. Focusing his attention particularly on the implications of the notions of respect and tolerance, he suggests that multiculturalism entails a Eurocentric distance when it respects and tolerates the local and particular cultures (44). In this sense, multiculturalism is based on a disavowed and inverted self-referential form of racism as it empties its own position of all positive content. The racism of multiculturalism does not reside in its being against the values of other cultures. Quite the contrary: it respects and tolerates other cultures, but in respecting and tolerating the different, it maintains a distance which enables it to retain a privileged position of empty universality. It is this emptied universal position which enables one to appreciate (or depreciate) other local cultures. Thus multiculturalist respect for the particularity of the other is indeed a form of asserting one’s own superiority and sovereignty. As David Lloyd cogently describes in “Race under Representation,” the alleged neutrality and universality is at the same time a process that secures a sovereign status for the subject:

 

The position occupied by the dominant individual is that of the Subject without properties. The Subject with “unlimited properties” is precisely the undetermined subject . . . Its universality is attained by virtue of literal indifference: this Subject becomes representative in consequence of being able to take anyone’s place, of occupying any place, of a pure exchangeability. Universal where all others are particular, partial, this Subject is the perfect, disinterested judge formed for and by the public sphere. (70)

 

In Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, I have suggested that it is the centering of the self, which, by setting itself off from the particular, allows its universalizing gesture (103). But, as Zizek suggests, the critical task here is not to expose the truth of multiculturalism, which is presumed to be the concealment of particular roots behind the mask of universality. Rather, the problematic of multiculturalism, premised on the hybrid co-existence of diverse cultural forms, “is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as universal world system; it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary world” (“Multiculturalism” 45). Therefore, for Zizek, “the true horror does not reside in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital, but rather in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course, that there is effectively no particular Secret Agent who animates it” (46). Precisely for this reason, the fight for cultural difference and respect for minorities leaves the basic universalizing operation of global capitalism unharmed and intact and hence needs to be seen as symptomatic of the suffocation and regulation of “politics proper” (“A Leftist Plea” 988-999).³ The task, therefore, is to understand the mechanisms by which this regulation, suffocation, and foreclosure are managed. If the institutionalized multiculturalist pluralism that characterizes the post-national global order implies a foreclosure of politics proper and is far from offering a potential for democratic politicization, then where do we locate the possibility of a politics that interrupts this foreclosure? To discuss this, allow me to make a detour through Jacques Derrida’s argument concerning conditional and unconditional hospitality.

 

HOSPITALITY AS LAW

 

In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida reads Kant’s writings on cosmopolitan law and draws our attention to his essay “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project,” particularly the “Third Definitive Article for a Perpetual Peace” which pertains to the “right of hospitality”: “The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.” Derrida notes that this article is limited by a number of conditions. From the very beginning we are confronted with the question of conditional hospitality. The question of hospitality in Kant’s writings pulls us into the domain of law, citizenship and the relation the state has with its subjects. Universal hospitality here is only juridical and political. Cosmopolitan law is about international agreement and refers to the condition of justice and law that is to be decided by nations. Hospitality is treated as a question of rights, justice and obligation that is to be regulated by law.⁴ Resting on a juridical and political definition, the Kantian formulation is based not on granting the right of residence but only the right of temporary sojourn. As a juridical regulation, it concerns the rights of citizens of states that are to be regulated and deliberated by a cosmopolitical constitution. As such, it suspends and conditions the immediate, infinite, and unconditional welcoming of the other (87).

 

Derrida directs our attention to the fact that conditional hospitality is offered at the owner’s place, home, nation, state, or city–that is, at a place where one is defined as the master and where unconditional hospitality or unconditional trespassing of the door is not possible. The host, the non-guest, the one who accepts, the one who offers hospitality, the one who welcomes, is the owner of a home and therefore is the master of the home.⁵

 

