parallax , 1998, vol. 4, no. 2, 25± 33

The Cause of the Other1

Jacques RancieÁ re

My argument does not exactly correspond to the theme of the exchange of gazesbetween France and Algeria. It will not in fact deal with looking at Algeria or witha body of knowledge about modern Algerian thought. My concern is, rather, withthe re¯ exive gaze we turn back on ourselves when we consider an o ther whose presenceor absence modi® es the meaning of the adjective `French’ and distances the `French’political subject from him or herself. I will therefore be speaking of what can, withoutprovocation, be called `French’ Algeria, and of the way in which the ties that wereknotted and then unknotted between the two terms at the S tate level knotted themtogether at the po lit ical level, and thus gave rise to a speci® c ordering of the relation-ship between the terms `Citizen’ , `French’ , `people’ , `man’ , or `proletarian’ . I willattempt to show how this knotting together has determined a relationship of alterity,a particular relationship between same and other that lies at the heart of our citizen-ship: a concern for the other that is not ethical, but truly political.

The latter opposition is enough to indicate that my intention is to re¯ ect on therelationship between this recent past and our present, to compare two ways ofordering relations between same and other, national and foreign, included andexcluded. I would like to project a few of the questions that arise when we considerthe knotting together of France and Algeria on to the contemporary ordering of the® gures of alterity (the homeless, the immigrant, the excluded, the fundamentalist,man and humanitarianism) that de® nes our political ® eld, or our absence of apolitical ® eld.

That a radical break has occurred between two cosmologies of the political, orbetween the two systems of relations between world, history, truth and humanitythat de® ne the rationality of the political, is so obvious that it is now diæ cult to speakof the relationship between same and other. If we reread the writings of those whosupported the Algerian cause in 1960, we are struck by the fact that when thephilosopher Jean-Paul Sartre comments on the theses of Frantz Fanon, and whenthe sociologist Pierre Bourdieu speaks on the basis of his ® eld work, they argue interms of categories belonging to the same cosmology. The war is seen as a language,and as a language that speaks the truth of a historical process. And that truth-processis likened to a de® nite system of relations between the same and the other: in thecourse of the struggle, a `people’ whose identity has been snatched away by colonialoppression becomes that alterity ’s other. That `people’ is not returning to a particular-ity that has been denied; it is conquering a new humanity. War is the unveiled andinverted truth of oppression, and it is completing the break with a primal identity.

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Insofar as it ends the negation that was colonialism, the war is a negation of thenegation. Colonial degradation ends with the conquest of a self which is new, whichcan no longer go back to old particularisms and which leads to the new citizenshipof the universal. `Like some time bomb’, writes Pierre Bourdieu,

the war is completely demolishing social realities; it is crushing andscattering traditional communities such as the village, the clan or thefamily¼ The peasant masses who rejected the innovations o å ered bythe West in the name of a sturdy tradition and conservatism, havebeen caught up in the whirlw ind of violence which is abolishing theremains of the past.2

The voice of the militant and that of the scientist, like those of the universalistphilosopher and the specialized scientist, can speak as one because their pronounce-ments relate to the same system of reference points. Within this system, the warconstitutes an emergent people; the emergent people identify with the voice of atruth; history is the moment of a truth that asserts the closure of a historical form(colonialism) as the subject that colonialism had wrested asunder becomes a voiceand a people. This system of relations between truth, time, identity and alterity is,of course, far removed from the systems that govern today’s analyses. That much isobvious from the way in which a contemporary sociologist of Islam describes andinterprets for us a similar phenomenon of `deracination’ . This is how Bruno Etiennenow explains the rise of radical Islamism:

The Nation-state is destroying communitarian structures and acceler-ating the ¯ ight from the countryside but cannot o å er any crediblewelfare provision for individuals, who become anonymous citizens.The reception facilities o å ered by the pious communities, insofar asthey are spiritual communities, do allow individuals to transcend theirderacination and sublimate their frustration.3

