Nation-States, the Race-Religion Constellation, and Diasporic Political Communities: Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Paul Gilroy

ABSTRACT

In Who Sings the Nation-State?, co-written with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Butler identifies the paradox between the seemingly global decline of the nation-state and the steadfast strength of its genealogical force. According to Butler, “Arendt allows us to realise that this may also be because the nation-state as a form was faulty from the start.” In the first section of the article, I focus on Butler’s analysis of Israel/Palestine as a failed nation-state and seek to identify its faulty start. I propose that the nation has been masked by the race-religion constellation in the creation of the Westphalian race-state and identify this as the “faulty start” of the nation-state in European history. The term “race-religion constellation” refers to the connection or co-constitution of the categories of race and “religion” and the practice of classifying people into races according to categories we now associate with the term “religion.” I contend that it is this genealogical force of the nation that frames Israel/Palestine, which was, and is, Europe’s offspring, and at times its prodigal son. In the third and final section I discuss alternatives to the nation-state by means of the notion of diasporic political communities, as taken up by Butler and Paul Gilroy respectively, to assess what such communities can provide instead of the exclusionary racist binary that is the faulty start and driving force of the race-state.

KEYWORDS:

• race-state
• race-religion constellation
• diaspora
• Hannah Arendt
• Judith Butler
• Paul Gilroy

In an interview with Udi Aloni in 2011, Judith Butler stated: “My politics, my life, even my feminism is about calling into question whether those ideas of femininity are necessary, and if I don’t fall into these categories … what social place is there for me?”¹ It is this last question that discloses the thematic thread connecting Butler’s analysis of gender, performativity, grievability, and her critique of the state of Israel. Where do I belong? How does my belonging affect the other? Can I be and feel at home in the world without violating myself or the other? Butler’s commitment, in her philosophy as in her political activism, has been to challenge categories that deny inclusion, belonging, or “a social place.” As Colby Dickinson and Silas Morgan have written, “Butler has taken up a sort of ‘exilic’ position vis-à-vis various communities, academic, social, political and religious alike, exhibiting her willingness … to join together with other voices in a shared quest for justice.”² Throughout her writing, the “I” asking this question has shifted from a person who refuses the script of heteronormativity to a Palestinian refugee whose body is not acknowledged as grievable or, more recently, to her own voice as a Jew who rejects the racist policies of the State of Israel. While the “I” has changed, the relevance of the question has (sadly) not changed, which leads me to ask: how, if at all, are these, and many other, binary exclusions that prevent the “I” from belonging, interrelated? What, if any, are the alternatives to these exclusions?

A year after this interview, in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Butler explored the principle of Jewishness, of cohabitation, as an alternative form of belonging for Israelis and Palestinians. Its political ethic is a direct response to all the “Eichmanns” in the world who “think” that they can choose with whom they want to share this earth.³ In other words, Butler’s political ethics of relationality rejects the basic and exclusionary binary that undergirds all forms of racism—the Fanonian binary of being and non-being.⁴ On one side are those whose privilege (rooted in a belief of supremacy) or white innocence creates and upholds the structural and psycho-social conditions that mark certain bodies as human, grievable, and non-superfluous, and others as non-beings, which she developed in dialogue with Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon in her second 2016 Tanner Lecture, “Legal Violence: An Ethical and Political Critique.”⁵ In Israel today, Palestinians whether as refugees (in camps or in diasporic communities) or as second-class citizens, are forced to inhabit zones of non-being, much like the Jews did in Europe in the past and many Muslims do today in Europe.⁶ While Butler’s recent focus is on Israel/Palestine and the BDS movement, her analysis is equally relevant to questions of the nation-state and racism in Europe (and indirectly to all the spaces it has colonised). These exclusionary binaries, whether citizen/refugee, Israeli/Palestinian, European/Other, are not accidental creations nor are they unrelated. By referring to Israel as Europe’s prodigal son, or as its offspring, I claim that the current state of Israel embraces the Greek/Ulysses paradigm of the nation-state of homogeneity/assimilation which explicitly devalues diasporic Jewish life and values and further dehumanises Palestinians. The alternatives Butler explores, such as the notion of Jewishness and cohabitation, may be significant for understanding not only the failure of Europe’s “Middle Eastern offspring” but also for understanding current-day Europe itself.

In the first section, I focus on Butler’s analysis of Israel-occupied Palestine in relation to the failure of the nation-state. Butler had previously noted that “Arendt allows us to realise that this [failure] may also be because the nation-state as a form was faulty from the start.”⁷ The question I address is: What is it about the nation-state that, according to Arendt and Butler, makes its start faulty? To answer this question, I seek in the second section to go beyond Butler, who does not consider Europe’s role, past or present, in creating and sustaining this anti-democratic political community, by considering the European origins of this “faulty start.” I wish to argue that the role of the race-religion constellation in the creation of the Westphalian race-state has been masked by the notion of the nation, and that it is this constellation that is the “faulty start” both in Europe and in Israel. Finally, I consider two alternatives to the nation-state both of which are forms of diasporic political communities: Butler’s notion of Jewishness and Paul Gilroy’s notion of the changing same.

