About 'Is Racism an Environmental Threat?' (Polity, 2017)

The liars of global warming and the liars of Islamophobia were bound to meet,
and they have met in you
Anonymous hate mail

A couple of friends have kindly offered me a space to write something that helps introduce 'Is Racism an Environmental Threat?' (IRET?). Vijay Prashad’s Will The Flower Slip Through The Asphalt (LeftWord Books, 2017) has been one of such spaces. Olivia Rutazibwa’s blog Rethinking Francophone Africa is another. Polity Press has also asked me to write a couple of paragraphs to introduce the book on their blog.

If there is proof needed that writing is always an artificial suspension of an analytical process that can go on forever here it is. As I began writing these introductory notes, I found myself too often thinking about what I wished I had written, who I wished I had quoted and what I wished I had emphasized, just as much as about what I have already written, quoted and emphasized.

I will highlight two very general considerations animating the book. What I have just said above means that these considerations are at the same time of the order of the ‘already in the book’, and of the order of the ‘I wish I had emphasized this more in the book’.

Since my very first book (White Nation 1998) I have been conjuring analyses of human-animal relations of domestication as a way of helping clarify the nature of certain inter-human relations of domination and exploitation. While I have found it useful, I have also felt that this intellectual instrumentalisation of animal misery to understand human misery was not ethically satisfactory. It simply forefronted human misery, and paid scant attention to the domination and exploitation of animals as a subject in its own right. To say ‘the manager of this sweatshop works the Vietnamese women as if they were mules’ might help us get a sense of the intensity of exploitation to which the Vietnamese women are subjected, but it often demonstrates that, beside their analogical value, we couldn’t care less about what is happening to the mules. IRET? is a step in the direction of caring about what is happening to the mules. That’s the first broad consideration. The second consideration involves an attempt to define the moment where the other, human or natural, moves from being ‘a nuisance in my space’, a problematic object in my environment, to something that turns my whole space into a nuisance and transforms my whole environment into a problem.

An ecological crisis is by definition something all-encompassing. It relates to everything located within it from the very moment it becomes categorised as an ecological crisis. This is why we also refer to it as ‘environmental’. When a crisis is deemed “environmental” it is no longer a crisis in a specific relationship that one can have with a particular x or y. It becomes a crisis of the very environment, or milieu, in which we can have relationships to x or y. Take for example a garbage-collection crisis that has been taking place in Lebanon since 2015. It began as a breakdown in the garbage disposal system due to its complex entanglement with the logic of economic and political sectarian competition in the country. As people began to dispose of their rubbish anywhere they could, the garbage started fouling the already polluted environment. Soon the street smells, the ugly appearance of sea and mountain vistas, the contaminated rivers, permeated everything, causing inconveniences, discomfort and disease. “Garbage disposal” was no longer an unmanageable relation to garbage; it became constitutive of the entire social atmosphere. It affected the way people worked, their mood, where children played, what could be eaten and where one could eat, how and where one could exercise, and more.

It is a similar all-encompassing quality that defines the “environmental crisis” we are facing globally today. Because of this, it is always possible to demonstrate that any social phenomenon is related to the environmental crisis. From such a perspective, however, we cannot tell if there is a difference between the relation between ecological crisis and racism and the relationship between the environmental crisis and the fluctuations of the stock exchange. In both set of relations we can imagine processes independent from each other coming to intersect, precisely because of the all-encompassing nature of the environmental crisis. The relation between the two is here imagined as external and conjunctural. What characterizes IRET? is the search for a different, internal, and far more intimate relation between racism and the ecological. It is argued that the two are never independent of each other to begin with. Their commonality and their interaction is not conjunctural but part of their very nature.