As I mentioned above, Derrida directs our attention to the fact that in Kant’s essay, hospitality is framed as a question of law, an obligation, a duty, and a right: it refers to the welcoming of an alien/stranger other as a non-enemy. The formulation of hospitality as a question of law weaves it with contradiction because the welcoming of the other within the limits of law is possible on the condition that the host, the owner of the home, the one who accepts, remains the master of the home and thereby retains his/her authority in that place. The law of hospitality is the law of oikonomia, the law of one’s home. Offered as the law of place, hospitality lays down the limits of a place and retains the authority over that place, thus limiting the gift that is offered, retaining the self as self in one’s own home as the condition of hospitality. In making this the condition of hospitality, it affirms the law of the same. Hospitality is a giving gesture. But with the hospitality as law, what this gesture in fact does is to subject the stranger/foreigner to the law of the host’s home. In this way, the foreigner is allowed to enter the host’s space under conditions the host has determined. Hence conditional welcoming entails a way of insinuating a place from which one invites the other and hence lays down the conditions for “appropriating for oneself a place to welcome the other, or, worse, welcoming the other in order to appropriate for oneself a place and then speak the language of hospitality” (15-6). Therefore the law of hospitality is characterized by a limitation. The host affirms the position of a master in his/her own home; in the space and things he/she provides to the stranger/guest, the host assures his/her sovereignty and says: this space belongs to me; we are in my home. Welcome to me. Feel at home but on the condition that you obey the rules of hospitality (14). This gesture affirms one’s sovereignty and one’s being at one’s own home. For this reason, hospitality as law limits itself with a threshold.⁶

 

Drawing on Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the contradictions inherent in conditional hospitality, we can suggest that multiculturalist tolerance of minorities within the host nation-state is not for nothing. Welcoming the other in the form of codified multiculturalist tolerance implies a conditional welcoming, as the hospitality offered remains limited within law and jurisdiction. But more importantly, this kind of tolerance does not result in a fundamental modification of the host subject’s mode of inhabiting the territory that is deemed to be solely within his/her possession. Far from laying the grounds for an interruption of sovereign identity of the self, multiculturalist respect and tolerance implies the conditional welcoming of the guest within the prescribed limits of the law and hence implies a reassertion of mastery over the national space as it enables the subject to appropriate a place for itself–an empty and universal and therefore sovereign place–from which the other is welcomed. Thus the place from which multiculturalist tolerance welcomes the particularity of the other, fortified by codifications such as affirmative action and other legal measures, is what precisely enables the disavowed and inverted self-referentiality of racist hospitality which by emptying the host’s position from any positive content asserts its superiority and sovereignty.

 

The inherent paradox of multiculturalism’s conditional and lawful welcoming of the other as guest can be productively understood as conforming to “the structure of exception” that Giorgio Agamben discusses in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. In discussing this, I want to refer to the German case where the paradox of the inclusion of minorities within the limits of law can be illustrated. All of the laws that regulate the conditions of arrival, presence, and departure of “guest-workers” in Germany reveal that the overriding concern is that of recruitment of a short-term labor force. For this reason, residence permits are conferred only as work permits. Laws explicitly anticipate that the workers will leave Germany when the needs of capital are fulfilled. The fact that the workers’ presence is regarded as temporary makes clear that the new regulations are seen as an exception: a parenthesis to be opened and eventually closed. The logic underlying these laws is that the acceptance/welcoming of foreign labor is a conditional one, as the workers’ presence, which is expected to be temporary, is deemed to be an exception to the general rule. Tellingly, the term “migrant” is not typically used to name this group. As guests, these workers are accepted as an exception to the general rule of membership in the German polity. Their welcoming is not regulated within the framework of the general rule of law. In accordance with the persistent and widespread sentiment that declares that “Germany is not a land of immigration,” the conditional welcoming or the temporary hosting of foreign labor appears at first glance to be set outside the purview of general law. Hence these regulations are nothing but the name of an interim, an exception.

 

Following Agamben, we can ask whether as an exception, the conditional welcoming of workers indicates that they are left outside the sovereign law of the host society? It is clear that this temporary foreign labor force has been included in the German territory without being turned into proper members of the polity. Their membership is undecidable from the perspective of the German self and law since their inclusion exceeds membership, testifying to the impasse of a system based on law, which is incapable of making their inclusion coincide with membership. As guests having temporary abode, they are not properly inside. But does this indicate that they are outside the purview of sovereign and general law? One way to approach this dynamic between outside and inside is to see them as a limit figure which brings into crisis the clear distinction between what is inside and what is outside. Surely this not an altogether invalid way of grasping the dynamic between the guest and the host that is structured through the law, but it is a limited one insofar as the paradox of exception is concerned.