This text describes a process of breaking with tradition similar to that argued for bySartre and Bourdieu thirty years ago. But the way in which it establishes its cause,and the e å ects it deduces from it, inverts the relationship between politics and truththat underpinned their words: the relationship between what knowledge can sayabout the world, and what politics can apprehend of it. The `cause’ of the deracin-ation is no longer oppression and liberation. It is now an e å ect that is equivalent toboth: the Nation-state which, as a modality of the social bond, is the typical form ofmodernity. Deracination no longer produces the universality of a disappropriationthat has been inverted into an appropriation of the universal. It is no more than aloss of identity, and a need to recover an identity. And the spiritual communityresponds to that need. The process which, thirty years ago, was supposedly forginga revolutionary man, is now supposedly forging a man who wants to transform thereligious law into the law of the political world. This inversion of e å ects inverts thepolitical status of the object of social science: whereas history was once a processthat turned alienation into truth, local communities based upon belief are all that

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remain. The social is no longer the instance of the `manifest’, or the site where thetruth becomes a meaningful political movement. It is the instance of obscurity oncemore. But the obscurity of the belief that can establish bonds is now seen as the onlything that can confer meaning. It supplies social science with both its raw materialand its mode of validity, namely the relativity that distinguishes it from philosophicalteleologies of truth. Bruno Etienne goes on: `It is because groups require cohesion ifthey are to survive that meaning exists, and not the other way round’.4

One could simply take note of the fact that the world has changed, or of the factthat it is now impossible to bind the four terms `history’ , `truth’ , `people’ and `univer-sal’ into a process that allows truth to forge a world. We would then have to concludethat the possibility of constituting political objects and utterances was bound up witha cosmology and a truth-regime that have become foreign to us. And we would thuscondemn ourselves to having to speak of that political con® guration in purely histor-ical terms. And yet I wonder if it might not be possible to keep the question withinthe limits of the political by de® ning a di å erent line of approach. The basic hypothesisis as follows: belief in a truth-regime is at least as much an e å ect as the cause of agiven mode of political subjectivation. If that is the case, we no longer have to simplycompare the illusions and disenchantments of history’ s relationship with the truththat de® nes possible political utterances. We can arrive at a positional comparisonof the political relationships between same and other that determine belief in a givenhistorical truth regime or regime of untruth.

I am therefore suggesting that we displace the argument away from a `historical’analysis centred on the war/truth relationship and on the cause of the universalproduced by the twofold negation of the alterity of the other, and in the directionof a political analysis centred on what made it possible to inscribe the political struggleagainst the war, namely a certain sense of the cause of the other. I am using a termwhich is, for us, o å ensive. But it has always been o å ensive. To speak of the cause ofthe other appears to refer politics to something it does not want to be, and which itis right not to want to be, namely ethics. The whole point is, however, to see thatthe other can be included in politics in a non-ethical way. Ethics and politics thuscease to be polar opposites, as they are in the normal ordering of the relationshipbetween these terms, or when politics is seen as a realm of self-interested communitiesgoverned by their own logics of self-preservation, and ethics as the realm of a respectfor the other governed by principles that transcend political limitations.

The question of the struggle against the Algerian war, or the way in which successiveFrench governments waged it, did pose a dilemma: in what sense, if not an ethicalsense, could the cause of the Algerians be our cause? Remember Sartre ’s preface toFrantz Fanon’ s L es D amne s de la terre . It is a paraodoxical preface in that it introducesus to a book by warning us that this book is not addressed to us. The war of liberationwaged by the colonized is their war, Sartre tells us. This book is addressed to them.They want nothing to do with us, and especially not with the humanistic protests ofour beautiful souls. Our protests are the last form of the colonial lie that is beingshattered by the war: the truth of violence is its negation. The truth of the war canthus be seen as a denunciation of the lie of ethics. The paradoxical thing about thisanti-ethical assertion is that, by excluding a cause of the other, it actually de® nes a