Some time ago now, I was struck by the uncanny resemblance in the language used by the Australian government when it was dealing with refugee boats heading towards the Australian coast and the language used to refer to oceanic waste. More precisely, the way the government spoke of the people smugglers who ‘dumped’ refugees in the ocean was very similar to the language used to speak of people illegally dumping toxic waste. What is imagined in both cases is, first, a social process happening outside Australia and producing a useless and harmful by-product, and, second, someone illegally attempting to force Australia as a nation to deal with this harmful by-product for which it has no usage, and against the national will and interest. Waste, unrecyclable, ungovernable, un-incompassable and toxic; All these classificatory names and adjectives and the images associated to them are important in helping us understand what is happening in the case of refugees and in the case of oceanic waste.

They are important for understanding the way we experience the ecological crisis generally and global warming in particular. The toxic gases and chemicals that are constitutive of our physical environment and that we consider partially responsible for the ecological crisis are primarily waste. That is, they are the by-products of a process of production and consumption. They are also unrecyclable waste which is a category relative to a specific social arrangement and technological knowhow: what is unrecyclable today might not be tomorrow thanks to some technological innovation or within different social relations. Still some waste proves itself to be durably unrecyclable marking the limitations of a society’s technical capacities. But what constitutes the ecological crisis is not just the existence of unrecyclable waste. As important is the experience of this un-recyclable waste as something that is going out of control, as something ungovernable: we have no way of dealing with it. It is also not just ungovernable but also un-incompassable. This concept (which has it roots in the work of Louis Dumont) is crucial. There are things we consider ungovernable but that remain containable, that is, they remain ungovernable within the frames of governability that are set by a given governmental process and power. As such they do not radically challenge the position of the governmental subjects. There are however ungovernable objects that become so ungovernable in scale that they become, intellectually and physically, impossible to encompass even as governmental problems: they cross governmental boundaries (such as national borders) and instead of us encompassing them they start to encompass us. This is, as noted above, when we move from a governmental crisis to an environmental crisis, from having an object being out of control within our milieu to that object diffusing itself in such a way such that the entire milieu in which we exist becomes experienced as out of control. Finally, even unrecyclable, ungovernable and un-encompassable waste is not enough to define an environmental crisis without the last classification: toxic, that is, harmful. The ecological crisis is not only the experience of something useless (waste) from which we cannot extract any more value (unrecyclable), becoming both ungovernable and un-incompassable. Importantly this ungovernable and un-incompassable waste is also considered by us as harmful: it damages us as individuals and as collectives. It damages our social relations and our practices. It can do so because it damages the very milieu in which these are constituted.

What is striking today is that each and every one of these classifications and their associated imaginary can also be used to understand the way ‘the Muslim refugee’ is experienced in the West. That is, these classifications are at the very heart of what we call Islamophobia. The Muslim refugee, particularly the Syrian refugee today, is first and foremost perceived as waste. It is the refuse, the by-product of wars or of social transformations that uproot people from their land and their societies without these societies having the means of re-integrating them. Just as importantly, the Muslim refugee today is unrecyclable: this, in a way, is one of the crucial differences between the classification of refugees today and their classification during and immediately following WWII. In the latter case refugees were also seen as the refuse and the waste produced by war and social transformations, but, because of its expanding economies, the West was largely convinced by refugee advocates and industrialists to look at them largely as recyclable: it could make new usage of them. This is not the case with the refugees of today: thanks largely to its shrinking economies the West sees them as unrecyclable waste.

At the same time, this unrecyclable waste is going out of control, it is perceived as unmanageable, as ungovernable, it does not stay put. Despite the conspiracy theory imaginary that often accompany them, wars such as in Iraq and Syria are beyond control. More importantly, they are increasingly becoming perceived as un-incompassable. Their effect whether in the form of the spread of Islamicist terror organizations or the spread of refugees cannot be contained to specific localities. The Muslim others are experienced as a ubiquitous presence. S/he is everywhere. They are growing locally while also traversing and overflowing national borders. They do so in such a way that they are creating anxieties in the Western governmental subjects concerning their very capacity to be sovereign governmental subjects. Un-incompassibility is perhaps more than anything else the trigger of the kind of phobic anxieties from which the Western Extreme Right feeds. It triggers fantasies of reverse colonisation: fictional stories where the populations that have traditionally been colonised by the West are feared of becoming themselves the colonisers of Western populations. Anything, from the deadly but pathetic figure of the ‘Islamic terrorist’ to the non-assimilating ‘Halal meat eating’ Muslim, feeds the spectre of Muslim domination. This takes us to the final classification: the toxicity and harmfulness of the Muslim other: the Muslim’s mere presence is seen as having a negative impact on the West (conceived as anything but Muslim) and as able to potentially destroy it.

