The times of movements

Judith Butler's expansive, stimulating paper can be seen as an exploration of the kinds of ethical positions that might become possible once we internalize fully the loss of a political conception of linear, progressive time and secure ethical foundations. I had little disagreement with the substantive critiques presented. Hence, I consider in an open-ended way some parallel thoughts and questions, including ones about the 'time' of the paper and the 'times' available to the paper. One way of reading the paper might be to acknowledge that the political languages of rights, liberation and freedom that emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and the black, women's and gay liberation movements that followed, are capable of being enfolded into military imperial as well as anti-migrant projects. This enfolding is of course by no means uncomplicated. (Aside from its neoliberal connotations, for George W. Bush, freedom can also mean the 'freedom' to worship Christ, and liberty means the 'liberty' that naturally arises through subsumption under the Christian dispensation (Hedges 2007). In a different way, the restriction on the freedom of movement of some migrants into the Netherlands because of their possible aversion to homosexuality goes with 'tolerance' of cultural difference such that the more explicit materials for the Dutch civic examination are censored if sent to some potential migrants abroad in order not to offend cultural and religious sensibilities enshrined in law in another geographical space conceived as anthropologically incommensurable in matters of sex.1) If feminism has been mobilized for imperial purposes and if gay rights are used coercively in Europe against certain classes of migrants, there seems no reason to suppose that anti-racism as it is understood in Euro-America cannot also be used in unexpected ways and for other chauvinistic aims. It is also striking that formerly minoritarian discourses relating to rights, discrimination and oppression have become emblematic of much right-wing majoritarian political discourse in many conflicts across the globe. Nevertheless, the ease with which emancipatory languages travel from left to right seems to indicate the governance or perhaps hypergovernance of populations on small and large scales as one feature of the neoliberal geomilitary 'now-time', one in which the very large and the very small, the very near and the very far have become intertwined in new global relations of domination, regulation and violence that are stratified but can be deflected in unpredictable ways. Therefore, I would agree that, within this context, thinking of a future as one of unfolding freedom is to invite a particular kind of jeopardy. If there are freedoms that we cannot not want (Spivak 1999), freedoms that constitute our very sense of social and political being, and that in the name of those same freedoms, indeed in the language of emancipation itself, Iraqis are being slaughtered and tortured, then what does freedom mean if we also demand, as we are morally compelled to, that Iraqis are liberated from US occupation and war and given back their freedom as sovereignty. Put otherwise, why is liberalism unable to inure itself against its own violent possibilities? There are ample precedents in history (and colonialism is frequently used as an example) that demonstrate liberalism's enduring capacity for violence, and for some this is largely all we need to say. But this can close the discussion too hastily and in so doing forecloses the possibility of other ethical challenges to a potent metaphysics of violence that remains preserved through such critiques, a metaphysics that can be shared by elements of left and right, 'progressives' and 'reactionaries', 'imperialists' and 'anti-imperialists'. The paper importantly raises the ways in which something called 'Islam' is figured by, within and against something called 'modernity'. If we consider a figure from the twelfth century, Abu al-Walid Mohammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd, this illustrates the complexities of some of the inversions and displacements we are currently witnessing. Ibn Rushd, a religious scholar, philosopher and senior court jurist unleashed a philosophical enquiry that offended a major religious institution of the time. That institution was the Catholic Church. Followers of his thought were purged from a several centres of theological learning, including what was then the University of Paris. The tradition that bore his name was a focus on sustained assaults by the Church (and forces of the local inquisition) and these continued well into the sixteenth century throughout Europe. We might say, peering into the swirling eddy (Benjamin 1998: 45) and snatching the past into our present, that Ibn Rushd originated the modern form of secularism. Hence, continental 'Europe', now considered the centre of secular modernity, then turned violently against a Muslim theologian who was an avatar of secular thinking. Indeed, under the Latinized and Spanish corruption of his name, Averröes, he is regularly claimed as one of the key founders of secularism in the west. Ibn Rushd, with his Arabic name reinstated, is increasingly claimed by some neoconservative and other right-wing and liberal projects, as an indigenous resource for the rationalist reformation that something called 'Islam' has to have (as many writers have said, 'Islam' in most such discussions is an