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purely ethical and individualistic relationship with the war as such. Thus, the deserterMaurice Maschino justi® es his action in terms of the ethics of absolute freedom andresponsibility established by the very same Sartre in L’ E tre e t l e ne ant: `If I am mobilizedin a war, that war is my war. It is made in my image and I deserve it’ .5 Twocon¯ icting Sartreanisms come together here: a notion of history-as-truth that dis-misses any ethics of a concern for the other, and a notion of freedom that makesthe French government’s war everyone’s business. The possibility of a truly politicalmobilization that could break out of a dialogue between war and ethics alone, wastherefore bound up with the possibility of a third utterance, an utterance capable ofsaying: `this war is and is not our war’ .

The work of certain historians has recently reminded us that the starting point forthe big demonstrations that took place towards the end of the Algerian war was17 October 1961. On that day, an Algerian demonstration called by the FLN inParis was marked by savage repression and a news blackout on the number of victims.That day, with its twofold aspect (manifest and hidden), was a turning point, amoment when the ethical aporia of the relationship betwen `mine’ and the other wastransformed into the political subjectivation of an inclusive relationship with alterity.The crucial thing about the e å ect of that day was the way in which the questions ofthe visibility and invisibility of repression became interwoven into the three relation-ships that were in play: the relationship between Algerian militants and the Frenchstate; that between the French State and `us’; and that between the Algerian militantsand `us’.6 From the French State’ s point of view, the demonstration meant thatAlgerians in struggle had emerged within the French public space as political particip-ants and, in a certain sense, as French subjects. The results of that intolerable eventare well known: savage beatings and drownings. In a word, the police cleared thepublic space and, thanks to a news blackout, made its own operations invisible. Forus, this meant that something had been done in our country and in our name, andthat it was taken away from us in two ways. At the time, it was impossible even tocount the victims. A phrase used by Sartre in his preface to L es D amne s de la terre

helps us to understand, a contrario, the meaning of that twofold disappearance: `Theblinding sun of torture has now reached its zenith, and it is lighting up the wholecountry ’ .7 Now, the truth is that this blinding sun never lit up anything. Marked andtortured bodies do not light up anything. We know that now, now that images fromBosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere show us much more than we were shown in thosedays. At best, our exposure to them inspires moral indignation, a powerless hatredof the torturer. It often inspires a more secret feeling of relief at not being in thatother’ s shoes, and sometimes it inspires annoyance with those who are indiscreetenough to remind us of the existence of su å ering. Fear and pity are not politicala å ects.

It was not the blinding sun that lit up the political scene in 1961. On the contrary,it was an invisibility, the removal of something by the action of the police. And thepolice are not primarily a strong-arm repressive force, but a form of interventionwhich prescribes what can be seen and what cannot be seen, what can be said andwhat cannot be said. And politics is constructed in relation to that prescription.Politics is not something that is declared in the face of a war that is seen as theemergence into truth of something truly historical. Politics is something that is

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declared in the face of policing, de® ned as the law that prescribes what emerges andwhat is heard, what can be counted and what cannot be counted.8 Now, it has tobe remembered that, oæ cially, the Algerian war was not a war. It was a policeoperation on a large scale. The political response was therefore a response to the`police’ aspect of the war, and that is not the same thing as a recognition of thehistorical validity of a war of liberation. From that point onwards, there becamepossible a political subjectivation that did not take the form of external support forthe other’ s war, or of an identi ® cation of the other’ s military cause with our cause.This political subjectivation was primarily the result of a disidenti® cation with theFrench state that had done this in our name and removed it from our view. Wecould not identify with the Algerians who appeared as demonstrators within theFrench public space, and who then disappeared. We could, on the other hand, rejectour identi ® cation with the State that had killed them and removed them from allthe statistics.