The Muslim then like a fluorocarbon gas is an unrecyclable, ungovernable, un-incompassable, toxic waste. It is not an object that is just mildly polluting certain social spaces within the modern social environment but an active subject has diffused itself throughout the planet and is responsible for wholescale global social crisis.

To be clear, this classificatory similarity is not what IRET? is about. Rather, noting and detailing the similarity is the starting point. The book argues that the classifications and the practices that constitute colonial racism and the practices that have generated the destruction of the natural environment are mutually self-reinforcing because they share a common root: they have a common mode of existence – a manner in which we humans are inserted, and deploy ourselves, in the world – that works as their generative principle. This is what is referred to in the book as ‘generalised domestication’. The book aims to explore this generalised domestication in so far as it constitutes a way of inhabiting the social and natural world. It analyses the practices and classifications that constitute its elementary structure. Last but not least, it explores the way this structure is articulated to and came to constitute the core of mono-realist capitalist modernity, and how it continues to propel the always patriarchal, always racist, always speciesist drive to colonise the world that characterizes the modernist capitalist project.

Tolerance, acceptance, enrichment… once again

Dear Dr. Hage,

I'm an assistant professor in the department of political science at Simmons College (in Boston, Massachusetts) and a longtime admirer of your work. As a graduate student in the early 2000s, White Nation was a badly-needed intellectual and political wakeup call. I teach the book regularly in my courses on race and contemporary political theory. 

Provoked in part by the nightmarish reality of US politics at the moment, and, in particular, the experience of attending a rally yesterday to protest Trump's Muslim ban, I'm hoping you might have a moment to share some insights. I was unsurprised to observe at the rally much "good white nationalist" discourse. Many white people held signs proclaiming that Muslims "are welcome here"; "This is your home too"; "I love my Muslim neighbors"... that sort of thing. One question that came to mind is: what happens when the fantasy of the white nation becomes the reality of the white state? In other words, do the operations of power behind the white assertion that non-white people are "welcome" shift at all when even the perfunctory multiculturalist message of the state is gone? Or alternatively, are these messages of welcome badly needed when political conditions are such that the white fantasy of control is rapidly becoming the founding principle of the new proto-fascist regime? I guess I'm wondering if, in your view, the argument in WN holds even in contexts when the disingenuous, but formal multicultural messaging of the state gives way to white supremacy altogether. 

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope to meet you in person one day.

Best,

Lena Zuckerwise

Dear Lena,

Thank you for your mail and for the very pertinent question that you raise. It is actually something I am very much thinking about at the moment and somehow, the way you have formulated the problem, has been very helpful to me. I'd like to try to write and publish my reply to it on my blog. I would also like to include your email if you have no objection.

Although part of White Nation was written and published following the rise of Pauline Hanson and during the Prime Ministership of John Howard, an era which represented the beginning of a conservative attack on multiculturalism and its institutions, what is perhaps the core critical moment of the book, the attack on the conceptual structure of white multiculturalism (the tolerance, acceptance, valorization of the other triumvirate) was a critique formulated during the Hawke and the Keating era which represented the height of the multicultural era: when the state moves from thinking of multiculturalism as something that one does, on the side as it were, to centering it as a core feature of the Australian identity. In some ways, White Nation’s critique of white governmental multiculturalism took this high ground for granted and aimed at pushing it towards a more radical future, a kind of ‘we can’t stop here, we ought to aim higher’ type of critique. Unfortunately, this critique was ambushed by reality which moved ‘lower’ rather than ‘higher’ as it were and it soon became a struggle to even maintain the multiculturalism we had, let alone improve on it.

