by François Rastier
The theme of Community is central in postcolonial studies. Tillotama Rajan, in an article by Postcolonial Text thus recounts his enchanting discovery of the translation of The Idle Community by Jean-Luc Nancy and The Coming Community by Giorgio Agamben.
For Homi Bhabha, recognized as one of the three main figures of postcolonial studies, along with Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak (translator of Derrida), postcolonial literature is characterized by an "incessant concern about who one is - as an individual or a group or a community - and the complexity of a global perspective" (Places of Culture. A Postcolonial Theory, 2012, p.18. Caroline Kalandji concludes: "This reality calls upon the postcolonial subject, whether individual or community, to undertake an exercise in reconstructing his identity", before adding: "The anxiety that Bhabha speaks of results from the hybridity that characterizes the postcolonial world" ("Postcolonial Theory and the Prospective of Identity", Lively thoughts, 1, 2005, p. 83).
Or defining the identity of the subject by its relationship to a "community" is a defining position of identity movements - and even if Bhabha and many others after him theorize "mixed race" as the pain of an impossible identity, they suppose and seem to regret by this very fact distinct racial or racialized communities.
From Nazism to Islamism
The theme of Community can be traced back to the constant common reference of Agamben and Nancy, Heidegger, who, from Time and time (1927), evokes " the Community, Volkes " even though the expression " Community of Peoples " (community of the people) was already in daily use in the Nazi press. To Kant's anthropological question, What is man?, Heidegger then substituted the identity question, the " Request » Who are we ? Jacques Derrida took it up again and radicalized it through the question How many of us are there? Since this is obviously not a population census, this "we" presupposes something in common, the foundation of the community, but also excludes those who escape the count. Jean-Luc Nancy thus writes, in his Heidegger's Banality : "We love neither Jews, nor technology, nor money, nor commerce, nor rationality - at least we never fail to put them at a distance" (p. 59), while omitting, despite this figure of participation, to specify who this "we" designates: an anti-Semitic, anti-capitalist and irrationalist community.
For the Nazis, the community (Community) opposed, it was a topos of the time, to the company (Society). The issue remains the identification of political power with a people purified having found his identity and not to a population which mixes in all modern states several languages, religions, ethnic origins, etc. Now democracy, in its contemporary form since women's right to vote, unites citizens who have precisely in common their right to vote: this temporary but radical equality terrifies all tyrannical thoughts. It is understandable that the permanent state of exception of the Reich put an end to this.
In the France of the National Revolution, Marshal Pétain promulgated in 1941, at the same time as the new constitution of the New Order, the Community Principles which replaced the human and citizen rights arising from the French Revolution (New France. Principles of the community tracking Calls and Messages, June 17, 1940-June 17, 1941, Paris, Fasquelle, 1941). In his study "Towards the Community Revolution. Meetings of the Third Way in the Time of the New Order", Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, n° 51 (2), 2004, p. 141-161, Antonin Cohen notes among "the ideological products resulting from the multi-sectoral mobilizations which, from 1940 to 1943, sought to give the National Revolution its Community » (p. 153), these expectations: "1. Experience shows that the Jews constitute, in each nation, a block of blood and spirit resistant to assimilation; 2. Jews residing in France must therefore be considered as non-assimilable foreigners" (p. 154; Journées du Mont-Dore, second session, 1943). It is clear that anti-Semitism is here at the foundation of community thinking.
Today, it is the "radical left" inspired by the Nazi ideologue Carl Schmitt who favours the theme of the Community to define a left-wing populism: thus the Schmittian philosopher Chantal Mouffe became an inspiration for We can in Spain and La France Insoumise.
This is also a point of convergence with the Islamists. At the time, spokesperson for the Party of the Natives of the Republic, which counts Tariq Ramadan among its first members and in which the Muslim Brotherhood is not without influence, Houria Bouteldja declared: "The decolonial perspective is to allow oneself to marry someone from one's community. Break the fascination of marriage with someone from the white community. […] The ideology according to which mixed couples, the meeting of two cultures, is beautiful, is really rotten." She adds, as if to clarify the background: "I am shocked that we send kids from the suburbs to Auschwitz..." ("Claiming a Decolonial World. Interview with Houria Bouteldja", din, No. 71, Spring 2015). The meaning of these suspension points becomes clearer when Bouteldja has himself photographed in front of a sign reading “Zionists in the Gulag,” a transparent tracing of “Jews in the Lager.” Identity is then defined by belonging, not by individuality. Bouteldja proclaims: “I belong to my family, my clan, my neighborhood, my race, Algeria, Islam” (Whites, Jews and Us, 2016, p. 72). Bernard Antony, a great figure of fundamentalist Catholicism, charitably complimented her for this statement: "Houria Bouteldja, that's Barrès" (Radio-Courtesy, April 13, 2016).