 

Exception, Agamben notes, “embodies a kind of membership without inclusion” (24). What defines the German sovereign claim of ownership of the land can be understood with Agamben’s following remarks: “what defines the character of the sovereign claim is precisely that it applies to the exception in no longer applying to it, that it includes what is outside itself . . . . What cannot be included in any way is included in the form of the exception” (24). It seems that we can talk about a paradoxical inclusion of guest-workers, which is indeed an “inclusive exclusion” (21). For Agamben, the regulation that is exercised by the law is achieved not by a command or prescription, but by the creation of “the sphere of its own reference in real life and make that reference regular” (26). The sovereign claim of the general law is constituted by having a grip over the exception and by articulating it into its domain through an inclusive exclusion. It is through the exception, through the inclusive exclusion of the exception, that the law is able to generate and cultivate itself. The apparent exclusion of the exception is in fact an indication of its paradoxical inclusion in the juridical order.

 

For Agamben, when we see exception as fundamental to the structure of the constitution of sovereignty, then sovereignty can be grasped neither as an exclusively political nor as a juridical category; it is not “a power external to law (Schmitt)” or to the supreme rule of juridical order (Hans Kelsen): it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it” (28). Following Jean-Luc Nancy’s suggestion, he gives the name ban to “this potentiality . . . of the law to maintain itself in its own privation, to apply in no longer applying” (28). The law, in excluding or banning, does not place the exception to its exteriority, but abandons or threatens it on a threshold where the distinction between outside and inside, life and law, becomes blurred. It becomes difficult to say in a definite manner whether the one who is banned is outside or inside the juridical order. The paradox of sovereignty is that it leaves nothing outside the law as it has a hold on life even when it abandons what it interdicts.

 

In offering hospitality that is conditional, the German national self appropriates a place for himself/herself so as to be able to say welcome. This entails not only maintaining the status of the German national self as master, but more importantly it institutes a welcoming in order to nourish the sovereignty of the German subject that was already in place. To understand the dynamic that is operating here, we can establish a link between Derrida’s understanding of “conditional hospitality” and what Agamben calls “inclusive exclusion.” Though pushed outside, the provisional acceptance of the guest-workers enables the regeneration and nourishment of the German national self, which needs to reconstitute its sovereignty each time anew. Such a sovereign self maintains and nurtures itself not by pushing particular others to its exteriority or outside the purview of general law. On the contrary, it is their inclusive exclusion, which the conditional welcoming enables, that is indispensable for a reassertion of a sovereign German national self. The empty and universal position of the sovereign claim enabled by the general rule of law is capable of instituting conditional hospitality as an exception and this enables the means to codify respect and tolerance for the different and confer upon them rights in the form of law. It is precisely at this point that we need to be vigilant and to problematize this codification by asking what is being negated and foreclosed here. Does this codification entail the opening of the space of politics or does it effectively signal the circumscription of what Zizek calls “politics proper” or what Antonio Negri calls “constituent power”?

 

POLITICS

 

In his discussion of the three forms of universality, Balibar gives the proposition concerning human rights as the example of ideal universality (65). Reversing the traditional relationship between subjection and citizenship, ideal universality justifies the universal extension of political (civic) rights by explaining that equality and liberty are inseparable, which Balibar calls “equaliberty.” As such, it introduces the notion of unconditional into the realm of politics: “equaliberty is an all-or-nothing” notion and hence cannot be relativized. It is either recognized or ignored as a principle or as a demand. Balibar links this characteristic of equaliberty to what Hannah Arendt calls “the right to have rights,” which is distinct from having this or that specific right that is guaranteed by law. Nor is it a moral notion. It is a political notion and delineates a process, which starts with resistance and ends with the actual exercise of constituent power (66). For this reason, for Balibar, the “right to have rights” can also be called the “right to have politics.” As an unconditional force, the demand for equaliberty sets in motion a permanent insurrection that can never be gentrified or “fully integrated into the harmonious whole of the concrete universality” (65). But does this mean that constituent power, as the irreducible excess (to use Zizek’s formulation), is allowed to exercise its full destabilizing potential of the political? Certainly not. The question thus becomes: what are the means through which this insurrectionary demand is domesticated, suffocated, limited, regulated, neutralized, or congealed?

