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Postnationalism, fundamentalism, andthe global Real: Historicizing terror/ism and the new North American/global ideologyJoseba GabilondoPublished online: 04 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Joseba Gabilondo (2002) Postnationalism, fundamentalism, and the globalReal: Historicizing terror/ism and the new North American/global ideology, Journal of SpanishCultural Studies, 3:1, 57-86, DOI: 10.1080/1463620020127022

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Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2002

ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818 online/02/010057-30 Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/146362002012702 2

Postnationalism, fundamentalism, and the global Real: Historicizingterror/ism and the new North American/global ideology

JOSEBA GABILONDO1

Muslim fundamentalism, global capitalism, and the postnational RealAs recently as September 2001, the global dynamic of culture and societychanged in ways that nobody can quite grasp yet. Thus it is important thatdifferent reflections and discourses are elicited from different positions. Here, mycondition of Basque cultural theorist and my theorization of postnationalism –which is Lacanian and � i�ekian rather than Habermasian – represent a departurepoint for a reflection on these events. At the same time, I want to analyse the wayin which these events affect Basque politics’ global position, which remainsoverdetermined by ETA terrorism, and thus by Spanish politics, as well. Yet thisreflection is also theoretical and reflexive in the sense that, finally,psychoanalysis is also questioned and reconsidered from the point of view of mypostnational theorization.

At any given time when world history was not changing in such radical andunprecedented ways I would agree that, from a strictly academic point of view,the following theoretical reflection is the compilation of four different articles:one on postnationalism, another on the history of terrorism, yet another on globalhistory, and a final one consisting in a postnationalist critique of psychoanalysis.Yet, because of the crucial historical juncture at which we find ourselves, I deemit important to show the articulation and interconnection between these fourdifferent ‘topics’ so that ultimately the new organization of a global political andcultural order is underscored in its complexity, even if at the expense oftraditional academic conventions. Perhaps in a not so far future this contributionwill be expanded and rewritten as four different articles. At this point, though, Ifind my actual approach politically more responsible and coherent with a‘cultural studies’ standpoint. At the same time, I am fully aware of the risk oneruns when writing about the present: any near-future event can contradict andmake obsolete the ongoing theorization. Yet, once again, the unprecedentednature of our recent history demands that we take this risk.

Till Benedict Anderson’s return to the issue of nationalism, Marxism – andmore generally the Left – had not readdressed the nationalist problem, for thelatter was a Herderian irrationality, a leftover from the nineteenth century;Kristeva still is a beleaguered defender of this position. However, asglobalization is becoming the new hegemonic discourse of late capitalism(Jameson 1991), new supra-state realities are emerging (European Community,North America/NAFTA, Japan’s area of influence in the Pacific Rim). Thesenew mega-formations lack the hegemonic legitimacy held by the nation-state

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over the last two hundred years, but at the same time the traditional state nolonger retains its old nationalist, hegemonic hold either. Yet, in the midst of thisabsence of political legitimacy and hegemony, new forms of nationalism are onthe rise. They emerge with a persistence that could rightly be characterized assymptomatic: the new nationalist emergence is not easily understandable(symbolizable) and yet it elicits compulsive responses and criticisms that keepinsistently coming back to this otherwise ‘old-fashioned’ issue.

If this situation is approached from an economic point of view, one has toconclude that the working class has lost its capacity for rallying a new radicalhegemony against capitalism and, furthermore, that the migration of subalternsubjects, especially but not only from Third-World countries to the new supra-state realities mentioned above, creates a new socio-economic reality that nomodern ideology (Marxism, liberalism, etc.) was prepared to confront. ArjunAppadurai has ciphered this break in modernity, the post-, in the fact that ‘[T]hestory of mass migration (voluntary and forced) is hardly a new feature of humanhistory. But when it is juxtaposed with the rapid flow of mass-mediated images,scripts, and sensations, we have a new order of instability in the production of[post]modern subjectivities’ (1996: 4).

This historical instability or crisis can also be summarized in a negative wayas the ‘withering-away’ of the traditional state. As Slavoj � i�ek argues:

This eroding of state authority from both sides is mirrored in the fact thattoday the basic political antagonism is that between the universalist‘cosmopolitical’ liberal democracy (standing for the force corroding thestate from above) and the new ‘organic’ populism – communitarianism(standing for the force corroding the state from below). And – as Balibarpointed out yet again – this antagonism is to be conceived neither as anexternal opposition nor as the complementary relationship of the twopoles in which one pole balances the excess of its opposite (in the sensethat, when we have too much universalism, a little bit of ethnic rootsgives people the feeling of belonging, and thus stabilizes the situation),but in a genuinely Hegelian sense – each pole of the antagonism isinherent to its opposite, so that we stumble upon it at the very momentwhen we endeavor to grasp the opposite pole for itself, to posit it ‘assuch’. (1994: 2-3)

Today, and within the new antagonistic proliferation of ‘populism-communitarianism’, the political reality of nationalism has not disappeared; it isnot withering away with the state. Furthermore, nationalism continues to be – in arather distorted way, as I will elaborate below – the political and ideologicalhorizon of these new formations. Furthermore, new nationalist realities areemerging throughout the globe, unlike states, which, after the dissolution of theEastern socialist block, no longer proliferate – the uniqueness of the Palestinianstruggle being a case in point.

Technically we might want to refer to these new distorted nationalistproliferations – from Third-World fundamentalist to post-socialist Eastern

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European and post-traditional Western European, such as the Basque – aspostnational in the sense that they remain thoroughly nationalist but also are fullyaware that the state, as the upholder of the traditional site of nationalism, nolonger is their political horizon or utopia. In short, these nationalisms emergeafter the crisis of the nation-state and its modern utopia of sovereignty and yetthey fashion themselves after the fading nation-state. In this double sense ofafter, the term ‘postnationalism’ aims to capture the nature of this new historicalcondition, which cannot be reduced to a simple historical narration (‘post’ meanssimply ‘after the demise of the nation-state’) or to a political theory ofdependence (‘post’ means ‘to be fashioned after the model of the nation-state’).Ultimately, postnationalism is radically differential.

Perhaps one could argue that invocation of the term ‘postnationalism’ mightbe far-fetched in the specific case of (Muslim) religious fundamentalism; that is,the most pressing case in contemporary global politics. If one were to object that,say, Muslim fundamentalism is religious, not (post)national, it would also beimportant to take into consideration that even this fundamentalism operates alongstate lines (Iran, although an early fundamentalist state, attacks the Talibanregime in Afghanistan, the most recent case of fundamentalism and perhaps themost radical). In case the above argument does not seem convincing, one couldre-read history from Marxism to Muslim fundamentalism: it is worthremembering that any Marxist political formation (communism/socialism) tookthe shape of state-nationalism in Europe and the Third World while, at the sametime, proclaiming itself ‘universal’. Muslim fundamentalism seems to be trappedin the same postnational conundrum: ‘we are not nationalist, but all the same…’.Bosnia is the other extreme scenario where one can observe the way in whichreligion was used to exterminate people along new ethnic-national boundaries.

Postnationalism, thus, emerges across four very new and global realities:firstly, the traditional Left’s vindication of the state as the sole site from which touphold workers’ economic and human rights against global capitalism; secondly,the new arrival of Third-World immigration in these very same states in such away that the discourse of nationalism is complicated rather than abolished, forthese groups also organize themselves along national lines; thirdly, the rise ofnew fundamentalist nationalist groups – from Le Pen in France to Khomeini inIran – that organize their rhetoric by opposition and hatred towards the other two(‘the leftists and the liberals are too soft on immigration’, ‘the secular state is toocomplaisant with Western capitalism and modernization’, etc.); finally, the riseof historical ethnicities that take advantage of the weakening of the state to claimnew rights. The resurgence of Scottish nationalism in Great Britain, for example,coincides with the rise of postcolonial communities, so that they do not canceleach other out but complicate the British postnational landscape. The coexistenceof new minorities in the USA – especially the Latino – that resist theassimilationist ideology of the melting pot alongside new fundamentalist groupswho fashion themselves along neo-Nazi and white-supremacist ideologiesexemplifies the complexity of the postnational scenario. The convergence ofBasque nationalist violence and illegal immigration in Spain as the two most

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important political state problems also attests to this manifold postnationalscenario.

In this complex context, postnationalism – dislodged from the state and yetreappearing after the latter’s demise – appears to be one of the political noises,stains, or kernels which neither the traditional Left nor global capitalism seems tobe able to symbolize. In this sense, and in strict Lacanian psychoanalytical terms,postnationalism can be defined as the global Real. As Slavoj � i�ek reminds us:‘the Real is neither pre-social nor a social effect – the point is, rather, that theSocial itself is constituted by the exclusion of some traumatic Real. What is“outside the Social” is not some positive a priori symbolic form/norm, merely itsnegative founding gesture itself’ (Butler et al. 2000: 311). Thereforepostnationalism qua Real is one of the historical conditions from which we canstart to think the political in the new millennium.