Community as a war machine
In fact, each community, whether defined by a "gender" affiliation as evidenced by the acronym LGBTI, religion or race, can open its own front of demands, motivated or not, independently of the equality prescribed by human and citizen rights: this will be for example "Islamophobia" (see the CCIF), "negrophobia" (cf. the Anti-negrophobia Brigade), "transphobia" or cisgenderism, etc.
Rosenberg's slogan, "every race has its soul, every soul its race," riveted the person to his race. On the one hand, it is an essentialization: the Jew will always be a Jew, the famous eternal Jew; on the other hand, it is a negation of his freedom: whatever he does, he cannot get rid of his racial soul. The same kind of identity assignment is found in various radical political projects. It is, for example, the argument of certain postcolonial feminists to reject "white feminism," which dares, for example, to allow abortion or criticize the excision recommended by Al Qaradawi, a major preacher of the Muslim Brotherhood, like the polygamy praised by Assa Traoré.
It will then be enough to decline the identity choices to multiply the "souls". The correspondence between a culture, a soul, a spirit, a vision of the world, a gender, and a sex, a race, an ethnicity or any other category (social environment, family tradition) thus finds itself founding a growing number of defining identities which will assert themselves by multiplying the separations, in the name of course of a fight against discrimination - hence for example the militant demand for separate toilets for transgender people.
In the past, in a cryptic manner, Heidegger defined Being by the homeland. Since his question Who are we ?, The Request, the answers multiplied: the Join does not necessarily correspond to a people, but can extend to a sexual, religious community, etc. Essays on the notion of community have multiplied, since The Unspeakable Community from Blanchot, The Idle Community from Nancy, The Community who is coming of Agamben.
From community we move on to "communism", whether "existential" in Nancy or neo-Maoist in Alain Badiou. This communism is that of internal links to a group united against Western plutocracy; hence, for example, the praise addressed by Agamben and Nancy to the radical-messianic group known as the Invisible Committee.
Community vs. Personal Rights
As an individual, an Arab or a Persian may be an atheist, but as a member of the religious community that claims to include him by birth, he may still be condemned for apostasy. This was the case with Salman Rushdie—still alive, but two of his translators were assassinated; with the Sudanese philosopher Mahmoud Taha, assassinated in 1985; and with Faraj Fodha, an Egyptian atheist, in 1992. Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz escaped an assassination attempt; and historian Nasser Hamed Abu Zayd was ordered to separate from his wife.
Indeed, it is the community that decrees the belonging of its members. Also, it prevails over personal interests: Bouteldja admires that a young black woman raped by a black man does not file a complaint, so as not to see a black man in prison. More generally, she must criticize the "white" patriarchy, but not the "indigenous" patriarchy: "The radical critique of indigenous patriarchy is a luxury. If an assumed feminism were to see the light of day, it could only take the winding and steep paths of a paradoxical movement that will necessarily pass through a community allegiance" (op. cit., P. 84).
Tariq Ramadan, who was his party comrade, clarifies this reasoning about excision: "We cannot deny the fact that [excision] is part of our traditions. […] We must stand up to defend our opinions, and before reacting hastily on any subject, we must have an internal discussion. […] We must not let others decide for us what our priorities are. We must say with dignity and confidence: it is up to us to decide, not to Islamophobes or racists." ("Scandal over excision in Islam", , July 3, 2017).
Ce repeated, like any “internal” identity assignment to a community, gives through its voice an answer to the question Who are we ? : We are not Islamophobic and we are probably Islamists.
Identity versus individuality
Since, according to him, thought does not depend on a subject capable of deliberating, but on the community that transcends it, Heidegger attacked the Cartesian subject, a gesture that Islamists repeat today, including Bouteldja: "I think therefore I am the one who subdues, who pillages, who steals, who rapes, who commits genocide. I think therefore I am the modern, virile, capitalist and imperialist man. The Cartesian "I" will lay the philosophical foundations of whiteness" (p. 30).
Thought by a white man, even one as little imperialist as Descartes, the philosophical Subject can only be genocidal.
As soon as the community defines the individual, it gives him, with his identity, a luster of his own, such as racial pride, but also a collective responsibility: thus, an anticolonialist and poor white man will remain dominant and, as such, an oppressor, whatever he does and thinks. This is the theme of Robin Di Angelo's bestseller, White Fragility (2018) kindly offered by Google to all its employees. It provides expensive training to make staff feel guilty; and we know, in all sectarian movements, that guilt fosters control. Whether this control is managerial and/or decolonial, it does not matter, if we realize that decolonial postmodernism has become the unofficial and soon official ideology of late capitalism.
We know that the Nazis made extensive use of the notion of collective responsibility, whether in Oradour-sur-Glane or in thousands of other villages. It remains the very principle of genocide since a "race" can be judged responsible without each of its members being responsible. Finally, as the individual owes everything to the Community, he must sacrifice himself for it, especially since it only exists through his sacrifice. He who defines himself by a membership finds an identity that removes all his doubts, but can sometimes open the way to fanaticism: the individual then goes to war against the enemy of the community and must then sacrifice himself for it, of which he becomes by death in combat a supereminent member and an example [1]
