jacques ranciere - the cause of the other

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The Cause of the OtherJacques Ranciere

Online Publication Date: 01 April 1998To cite this Article: Ranciere, Jacques (1998) 'The Cause of the Other', Parallax, 4:2,25 - 33To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/135346498250217URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/135346498250217

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parallax , 1998, vol. 4, no. 2, 2533

Th e C au s e of t h e O t h er1

Jacques Ranciere

My argument does not exactly correspond to the theme of the exchange of gazesbetween France and Algeria. It will not in fact deal w ith looking at A lgeria or witha body of knowledge about modern Algerian thought. My concern is, rather, withthe reexive gaze we turn back on ourselves when w e consider an otherwhose presenceor absence modies the meaning of the adjective `French and distances the `Frenchpolitical subject from him or herself. I will therefore be s peaking of what can, withoutprovocation, be called `French Algeria, and of the w ay in which the ties that wereknotted and then unknotted between the two terms at the S tate level knotted themtogether at the political level, and thus gave rise to a specic ordering of the relation-ship between the terms `Citizen, `French, `people, `man, or `proletarian. I willattemp t to show how this knotting together has determined a relationship of a lterity,a p articular relationship between sam e 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 reect 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 p roject a few of the questions that arise w hen w e considerthe knotting together of France and Algeria on to the contemporary ordering of thegures of alterity (the homeless, the immigrant, the excluded, the fundamentalist,man and humanitarianism) that denes our political eld, or our absence of apolitical eld.

That a radical break has occurred between two cosmologies of the political, or between the two systems of relations between world, history, truth and humanitythat dene the rationality of the political, is so obvious that it is now dicult 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 langu age that speaks the truth of a historical process. And that truth-processis likened to a denite system of relations between the same and the other: in thecourse of the struggle, a `people whose identity has been snatched away by colonialoppression becom es that alteritys 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, w rites Pierre Bourdieu,

the war is completely demolishing social realities; it is crushing and

scattering traditional communities such as the village, the clan or the family The peasant masses who rejected the innovations oered bythe West in the name of a sturdy tradition and conservatism, havebeen caught up in the whirlwind of violence which is abolishing theremains of the pa st.2

The voice of the militant and that of the scientist, l ike 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 rem oved from the systems that govern todays analyses. That much isobvious from the way in which a contemporary sociologist of Islam describes andinterprets for u s a similar phenom enon of `deracination. This is how Bruno E tiennenow explains the rise of radical Islamism:

The Nation-state is destroying communitarian structures and acceler-ating the ight from the countryside but cannot oer any credible welfare provision for individuals, who become anonymous citizens.The reception facilities oered by the pious communities, insofar asthey are spiritual com munities, 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 eects it deduces from it, inverts the relationship between politics and truththat underpinned their words: the relationship between what knowledge can sayabout the w orld, a nd w hat politics can apprehend of it. The `cause of the deracin-ation is no longer oppression and liberation. It is now an eect 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 a

loss 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 m an, is now supposedly forging a man who w ants to transform thereligious law into the law of the political world. This inversion of eects 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. B ut the obscurity of the belief that can establish bonds is now seen a s the onlything that can confer m eaning. It supplies social science w ith both its raw materialand its mode of v alidity, namely the relativity that distinguishes it from philosophicalteleologies of truth. Bruno Etienne goes on: `It is because groups require cohesion if

they are to survive that m eaning exists, and not the other w ay round.4

One could simply take note of the fact that the world has changed, or of the factthat it is now impossible to b ind the four terms `history, `truth, `people and `univer-sal into a p rocess that allow s truth to forge a w orld. We wou ld then have to conclu dethat the possibility of constituting political objects and utterances w as bound up witha cosm ology and a truth-regime that have become foreign to us. A nd we would thuscondem n ourselves to having to speak of that political conguration in purely histor-ical terms. A nd y et I wonder if it might not be p ossible to keep the question w ithin

the limits of the political by dening a dierent line of approach. The basic hypothesisis as follows: belief in a truth-regime is at least as much an eect as the cause of agiven m ode of political subjectivation. If that is the case, we no longer ha ve to simplycompare the illusions and disenchantments of historys relationship with the truththat denes possible p olitical utterances. We can arrive at a positional com parisonof the political relationships between sam e 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, oensive. But it has always been oensive. 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 relationship

between these terms, or when politics is seen a s a realm of self-interested com munitiesgoverned by their own logics of self-preservation, and ethics as the realm of a respect for the other governed by principles that transcend political limitations.