Furthermore, one could conclude that political universality – the basis of anynew political engagement in the world – is precisely situated at the postnationalcrossroad in the sense that both neo-liberal democracy and subalterncommunities – from ethnic to religious – fail to symbolize it: the postnational istheir Real. Therefore the masses, which remain subaltern as a result of thispostnational inability to articulate their position within late capitalism, becomethe subject position from which political universality can be reclaimed. As � i�ekargues:

I perceive the shadowy existence of those who are condemned to lead aspectral life outside the domain of the global order, blurred in thebackground, unmentionable, submerged in the formless mass of‘population’ [….] I am tempted to claim that this shadowy existence isthe very site of political universality; in politics, universality is assertedwhen such an agent with no proper place, ‘out of joint’, posits itself asthe direct embodiment of universality against all those who do have aplace within the global order. (Butler et al. 2000: 313)

Thus it is paramount to approach postnationalism as one of the shadowy andspectral existences, out of joint, from which to rethink political universality andits subject. In this sense and, at a point at which, as � i�ek contends, ‘one cannoteven imagine a viable alternative to global capitalism’ (Butler et al. 2000: 321),postnationalism could become one of the referents – perhaps the referent – in thechain of equivalences (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) that might help us think aradical democratic hegemony in/after global capitalism.

Yet, and as if we had arrived too late, a new hegemony, a neo-liberalhegemony has been articulated as a result of the bombing of the WTC Towers inNew York in September 2001. It is no coincidence that the late-night-show hostJay Leno joked about George Bush’s popularity by claiming that the latter’sapproval ratings had risen to 130% due to the fact that now even illegalimmigrants approved of his appointment. The joke is possible precisely becausethe new North American hegemony exceeds its supposedly ‘national’ limits andaffects the rest of the world, including the non-Muslim Third-World. At the same

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time, a similar joke could be made about Osama bin Laden and the Muslimfundamentalist world: there is an excess of ‘approval’ that is the clearest sign ofhegemony. I will discuss below the apparent contradiction of simultaneouslyreferring to ‘two’ hegemonies; that is, the neo-liberal and the Muslim-fundamentalist.

If we address the North American/global hegemony in psychoanalyticalterms, we have to conclude that Muslim fundamentalism has become the objectpetit a (the Lacanian other) of global capitalism. As � i�ek states:

In somewhat simplistic Hegelian terms, object petit a is the remainderthat can never be ‘sublated [aufgehoben]’ in the movement ofsymbolization. So not only is this remainder not an ‘inner’ objectirreducible to external materiality – it is precisely the irreducible trace ofexternality in the very midst of ‘internality’, its condition ofimpossibility (a foreign body preventing the subject’s full constitution)which is simultaneously its condition of possibility. (Butler et al. 2000:117)

In this sense, bin Laden has become the condition of possibility that holds theglobal capitalist system together, to the point that, as a result of his actions, ‘weall now have become global capitalists’. We are now ‘subjects’ of the new globalsymbolic order managed by North American politics. Now we all oppose binLaden for the big Other of global capitalism.

At the same time, bin Laden has become the quilting point or point decapiton of Islamic fundamentalism, and ultimately any violent opposition tocapitalism. As � i�ek explains:

What creates and sustains the identity of a given ideological field beyondall possible variations of its positive content? […] the multitude of‘floating signifiers’, of proto-ideological elements, is structured into aunified field through the intervention of a certain ‘nodal point’ (theLacanian point de capiton) which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding andfixes their meaning.

Ideological space is made of non-bound, non-tied elements, ‘floatingsignifiers’, whose very identity is ‘open’, overdetermined by theirarticulation in a chain with other elements – that is, their ‘literal’signification depends on their metaphorical surplus-signification [….]What is at stake in the ideological struggle is which of the ‘nodalpoints’, points de capiton, will totalize, include in its series ofequivalences, these free-floating elements. (1989: 87-8)

The difficulty that many countries with a majority Muslim population encounterin siding with the USA and condemning the terrorist attack, most notablyPakistan, explains the fact that the Muslim world, fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist, cannot escape the overdetermination of bin Laden’s actions. Ifthe relationship between modernity and Islam had previously fluctuated from theTurkish case to that of Afghanistan, it is clear that now all of them are

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overdetermined by bin Laden as the quilting point of the contemporary Muslimworld in its dealings with modernization and the West. The ability of bin Laden’sside to capitalize on the Palestinian struggle for sovereignty does not simplyamount to political opportunism; it explains the force by which bin Laden’sactions quilt and freeze the different meanings of the relationship between Islamand the West – the very fact that the terrorist actions can be equated with thename ‘bin Laden’ is as empirically incorrect as it is ideologically correct.

It is against this new global hegemony articulated by the USA and bin Ladenthat we need to recuperate and articulate postnationalism as a Real position ofuniversal politics against global capitalist hegemony.

A global history of terrorismFrom my Basque position, I want to embark on a second reflection that deals withthe issue of terrorism as political activity, in the sense that the attack on the WTCtowers affects terrorism all over the world, including the Basque Country andETA. At the same time, because of its ‘global novelty’, the terrorist attack ofSeptember 2001 permits older histories of terrorism, such as the Basque, tobecome platforms from which to theorize and describe this new globalization ofterrorism in ways that North American theorists, because of their lack ofhistorical experience, cannot yet do.

As Joseba Zulaika contends, after bin Laden no Western terrorist group canresort to violence as a means to achieve political revolution or utopia (from theworkers’ revolution to national sovereignty). Thus the terrorist actions ofSeptember 2001 close an entire chapter – one we could denominate ‘classicalterrorism’ – in what we might provisionally label a traditional and teleologicalhistory of terrorism:

If in the 60s violence was considered (after the models of Israel, Cuba,and Algeria) a necessary condition for oppressed people to achievesovereignty, after September 11th 2001 (and in a world scared by thedestructive capabilities of nuclear and biological weapons in the handsof terrorists) there is only one fundamental situation in whichsovereignty can be denied to oppressed people: their association withterrorism. The evidence supporting this new situation will becomeoverwhelming in a near future marked by horror. (Zulaika 2001, mytranslation; I prefer to make this quotation available in English)

In this sense, any terrorist action nowadays becomes a way of siding with binLaden against ‘The World’, since, at this point, any political antagonism isregulated by global capitalism through the referent/empty signifier of ‘TheWorld’. That is, any political violence, regardless of its aim or history, is todayoverdetermined by the new North American/global ideology, and thus is equatedwith terrorism, which ultimately reverts to Muslim fundamentalism and binLaden. Any form of terrorism today becomes the object petit a of NorthAmerican ideology of the global. This would be the first characteristic of thishistorically new terrorism. In this respect and in the foreseeable future, any form

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of terrorist violence against any political target other than the North American isliable to be interpreted and dealt with as a threat to the USA while beingconnected to violent Muslim fundamentalism. This is the powerful effect ofideological overdetermination.

Although I will come back to this issue, allow me to cite a few examples. Inthe case of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, the firstsuspects were automatically overdetermined as ‘Muslims’. As Joseba Zulaika andWilliam Douglass summarize: ‘[T]he real shocker regarding Oklahoma City wasthat, after two days of finger pointing at Muslims as the “natural” suspects, it wasa white American who was ultimately detained’ (1996: 13). At the same time,after the attack of September 2001, the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center has madeBin Laden its priority. However, among the names given to the passagewaysbeing formed between compartments, ‘Basque Avenue’ (Zakaria) comes in handynext to the newer ‘Bin Laden Lane’ as if it provided a new ideological andcognitive map of the new ‘terrorism to come’. Basque terrorism, thus, is notdiscarded but overdetermined by the new terrorist ideology of the CIA.Conversely, it is no coincidence that a Basque became a suspect in the anthraxcases that followed the attacks of 2001. This particular case, which took place atthe headquarters of American Media at Boca Raton, is telling: ‘Suspicioninitially landed on a summer intern from Florida Atlantic University who had leftbehind what Bolton [senior reporter] called a cryptic e-mail message. JordanArizmendi, who is of Spanish-Basque descent, was interviewed by the FBI onMonday and quickly ruled out as a suspect’ (Breed 2001). Supposedly the cryptice-mail message was something to the effect that he had ‘a surprise’ for the staff.Later he showed up with the surprise: bagels and cream cheese. Obviously aBasque surprise is overdetermined in a way that a North American surprise isnot.

Yet, this general overdetermination has at least three other ramifications.A first ramification has to deal with geopolitics. Classical terrorism (1945

through 2001) was local, whereas new terrorism is global in a radical andunprecedented way. First of all, this difference does not mean that classicalterrorism was not international. In the Basque case, for example, the connectionsbetween the Basque terrorist band ETA and the IRA or Libya were well known(Domínguez Iribarren 2000). Moreover, most terrorist groups borrowed fromeach other’s historical and theoretical discourses. Mao Zedong, Franz Fanon, andLenin became important theoretical references when ETA articulated arevolutionary discourse based on the working class and the Third World in thelate 1960s (Jaúregui Bereciártu 1981: 267-71). Nevertheless, these terroristgroups and practices were ultimately located within a state and responded to thelocal politics of that state. ETA never had direct repercussions, say, on Ireland orPalestine. In this sense, terrorism was either national or inter-national. Yet thenew terrorism inaugurated by bin Laden is global in the sense that it affectsterrorism throughout the world and makes it impossible to contain it on a localscale.