What is important for the question raised above is that this high point of white governmental multiculturalism is the point where tolerance, acceptance and valorization finish moving from being reactive anti-racist moments against what was seen as institutionalized racism (lack of tolerance, lack of acceptance and devalorization of the other) to becoming institutionalized and, importantly, ossified, governmental structures themselves. I don’t think tolerance-acceptance-valorization is the only ideological formation that is radical when deployed oppositionally but loses its radicalism when it becomes an institutionalized governmental structure. My argument then was that it is ok to say ‘long live hospitality to the stranger’ when there is institutionalized lack of hospitality. But hospitality still carried within it the seeds of a power structure between the welcoming and the welcomed subject. And while it is ok to deploy it in opposition to lack of hospitality, it is not ok to institutionalize it as the reality one is aiming for. This is especially so when the structural relation between the welcoming and the welcomed subject articulates itself to the racial/colonial structure such that the welcoming subject is always white and the welcomed subject is always a third-world-looking person.

I guess what we have today is the same situation. While from the very premise of White Nation it would be wrong to assume that today we have a regime of white fantasy while earlier we didn’t, nonetheless, the difference is clearly important. A regime of White restoration is in power: a regime aimed at re-valorizing the cultural capital derived out of the mere possession of whiteness (whether it will succeed or not is a different question –  personally I don’t think it will). It is re-introducing a politics of lack of hospitality (non-acceptance), lack of tolerance and devalorization of the third world looking other.  So, we are seeing the bad white nationalists gain power and the good white nationalist discourse re-emerge again as part of the language of opposition, as you point out: ‘Muslims are welcome’ etc…

It seems to me that we have to do the same all over again. We cannot be overcritical of the good white nationalist’s ‘you are welcome’ in so far as it is opposed to the ‘you are not welcome’ but we have to continue to be critical of it as a final fantasy of society: we don’t want to go back to a situation where people think that the best we can get to is a society of tolerant White ‘welcomers’ who think that the third world looking other is valuable and ‘enriching’.  Already, the sight of all these third world looking American immigrant ‘spokespeople’ trying to valorize their community in the face of the bad white nationalists is quite demeaning. Looking at how they try to pump up the value of their communal capital by listing how many doctors, lawyers etc… have come out of them is particularly sad for those of us who have seen this happen and have criticized it again and again. How to avoid this repetition is an urgent task.

At the same time, nothing ever repeats itself completely. It is easier to recognize what is repeating itself because we have the intellectual means of perceiving it. There is still the task of recognizing and processing what is new and that is perhaps the hardest of the forms of intellectual labor facing us.

The tyranny of geopolitical reality in Syria

In a keynote I presented to the international cultural studies association Crossroads (#XR2016) yesterday, i used the Syrian predicament as an example of the analytical importance of thinking in terms of multiple realities, and particularly the productivity of thinking politics as a struggle between realities not just a struggle over a single reality.

The world of international relations and geo-politics is an order of life where states or sub-state groups are agents interacting with other states. In such a world human actors whether foreign affairs, or diplomatic corps, or military, officials do play a variety of roles. but these are channelled in the final analysis towards giving shape to what is the action of a nation-state assemblage, unless such national assemblage is too weak to act.

This geopolitical world of nation states is different from the world of individuals and citizens facing their state apparatus in so far as it is a governmental apparatus. The two worlds are clearly interrelated but they are nonetheless different worlds, different realities or different orders of life, each having what Aristotle would call their own particular 'individuality'. This is slightly similar to the classic Durkheimian differentiation between the order of social facts and the order of individual facts.

Left politics occurs and has a separate dynamic in each of these worlds and realities. In the geopolitical domain left politics is defined by degrees of opposition to the imperialist design of the colonialists.
In national space it is defined by struggles against inequality, exploitation, injustice, despotism, etc... and for better public health and schooling.