Insofar as it is a political ® gure, the primary meaning of the cause of the other is arefusal to identify with a certain se lf . It is the production of a peopl e di å erent fromthe people seen, named and counted by the State, of a people de® ned by the wrongdone to the constitution of a commonality that was constructing an other communalspace. A political subjectivation always implies a `discourse of the other’ in threesenses. It is, ® rstly, a rejection of an identity established by an other, a degrading ofthat identity, and therefore a break with a certain se lf . Secondly, it is a demonstrationaddressed to an other that constitutes a community de® ned by a certain wrong.Thirdly, it always contains an impossible identi ® cation, an identi ® cation with another with whom one cannot in normal circumstances identify: the `wretched of theearth’ or some other object. In the case of the Algerian war, there was no identi ® ca-tion with those ® ghters, whose motives were not ours, or with those victims, whosevery faces were invisible to us. But an identity that could not be assumed was includedin a political subjectivation ± in a rejection of an identity.

This rejection of an identity could become the principle behind a political action,and not merely some form of compassion, for one speci® c reason. The po lit ical self-di å erence corresponded to another di å erence, namely the juridico-Statist di å erencethat had been inscribed for hundreds of years as the di å erence internal to Frenchidentity. I refer to the di å erence between a French sub je ct and a French ci tiz en whichwas inscribed by the colonial conquest as the di å erence internal to the juridicaldetermination of being French. The French state had proclaimed the end of thatdi å erence at the beginning of June 1958. The point is that its policemen once moreunderlined it heavily on that day in October 1961 by meeting out a repression thatdi å erentiated between some `French people’ and others , and by distinguishingbetween those who did and did not have the right to appear within the French publicspace. The State therefore made it possible to subjectivate the self-di å erence of ourcitzenship, or a gap between juridical citizenship and political citizenship. That self-di å erence of French/Algerian citizens could not, however, be subjectivated by ® ghtersinvolved in a war of liberation who were now determined to win their Algerianidentity through war. We, on the other hand, could subjectivate it as we were caughtbetween two de® nitions of citizenship: the national de® nition of membership of theFrench nation, and the political de® nition of citizenship as a way of counting the

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uncounted. This did not create a politics for the Algerians. But in France it did createa political subjectivation, or a relationship between included and excluded in whichno subject was speci® cally named. Yet perhaps that nameless subjectivation of a gapbetween two citizenships did ® nd a name a few years later in an exemplary formulafor an impossible identi ® cation: `W e are all G erman J ew s’ . That impossible identi ® cationinverted a name that was meant to stigmatize by turning it into the principle behindan open subjectivation of the uncounted, but it did not politically confuse them withany representation of an identi ® able social group. What is it that gives the politicalsequence punctuated by May 68 ± which some imbeciles insist on interpreting as amutation in modes of behaviour and mentalities ± its speci® city? It is, I think, therediscovery of what lay behind the great subjectivations of the labour movement,and of what was lost between the sociological identi ® cation of a class and the bureau-cratic identi ® cation of its party. It is the rediscovery of what a political subject( proletarian or otherw ise) is: the manifestation of a wrong, a counting of the uncoun-ted, a form of visibility conferred upon something that is supposedly non-visible orthat has been removed from visibility.