 

To answer this question–to understand the dynamic by which the “right to have rights” or the “right to have politics” of minorities and foreigners is regulated and hence limited through institutionalized multiculturalism and through the granting of a set of rights guaranteed by law–it is useful to turn to (and to revise) Antonio Negri’s conception of constituent and constitutive power as articulated in Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. I have already suggested, following Zizek, that it is through liberal multiculturalist institutional and juridical regulations that the post-national global order renders its global universalizing tendency indiscernible and thereby forecloses the possibility for a right to have politics or democratic politics. But does the current global management of the conditional and legal hosting of immigrants mean that any change in the law or any attempt to modify the law will by definition play into the hands of the forces of globalization? Can the legal conditions of hospitality or laws on immigration be improved? The analysis that Negri offers regarding the relation between constitutive and constituent power seems to imply that any attempt to improve or change the law is a vain effort; that it’s futile to attempt to replace existing laws with better ones, for any politics that remains within the purview of law is doomed to fail as it implies suffocation of democratic politics through constitutional arrangements. After a brief discussion of the analysis Negri offers and its limitations, I will discuss Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the relation between law and justice on the one hand and conditional and unconditional hospitality on the other hand and suggest that the latter offers a radically different opening of politics.⁷

 

For Negri, to speak of constituent power is to speak of democracy for it is constituent power that regulates democracy. It is not only all-powerful, but also has an expansive and unlimited quality. It emerges from the vortex of the void and is characterized by the openness of its needs and the absence of determinations and finalities. Its strength lies in the fact that it never ends up in power, nor its multitude results in a totality. As an open multiplicity, it is always based upon a set of singularities. Its all-powerful and expansive tendency, its strength, which opens a horizon, never results in a vertical or totalitarian dimension. The active elements of constituent power are resistance, desire, and an ethical impulse. It does not seek institutionality but aims at constructing an ethical being. It is for these reasons that Negri emphasizes the strong link between constituent power and democracy. Democracy is the political form of constituent power. The concept of democracy in Negri’s formulation is not treated as a subspecies or a subcategory of liberalism but refers to a form of governability that enables the freeing of constituent power, because it entails a totality without a closure and the exclusion of any sign of external definition. It is a project of the multitude and is a creative force. This multitude is not an ungraspable multiplicity but is the strength of singularities and differences. As a singular multidirectionality it refers to an irreducible concept of the political and to an ethics that recognizes singularities. Like democracy, constituent power resists being constitutionalized.

 

The opposite of democracy and constituent power is not totalitarianism but sovereignty itself and constitutional power. The establishment of constitutional power presents a closure to the always-open nature of constituent power. When constituent power is articulated in juridical definitions, it is limited, closed, reduced to juridical categories, and is restrained in administrative routines. The State’s constitutionality and its various other regulatory activities bring a form of control, well-defined limits, and procedures to the all-expansive force of the constituent power. Once it is situated in the concept of the nation and absorbed by the mechanism of representation, constituent power is perverted, desiccated, congealed in a static system. Representation is one of the fundamental juridical-constitutional instruments in exercising control and in segmenting constituent power. Its dilution in representative mechanisms manifests itself in political space but is disguised in the activity of the Supreme Court and other organs of the State. These mechanisms restore traditional sovereignty and close the possibility of democratic innovation. The taming and suffocation of constituent power by constitutionalist arrangements entails the mediation of inequalities and hence the neutralization of its strength. The fixing and institutionalization of constituent power implies its de facto termination and negation. And in this way, the sovereignty inverts the ostensible foundation of democratic polity and reconstructs itself as the foundation.

 

Although Negri’s analysis of the ways in which constitutive power tames and suffocates constituent power is a useful one to think how laws of conditional hospitality limit the unconditional welcoming of foreigners, it nevertheless suffers from certain limitations. Negri does not use the concept of constituent power as a theoretical or philosophical device that enables him to better understand how constitutive arrangements limit a more expansive politics. Rather, he treats constituent power as something that can actually be established as such by its affirmation or as a self-affirming power. Moreover, Negri posits the relation between constitutive and constituent power as an opposition or a dialectical contradiction; he poses the relation between constitutive and constituent power as an either/or question. The heterogeneity between the two is reduced to an antinomy. As such, his analysis risks leaving intact the very structure it aims to criticize; it risks repeating the same desire for a sovereign position, shifted now to the side of the hegemonized second term.

 

In an attempt to rethink another philosophical and theoretical framework that might help us to envision the possibility of reinventing a political space that is neither locked within the limits and congealments of conditional hospitality nor one that pretends to go beyond the law by simply reversing it, I want to discuss Derrida’s reading of the relation between conditional and conditional hospitality and law and justice.

 

ETHICS OF HOSPITALITY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS

 

How does Derrida think the relationship between conditional and unconditional hospitality? Are they mutually exclusive of each other and hence standing in a relation of opposition? Does unconditional hospitality simply imply that nation-states make it their official policy and open their borders and unconditionally welcome anyone who wants to come? Does it have the status of a regulative idea and hence constitute the name of a correct politics? Or does it have the status of a deconstructive tool devised to read the limits of conditional hospitality?