extra-historical, extra-social abstraction). Conversely, Abu Hamid Mohammed al-Ghazzali (against whom Ibn Rushd launched his most pointed and conclusive critique) is considered today to be the progenitor for the dogmatic and fundamentalist closure of 'Islam' (a familiar trajectory travels from him via Ibn Taymiyyah to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and from there to Sayyid Qutb and Bin Laden). We could invert this and argue that Ibn Rushd's neo-Platonism leads inevitably to elite secular authoritarianism. Or we can argue that al-Ghazzali's mysticism, fondness for philosophical debate and openness to key elements of theology identified with Sufism lead to liberal tolerance. Or we could highlight a different history of the travels of Averroism via (largely secular) Jewish philosophers and thinkers who preserved this philosophy in medieval Europe and became identified with it in a way that made them targets of a violent, Church-driven anti-Semitism. However, of significance is not that a variety of differing appropriations ('histories of the present') are possible, but that the appropriations today have settled into a highly specific configuration of 'medieval' and 'modern' time. It seems that the apprehension of time that is productive for so many political configurations today – whether considering themselves friendly to Muslim beliefs or opposed to whatever is claimed to be Islam – is shot through with shards of 'medieval time' that are seen to illegitimately pierce the present, but also give to the present an intelligible narrative about itself, and so are useful in producing a wide field of politics. As the paper argues, the political texture of the 'now-time' is one in which something called the West or modernity is counterposed to something called Islam, and this binary has become a potent conductor for a wide range of other oppositions – between civilization and barbarism, the religious and the secular, freedom and oppression, and so on. Ibn Rushd is also claimed by a category of figurative people called 'moderate Muslims' and in Britain this has become a largely state- and media-created identity that Muslims who disagree with religious absolutism may find difficult to affiliate with precisely because it has become so closely allied with the state and its normative regulation of religious dogma. The intrusion of the state in dogma is anathema to one strand of laicité, though in other strands of secularism, that intervention is considered essential. In other forms of secular thinking, the state is deemed to have no role in intervening in any religious affairs except where other contraventions of fundamental rights have taken place. In others still, secularism actively promotes religious expression in the public sphere. As the paper points out, in some nations secularism manifests as a ferociously violent state authoritarianism (one of the reasons for the growth of political religion in some nations). In other nations, secularism is among the key guarantees for religious freedom (including minority religious freedom) and in others still secularism comprises one element of what might be considered a necessary and permanent tension between secularism, liberalism and democracy. As the paper says, there are many varieties of secularism (in this sense, there is no universal ideology of secularism as such). But it also appears that secularism is characterized in opposition to religion, possibly also in opposition to religious expression. I was considering therefore how the paper positioned itself in relation to debates about secularism, especially since there have been intense, often fraught debates about secularism over several decades in, for example, south Asia and the Middle East. This also relates to a another issue: if the state regulates major areas of biopolitical life, the norms of kinship, the rearing of children, the regulation of the most intimate areas of concupiscence, then in seemingly exempting religion or its believers from certain areas of state regulation (or conversely, stipulating only certain forms of regulation), is there not a risk of assenting to certain transcendental claims that some religious thought makes about itself and in so doing, depoliticizing what we already know to exist in and through its embedment in history and politics? It also seems that some thinkers (Connolly 1999) who have argued against secularism in the USA or Europe nevertheless have to presuppose certain transformations in religious orthopraxy, perhaps also doxa, as well as presuppose certain anterior, secular conditions before their postsecular positions become viable within a public sphere where secularism is characterized as one of a range of faiths that engage in an honourable and respectful public conversation with other faiths. What seems to make this position appealing is an identification of metaphysics (of the kind that one can find discreetly vitalizing the most rationalist and normative of secular philosophical traditions) with religion itself. I wondered about this in relation to the paper, and also wondered whether it was possible to distinguish a secular, non-religious metaphysics from the religious impulse that it seems to be collapsed into. Does the dwarf hidden by mirrors under the chessboard and animating the Turk have to be religion? It can be an argument of some self-avowedly 'non-western' philosophical systems that 'western philosophy', whatever may be its metaphysical claims, is