A second ramification involves the utopian realization of terrorism. If, in the

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modern era, the aim of terrorism was to create a revolutionary chain of actionsand events which would first destabilize the state but ultimately would expandbeyond the state on a global scale, bin Laden’s terrorism has actually realized thisterrorist utopia, although the results are the opposite of what classical terrorismintended in any of its variants (ethno-nationalist or Marxist/revolutionary). In thissense, bin Laden has terrorized any possibility of revolutionary politics based onterrorism. There is no longer room for any other form of terrorism than the globalone inaugurated by bin Laden. Ironically we can no longer talk about ‘terroristmovements’ around the world; all of them have been overdetermined – terrorized– by bin Laden’s actions. In psychoanalytical terms, one could claim that there isonly one form of terrorism in this new global phase of terrorism: it is theterrorism of the global Other. Any terrorist action no longer responds to a local,state-based order, so that it can be read from that local context: global terrorismis always the terrorism of the global Other.

In the case of Spain and ETA, the above global reorganization of terrorismactually announces a very clear development: the end of ETA terrorism. AsGurutz Jaúregui Bereciártu has historicized, ETA moved in the early 60s from atraditional nationalist discourse derived from the Basque Nationalist Party (1981:151-263) to a revolutionary discourse that combined working-class revolutionaryideology with Third-World anti-colonialist politics (1981: 267-459). However,and as Domínguez Iribarren argues, after 1992 ETA lost its ideological andpolitical direction and entered a new spiral of increased violence that alienatedmost of the Basque nationalist spectrum. This situation gave rise to the mostmassive demonstrations against ETA: those after Miguel Ángel Blanco’sassassination in 1996. As a result, ETA’s ultimate ideological discourse and goalhas become the negotiation of the cessation of its activity. At this point, binLaden’s actions have not only voided any possibility for ETA to find a newtheoretical discourse that would allow it to continue, but have also voided thepossibility of any discourse whatsoever, since terrorism no longer can be local orexist within the West. ETA’s only course of action would be to side with a newglobal discourse of anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism, but such a discourse isimpossible in the Basque Country and Spain. At the same time, the continuationof ETA terrorist activity – the only other possible course of action – wouldlegitimize the Spanish government and the USA in overdetermining it as sidingwith Muslim fundamentalism, and thus in liquidating it through sheer policeviolence. Expressions such as ‘talibán Arzallus’ (Lamo de Espinosa) used in theSpanish press to refer to the president of the Basque Nationalist Party and hisrelations with ETA, already point to the first signs of the overdetermination towhich I referred above. Also, The New York Times has already reported a similarexchange between the Spanish head of government, Aznar, and ETA.Paraphrasing Aznar, the newspaper states: ‘No distinction could be madebetween terrorists, he [Aznar] added, whether they mounted attacks like those ofthe World Trade Center or set off car bombs [like ETA]. The Basque groupsought to ridicule that argument, saying that comparing the Basque conflict toOsama bin Laden’s network was like “using missiles to swat flies”’ (‘“Peace...”’

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2001). In short, local terrorism is no longer possible.At the same time, the end of local or traditional terrorism brings about an

important consequence that affects the state. Since the end of the Francodictatorship (1975) and the consolidation of democracy (1982), the Spanishruling parties have faced the problem of ETA terrorism as the most importantpolitical problem next to the increasing presence of a global immigration, mostlyillegal, that enters the EC through Spain. Thus, the disappearance of ETAterrorism is not simply the end of the last political problem of the Spanish state,but also the end of the last political problem that legitimized the Spanish state asthe only legitimate upholder of the right to violence.

When the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) was in power (1982-96), theSpanish government went to the extreme of creating a counter-terrorist group thatoperated illegally: the GAL. The fact that this operation was discovered and thatthe ensuing scandal contributed to the electoral defeat of the Socialist Party alsorepresents the end of the Spanish state as the legitimate upholder of violence. Thestate’s need to reduplicate itself across the violent divide between legal andillegal violence – via the police and via GAL – points to the importance ofterrorism in legitimizing the state. It is the culminating point at which the stateacknowledges its powerlessness vis-à-vis terrorism while creating a surrogateterrorist self that mirrors the state and thus legitimizes it, specularly, as the onlyupholder of violence – legal and illegal. This is the narcissistic moment when thestate drowns in the reflection of its own violence.

Thus, and as a third ramification, the end of local terrorism also brings aboutthe end of the state as both legal and illegal practitioner of violence. If terrorismis being overdetermined by a new global/North American hegemony, this newhegemony delegitimizes states such as the Spanish in their right to exert themonopoly of violence. The Spanish state is no longer legitimized to fight a globalterrorism that haunts the world qua North America. The Spanish state still facesmany political problems, but the ultimate legitimation of the state – the exclusiveuse of violence – no longer defines it as such.

Even the Spanish discourse on terrorism, which is mainly produced by anti-nationalist Basque intellectuals, reflects this withering away of the Spanish state.If the state doubled its investment in terrorism by crossing the line of legality andby doubling itself as terrorist group, intellectuals have also doubled theirdiscourse on terrorism in an identical fashion. Till the mid 1990s, most terrorismdiscourse kept a distance from its object of study by mobilizing a historical andscientific apparatus that analysed ‘rationally’ the ‘irrational’ and ‘barbaric’activity of terrorism (Jaúregui Bereciártu 1981). However, since the mid 1990s,this discourse has also crossed the line of political legitimacy and has begun todevelop a new type of ‘irrational and barbaric’ discourse based on gossip, insult,slander, attack, etc. Most notably Jon Juaristi’s El bucle meláncolico (1997)created an excitement and curiosity among the Spanish public that no previousdiscourse on terrorism had. As I have argued elsewhere (Gabilondo 1999), bycrossing the line of objectivity and scientific legitimacy, Juaristi’s book allowedSpanish readers to access what no other discourse had so far offered: ‘the primal

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scene of Basque nationalism’, so that the reader can also participate in and enjoythe violent libidinal economy of the terrorist. In other words, Juaristi’s workallows the Spanish and Basque reader to become a terrorist – enjoy terrorism –without being one. In that way, Juaristi generalizes for the Spanish citizenry thestate’s experience of narcissistically doubling itself as a disempowered state –unable to dismantle ETA – and a more powerful state that can simulate terrorism– GAL.

Thus, the terrorist doubling is the same in both cases: that is, the politicaldoubling by the state (the GAL groups) and the discursive doubling byintellectuals (Juaristi). This effect has also permeated other theoreticians ofterrorism such as Elorza (2000: 13-74) and philosophers (Savater), and runs therisk of becoming the official discourse on terrorism. Yet both doublingsultimately point to the end of the Spanish state. In this sense, the globalization ofterrorism is also another sign that the fading away of the state brings about a newglobal postnational scenario.

Yet, terrorism as object petit a of North American/global hegemony is thereferent that forecloses postnational politics. If, thanks to bin Laden’s actions, thenew global ideology of North American capitalism becomes the empty referentthat regulates the chain of signifiers and their equivalences in world politics, wehave to read bin Laden’s terrorism as also inaugurating a new form of second-degree terrorism. After his actions, any attempt to side politically with thepostnational, with the shadowy masses, risks disrupting the hegemonic structureorganized around terrorism. Any attempt to reclaim postnational politics might beoverdetermined by the new North American/global hegemony and equated withterrorism. In short, terrorism also affects politics as a whole: there is no longer aplace for antagonism and radical democracy vis-à-vis North American hegemonyin globalization. Contrary to nationalism, which was hegemonic in modernity,postnationalism has become the condition left outside global hegemony. Yet, atthe same time, the overdetermination by which any postnational political actionis nowadays read as joining bin Laden dictates the need to elaborate new theoriesof ideology and globalization that help us break this new form of second-degreeterrorism inaugurated by bin Laden’s violence.

A new global history of terror: New North American history and the globalsymptomThe other face of what I described above as ‘global terrorism’ has to deal withthe ‘new Terror’ that the new North American/global hegemony might bringabout. If � i�ek is right in claiming that ‘today’s “mad dance”, the dynamicproliferation of multiple shifting identities, also awaits its resolution in a newform of Terror’ (Butler et al. 2000: 326), it appears that ‘the new Terror’ mighthave arrived. Yet it remains to be seen whether the identity politics of the lastfew years and this new ‘global Terror’ have any ‘causal/structural’ relationship,as � i�ek contends.

A second aspect of this new global Terror has to do with what ErnestoLaclau and Chantal Mouffe have theorized as the possibility of a ‘radical

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democratic hegemony’, which would depart from assuming the different subjectpositions historically involved in the antagonistic struggle for hegemony. � i�ekclaims against Laclau: ‘I do not accept that all elements which enter intohegemonic struggle are in principle equal: in the series of struggles (economic,political, feminist, ecological, ethnic, etc.) there is always one which, while it ispart of the chain, secretly overdetermines its very horizon’ (Butler et al. 2000:320). The new war between George Bush and bin Laden, which was originallysignified religiously by both sides (infinite war/jihad), appears to signify a rebuketo Laclau’s theory of radical democracy in late capitalism and a confirmation of� i�ek’s suspicions. Therefore, it is important to think hegemony historically fromthe new horizon opened up by this act of terrorism, for we might be at the dawnof a new form of global Terror – a new order that regulates not only terrorism butalso global politics overall. In this respect it is important also to analyse whyspecifically terrorism enables both the steady consolidation of a NorthAmerican/global hegemony and the cancellation of a radical democratichegemony.