 

While Kant is concerned with hospitality as law and thereby with the conditions and limitations of hospitality, Levinas engages with it as a question of ethics or as the question of ethicity itself. In his reading of Levinas’s formulation of the ethics of hospitality, Derrida orients our attention to the fact that in the lawful admittance of the other as guest there is a level that exceeds and hence cannot be captured by those analyses that take the nation-state and the juridical regulation as the model to work on. Or rather, his question is whether the ethics of hospitality, in Levinas’s thought, is conducive for “a law and a politics beyond the familial dwelling, within a society, nation, State, or Nation-State” (Adieu 20). It is this level that Derrida’s reading of Levinas’s ethics of hospitality brings to the fore.

 

Pointing to a hiatus between the law and ethics of hospitality, Derrida underlines how the ethics of hospitality cannot be treated as a decree nor can it be imposed by a command. The hiatus between the law and ethics of hospitality also pertains to the fact that it is unthematizable, implying that a particular law or politics of hospitality cannot be deduced from Levinas’s discourse of the ethics of hospitality, for it is irreducible to a theme, thematization, or some kind of formalization. Ethics as such is an attentive intention, a welcome and tending toward the other, an unconditional “yes” to the other. Hospitality as ethicity is infinite (it is either infinite, unconditional or not at all) and cannot be limited in the sense that Kant talks about it; it cannot be regulated by a particular political or juridical practice of a nation and therefore cannot be circumscribed.

 

Derrida notes that the ethics of hospitality, the welcome made to the other, entails the subordination or putting in question of the freedom of the subject and an interruption of the self as other. But this interruption is not something that can be enforced by a decree or law. It is an interruption produced in the intentional attention to the other. The subordination of the freedom of the subject does not imply depriving the subject of its birth. Rather it implies the subjection of the subjectum and enables the birth of the subject along with freedom: the coming of the subject to itself as it welcomes the other. Responsibility for the other, the being-host of the subject, puts the subject into question; it puts the subject’s being in question. Therefore, for Derrida, “the host is a hostage insofar as he is a subject put into question, obsessed (and thus besieged), persecuted in the very place where he takes place, where as emigrant, exile, stranger, a guest from the very beginning, he finds himself elected to or taken up by a residence before himself electing or taking one up” (20).

 

Unconditional hospitality entails a reversal, since the owner of the home can perform hospitality on the condition that she is invited to her own home by the one whom she invites, by being welcomed, accepted by the one whom she welcomes or accepts, and shown hospitality in her own home by the guest. Unconditional hospitality or hospitality as ethics implies the interruption of a full possession of a place called home and when its inhabitant becomes a guest received in her home–that is, when the owner becomes a tenant in her place. The inexorable law of hospitality therefore involves a situation in which

 

the hote who receives (the host), the one who welcomes the invited or received hote (the guest), the welcoming hote who considers himself the owner of the place, is in truth a hote received in his own home. He receives the hospitality that he offers in his own home; he receives it from his own home–which, in the end, does not belong to him. The hote as host is a guest. The dwelling opens itself to itself, to its “essence” without essence, as a “land of asylum or refuge.” The one who welcomes is first welcomed in his own home. The one who invites is invited by the one whom he invites. The one who receives is received, receiving hospitality in what he takes to be his own home, or indeed his own land . . . . (41-2)

 

Hospitality in this sense precedes property, since home, in this unconditional welcoming, is not owned, or is owned only in a very singular sense. That is, only insofar it is already hospitable to its owner, when the master of the house is already a received hote or a guest in her own home. When home is no longer a property but a place that welcomes its owner, the question of hospitality cannot be reduced to a multiculturalist tolerance, for there is no longer a question of limiting, restricting, or regulating tolerance for the other. As Derrida puts it:

 

That a people, as a people, “should accept those who come and settle among them–even though they are foreigners,” would be the proof [gage] of a popular and public commitment [engagement], a political res publica that cannot be reduced to a sort of “tolerance,” unless this tolerance requires the affirmation of a “love” without measure. (Adieu 72)

 

In the hospitality without conditions, the host should, in principle, receive even before knowing anything about the guest. A pure welcome consists not only in not knowing anything or acting as if one knows nothing, but also in avoiding any questions about the Other’s identity, their desire, their rules, their language, their capacity for work, for integration, for adaptation . . . From the moment that I formulate all of these questions, and posit these conditions . . . the ideal situation of non-knowledge–non-savoir–is broken–rompue. (“A Discussion” 9)

 

Above I have delineated the characterizing features of what unconditional hospitality is. To be able to understand its relation to conditional hospitality, I want to briefly review how Derrida understands the relation between law and justice in “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,'” as it has a parallel structure with conditional and unconditional hospitality. This will enable us to better comprehend the nature of the relation between conditional and unconditional hospitality and thus better understand how unconditional hospitality is not simply the name of a political program.