irreducibly rationalizing – it does not acquire its disciplinary knowledge through, for example, mystical apprehension of the divine, but through rational scholarship within a regulated discipline. If this is the case, what are the possible risks to philosophy in removing the mirrors that disguise a religious metaphysics? What might be the additional risks of 'cultural' closure or 'cultural' assertion in the demotic popularization of certain religious metaphors ('messiah') within the discipline(s), but not others? This leads to a broader set of questions. In sociology, cultural theory or cultural studies, many of us assume a field of truths about ideology or its Foucauldian alternatives such as processes of discursive normalization (or other theoretical alternatives) and that the latter effect a creation which we call the subject and that we largely know what the subject is, and that from this conception of the subject we might proceed to a theory of identity and from there collective identities in terms of cultures, sexualities, religions, ethnicities and so forth. We might alter the order in which these processes of subject formation and identity occur, or their staging, but nevertheless we have a (albeit contested) field of theoretical intelligibility for understanding or describing 'self', 'other', the subject, identity, culture. The argument here is necessarily compressed and not intended to be concluded. But it becomes an interesting question then whether a metaphysics of violence inheres as a possibility in each response to a call that 'the self' judges to be an ethical call from the 'other'. Similarly, if the theoretical doublet of 'self–other' can cloak what might be partially a religious (or at least non-secular) understanding of the subject, identity, ethics and culture, one influenced by some strands of religious metaphysics and some understandings of religious mysticism, then how might we understand the 'self' that could be in an ontologically secure position so as to be able to judge the call of the 'other' as an ethical call? Partly, this is raised because such knowledges have become instrumentalized in the calculus of subject formation in neoliberal, imperial projects that seek to displace existing sociality in nations outside Euro–America in favour of 'NGO civil societies' that can be regimented and militarized in various ways. The knowledge regimes of the new 'civil society of the South' deploy precisely the kinds of approaches to the subject, identity, culture, gender and so forth that we work with. In a similar way, the 'call of identity' is inherently an asymmetric one that may be heard by and mobilizes those who wish to make identity claims of the kind that are already presupposed by a political field in which our theoretical conceptions of identity flourish. But this may displace or marginalize those who refuse to enter this field or entertain a politics of subject or identity formation of the kind that (in one sense) is already completed within an Althusserian framing. I was also considering if the set of ideas about the subject, identity and culture we work with foregrounds a particular tunnel of time that pushes into the shadows other understandings of the 'time of the now' and how they might inform critical politics. Culture often comes to signify itself, as indeed do religion and ethnicity, and they can remain strangely dehistoricized, apolitical, existing almost as if they were pure seriality, even as we regularly proclaim that they are fields of contestation or conflict or change. Similarly, I am no longer sure these concepts necessarily have the expansive capacity to speak to the massive transformations in lifeworlds outside Euro–America, the rapid unscrambling and repackaging of what we call 'identity', and the unravelling of the furnitures of consciousness that occurs through new configurations of transnational state powers, militarism and political economy – and, indeed, through the restless transformations in religions themselves. The word 'culture' does a lot of work in the paper and so I was wondering about how culture was being used and about the problems of using it that we have across various disciplines. I also considered, with Antigone's Claim in mind, how culture might theoretically associate with both kinship (how might a general theoretical approach to kinship manifest the possibility of the emergence of different 'cultures'?) and with the symbolic order (if the latter exists anterior to 'culture', how does 'culture' become differentiated? If it is not (strictly) anterior, how is 'culture' possible?). I also agree very much that we should reject the presumption of the modernity of anyone, but I am less sure that this is the main issue at stake. There are several strands here which cannot be elaborated fully for reasons of space. But I am uncertain if concepts such as 'racism' or 'cultural racism' properly describe the violent xenologies that we see, nor am I sure the latter are predicated on a division between the human and the non- or infrahuman nor am I sure that they lie necessarily within the parameters of an existential conflict between modernity and tradition. For example, what makes the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere both possible and intelligible is precisely the recognition of the irreducible human – and I think civilized human – that is being tortured. Well before Samuel Huntington crystallized it in the insidious way he did (Huntington 1996), the