Ideally, a leftist politics should succeed in making the struggles occurring within each of these domains complement each other if not even fuse with each other. Practically this has rarely been the case.
Because of its ontological autonomy geopolitical anti imperialism has been used by an assortment of national bourgeoisies and petit-bourgeoisies, bureaucratic, military and police personnel as a governmental as a mode of carving for themselves a space of capitalist accumulation, which is opposed to western imperialism, but has little time for popular aspirations for freedom, justice etc...
Likewise it facilitates movements expressing a desire for freedom, justice, etc. devoid of any internationalist anti-imperialist dimension and easily récupérable by alternative reactionary formations.
The Syrian state today deploys geo-political reality against the reality where popular demands for justice are being formulated. It deploys it as a way of making its petit-bourgeois 'anti-imperialist' problematics drown the problematic of popular liberation. That some radical Marxists in the west fall for this cheap trick that basically institutes a tyranny of geopolitical reason at the expense of popular aspirations is beyond me. 

But one must recognise that the difficulty also lies in the absence of a political/ military force that represents that dimension of the popular revolution that is both liberationist and anti imperialist in its ethos. This dimension exists among the population but on the whole its only means of *public* expression is among some of the intelligentsia of the Syrian diaspora.

Peter Dutton and the Lebanese Sunnis

Take a sociological fact: one the most socio-economically deprived parts of Lebanon's population live in the north-western suburbs of Tripoli, Lebanon's second biggest city after Beirut. They live in deplorable conditions: the highest number of people per square meter in Lebanon, the lowest level of education in the whole country. And yes, fertile ground for the growth of Islamic fundamentalist of all kind of looney tunes variety, no doubt. but i understand that the number of young males who joined the police force, and even the number of males who became hairdressers from this milieu exceeds the number of males who became Islamic fundamentalist. So it's definitely not a sociological fact to just choose to emphasise the Islamic fundamentalist credentials of this group. 

Polemic: When Australia, under Fraser's government offered to have an intake of Lebanese amid the civil war. It made sense to take the most economically deprived part of the population. it's called humanitarian help. Now I know that today's rampant neo-liberal instrumentalism makes it inconceivable that one takes people like this. I know that today you are supposed to take the least needy people. people who represent a net asset gain. but. still, humanitarian help used to happen. some of us still remember it.
So yes, along came the most deprived of the deprived and yes, they came with the possibility of Islamicos among them. But do we have any statistical evidence of how this cohort developed as a totality. That is, *beside* not as opposed to the believable fact that there might have been a few home-grown Islamic fundamentalists that popped up from among them?
how many coiffeurs for instance? I'd be very interested. I've got this theory about Lebanese coiffeurs. Have you noticed how many of them there are in the world? Lebanon has unleashed way more coiffeurs on the word than Islamic fundamentalists and yet no one wants to talk about this. The destruction of western civilisation they have been responsible for far exceeds... (I'd better stop since my cousin in Lebanon is one so I'l wait to have more empirical evidence before pronouncing myself on this matter)

Take a second sociological fact: Peter Dutton was born in the working-class Brisbane suburb of Boondall. almost the equivalent (relatively speaking, of course) to Tripoli's working class suburbs. 

Take a third sociological fact: Beside coiffure, the Tripoli people from those suburbs who manage to get out of poverty commonly do so by getting some military education and joining the police force. Now, what do you know: Peter Dutton also rose from his working class background by getting a military education and becoming a police officer. 

Concluding Polemic: Now perhaps Peter Dutton has a lot more in common with the people he is attacking than meets the eye. Perhaps *he knows* he has a lot in common: working class, military education, low cultural capital, zero cosmopolitanism, tendency towards cultural fundamentalism.
Are we to blame the whole suburb of Boondall for the fact that the Liberal Party has unleashed someone like Peter Dutton on us. indeed on the whole world. of course not. Likewise, let's leave this poor Sunnis of Tripoli alone. They have enough problems surviving as it is. I mean they have to deal all the time with all the filthy Lebanese politicians for god's sake. It is just not fair to add some of the filthiest of all Australian politicians to this.