It seems safe to assume that, historically speaking, nationalism (that is, theideology of the imperialist nation-state) was a hegemonic discourse in modernitywhich overdetermined other elements such as gender, class struggle, or even race.Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking work on the Black Atlantic departs precisely fromthis juncture. As he declares: ‘My concern here is […] with exploring some ofthe special political problems that arise from the fatal junction of the concept ofnationality with the concept of culture and the affinities and affiliations whichlink the blacks of the West to one of their adoptive, parental cultures’ (1993: 2).Historically speaking, non-nationalist political formations such as communistparties or feminist groups tried to strive for universality but they ended uprallying along nationalist lines, as when the Third International agreed to pursuethe revolutionary struggle within the confines of the state on the colonial andnational fronts. Yet this is a historical development that does not necessarily leadto Anderson’s universalization of nationalism as when he equates it with religionor kinship (1983: 15); nationalism presents a more defined historical shape.Precisely for that reason, the very historical overdetermination effected bynationalism’s hegemony in modernity does not foreclose the possibility ofminority or identity politics. But in order not to be overdetermined bynationalism, and as Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallemacknowledge for the case of feminism, any identity discourse has to thinkthrough the problem of (post)nationalism: ‘[I]n both aspects, international andnational, that logic [national understanding of gender] must be displaced by themore complex rhetoric of the double concept of borders insofar as the formerkeeps woman/women sequestered “inside” the nation in the face of transnationalmovements or turns them into “boundary subjects”’ (1999: 9). Here, they areechoing Gayatri Spivak’s own take, when she urges us to ‘negotiate between thenational, the global, and the historical, as well as the contemporary diasporic’(1993: 278). In this respect, it is only very recently that minority and identitypolitics have begun to address this problem and to rethink their own political

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horizons so that they do not continue being overdetermined by traditionalnational hegemonies and thus open up to postnationalism.

Yet considering that most minorities occupied a liminal position under thehegemony of modern nationalism and that, at the same time, this liminal positioncontinues to define them – most authors, including � i�ek, can only think theglobal (and its Terror) as ‘consequence/effect’ of the ‘mad dance of identities’ – Iwould like to propose that the ‘proliferation of minority and identity politics’does not have to do with the anticipation of some new Terror à la Thermidor. Itwould be more coherent to infer from my analysis that such a proliferation has todo with the fact that minorities have gained historical prominence, preciselybecause of their liminality, at the threshold of the new historical transition I amtheorizing here: the transition from nationalist modern hegemony to postmodernNorth American/global hegemony. Thus, what we have considered, afterJameson, as one of the conditions of postmodernity – that is, the fragmentationand proliferation of identities – appears now, according to my analysis, as aliminal stage in a new global history whereby this proliferation might bepositioned alongside the global/postnational axis. When I say ‘global/postnational axis’, I am referring to the divide between hegemony and itssubaltern exteriority – an exteriority that in globalization nevertheless isoverdetermined as internal, as when we assume that ‘nobody escapescommodification’. In this sense, it is important to take on board WalterMignolo’s emphasis on the exteriority of subalternity (2000: 337-8). At the sametime, it is paramount to emphasize that this is not some new metanarrative, butrather a local narrative of a break, transition, or change that we cannot theorizeexcept as such; that is, as what Foucault would denominate coupure (1973).

Yet, it is crucial to understand the archaeology of this hegemonic shift fromnationalism and identity politics to globalization and postnationalism. It isimportant to study the historical changes in hegemony, the archaeology ofcontemporary hegemony, from nationalism – through identity politics – toglobalization – and its postnational subalternity – so that we can understand how‘minority and identity politics’ can be rearticulated from a global andpostnational perspective in order to challenge their liminality in postnationalistterms.

From a Basque position, in which Basque political violence has been theother (object petit a) of Spanish nationalism since the end of the nineteenthcentury, postnationalism is a condition that has been theorized over several years– although the term has been deployed in different ways, as in the theorization,for example, of Jon Juaristi who follows Habermas. From the postnationalBasque position I am theorizing here, my intervention deals with rethinkingglobal history in order to rethink the historical transition or coupure outlinedabove. In this respect, the history of Spain and the Basque Country might serve,as a situated knowledge, to effect a retro-reading of contemporary globalization –a Hegelian sublation of sorts made backwards in history – since the events of1898 also represent a similar hegemonic moment. Yet, this similarity has ahistorical and structural basis, since the two dates (1898 and 2001) represent the

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first (Spain) and last (USA) imperialist traumas in Western history.As I have argued elsewhere (forthcoming), the year 1898 represents for Spain

the ‘awakening’ to imperialist loss as it loses its last colonies: Cuba, Puerto Rico,the Philippines, and Guam. The war with the USA had traumatic nationalistrepercussions for Spain, which are very similar to the events of September 2001.In both cases, an ‘empire’ awakens to its own historical and global ‘vulnerability’– the first and last empires in the West to be more precise. However, what is mostimportant here is to emphasize that the traumatic experience of 1898 serves thefirst nationalist hegemonic organization of Spain, so that its history is rewritten innationalistic terms. Considering that the Spanish ‘awakening’ was also interior –that is, Basque, Catalonian, and Galician nationalisms emerge at that point,alongside very strong anarchist activity in Andalusia and Catalonia – it isimportant to stress that ‘imperialist defeat’ served to articulate a new nationalisthegemonic discourse that overdetermined any interior and exterior dissent.Although this formation is complex, it can clearly be followed in the work of oneof its main ideologues: Miguel de Unamuno. As a result of the new Spanishnationalist hegemonic organization, Spain became ‘existentially different’ fromthe outside and ‘historically homogeneous’ on the inside. Thus, ironicallyenough, the end of Spanish history (Spain in global history) also represents thebeginning of Spanish history (Spain as the hegemonic national subject of its‘different’ and internally ‘homogeneous’ history). The ensuing Civil War andFranco dictatorship are historical reminders of the serious political consequencesof a nationalist hegemony based on difference and homogeneity.

From my historical Basque position, which till recently has beenoverdetermined by the Spanish nationalist hegemony described above, I wouldlike to stress that the terrorist attack on North American soil is not by any meansthe end of the American ‘holiday from history’ (Will 2001), but rather theopposite; this is the beginning of a new ‘holiday from history’ for the rest of us,the non-Muslim-fundamentalist/non-North-American world.

My description of Spanish nationalist hegemony based on the discursivestructure of homogeneity and difference is pertinent here, since North America isemerging as the new subject of history: a new virtual history that can be viewedon TV and the Internet. If Francis Fukuyama claimed in his The End of Historythat the Pax Americana of the 1990s was the new and truly global end of history,as announced by Hegel in the nineteenth century for European imperialism, andif, at the same time and at the opposite pole of the ideological spectrum, Jamesonconcluded that history was no longer accessible in postmodernism (1991: 156,310), the terrorist attack on the WTC becomes a new herald of History. Historyhas just begun in this new phase of postmodernism, precisely as NorthAmerican/global history, the New History. In this sense, these events seem to bea starting point for thinking beyond the impasse in which the conundrums ofpostmodern theorization had cornered us so far (subject fragmentation, loss ofhistory, etc.).

At this point, it is important to understand the specific subjective andlibidinal mechanisms that legitimize this (North American) history as (global)

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History. What I have termed ‘the new American history’ is hysterical in the sensethat it becomes libidinal through the compulsive replay of a traumatic experiencein the media. In this way, North American self-recognition is never achieved andthus the media must continue producing the traumatic images in order to organizethe ensuing historical narrative of misrecognition. The media’s production ofimages can be discussed alongside � i�ek’s reconsideration of Althusser’stheorization of ‘interpellation’. � i�ek contends that: ‘[N]ot only does the subjectnever fully recognize itself in the interpellative call: its resistance tointerpellation (to the symbolic identity provided by interpellation) is the subject.In psychoanalytic terms, this failure of interpellation is what hysteria is about; forthis reason, the subject as such is, in a way, hysterical’ (Butler et al. 2000: 115).Most crucially, the image of the two airplanes crashing into the WTC towers isthe ultimate image and moment of interpellation in which the North Americanindividual is interpellated as the Subject of History but, at the same time, refusesto identify him/herself with the images. The negative comments heard among theNorth American public of the sort ‘I can’t believe this has happened in ourcountry’ or ‘things will never be the same any more’ begin to organize thishysterical narrative of North American/global history.