political fields of possibility for thinking about modern humans appear to concern a set of xenologies that are about the political imagination of civilization and civilizational time. Such xenologies manifest an understanding of the imagined civilization as a possession or property of humans. This often coexisted with a three-fold division of historical time that could animate the politics of the 'now-time'. This seems to complicate the dialectic of modernity and tradition, and the idea of tradition that is created by and lives within and against modernity. In the brilliant reading of Joseph Ratzinger, there was something like this proximity. Here, perhaps the unsettling issue is the intensity of violence that accompanies civilizational proximity, as many have said about Greater Serbian nationalism, Hutu supremacism, the carnage in Gujarat among other instances of mass violence. The other civilization is close enough to be able to recognize oneself in it even as one disavows that possibility at the moment of recognition through a circuit which surreptitiously claims the other civilization's virtues for oneself even as one discards one's vices into the other civilization, and this creates a new cycle of disavowed identification through repetition (in the sense that disavowal is a moment of appropriation). A certain expansion of the time of one's imagined civilization occurs and creates a different kind of mythic temporality, a nostalgia for the future that fills up the temporal horizons that are seen as important for politics. This can result in the face and appearance of the imagined civilization's character embodied in its personalities. It then is the 'physiognomy of character', so to speak, rather than simply the physiognomy of the racialized face that then becomes important (or rather both may be coextensive with a new constellation of racism). We might propose that this leads to a driving politics of something like virtue, the character of character, the loading of imagined civilization onto personality, the aesthetic charge of charisma and power, the repertoire of virtues that it is claimed define a civilization or 'culture'. Differential virtues are also claimed to cleave civilized humanity in a number of ways and along different constellations of human time. (As an aside here, there are interesting examples of US soliders' fascination with what they understood as the origins of civilization in Iraq and some remarkable rebukes by the tortured against the Americans who are seen as only recent entrants to the world of the civilized, if even that. The images of the Abu Ghraib atrocities were discovered on a CD and reported by a solider who wanted to find out about the Tower of Babel, the city of Babylon and various other sites of the civilization that he claimed for himself and which he had read about in the Bible, and which, one presumes, he could map himself onto in some way.2) I am not sure then that we are speaking of the civilizing mission, or rather that if we analogize what is happening now with older configurations of (a thoroughly religious) racism and its mission to civilize during early colonization and, in a different way, in later Empire, we might risk eliding some other emergent transformations in the xenological characterizations of humanity in our time. Hence, the training US interrogators received focused on issues that were bizarrely sophisticated, such as the supposed inability of Arabs to convey a (presumably Cartesian) timeline and describe what they had been doing as a chronological narrative of time, event, duration, witness. However, the timeline, the events described within it, and the contradictions between timelines elicited through torture are the key fetishes that the torturer is after within an overall economy of rationalized military information. This seems to present a different kind of xenological thinking. In a related vein, one common theme in texts that range from David Pryce-Jones's book (Pryce-Jones 1989) on the 'shame-honour' or 'power-challenge' dialectics that allegedly characterize society through to book on the is the to the of the This is not necessarily or seen as an property of a culture or civilization, which might even be in an way, so much as it is a result of a of a modernity one that is that in an inability to oneself in a civilizational and therefore a civilizational I would perhaps also have a different with to the Abu Ghraib concern is that the images of the torture at Abu Ghraib risk an that is precisely there in the form of the of who have themselves through their and may a of the of the US and even of But the of the or narrative can the ethical circuit before it the where the history in the sense of comes to the and this can therefore risk eliding and many other sites where of torture were and I would also here the modern of the torture and of during conflicts and in ways that are similar to the at Abu like the of violence against during from the during of military and I agree about the need for critical political of the kind between religious and but I am about their who would do they can to the emergence of such as well as those who might have a different imagination of political time and space that to the that are in one sense already by a politics of identity and social movement within the or even space. What expansive politics of time might speak to a from and a from such that they each other as

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