It could of course be said that these considerations, which should be reciprocal, arecompletely self-centred. I said that I would be speaking only of French forms ofidenti ® cation of what was at stake for the Algerians. But I think it is just as importantto grasp the speci® c form of the inclusion-exclusion relationship that established thelimitations of this political subjectivation. This appropriation of the invisibility of thedead bodies that had been taken away was obviously a way of not seeing them, andof constructing an Algerianness which was no more than a category of French politicalactivity. One might argue that there was a strict correlation between this occultationand the discourse of the Algerian revolution. For that discourse, the face of theAlgerian ® ghter was simply the pure face of a war that was destroying oppression,and of the virgin future to come. The abstraction of the other thus corresponded tothe abstraction of the same. On the one hand, the sole relationship authorized bythe discourse of a war of reappropriation was one of external support for the identitythat was being constituted. On the other hand, the internalizing relationship withthe other de® ned by French subjectivation of the gap in citizenship was con® ned tothe French political scene. A war to appropriate a historical identity and the politicsof subjectivating an impossible identity merged, even though there was no strongpolitical link between the two. The leaders of the Algerian struggle and anti-waractivists thus found themselves colluding in the po lit ical erasure of the singularity ofthe ® ght. That erasure had, however, diametrically opposed political e å ects in Algeriaand France. In the Algeria that won its independence, it meant a brutal confrontationbetween discourse and reality as what had been denied or repressed returned in somany forms. It meant the unmediated con¯ ict between the people of the State’ sdiscourse, and a population confronted with its sociological and cultural reality. Forthose who lost the war, on the other hand, it helped to rede® ne a setting for thepolitical subjectivation of the uncounted. One might therefore say that the politicalpro® ts from this `cause’ of the other were reaped here, and one might express theparadox in the ethical teminology of an unpaid debt. I think, however, that it wouldbe more pro® table to think in terms of amnesia, and to measure the long-termimplications of that amnesia for our present.

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As I have said, the most useful way to compare our present with the period of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles is not to draw a contrast between a time ofhistorical faith and a time of generalized relativism. The dominant discourse tells usthat political activity is being constantly undermined by a disillusionment with suchfaith. It describes an inverted inevitability which, by re-establishing fact after fact,has supposedly destroyed political activity’s faith in history. We have supposedlymoved from the immediate disillusionment of the Third-Worldist illusions of the1960s to the discovery of the Gulag in the 1970s, to the discovery in the 1980s thatnot all French people were involved in the Resistance and then, in the watershedyear of 1989, to the discovery that the French Revolution was not what we thoughtit was. Political activity has therefore been orphaned, and there is no longer anythingto make it a world. I have tried, for my own part, to show that we might have totake the opposite view: rather than comparing a triumphant truth regime with adisenchanted truth regime, we should be comparing one alterity status with another.Politics does not exist because of some faith in the triumphant future of emancipation.Politics exists because the cause of the other exists, because because citizenship isnot self-identical.

We do not have to look far to see what happens when we forget that di å erence. Aconsensus identi ® es the political subject known as the `people’ with a population thatis broken down and then reconstituted into groups with speci® c interests or a speci® cidentity, and the political citizen is identi ® ed with a legal subject who then tends tobe identi ® ed with an econom ic subject who is a microcosm of a macro-circulationand an incessant exchange of rights and civil capacities, of consumer goods and thecommon Good. This is also a product of ± or a complement to ± the consensualutopia: this is the breaking point where the little econom ico-juridical machine takeson the appearance of the excluded, of those who have lost their `identity’ becausethey have lost their goods and because `the social bond’ has been broken. Petitionsfor identity are a negation of the citizenship that includes the other. They can taketwo forms: the communitarian form that asserts only the rights of the Same, and thereligious form that requires only obedience to the law of the Other. Then there isthe pathetic corolla ry of communitarianisms and fundamentalisms: the `universalism’that fully identi ® es citizenship with a juridical status de® ned by the State, and rarelymisses the opportunity to combine the principles of secularism with the discreetfrissons of racism, or the defence of the rights of peoples with the fever of wars orreconquest. There is also the humanitarianism that is de® ned as the cause of a nakedhumanity, as the defence of human rights that are identi ® ed solely with the rightsof the victim, with the rights of those who do not have the means to assert theirrights or to use them to argue a politics; in a word, a `cause’ of the `other’ thatretreats from politics to ethics, and is then completely absorbed into duties towardsthe su å ering. Ultimately it plays into the hands of the geostrategic policies of thegreat powers.9

The Franco-Algerian past cannot be analysed simply in terms of the distribution ofpro® ts and losses. The dissymmetry of the Algerian question had immediately contra-dictory e å ects. But that dissymmetry was not simply a matter of a task that had beenleft undone. It was inherent in the knot that bound together the logic of war andthe political logic characteristic of colonization. In a war, there is no cause of the