The question of the struggle against the A lgerian war, or the way in w hich successiveFrench governments waged it, did pose a dilemma: in what sense, if not an ethicalsense, could the cause of the A lgerians be our cause? Rem ember Sartres preface toFrantz Fanons Les D amnes de la t erre . It is a paraodoxical preface in that it introducesus to a book by w arning us that this book is not addressed to us. The w ar of liberation

waged 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 denes a

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purely ethical and individualistic relationship with the war a s such. Thu s, the deserterMaurice Maschino justies his action in terms of the ethics of absolute freedom andresponsibility established by the very same Sartre in LE tre et le neant: Ìf I am mobilizedin a war , that war i s my war . I t i s made in my image and I deserve i t .5 Tw oconicting 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 makes

the French governments war everyones 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 w ar.

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 s avage repression and a news blackout on the num ber of victims.

That day, with its twofold aspect (manifest and hidden), was a turning point, am oment w hen the ethical aporia of the relationship betwen `mine and the other w astransform ed into the political subjectivation of an inclusive relationship w ith alterity.The crucial thing about the eect of that day w as the way in which the questions ofthe visibility a nd invisibility of repression becam e interwoven into the three relation-ships that were in play: the relationship between Algerian militants and the Frenchstate; that between the French State and ùs; and that between the Algerian militantsand ùs.6 From the French States point of view, the demonstration meant thatAlgerians in struggle had em erged w ithin 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 b lackout, m ade its own operations invisible. Forus, this m eant that something had been d one in our cou ntry and in ou r 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 e s D a m ne s d e l a t e r r e 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 nev er lit up anything. Marked and

tortured bodies do not light up anything. We know that now, now that images fromBosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere show us m uch m ore than we were shown in thosedays. A t best, our exposure to them inspires m oral indignation, a powerless hatredof the torturer. It often inspires a more secret feeling of relief at not being in thatothers shoes, and sometimes it inspires annoyance with those who are indiscreetenough to remind us of the existence of suering. Fear and pity are not politicalaects.

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 and what 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, dened as the law that prescribes what emerges and what is heard, what can be counted and what cannot be counted.8 Now, it has to be remembered that, ocial ly, 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 became

possible a political subjectivation that did not take the form of external support forthe others w ar, or of an identication of the others military cause with our cause.This political subjectivation was primarily the result of a disidentication 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 identication with the State that had killed them and removed them from allthe statistics.

Insofar as it is a political gure, the p rimary m eaning of the cause of the other is arefusal to identify with a certain self . It is the production of a people dierent fromthe people seen, named and counted by the State, of a people dened by the w rongdone 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 b reak w ith a certain se l f . Secondly, it is a dem onstrationaddressed to an other that constitutes a community dened by a certain wrong.Thirdly, it always contains an impossible identication, an identication with an

other 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 identica-tion with those ghters, w hose m otives w ere not ours, or with those victims, whosevery faces were invisible to us. But an identity that could not be assum ed 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 specic reason. The political self-dierence corresponded to a nother dierence, namely the juridico-Statist dierence

that had been inscribed for hundreds of years as the dierence internal to Frenchidentity. I refer to the dierence between a French subject and a French citiz en which was inscribed by the colonial conquest as the dierence internal to the juridicaldetermination of being French. The French state had proclaimed the end of thatdierence at the beginning of June 1958. The point is that its policemen once moreunderlined it heavily on that day in O ctober 1961 by meeting out a repression thatdierentiated between some `French people and others, and by distinguishingbetween those who did a nd d id not have the right to appear within the French pub licspace. The State therefore made it possible to subjectivate the self-dierence of our

citzenship, or a gap between juridical citizenship and political citizenship. That self-dierence 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, cou ld subjectivate it as we w ere caughtbetween two denitions of citizenship: the national denition of membership of theFrench nation, and the political denition of citizenship as a way of counting the

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uncounted. This did not create a politics for the A lgerians. But in France it did createa political subjectivation, or a relationship between included and excluded in whichno subject was specically named. Yet perhaps that nameless subjectivation of a gapbetween two citizenships did nd a nam e a few y ears later in an exemplary formulafor an impossible identication: `W e are all G erm an J ew s. That impossible identicationinverted a name that was meant to stigmatize by turning it into the principle behindan op en sub jectivation of the uncounted, but it did not politically confu se them w ithany representation of an identiable 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 specicity? It is, I think, therediscovery of what lay behind the great subjectivations of the labour movement,and of w hat was lost between the sociological identication of a class and the bureau-cratic identication 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 uncou n-ted, a form of v isibility conferred upon something that is supp osedly 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 ofidentication of what was a t stake for the A lgerians. But I think it is just as importantto grasp the specic form of the inclusion-exclusion relationship that established thelimitations of this political subjectivation. This appropriation of the invisibility of thedead bod ies that had been taken away w as obviously a w ay of not seeing them, andof constructing an Algerianness which was no more than a category of French politicalactivity. O ne m ight argue that there w as 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 dened by French subjectivation of the gap in citizenship was conned to