What I described above as North American interpellation is the basis of itshegemonic globalization since, as a result, the rest of the non-Muslim-fundamentalist world can no longer afford a history, a trauma, of its own. Nowwe are terrorized into a new traumatic situation: that of not being able toexperience our own history/trauma but only the North American one. We can nolonger experience our own history and trauma unless it first becomes the NorthAmerican trauma. This second form of terrorism – not bin Laden’s but that ofNorth American hegemony – is also a form of second-degree terrorism in thesense that what is violently attacked is representation itself. As a result, ourtrauma actually becomes North American: our attempt to represent ourselves inthe global landscape is traumatized by the violent and monopolisticrepresentation of the North American trauma. The North American/global mediainterpellate us as North American, and thus our own hysterical reaction is ‘wecannot believe that this North American representational violence is happening inour country (Spain, etc.)’. However, precisely because this representationalterrorism mobilizes and overdetermines all the other political referents of thenon-Muslim-fundamentalist world, it succeeds in becoming hegemonic, and thuscan no longer be called terrorism, even in the technical sense of the term. Yet,this form of representational and political violence can be called ‘Terror’; that is,‘representational Terror’. Following � i�ek’s brilliant coinage, the global/NorthAmerican media’s hegemonic discourse can be synthesized in this sentence:‘enjoy your new North American/global symptom!’

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer to ‘Empire’ as the formation that Icall North American/global, and would probably not agree with my own specificformulation. However, they do point out very convincingly that imperialistformations rely on acts of terror such as the one described above, so that empiresfeel justified in intervening and cancelling different forms of history and

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historical subjectivity – the Western imperialist, the Third-World revolutionary,etc. – and, instead, install their own history as hegemonic – and, thus, asultimately ahistorical: ‘Empire exhausts historical time, suspends history, andsummons the past and future within its own ethical order. In other words, Empirepresents its order as permanent, eternal, and necessary’ (2000: 11). By recallingthe Medieval concept of ‘just war’ and traditional Western political theory onimperialism, Hardt and Negri explain the way in which Terror installs itself at thecore of the ideological manoeuvre that legitimizes (the North American/global)empire in imposing its own history at the centre of the new order it inaugurates:

The Gulf War gave us perhaps the first fully articulated example of thisnew epistemology of the concept […] of just war […]. All interventionsof the imperial armies are solicited by one or more of the partiesinvolved in an already existing conflict […]. Empire is formed and itsintervention becomes juridically legitimate only when it is alreadyinserted into the chain of international consensuses aimed at resolvingexisting conflicts [….] the expansion of Empire is rooted in the internaltrajectory of the conflicts it is meant to resolve. The first task of Empire,then, is to enlarge the realm of the consensuses that support its ownpower. (2000: 13-15)

As Hardt and Negri concluded before the events of 2001, the Gulf War – andnow the USA’s retaliation against bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban regime –could be considered as the beginning of a global hegemony, based on a new justwar – the war against terrorism – which ultimately would imply the legitimationof this North American/global order as ‘permanent, eternal, and necessary’; thatis, as the legitimation of global Terror.

Therefore it is necessary to elucidate the ideological mechanism that explainsthe importance of terrorism in the new North American/global history. The firstfact that this new history conceals is its own prehistory. As Zulaika and Douglassclaimed with uncanny foresight in 1996, when many terrorist scenarios aroundthe world seemed to be on the brink of solution: ‘[A] blinkered optimist withlittle sense of history might even be prepared to pronounce “terrorism” itselfdead. Yet there is suddenly a new promised land for terrorism – the UnitedStates’ (1996: 228, my emphasis). The uncanny nature of such an announcementmade in 1996 derives from the fact that the events of September 2001 have madeunfamiliar the ‘pre-history’ of the formation of the North American/globalhegemonic discourse, which already centred on terrorism. As Zulaika andDouglass explain, this hegemony has been in the making for at least two decades:

The period 1980-1985 was the peak of the counterterrorist campaignduring which the Reagan administration had labeled terrorism its majorinternational problem; at times over 80 percent of Americans regarded itas an ‘extreme’ danger, although only seventeen people were killed byacts of terrorism in the United States. […] between 1989 and 1992 therewas not a single fatality from terrorism. During this same four-year

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period, the United States reported approximately 100,000 homicides.(1996: 5-6)

Although many commentators and historians had already explained the USA’sneed to find new ‘others’ after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 in order toperpetuate its hegemonic discourse on the Cold War, nevertheless, after theevents of September 2001, it appears that the terrorist discourse organized by theReagan administration ‘brought on’ or ‘announced’ bin Laden’s terrorist attackon New York. Zulaika and Douglass already hinted at this ‘historicalanticipation’ when they concluded that terrorism had become part of the NorthAmerican political fibre: ‘Terrorism has been “naturalized” into a constant riskthat is omnipresent out there, a sort of chaotic principle always ready to strikeand create havoc, and against which society must now marshal all its resources inan unending struggle. Now that it has become a prime raison d’état, itsperpetuation seems guaranteed.’ (1996: 238) But why this ‘perpetuation’ actually‘brought on’ the terrorist attack of 2001 still needs to be analysed. In what I thinkis one of the most insightful and condensed explanations of terrorism’s logic,Zulaika and Douglass explain the seemingly retro-historical functioning ofterrorism by which the discourse generates ‘its reality’:

Revolutionary freedom fighters when attacking Soviet communism forthe sake of Islam, they are depicted as loathsome terrorists when fightingcapitalism for the same cause. If Sheik Omar [Abdul Rahman]’sfollowers fought side by side with the Green Berets in Afghanistan, aprospective Green Beret repudiated by the Army, Timothy McVeigh,had the opportunity to fulfill his warrior dreams as a civilian inOklahoma City. Educated in the Reagan-Bush period of massive militaryintervention against ‘terrorist’ targets, the alternatives for a war hero likeMcVeigh seemingly oscillated between becoming a defending Rambo oran avenging Rebel. In this sense the counterterrorist and the terrorist arenot so different. (1996: 231)

The above example permits the authors to conclude that, at the core of terrorism,there is a high flexibility in the way in which a hegemonic discourse legitimizesitself by othering political violence to the point that even ‘causality’ and‘historical continuity’ can be ideologically reversed or even re-produced: ‘[A]swe have insisted […] one of the royal advantages of controlling terrorismdiscourse is that our most trusted allies can, by the stroke of a pen, be redefinedas frightening monsters, while we ourselves, acting as their judges, remaininnocent and even enhance our moral legitimacy’ (1996: 238).

In other words, terrorism discourse, unlike anti-communist Cold-Wardiscourse, allows the USA to mobilize its discourse and violence – its Terror –with a higher degree of precision and flexibility around the world. Ultimately it isa hegemonic discourse that bypasses modern categories such as causality, history,etc., and, instead, reproduces or simulates otherness. This is the reason whyterrorism becomes the ultimate, ideal ‘other’ of this new ideology: terrorismranges from one man to one country or region, and does not follow a specific

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ideological discourse. In short, terrorism suits better a global imagination wherethe micro and the macro must be managed with flexibility and efficiency.Terrorism is the perfect referent of the global other. In other words, terrorismpermits the construction of a late-capitalist, flexible and managerial discourse ofglobal otherness that encompasses the macro and the micro. Terrorism permitsthe highest ideological surplus: low production costs (such as funding an Islamicmilitia in Afghanistan) and a high ideological return (global Terror). In this way,any postnational reality can be regulated according to the needs of the new NorthAmerican/global hegemonic discourse. An academic like myself, a feministgroup, a fundamentalist country, or a non-cooperative capitalist state can beregulated through terrorist ideology. Zulaika and Douglass clearly capture thequality of ‘otherness’ that terrorism brings about when they put the emphasis noton the terrorist, but on the new libidinal, cultural, and political hegemony thatterrorist discourse produces with a high degree of hegemonic surplus: ‘The gripthat terrorism discourse holds upon the collective imagination is far beyond whatthe phenomenon would merit in strictly military or destructive terms; thesubjectively experienced potential terror becomes “real” independent of theactual violence’ (1996: 29-30). This ‘reality’ is what secures the high ideologicalsurplus of terrorism as well as the conditions of its own reproduction.

Once such a political and global order becomes hegemonic, the order itselfpredetermines the fact that any subaltern position, when needing to make itsposition felt and heard on a global scale, ends up resorting to terrorism, as in thecase of bin Laden. When Lacan and � i�ek stress the fact that the imaginarycharacter of the unconscious creates the ‘back to the future’ effect (� i�ek 1989:55-69), they point to this regulative power of the symbolic order. Any form ofsignification is regulated by the symbolic order and thus anything significant ormeaningful will occupy the place that the symbolic order has alreadypredetermined in its structure of signification. If we think retrospectively that it isalmost magical or a miracle that a signifier, such as bin Laden, occupies its placein the new global symbolic order – the North American/global hegemonicdiscourse on terrorism – we are overlooking the logic of the symbolic order. Instrict psychoanalytical terms, we can conclude that ‘Reagan produced bin Laden’or ‘bin Laden is a North American product’. Robert Friedman, in more ironicalterms, concluded already in 1995 that ‘the CIA has inadvertedly managed to dosomething that America’s enemies have been unable to: give terrorism a footholdin the United States’ (quoted in Zulaika and Douglass 1996: 27). Psychoanalysismakes redundant the word ‘inadvertedly’ in the above sentence. Terror does notallow for inadvertedness.

Finally the fact that terrorism, unlike in the 80s, now takes place in the USAcannot be understood as an ‘error’ in the above theory of hegemony. The fact thatterrorist discourse and hegemony no longer exempt the North American territoryonly entails an extension and intensification of its logic. Now even the USA andits citizens can be regulated by terrorist discourse; now everybody is a suspectterrorist, not only ‘the Arabs’. In a way, now the North American territory hasbecome the most global and central place in the new history that terrorist

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ideology inaugurates. Once again, and through the retrospective manoeuvre ofhistory-rewriting enabled by ideology, North American/global hegemonicdiscourse can claim that ‘terrorist history’ starts in the USA. Any previousterrorist attempt now is prehistory. Terrorism finally has become a NorthAmerican and global phenomenon, as violence and discourse.