By the way, the brilliant Lebanese novelist Jabbour Douaiheh has written a novel called 'The American Neighbourhood' (available in English) on that part of Tripoli the is being talked about here. It is about an Islamic fundamentalist from the neighbourhood who returns after failing to go through a suicide-bombing mission in Iraq. go and read it if you are interested in intelligent fiction about this socio-economic milieu. Intelligent fiction is nicer and way more informative than Dutton's non-intelligent pseudo-sociology.

Trumpontologies 1

There are various intellectual trends that are increasingly seeing the world as a plurality of worlds, realities or ontologies, such as 'the ontological turn' in anthropology. I think that those who see this trend as a mere 'intellectual choice' or 'fashion' with no basis in reality are really mistaken. The popularity of the ontological has to be itself explained ontologically, not epistemologically. Or at least to put it in a Marxist language it has to be explained materially not idealistically. 

This is not unlike the way Marx regarded the upside down nature of the reality of the commodity as an ontological issue not an epistemological one. It was a situation where, as Godelier put it, 'It is not the subjects deceiving themselves it is reality that is deceiving them'. Likewise, we can say it is not the analytical subject increasingly opting for ontological difference it is reality that is increasingly presenting itself as ontologically differentiated.

To continue flirting with Marxist analogies, perhaps it is only in the era of dynamic capitalist accumulation that 'All that is solid melts into air'. when this dynamic stalls, all that is melting into air slowly becomes solid.

Like a volcano emitting it's lava capitalism has been burning every thing that is in its way. Now that its 'driving heat' is slowing down the lava is becoming solid turning to rock. Cultures that were being transformed are solidifying mid-way through their transformation. To a certain extent western multiculturalism reflects the cultural beginning of this stalling of the transformative/assimilationist drive that was western/capitalist modernity. It marks the rebirth of culturally essentialist 'resistance' in the face of a stalling processes of capitalist globalisation. The french essentialism of Le Pen and the Islamic essentialism of ISIS are both 'Lava rock formations': evidence of the cooling down of the melting (pot?) processes that fuelled and drove capitalist modernity.

This also links up with the work I have done on stuckedness (see Alter-Politics): for example, the processes of people identifying themselves as 'middle class' in the US relied on the existence of some minimal upward class mobility which kept the belief in the possibility of such a mobility alive. Once this social mobility despite its minimal nature actually stops, the belief in its possibility dies, people experience themselves stuck and their social cultural world becomes frozen. What was a process of social transformation and change comes to a halt and people feel imprisoned in their social locations. Is that not one defining characteristic (needless to say, among many) of the ontological reality that is the Trumpist life-world?

Gaia

All I said was ‘woof!'

I was not asking you to look at who was walking down the footpath past our front door!

That would have been more like ‘woof’ with a little bit more oonf and intentionality. Which again is very different from the more intense ‘woof’ which says I know who is coming and they’re not my friends. If you paid attention this woof was a little bit more low key which did not involve me even moving a single muscle in my body. my head is still resting on the mat, my body’s muscles are very relaxed. maybe there was a minor movement of my paw but this is it. This has always meant: ‘somebody is passing by, it is not worth worrying about it, but might as well make sure they know that I am here and that I know that they are passing by'. 

So, let's be clear, it is is not my fault if you rushed to open the door and tripped and hit your head on the wall.

You are always so big on ‘teaching me’ things. And I am supposed to know the difference between slow down and stop and go and come here and come here  now I said, and even complex formulations like how many times do I fucking need to fucking say: you don’t bite the fucking ham sandwich when I am fucking holding it in my fucking hand. 

I have to learn all this and all the subtleties in intonation you are capable of, and you can’t tell the difference between one woof and another. 