the 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 political erasure of the singularity ofthe ght. That erasure had, however, diametrically opposed political eects in Algeriaand France. In the A lgeria that won its independence, it m eant a brutal confrontationbetween discourse and reality as what had been denied or repressed returned in somany forms. It meant the unmediated conict between the people of the Statesdiscourse, and a population confronted with its sociological and cultural reality. For

those who lost the war, on the other hand, it helped to redene a setting for thepolitical subjectivation of the uncounted. One might therefore say that the politicalprots 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 would be more protable 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 m ost useful w ay to com pare 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 such faith. It describes an inverted inevitability which, by re-establishing fact after fact,has supposedly destroyed political activitys faith in history. We have supposedly

moved 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 w orld. 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 com paring 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 dierence. Aconsensus identies the political subject know n as the `people with a population thatis broken dow n and then reconstituted into groups with specic interests or a specicidentity, and the political citizen is identied with a legal subject who then tends tobe identied with an economic subject who is a microcosm of a macro-circulationand an incessant exchange of rights and civil capacities, of consumer goods and the

common Good. This is also a product of or a complement to the consensualutopia: this is the breaking point where the little economico-juridical machine takeson the appearance of the excluded, of those who have lost their ìdentity becausethey have lost their goods and because `the social bond has been broken. Petitions for identity are a negation of the citizenship that includes the other. They can taketwo form s: the com munitarian 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 corollary of com munitarianisms and fund amentalisms: the ùniversalismthat fully identies citizenship w ith a juridical status d ened by the State, and rarely

misses the opportunity to combine the principles of secularism with the discreet frissons of racism, or the defence of the rights of peoples with the fever of wars orreconquest. There is also the hum anitarianism that is dened as the cause of a nakedhumanity, as the defence of human rights that are identied 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 òther thatretreats from politics to ethics, and is then completely absorbed into duties towardsthe suering. Ultimately it plays into the hands of the geostrategic policies of thegreat pow ers.9

The Franco-Algerian past cannot be analysed simply in terms of the distribution ofprots and losses. The dissymm etry of the Algerian question ha d imm ediately contra-dictory eects. 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 identication. To forge t that contrad iction, which is know n as the A lgerianwar, is to forget an internal alterity: the dierence internal to c itizenship that is themark of politics. We k now that, in France, amnesia has returned in the form of theìmmigrant problem and new outbreaks of racism. Like others, I have written else-where that the ìmmigrant who is the target of these outbreaks is the migrant worker

of 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 `workeror the `proletarian operational was the d isjunction betw een political subjectivity andsocial group. A nd that disjunction w as the result of an openness to the cause of theother. It is that which allows that a subject such as the `worker or the `proletarianto be divorced from the identity of a social group whose self-interests bring it intoconicts with some other group, and to become a gure of citizenship. To forget

Algeria is to forget one of the fractures that shatter social identities and give rise topolitical subjectivations. It is dicult to be politically active ìn a war. But beingpolitically active is always dicult. And those extreme situations in which politics,war and ethics make the question of the other an aporia are a lso the crucial situationsthat allow us to think of the fragility of politics.

Translated by D avid M acey

Notes1 This text i s a transla tion o f Jacques o f the o ther . It shows that the gure o f theRancie re, `La cause de l autre , lignes, 30 suering other does not in i tsel f lead to a(Fevrier 1997), pp.3649. politics because this other, unlike the Algerian2 Pierre Bourdieu, `Revolution dans la revolu- or Vietnamese other, was not our other andtion, E sprit ( January 1961). did not dene our citizenships relationship3 Bruno Etienne, LIslamisme R adical (Paris: with itself. Every eort to launch a politicalH achelle, 1987), p .142. struggle for Bosnia has consisted in the4 Etienne, LIslam isme R adical, p .143. attem pt to get away from mere demands for5 Maurice Maschino, Le R efus (Paris: Maspero, a id for v ictims, and to dene a common

1960), p .179. interest on the basis of the dichotomy, within6 Throughout the remainder of this text,suering Bosnia itself, between two notions`we/us simply refers to a political generationof community: the idea of a fair distributiontaken as a whole.of populations and identitities, which stil l7 Jean-Pau l Sartre, `Preface in Frantz Fanon,sub sc rib es to th e `p oli ce l og ic of th e

L e s D a m n e s d e l a t e r r e (Paris: Maspero, 1961),aggressor, and the idea of the memberlessp.26.community of those who assume the pure8 For a more detailed discussion, the readercontingence of being there together, andis referre d to m y L a M e sentente (Paris:

whose only principle of distribution is theGalilee, 1995).principle that founds politics: the equality of9 The Bosnian question i s an exemplary

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

Jacques Rancie 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 ightsof Labour: T he W orker s D ream in N ineteenth- C entury F rance (Temple University Press,1989); T h e I g no r ant S c ho o l m a s t er : F i ve E s s a y s o n I n t el l e ct ua l E m a nc ip a ti o n (Stanford

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jacques ranciere - the cause of the other

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