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other. The cause of the other exists only within politics, and it functions there as animpossible identi ® cation. To forget that contradiction, which is known as the A lgerianwar’ , is to forget an internal alterity: the di å erence internal to citizenship that is themark of politics. We know that, in France, amnesia has returned in the form of the`immigrant problem’ and new outbreaks of racism. Like others , I have written else-where that the `immigrant’ who is the target of these outbreaks is the migrant workerof the past who has lost his other name: `worker’ or `proletarian’ . And having lostthat political subjectivation, he ® nds himself reduced to having only the identity ofthe other, to being a mere object of pity or, more commonly, hatred. I think wenow have to complete that analysis. What made the political identity of the `worker’or the `proletarian’ operational was the disjunction between political subjectivity andsocial group. And that disjunction was the result of an openness to the cause of theother. It is that which allows that a subject such as the `worker’ or the `proletarian’to be divorced from the identity of a social group whose self-interests bring it intocon¯ icts with some other group, and to become a ® gure of citizenship. To forgetAlgeria is to forget one of the fractures that shatter social identities and give rise topolitical subjectivations. It is diæ cult to be politically active `in’ a war. But beingpolitically active is always diæ cult. And those extreme situations in which politics,war and ethics make the question of the other an aporia are also the crucial situationsthat allow us to think of the fragility of politics.

T rans lated b y D avid M acey

Notes

1 This text is a transla tion of Jacques of the other. It shows that the ® gure of theRanc ieÁ re, `La cause de l’autre’ , l igne s, 30 su å ering other does not in itself lead to a(Fe vrier 1997), pp.36 ± 49. politics because this other, unlike the Algerian2 Pierre Bourdieu, `Re volution dans la re volu- or Vietnam ese other, was not our other andtion’ , E sprit ( January 1961). did not de® ne our citizenship’s relationship3 Bruno Etienne, L’ Is lam isme R adical (Paris: with itself. Every e å ort to launch a politicalHachelle , 1987), p.142. struggle for Bosnia has consisted in the4 Etienne, L’ Is lam isme R adical , p.143. attem pt to get away from mere dem ands for5 Maurice Maschino, Le R efus (Paris: Maspero, aid for victims, and to de® ne a com mon1960), p.179. interest on the basis of the dichotom y, within6 Throughou t the remainder of this text,

su å ering Bosnia itself, between two notions`we/us’ simply refers to a political generati onof com munity : the idea of a fair distributiontaken as a whole.of populations and identitities, which still7 Jean-Pau l Sartre, `Pre face’ in Frantz Fanon,subscribes to the `police’ logic of theLes D amne s de la terre (Paris: Maspero, 1961),aggressor, and the idea of the memberlessp.26.com munity of those who assume the pure8 For a more detailed discussion, the readercontingence of being there together , andis referred to my La M e s entente (Paris:whose only principle of distribution is theGalile e, 1995).principle that founds politics: the equality of9 The Bosnian question is an exem plary

instance of this displacement of the position everyone with everyone else.

Jacques RancieÁ re is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Universityof Paris VIII, where he teaches aesthetics and politics. His books include T he N ights

o f Lab our: T he W orker’ s D ream in N ine teenth- C entury F rance (Temple University Press,1989); T he I gnorant S cho o lm aster: F ive E ssay s on I nte ll ectual E mancipation (Stanford

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University Press, 1991); T he N am es o f H isto ry : O n the P o etics o f K now ledge (University ofMinnesota Press, 1994); and O n the S hores o f P o li tics (Verso, 1995).

David M acey is a freelance translator and the author of Lacan in C ontex ts (1988)and T he L ives o f M iche l F oucault (1993). He is currently working on a biography ofFrantz Fanon to be published by Granta in 1998 and on a dictionary of criticaltheory to be published by Penguin Books.

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