So, let me repeat since you are refusing to accept this and you are still giving me these dirty looks: it is not my fault that you rushed to open the door and have cut your head open needing a couple of stitches. I can live with you using me as your emotional punching bag. projecting on me whatever mood you’re in. But you need to take some responsibility for your inability to understand me. Would you understand it better if I said ‘you need to take some fucking responsibility for your fucking inability to fucking understand me’? If you still can’t at the very least stop pretending that you are so intellectually and morally superior.

Just accept it. it was you who rushed, you who fell, you who fainted, you who had to be taken to hospital two hours later, you who gave yourself stitches, you who didn’t end up taking that Uber that came for you.

And no, I recognise an Uber when I hear one, no its not like any other car, an uber has a far more ambivalent arriving sound. I can’t tell you a lot more about what makes its arrival sound so specific. I would have woofed differently had it been the Uber you were waiting for. So no it is not me that made you miss your job interview. and yes the world is not going to be the same even you try and understand my woofing. had you done it in the past, perhaps.

woof. in case you’re wondering, this woof means you still have my sympathies as a fellow creature. but you sure have fucked things up for yourself.

"I will fight for this naked breast"- Ghassan Hage

I have already read a lot of facebook commentary about the French PM saying that the naked breast represents France better than the headscarf. While I find it as ridiculous as any of my facebook friends, it actually brought home to me how scholastic so many intellectual reactions to Islamophobia and other things produced by politicians, including those like Pauline Hanson in Australia, Trump in the US, etc... are. Indeed I think that scholasticism is increasing, especially among intellectuals, today. It is a way of escaping a reality that is hard to fathom, a reality where we come to terms with how desperately politically inefficient at convincing and mobilising those who disagree with us we intellectuals have become. Scholasticism, in Bourdieu's term, means that we discuss what politicians say as if it is a statement of logic or an analytical statement. we discuss it, analyse it, agree with it or laugh at it and ridicule it as if the world is one big facebook discussion page and, most importantly, as if the sole purpose of an enunciation is to exist as an object of facebook, or tutorial room, discussion in terms of its coherence and its logic. To use Bourdieu again, we project into the object our particular relation to the object. We take the way a statement presents itself to us as intellectuals (ie, as an object of intellectual inquiry) as the way it presents itself to everyone in the world. But politicians are not analysts and they don't make statements aimed at being sophisticated, they make statements aimed at being politically efficient. So, while its fine to make fun of what the French PM says, or what Trump says, etc... some of us increasingly forget to ask: how good are they at doing what they are doing? What are the conditions of political efficiency of statements like this?

I happen to think that the French PM statement is an exceptionally powerful and skilful political statements. it is simple, metonymic, and manages to condense all the differences that French Politicians in their embrace of Islamophobic culture are competing to mobilise politically today.

I have written before how so many western values today are being re-deployed in a phallic manner. Instead of caring about how democratic the West is, more and more Westerners care more about 'flashing their democracy' to the other and say: 'look at my democracy it's better than yours'. Instead of enjoying their jokes they enjoy showing off that their sense of humour and capacity to be irreverent towards religious symbols is so superior to that of the other. And now, in this latest installment, some French people want to show off the naked breast of their women in a phallic manner. It is a masculine appropriation of the feminine for warring purposes and it is very efficient. It actually reminds me of Yassin Al Haj Saleh's analysis of a photo showing ISIS combatants in a region under their control pinning a poster which shows a fully covered woman with the caption; 'Your veil is my blood'. The French PM is now introducing a similar warring appropriation of the feminine: 'your naked breast is my blood', that is, I will fight (in a masculine way) to protect it.

We can ridicule what we have come to here, and maybe we should do so between us to comfort each other, but we need to always remember that we intellectuals, or intellectually savvy people, ridiculing something has not political efficiency whatsoever, Indeed, it even works at making what we are ridiculing more efficient.

Especially we intellectuals, should not shy away from confronting the fact that we have no political authority whatsoever today among those who are mobilised in such a phallic way. indeed we are the opposite of an authority: people go out of their way to embrace everything we laugh at and everything we criticise. Enough to drive anyone into the comforting refuge of scholasticism.