 

For Derrida, there lies an aporia within the drive for justice because it has to respect universality on the one hand and absolute singularity on the other. One faces difficulty in justice precisely because of the necessity to speak in terms of the universal principles when one is deciding about particular cases. Since law includes these two conditions simultaneously, the singularity has to be translated into universality. The aporia resides in the principle of universality which cannot directly speak to the particular case: in the fact that it is not possible to be just for everyone and for every single case. This is what Derrida means in saying that “justice is impossible.” However, justice is the principle in the name of which law is deconstructed; that is, it is possible to change and improve the law, the legal system. Law can be criticized and therefore is deconstructible, but justice is not deconstructible. Thus despite the absolute radical heterogeneity between the two, the relation between them is not one of opposition. Law is not opposed to justice, nor is justice opposed to law. Derrida makes clear that justice and law are indissociable because it is in the name of justice that one deconstructs the law. The relation between them will remain endlessly open and irreducible. To tend to justice one has to deconstruct and improve the law, but it is never just–and it is there, in the space between law and justice, that one negotiates between the universal and the particular.

 

Like justice, unconditional hospitality is also impossible. But this impossibility does not mean that one does not aspire to pure hospitality. Its impossibility lies in the very structure of unconditional hospitality itself. In principle, it is offered to an unlimited number of Others and to an unlimited extent, without asking any questions. The Other’s welcoming is not to be contingent upon the Other’s identity or the questions asked. The very notion of pure or unconditional hospitality assumes that one must offer to any stranger the right of entry to a territory, home, or nation of which one is legitimately in possession.

 

With the concept of unconditional hospitality, Derrida is not trying to offer a political program about how a pure hospitality might be implemented; rather, he is trying to expose the presuppositions of conditional hospitality and the series of concepts that it is based upon–such as one’s proper residence, proper identity, and proper cultural identity. For Derrida, there is an essential link between society or culture and hospitality. In every society there is space allocated for those who are invited and this enables the welcoming of the strangers who arrive. In other words, conditional hospitality is what enables one’s being at home. There is no culture, no home, no nation or family without a door. It is the opening of this door that functions as a means of welcoming strangers. When the stranger, the Other, is welcomed on the condition that he adjust to the chez soi, the hospitality that is offered is a conditional one, one of visitation: the stranger is welcome only as long as he respects the order and rules of the home, the nation or culture, and learns to speak the language. In contrast (but not in opposition) to conditional hospitality is unconditional or pure hospitality: the pure welcoming of the unexpected guest or anyone who arrives or visits, the hospitality of invitation. Conditional hospitality of invitation is distinguished from the unconditional hospitality of visitation by the fact that in the former, the master remains the master, the host remains the host at home, and the guest remains an invited guest. As an invited guest, one is expected not to alter the rule and order of the home. Derrida imagines the hospitality of visitation in order to distinguish it from the hospitality of invitation where the stranger is not an invited guest, but one who arrives unexpectedly, where the host opens the house without asking any questions.

 

Derrida reminds us that the relation between the two forms of hospitality has the same structure between law and justice (and let’s remember that according to Derrida justice is impossible); they are heterogeneous but at the same time absolutely indissociable. These two forms of hospitality refer to the legal and just forms of hospitality. Like justice, unconditional hospitality is impossible as one cannot deduce a rule from it. In other words, it is impossible to make it a rule that nations, families, cultures, or governments should open their house unconditionally to everyone and hence to turn it into an official policy. Although it is impossible, Derrida nevertheless designates with the term unconditional what hospitality should be in principle. Thus the concept of conditional hospitality enables Derrida to conceive of unconditional hospitality. As he puts it:

 

to think of this conditional hospitality one has to have in mind what would be a pure hospitality to the messianic Other, the unexpected one who just lands in my country and to whom I simply say: come and eat and sleep and I won’t even ask your name. (“A Discussion” 13)

 

If we have a concept of conditional hospitality, it’s because we have also the idea of a pure hospitality, of unconditional hospitality. (15)