Returning to my Basque position, and at the risk of contradicting myself, Iwould like to conclude that this new hegemonic discourse, as analysed above,brings about the continuation of states – such as the Spanish – and local terrorism– such as that of ETA – in ways that have important repercussions for the abovediscussion of hegemonic terrorist discourse. It is probably ‘very good luck’ forthe Spanish state ‘to happen to have’ a terrorist problem at home. Although thisproblem no longer allows the Spanish state to legitimize itself as a modern statewith an exclusive right to violence, nevertheless, the global overdetermination ofterrorism by North American/global ideology actually makes the Spanish statemeaningful and legitimate to this new order, so that the Spanish state becomes asubset, a sub-state, of the latter. This also means that ETA can afford a new life,not as an ideological utopia and alternative for the Basque Country, but rather asa new other upon which the North American/global order might want tolegitimize itself further down the line. In this way, bin Laden is good news toETA.

Therefore, from a postnational Basque position – that is, from a positionamong the postnational/subaltern masses overshadowed by North American/global hegemony – I want to underscore the ethical and political imperative ofreclaiming a new global subjectivity – our subject positions – by challenging theglobality of the new North American hysterical and hegemonic History. At thispoint, what we now understand as ‘first-world identity politics’ might also takeon a very different shape, one that no longer mirrors global capitalism butactually challenges it from our newly regained understanding of global Terror.

Global symbolic orders and a postnational critique of LacanianpsychoanalysisAt the same time, my Basque theorization of postnationalism might serve as alocation from which to rethink some of the theoretical presuppositions of theLacanian-� i�ekian discourse upon which I have been relying so far.Postnationalism as theorized in this article – that is, as a location of politicaluniversality and subalternity – also affords a ‘shadowy’ critique of the abovetheoretical discourses, which are not exempt from the global ideologicaloverdetermination we are criticizing here.

Language and, more specifically, my own positionality in language – Basque– play a very important role in my theorization of postnationalism since, in thehistory of the Basque Country, languages are crucial in the theorization ofpolitics. Thus my linguistic positionality is the departure point for mypostnational critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The Basque language is theoldest language of Europe (it is pre-Indo-European), and has lived with French,Spanish, Gascon, and other extinct Romance languages, such as Navarran, for

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centuries. At the same time, Basque never achieved a standard, unified form till1968. Yet at that point it had already become a minority language within theBasque Country (Trask 1997). Thus, even in terms of languages, Basque is ashadowy language next to French and Spanish, with the result that it facilitates apostnational critique of theories such as psychoanalysis, which rely onhegemonic and nationalist/imperialist languages such as French in a way that, asmy critique will unravel, is not coincidental but structural.

The fact that my linguistic positionality becomes the basis of my criticalengagement is not accidental. It is widely acknowledged that the consideration oflanguage as a new reality has altered the epistemological and ontologicalfoundations of the human sciences in the twentieth century (Foucault 1973). It isalso clear that language is at the bottom of the epistemological foundation of thepsychoanalytical discourses I am relying on for my theorization ofpostnationalism. Lacanian psychoanalysis is very much connected to thestructuralist revolution brought about by Roman Jakobson’s and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theorization of culture as ultimately a linguistic structure. Although thecase of � i�ek represents a new transcoding of Hegelian – and more generallyIdealist – philosophy, it remains ultimately Lacanian. Thus, the structuralist andpoststructuralist legacy that founds Lacanian psychoanalytical discourse has alsoa very specific linguistic genealogy, which ultimately has to be analysed inpolitical terms, that is, from a postnational perspective, if a ‘shadowy’ critique ofpsychoanalysis is to be firmly grounded. As Vincent Descombes historicized atthe height of poststructuralism in 1979, that is, when the linguistic basis ofstructuralism still was a novelty: ‘if […] we compare the whole of social life to aprocess of signals in exchange, we will arrive at structural anthropology asdefined by Lévi-Strauss, or the reduction of anthropology to semiology.Generally speaking, the structuralist thesis is embodied in Jacques Lacan’sfamous formula: the unconscious is structured like a language’ (1980: 94). Thus apostnational critique must begin by reconsidering the political implications oflanguage for psychoanalysis. More specifically and in the case of Lacan, theinnocent but overdetermined pronoun ‘a’ in the expression ‘like a language’quoted above will serve as the basis of my postnational critique ofpsychoanalysis.

Perhaps the shifting point in the structuralist revolution of the humansciences can be located not in Lévi-Strauss’s incorporation of the RussianFormalists’ elaboration of linguistic structures, but in his anthropological re-elaboration by which the very articulation of language as differential structurebecomes the key foundational act of culture. In his early work Lévi-Strauss linksthe articulation of language to the universality of the incest taboo. In that way,gender, sexuality, and economics are intertwined and explained as both alinguistic structure and a structural result of language. In The ElementaryStructures on Kinship of 1949, Lévi-Strauss already postulates that: ‘[T]he incestprohibition is not a prohibition like the others. It is the prohibition in the mostgeneral form [….] The incest prohibition is universal like language, and if it istrue that we are better informed of the nature of the latter than on the origin of the

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former, it is only by pursuing the comparison to its conclusion that we can hopeto get to the meaning of the institution’ (1969: 493). By the end of his book,Lévi-Strauss does equate language and the incest prohibition when he concludes:‘[W]hat does this mean except that women themselves are treated as signs, whichare misused when not put to the use reserved to signs, which is to becommunicated? […] The emergence of symbolic thought must have required thatwomen, like words, should be things that were exchanged’ (1969: 495-6).

Yet in Lévi-Strauss’s discourse, the equation of the exchange of women –through the regulation of the incest taboo – and symbolic thought – through theexchange of signs, among which woman is the privileged sign – takes place in thefield of the other, that is, in an ‘other reality’: the reality of colonial, ‘primitive’,and ‘native’ people among which ‘elementary’ structures of kinship persist. It isthis displacement of the problem of structural inquiry to the field of the other thatpermits Lévi-Strauss to equate and naturalize language as a structure ofexchange, since such structure is primarily observed in ‘elementary’ or ‘primitivesocieties’; that is, societies where modernity, industrialization, and imperialismhave not completely altered the original social structures. Conversely these‘primitive’ societies end up justifying European structures of kinship in a clearteleology from ‘elementary’ to ‘complex’ structures. Lévi-Strauss claims that‘Europe, in its present state, or in the still recent past, provides, or provided, abody of structural features all relating to what we have called generalizedexchange, the functional relationships of which are still observable in the studyof simple forms of this type of exchange’ (1969: 472). As a result, Europebecomes the exception, the only society privileged with exemption from theexchange of women, so that the rule reverts back to the field of the primitive orelementary other:

It remains no less the case that, with swayamvara marriage, the threebasic characteristics of modern European marriage were introduced in,to borrow the Welsh expression, a ‘furtive, secret’, and almostfraudulent manner. These characteristics are: freedom to choose thespouse within the limit of the prohibited degrees; equality of the sexes inthe matter of marriage vows; and finally emancipation from relatives andthe individualization of the contract. (1969: 477)

In this way, Europe and the lack of circulation of women, as a result of ‘freedom,equality, and emancipation’, become the exception, the fraudulent secret thatnevertheless finds its reflection in the other and in its primitive exchange of signsand women. As a result, European reality, despite its fraudulence, also becomes alinguistic reality regulated not by imperialism and colonialism, but rather by the‘primitive’ exchange of women that grounds language. That is, the colonialmirror of the other serves to ‘naturalize’ Europe as a linguistic reality with theincest taboo at its core, while also eliminating the imperialist activity thatconstructs the other as primitive and original. In Lévi-Strauss’s work imperialismis rewritten as the teleology of progress from ‘elementary’ to ‘complex’.

In short, only by naturalizing the imperialist othering of the primitive does

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Lévi-Strauss redefine the field of the other as ultimately a linguistic reality ofexchange (signs, women). In turn, this imperialist othering serves as ateleological justification for the naturalization of Europe as also a linguisticreality – despite its fraudulence and exceptionality. This double action ofothering and naturalizing allows the definition of human reality as linguisticacross the imperialist/colonial divide. As a result, imperialist/nationalistlanguages such as French are depoliticized from their involvement in imperialismand become as natural and foundational as any ‘primitive language’ and thusprone to becoming the ideological basis for a universalization ofimperialist/nationalist discourses as in Lévi-Strauss and, more generally,structuralism. The legitimation of an imperialist/nationalist language like Frenchas being a ‘natural’ or ‘non-political’ cultural structure, in turn, allows thelegitimation of structuralism as the new discourse that defines human reality asultimately linguistic and differential.

Even in his later works, such as Tristes Tropiques (1955) and StructuralAnthropology (1958), Lévi-Strauss’s view of language as primordial structurecontinues to shape his thought while his naturalized vision of imperialism takeson metaphysical tones, as when, at the end of Tristes Tropiques, he establishes adirect, teleological line between Buddhism and modernity (‘Between the Marxistcritique […] and the Buddhist critique […] there is neither opposition norcontradiction’ [1974: 412]) which ultimately justifies modernity’s nihilism. Yetthis very same nihilism is the one that travels through Brazil and the Muslimworld and ultimately leaves them behind so that their non-modern difference –their colonial and native difference – is mobilized to justify and naturalize (de-historicize) modernity and the imperialist experience. After claiming that ‘Theworld began without man and will end without him’ (1974: 413), Lévi-Straussconcludes that we are all ‘natives’ and ‘primitives’ in a very modern way thatultimately legitimizes imperialism as another ‘natural’ state. As he concludes:‘[N]either psychology nor metaphysics nor art can provide me with a refuge.They are myths, now open to internal investigation by a new kind of sociology’(1974: 414). The distance and difference between myths and science has beennaturalized by ‘a new kind of sociology’ so that the imperialist experience ofmodernity is conflated as metaphysical nihilism.

Neither does Lacanian psychoanalysis escape the national-imperialistgenealogy of structuralism delineated above. Although in his theories Lacanevolved away from the idea of incest and other Freudian sexual narratives,nevertheless he began his theorization by redefining Freudian tenets followingLévi-Strauss’s theories on the universality of language and the incest taboo. Forexample, when Lacan claims about the Oedipus complex that: ‘the ways of whatone must do as man or as woman are entirely abandoned to the drama, to thescenario, which is placed in the field of the Other – which, strictly speaking, is theOedipus complex’ (1981: 204), his understanding of the symbolic order and itsstructuring of the Other depend on an anthropological-structuralist-linguisticunderstanding of the incest taboo – the Oedipal complex. Thus, Lacan – and � i�ekfollowing him – understand politics and reality as ultimately linguistic and

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symbolic. Moreover, this linguistic reality is, according to Lacan, ultimatelyorganized as one symbolic order – hence, both authors’ emphasis on onehegemonic discourse or one Other/Real – even if the ‘one’-ness of the Real isinternal, and not external to the symbolic order. If the above postnational critiqueof structuralist anthropology is extended to psychoanalysis, it appears that the‘one-ness’ or ‘single-ness’ of the Symbolic Order as a linguistic order can bejustified only by naturalizing modernity and its imperialist/nationalist languages,such as French, into non-political phenomena; that is, into the ultimate horizon ofthe human condition. In his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,Lacan clearly states his structuralist and Lévi-Straussian genealogy. Furthermorehe underscores the equation between language and nature through the conflationof modernity and ‘savage thought,’ and thus modernity and imperialism:

Most of you will have some idea of what I mean when I say – theunconscious is structured like a language. This statement refers to afield that is much more accessible to us today than at the time of Freud. Iwill illustrate it by something that is materialized, at what is certainly ascientific level, by the field that is explored, structured, elaborated byClaude Lévi-Strauss, and which he has pinpointed in the title of hisbook, La Pensée Sauvage […]. Before strictly human relations areestablished, certain relations have already been determined. They aretaken from whatever nature may offer as supports, supports that arearranged in themes of opposition. Nature provides – I must use the word– signifiers, and these signifiers organize human relations in a creativeway, providing them with structures and shaping them. (1981: 20, myemphasis)

In the above quote, language is a natural reality for Lacan. Thus, againststructuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and from the multi-diglossic realityof the Basque Country, I have to theorize reality first and foremost asmultilingual, in the sense that different languages, which cannot be reduced to auniversal anthropological category such as ‘language’, organize ‘reality’. Eachlanguage is organized around and supported by a different set of politicalinstitutions and subjects to the point that the Basque political reality is notreducible to one language-nation-state, to one symbolic order. It is the other wayaround. Basque reality emerges precisely from the mutual irreducibility of suchlinguistic orders. These linguistic orders are particular and can be claimed only asuniversal when their linguistic-political particularity is not overlooked. That is,from the diglossic and multilingual postnational reality of the Basque Country,language no longer emerges as the ultimate natural horizon of the humancondition. Thus the aim of my postnational critique is to steer the structuralistnaturalization of languages away from legitimations of a single human reality andinto a de-naturalized and re-politicized understanding of human reality – asultimately political rather than linguistic. Thus, my critique must now proceed torepoliticize psychoanalysis’s claim about the singularity of the symbolic order.

There is another way to address this issue in order to de-anthropologize

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languages and, hence, any nationalist/imperialist understanding of languages,including that of psychoanalysis, while at the same time impinging upon thepolitical and more specifically postnational dimensions of Lacanian-� i�ekiandiscourse. Louis Althusser’s elaboration of Ideological State Apparatuses(henceforth ISAs) brings out the nationalist/imperialist dimension of Lacanianpsychoanalysis while offering a way out. Unlike Lacanian psychoanalysis,Althusser’s theorization does not naturalize language as the ultimate horizon ofhuman experience; that is, as the anthropological field of the other wherelanguage becomes the first and only space in which the individual is constitutedas subject – first as sexual subject and then as social subject. His theory does notcreate a mirroring effect in the other either such that the imperialist/nationalistindividual is also naturalized as linguistic. As Althusser elaborates, the state isthe ultimate instance responsible for subject formation and legitimation inmodernity. Therefore, he shifts the weight from natural languages to theinstitution of the state, and more specifically to the different apparatuses thatform the state: the ISAs. Furthermore, he establishes that there are severalapparatuses, basically located in the private sphere, which are central to theformation of the hegemonic state ideology whereby the bourgeoisie is legitimizedas the ruling class. Althusser concludes that ‘an ideology always exists in anapparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material’ (1971: 166).As noted above, Althusser denominates these apparatuses the Ideological StateApparatuses (ISAs) and concludes that, in modernity, the educational ISA is thepredominant apparatus: ‘the ideological State apparatus which has been installedin the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of aviolent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominantideological State apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus’ (1971:152). More specifically, he historicizes the centrality of the School when heclaims ‘the Church has been replaced today in its role as the dominantIdeological State Apparatus by the School’ (1971: 157).

Although Althusser does not elaborate on the centrality of the School as ISA,it is clear that the educational ISA is where the national/imperialist language istaught and connected with history, culture, etc. From a Basque position in whichBasque schools are a very recent historical phenomenon (1960s) and thepenalization of the use of Basque in Spanish schools is not such a distant memory(1940s and 1950s), the relation between a national/imperialist language and itsformation in the educational ISA appears historically connected in a way that 150years of schooling (as in the French case) perhaps do not allow a French theoristto perceive. Therefore, from a postnational point of view, it is paramount toemphasize that the formation of language, as a single, unified and coherenthorizon of the human condition, derives from the modern and national ISA of theSchool. A non-modern and a non-national framework would never yield a theoryof the human condition based on the assumption that the unconscious (and thusthe subject) is structured ‘like a language’. Therefore a postnational politicizationof the School as ISA becomes a necessary starting point for a re-politicization of‘language as the ultimate horizon of human reality’.

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Althusser follows Lacan when explaining the mechanisms by which the ISAsare successful in forming an ideology that the individual does not perceive assuch but rather as ‘nature’; that is, as a basic, non-historical, non-ideologicalhorizon of existence. As Althusser concludes: ‘We observe that the structure ofall ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique andAbsolute Subject is speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary: thismirror duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning’ (1971:180). Although at the level of interpellation Althusser does not bring Lacanianpsychoanalysis to its ultimate consequences, as � i�ek has noticed (1989: 43-4),nonetheless on a general level he does capture the ultimate structure by whichideology works as ideology in his famous sentence ‘Ideology has no History’(1989: 159). Ideology’s lack of historicity is connected with the way in whichideology organizes the borders between interiority/exteriority: outside and insideideology. As Althusser states:

what thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in thestreet), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place inideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those whoare in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one ofthe effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideologicalcharacter of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I amideological.’ (1971: 175)

My postnational critique of psychoanalysis thus follows Althusser in the sensethat the national/imperialist language as part of the educational ISA is ultimatelythe apparatus that makes the Lacanian-� i�ekian linguistic discourse ofpsychoanalysis possible precisely as not ideological, and thus as fullyideological. In his response to Butler, � i�ek endorses and quotes Laclau as a wayof explaining the exteriority/interiority organized around the symbolic order (andthe Real); that is, the borders of the linguistic horizon theorized by Lacanianpsychoanalysis. He concludes that:

if the representation of the Real was a representation of somethingentirely outside the symbolic, this representation of the unrepresentableas unrepresentable would amount, indeed, to full inclusion [….] But ifwhat is represented is an internal limit of the process of representationas such, the relationship between internality and externality is subverted:the Real becomes a name for the very failure of the Symbolic inachieving its own fullness. (Butler et al. 2000: 214)

� i�ek adds that historicity, as Real, is also the place of this failure ofsymbolization: ‘it is the very “ahistorical” bar as the internal limit of the processof symbolization that sustains the space of historicity’ (Butler et al. 2000: 214).Yet ultimately, when discussing the historical antagonism that gives place to apolitics of the Real, � i�ek reverts to the Saussurean linguistic paradigm in orderto correct it but at the same time assert his genealogical continuity with it:‘antagonism is precisely not the Saussurean differential relation where the

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identity (of a signifier) is nothing but a fascicle of differences [….] what ismissing in the Saussurean differentiality is the “reflective” overlapping ofinternal and external difference’ (Butler et al. 2000: 215).