 

If unconditional or pure hospitality is impossible, then what is the possibility of the politics of hospitality? Like the relation between law and justice, where it is in the name of justice that one deconstructs the law, it is in the name of unconditional hospitality that conditional hospitality can be deconstructed. To tend to unconditional hospitality one has to deconstruct and improve the laws on hospitality (such as immigration laws), but these laws will never guarantee unconditional hospitality as such. The relation between them will remain open and irreducible. As Derrida notes, the law is perfectible and there is progress to be performed on the law that will improve the conditions of hospitality. The condition of the laws on immigration has to be improved without claiming that unconditional law should become an official policy. The very desire for unconditional hospitality is what regulates the improvement of the laws of hospitality.

 

CONCLUSION

 

So how, then, can we rethink the forces of capitalist globalization and institutionalized multiculturalism, which I suggested are working hand in hand, in light of the Derridian notion of unconditional hospitality? This essay has not meant to imply that the operation of the forces of globalization are limited by the laws that regulate the welcoming of immigrants or through institutionalizing multiculturalist respect and tolerance. Globalization works on many fronts, and we need to be vigilant: about the complicated links between globalization and the workings of nation-states in the so-called Third World; about the novel ways in which the rural is now accessed by global capital; about the interventions of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank which impose as international law the laws of the national economies of the global North; about the reinstitution of the repressive powers of the nation-states in the Third World so as to enable the smooth operation of global capital.⁸My analysis here engages with the question of globalization in terms of its ideological and political presuppositions. The reason for my discussion of how liberal multiculturalism functions as the ideal form of global capitalism and how it is conditioned by its demands is twofold: first, to examine the hegemonic ideological form of global capitalism as it relates to the ethnically and culturally Other; second, to challenge the idea that the valorization of particular identities can be seen as a destabilizing counter-hegemonic political force in the wake of the global abstraction of transnational capitalism. I have suggested that Derrida’s concept of conditional hospitality is a useful philosophical and theoretical apparatus for deconstructing the ideology embedded in liberal multiculturalism.

 

But let me be clear: I do not mean to suggest that conditional hospitality should be dismantled, that the welcoming of immigrants based on legal regulations should be done away with, or that unconditional hospitality should be substituted as the official policy of the host nations. I do not recommend the concept of unconditional hospitality as a technical application of a rule or norm. Unconditional hospitality is not to be regarded as the name of a counter-political program against the global management of the ethnically and culturally different. Nor is it a command that can be conformed to or deviated from, as it cannot be treated as a rule or an injunction that can organize the nature of the relation with immigrants. Unconditional hospitality is neither a means of determining judgment nor a rule of action. It is, rather, the condition of the possibility of the perfection and improvement of conditional hospitality. Speaking of unconditional hospitality, Derrida notes:

 

It’s impossible as a rule, I cannot regularly organise unconditional hospitality, and that’s why, as a rule, I have a bad conscience, I cannot have a good conscience because I know that I lock my door, and that a number of people who would like to share my house, my apartment, my nation, my money, my land and so on so forth. I say not as a rule, but sometimes, exceptionally, it may happen. I cannot regulate, control or determine these moments, but it may happen, just as an act of forgiveness, some forgiveness may happen, pure forgiveness may happen. I cannot make a determinate, a determining judgement and say: ‘this is pure forgiveness,’ or ‘this is pure hospitality,’ as an act of knowledge, there is no adequate act of determining judgment. That’s why the realm of action, of practical reason, is absolutely heterogeneous to theory and theoretical judgments here, but it may happen without even my knowing it, my being conscious of it, or my having rules for its establishment. Unconditional hospitality can’t be an establishment, but it may happen as a miracle . . . in an instant, not lasting more than an instant, it may happen. This is the . . . possible happening of something impossible which makes us think what hospitality, or forgiveness, or gift might be. (“A Discussion” 15-16)

 

This “possible happening of something impossible” can be seen as the condition of a democratic possibility. To use Derrida’s formulation in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, this condition of democratic possibility is something “to be thought and to come [à venir]: not something that is certain to happen tomorrow, not the democracy (national or 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” (78). It is the introduction of the notion of unconditionality into politics–or to put it in Balibar’s term, the politics of equaliberty, which is an all-or-nothing notion–that can open the possibility of a democratic politics. As we saw earlier, Balibar argues that as an unconditional force, the demand for equaliberty or the right to have rights cannot be relativized. The unconditional nature of equaliberty, like the unconditionality of hospitality, is distinct from this or that specific right guaranteed by law. However neither equaliberty nor unconditional hospitality in themselves are possible. But their impossibility should not be taken as the closure of the possibility of democracy; on the contrary, it is the principle of unconditionality which is the driving force behind the condition of possibility of a democratic opening and, with it, a revision in law.