From an Althusserian point of view, one could conclude that Lacanian-� i�ekian psychoanalysis actually turns into the non-ideological (the Real) what isultimately fully ideological: the outside of national/imperialist language; that is,the ISAs (School, etc.) that constitute the ultimate horizon from which theideology of the national/imperialist language is sustained. In other words, any‘reality’ outside the symbolic order is non-symbolizable precisely because itconstitutes the Real and thus any claim to exteriority is tainted by ideology; anysuch claim is based on a wrong epistemology, naïf theory, crass historicity, etc.as in the case of Saussure or even Judith Butler. Similarly, anything inside thesymbolic order is ultimately subject to ideology and thus ideology becomesultimately a linguistic reality, which in turn justifies language as non-ideological.In short, anything ideological is linguistic, except language itself, and thuseverything is ideological except the ideology of national/imperialist languagesand its ISAs. This is ultimately an Althusserian and postnational reading ofLacanian and � i�ekian psychoanalytic discourse.

The field of ethnography and anthropology has already confronted theproblem of the political limits (interior and exterior) of a linguisticallynaturalized discourse after postcolonial writers and intellectuals began toquestion the Western discourse of otherness in the aftermath of Word War II.Here, the admission that ethnography was ultimately writing (Clifford 1986) andthus language, did not lead to a monolingual theorization of reality, as in the caseof Lacanian psychoanalysis. When James Clifford reflects on Lévi-Strauss’s odeto his anthropological/structural/linguistic understanding of other cultures, herescues a heterogeneity that the latter reduces to a monolinguistic prism. AsClifford concludes:

Twentieth-century identities no longer presuppose continuous cultures ortraditions. Everywhere individuals and groups improvise localperformances from (re)collected pasts, drawing on foreign media,symbols, and languages. This existence among fragments has often beenportrayed as a process of ruin and cultural decay, perhaps mosteloquently by Claude Lévi-Strauss in Tristes tropiques (1955). In Lévi-Strauss’s global vision – one widely shared today – authentic humandifferences are disintegrating, disappearing in an expansive commodityculture to become, at best, collectible ‘art’ or ‘folklore.’ The greatnarrative of entropy and loss in Tristes tropiques expresses aninescapable, sad truth. But it is too neat, and it assumes a questionableEurocentric position at the ‘end’ of a unified human history, gatheringup, memorializing the world’s local historicities. (1988: 14)

Clifford adds that there is an irreducible heterogeneity, as in Aimé Césaire’sconstruction of ‘négritude’, which is ultimately engrained in a ‘history ofdegradation, mimicry, violence, and blocked possibilities’ (1988: 15). Clifford

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concludes: ‘[T]his kind of ambiguity keeps the planet’s local futures uncertainand open. There is no master narrative that can reconcile the tragic and comicplots of global cultural history’ (1988: 15). Although in the case of Lacan and� i�ek the ideological nostalgia towards the post/colonial other is not present, asin Lévi-Strauss, the same ideological desire to reduce human reality to ‘a singlesymbolic order’ that works ‘like a language’ persists.

Besides the postcolonial objection, which psychoanalysis has not yet fullydealt with (here Bhabha sides with Lacan), from a postnational position there is asecond form of criticism that goes back to the formation of the ISAs, includingthe School, and thus national/imperialist languages. It is not enough to denouncethe national/imperialist language of the modern state and its ISAs as the ultimateideological horizon from which Lacanian psychoanalysis emerges as the theoryof the symbolic order. A true Marxist and historical analysis, aware of thepostnational condition of contemporary states, has to begin by theorizing andhistoricizing the (nation-)state itself. Only from this historicization can we goback to the issue of national/imperialist languages and the ISAs. At the sametime, this criticism brings us back full circle to the beginning of this article.

The Gulf War and the terrorist attack of September 2001 have brought to thefore the new technological mediation of ideological apparatuses such as film, theinternet and American-centred global TV: the world watching CNN’sbroadcasting of the Gulf War from Baghdad or, more perversely, the Russianswatching on CNN the world watching the coup-d’état in the Russian parliament.Yet until the terrorist attacks of September 2001, these new global and mediaticideological apparatuses have centred on the other: Iraq, O.J. Simpson, etc. Inshort, although the interpellation was global (we all watched the CNN images,we all were interpellated as global viewers by the media), yet the subject ofviolence, upon which the interpellation relied, was the other. The global/NorthAmerican subject was only an interpellative subject: watcher, not watched. Thiscondition could be summarized in the following sentence: ‘We, the NorthAmericans, are watching the Iraqis being bombarded by us while they are alsobeing simultaneously watched by the rest of the world through our media, that is,as we watch them’. Here a new global Other emerges as the North Americaninstance that globally regulates the watching, since the rest of the world is alsowatching what the North Americans watch – the Americans watch for the Otherand, thus, for the rest of the world. Yet the violence of representation, at thispoint, does not coincide with that of interpellation: the Iraqis are the subjects ofviolence whereas the North Americans (and the rest of the world) are the subjectsof viewing, and thus, interpellation.

However, after the events of September 2001, the North American subjectbecomes both the subject of violence (the other is attacking us) and the subject ofinterpellation (we are watching ourselves being attacked). This newrepresentational overlapping of violence and interpellation is the one that finallycreates a new global hegemony whereby the North American individual becomesthe ideological subject of globalization and late capitalism: now the NorthAmerican individual is the subject of history. The North American individual is

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the subject of the violence of the Real (fundamentalist Islamic terrorism) and thesubject of interpellation (the North American individual is subjected to therepresentation of the globalized North American media).

Therefore we now witness a new arrangement of ideological apparatuses,which are no longer organized and controlled by the nation-state (France, Britain,etc.) but rather by a globalized North American state. We are no longer facingIdeological State Apparatuses, but rather Ideological Global Apparatuses (IGAs),and thus the new ideology of globalization is not structured around the idea of anational/imperialist language (formed by the ISAs) but rather around anaudiovisual English language formed by the new IGAs.

In this context we need to re-evaluate the idea of ‘the symbolic order’ whichultimately responds to a national/imperialist state reality. Nowadays evennational languages and ISAs are subaltern discourses, which, in traditionalLacanian-� i�ekian theory, would have to be aligned with the Real, which is theinstance that the new global order cannot symbolize. Yet, by othering them, thenew ‘global symbolic order’ turns them into an internal limit and, ultimatelysymbolizes them as symbolic failure. Once we abandon the genealogicalparadigm of national languages and ISAs, we must retheorize what a putativeglobal symbolic order and its global Real might mean.

When the revolution of language took the humanities by storm in the 1970sand 1980s, Walter Ong in his seminal work Orality and Literacy described theinner-coherence and high-technicality of oral cultures, with the result that hedifferentiated between primary and secondary oral cultures, the latter being thenew cultures produced by writing. I believe that we must begin to theorize a newglobal culture of ‘tertiary orality’ whereby the audiovisual becomes a return tothe performative and more communal organization of primary oral cultures(1988: 175-7). The irony is that, by doing so, we might be able to contemplatenational languages and ISAs not as ‘the natural horizon of our post/modernmilieu of existence’, as Lacan would have it, but rather as somewhat archaic anddémodé technologies, comparable to primary oral cultures before Ong’s re-evaluation. From this new historical and technological reconsideration oflanguages and cultures, suddenly the technological and historical side of ‘thesymbolic order’ theorized by Lacanian psychoanalysis appears in a differentlight.

Rephrasing � i�ek, postnationalism requires us to rethink the history andpolitics of the formation of the Lacanian ‘symbolic order’ in order ‘to ground anew political universality by opting for the impossible, fully assuming the placeof the exception, with no taboos, no a priori norms (“human rights”,“democracy”), respect for which would prevent us also from “resignifying”terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice’ (Butler et al. 2000:326). I would like to argue that, if the unity/uniqueness of the Lacanian symbolicorder is not rethought, we run the risk of turning the symbolic order into theperfect theoretical tool for legitimizing the new global capitalist order. Anyattempt to think the Real, as in the case of Basque postnationalism, from anational/Lacanian conception of the symbolic order runs the risk of justifying

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violence as the only Real discourse of the shadowy masses. At that point thenaturalizing equation between postnationalism and terrorism could give rise to anew hegemonic ideology based on global Terror.

Spivak had already a while ago posed the following question: ‘Can thesubaltern speak?’ From a Basque, postnational position, the question toLacanianism is: Can the postnational masses speak? Can the Real speak? This isheresy in Lacanian psychoanalysis – and the recourse to jouissance is no longersatisfactory either. And yet this is precisely what we are attempting to think: ‘toground a new political universality by opting for the impossible’, from theshadowy postnational masses left out by a nationalist psychoanalysis. If Lacanianpsychoanalysis is to be global and political, it first has to be postnational.Otherwise it runs the risk of becoming the theoretical tool for the legitimation ofa global Terror.

Notes1 I would like to acknowledge Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass for helping me with the historyof both anthropology and terrorism in ways that no other scholars could.

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