 

At this point, it might be useful to situate the demand for equaliberty and the ethics of hospitality in the context of contemporary global capitalism, as my aim is not to theorize them as pure, atemporal and context-independent forces ultimately separated from forces of economy and politics.

 

From the point of view of politics proper, globalization can be characterized as a contradictory process: on the one hand, the very processes of globalization produce the demand for equaliberty. The globalization of production and other market forces necessarily create the conditions for the welcoming of immigrants as well as the granting of certain rights. These very same groups, as a consequence of the production of new political and ideological needs, make claims that may be against the interests of global capitalism. On the other hand, however, globalization is a law-governed process, and institutionalizing forces such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank absorb the demand for equaliberty through the mechanism of the law. Thus, the ideal of the right to have rights or the demand for equaliberty is necessarily compromised as it becomes articulated within global capitalism. And it is in this regard that Negri’s analysis becomes useful for understanding the constriction of politics proper through constitutional means. Such institutionalization coincides with the direction global capitalism has taken. Demands for equaliberty are always compromised, always diluted and contained by their expression within lawful and institutionalized processes.

 

In the face of this compromise, where can we situate the possibility of a democratic politics? In the face of this containment of the politics for equaliberty in global capitalism, must we forfeit the desire for unconditional hospitality? In a word: no. But the task is to rethink the very force of the demand for equaliberty not in terms of its full realization–as this would imply a total transcendence of global capitalism, which at the very least will not come any time soon–but precisely in terms of its inevitable containment or dilution by global forces. For unconditional hospitality or the demand for equaliberty is not exhausted by or reduced to the current historical context of the granting of conditional and legal rights. Neither is its full realization contingent upon the transcendence of the capitalist world system. Instead, unconditional hospitality has to be understood as immanent to the present–“the possible happening of something impossible”– demanding, in the present, the immediate transformation of the present conditions of hospitality.

 

Notes

 

I am grateful to Kenneth Bar and Mahmut Mutman for their close reading of the essay and for providing suggestions which helped me to clarify the arguments developed here.

 

1. The distinction Etienne Balibar makes between three forms of universality, namely “real universality,” “fictitious universality,” and “ideal universality,” is a very useful one to rethink the difference between the nature of the universality that globalization implies (which Balibar calls “real universality”). He differentiates it from “ideal universality.” The latter refers to a subversive element and is intrinsically linked with the notion of insurrection and rebellion in the name of freedom and equality. See “Ambiguous Universality.”

 

2. Balibar designates this “new world order” with the term “real universality.” See “Ambiguous Universality.”

 

3. For Zizek the term “politics proper” “always involves a kind of short circuit between the universal and the particular; it involves a paradox of a singular that appears as a stand-in for the universal . . . . This singulier universel is a group that . . . not only demands to be heard on equal footing with the ruling oligarchy or aristocracy . . . but, even more, presents itself as the immediate embodiment of society as such, in its universality, against the particular power interests of aristocracy and oligarchy” (“A Leftist Plea” 988-89).

 

4. Derrida notes that the German word for hospitality is about the stranger’s right, upon arrival to the domain of another, to be treated not as an enemy. Hence hospitality is in opposition precisely to opposition itself, that is, to hostility. The guest, who is hosted as the opposite of the one who is treated as an enemy, is a stranger who is treated as an ally.

 

5. Kant adds the word Wirbarkeit as synonymous to the word hospitality. The word Wirt(in), Derrida writes, refers to host and guest, the host who accepts the guest. Derrida notes that the word Gastgeber refers to the owner (proprietor) of a hotel or restaurant. Like Gastlich, Wirtlich, also means the one who hosts or accepts. Wirt, Wirtschaft thus refers to the domain of economy, the governing of home.

 

6. By this way, hospitality becomes the threshold itself. For hospitality to exist there has to be a door. But when there are doors that means there is no (unconditional) welcoming as this implies that someone has the key for the door and thus controls the condition of hospitality.

 

7. As it will become clear in the following pages, it is legitimate to discuss the relation between these two as they have the same structure.

 

8. For a fuller discussion of these issues see Yegenoglu and Mutman.

 

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