Occupation

In their 2007 dialogue Who Sings the Nation-State, Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak discussed the nation-state, belonging, language, and power. It is of course no surprise that their conversation was very much guided by the thought of Hannah Arendt. In their dialogue Butler noted the paradox of the apparent global decline of the nation-state and the steadfastness of its genealogical force. While there may be fewer nation-states across the globe, the logic that led to the creation of nation-states remains ever present. In her more recent speeches and writings, and especially in Parting Ways, Butler explores this “genealogical force” in relation to the case of the Jewish (and “democratic”) state of Israel. In her analysis of Israel as a failed nation-state, Butler considers its form, which, following Arendt, she claims was faulty from the start.

In her February 2013 speech at Brooklyn College on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement (delivered with its founder Omar Barghouti), Butler succinctly presented her position on Israel, arguing that it was not possible for Israel to be both a Jewish nation and a democratic state, as it claimed it was. “The state of Israel should be representing all of its population equally, regardless of whether or not they are Jewish, regardless of race, religion or ethnicity.”⁸ By prioritising its Jewish citizens (and in particular its European or Ashkenzi Jewish citizens⁹), Israel cannot maintain its democratic guarantee of treating all citizens equally. Butler develops her critique in a way that connects it to her work on binaries and categories:

In my view, we have to remain critical of anyone who posits a single norm that decides rights of entry into the social or cultural category determining as well who will be excluded. Most categories of identity are fraught with conflicts and ambiguities; the effort to suppress the complexity of the category of “Jewish” is thus a political move that seeks to yoke a cultural identity to a specific Zionist position.¹⁰

She finds the fixing of “Jewish” identity to a particular violent ideology problematic. It repudiates the possibility of a political ethics of relationality and serves to justify an exclusionary category—preventing the “I” from finding its social place, from belonging.¹¹ In her speech, Butler referred to the approximately 25% of Israel’s population that is not Jewish, most of whom are Palestinians:

If Israel is to be considered a democracy, the non-Jewish population deserves equal rights under the law, as do the Mizrachim (Arab Jews) who represent over 30 percent of the population. Presently, there are at least twenty laws that privilege Jews over Arabs within the Israeli legal system. The 1950 Law of Return grants automatic citizenship rights to Jews from anywhere in the world upon request, while denying that same right to Palestinians who were forcibly dispossessed of their homes in 1948 or subsequently as the result of illegal settlements and redrawn borders.¹²

Unlike 76% of Israelis who believe Israel can be both a Jewish and democratic state,¹³ Butler does not believe that a state that systematically, legally, and structurally privileges a part of its population can be called democratic, since creating an internal racial or ethnic hierarchy is fundamentally opposed to the egalitarian and inclusive principle of a democracy. Given the current controversy concerning the working definition of anti-Semitism in Europe, and the confusion it causes by reducing critique of the State of Israel to a form of anti-Semitism, it is essential to separate legitimate critique of the state of Israel from anti-Semitism. When criticising the state of Israel as a failed democracy, we must also acknowledge that an ideal democracy doesn’t exist anywhere. Nonetheless, we cannot allow this fact to prevent us from stating that the state of Israel was “established” in 1948—at a time when the world was not naïve about the dangers of an exclusionary state. Not only in Israel, but also in the partition of India, the largest groups of global refugees (until then) were created. Many Jews, especially among intellectuals who wrote about this, because of their experience as refugees during the Shoah, were fully aware of the dangers of explicitly prioritising one people (nation) at the expense of another. That such prioritisation was legally permitted by the UN, in full awareness of its role and responsibility in the creation of yet another refugee crisis, is thus particularly problematic.

The second point Butler raises, which will be explored further in terms of her notion of Jewishness, is that the state of Israel, and in particular its political Zionist ideology, does not represent all Jews. What she is specifically referring to here is the Jewish diaspora (just over 50% of the world’s Jewish population), and its exilic ethical tradition, which she affirms as positive (as opposed to its negation by political Zionism). The highly problematic reduction of Jewishness to Zionism, promoted by the state ideology, is not only anti-democratic, according to Butler, it is also anti-Jewish in that it rejects diasporic or Rabbinic Judaism, the very foundation of Jewish ethics she seeks to empower. She explains that her support for the BDS stems from the fact that it upholds the principle of exilic Judaism, a form of plurality that promotes cohabitation and the end to the unjust privileging of Jews over Palestinians.¹⁴

Butler’s normative claim is that a democratic state cannot prioritise a particular group of people, or nation. However, in the case of Israel this nation is religiously defined. While it is not clear if this religious definition poses additional problems for Butler, it is significant in relation to the creation of the Westphalian nation-state, which was also religiously bound.¹⁵ While Butler declares that any non-egalitarian citizenship that is restricted on a religious basis, as in Israel, is an obstacle to emancipation—the broader political issue is the link between nation and state. In Parting Ways, she turns to the concept of binationalism in order to deconstruct the concept of a nation. Binationalism does not have a pre-determined form but calls for the following minimal criteria to be met: (1) an end to (settler) colonial rule; (2) the social and legal equality of all inhabitants; and (3) a polity that is inclusive towards all inhabitants in full recognition of their alterity (rather than being blind to difference as the liberal state is presumed to be).¹⁶ Only if the concept of a nation is decoupled from that of the state, which would be impossible in the proposed two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, does she see any hope of creating an egalitarian and inclusive democratic polity. It is thus the very fact that Israel was created as a Jewish nation-state that makes its start “faulty” according to Butler.

To understand this “fault” in broader terms, Butler turns to Arendt, who demonstrated how the nation-state, because it prioritises a particular “nation,” leads to the exclusion and expulsion of others, who all too often become dehumanised refugees. Referring to Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, Butler reminds us that the state of Israel was meant to solve Europe’s post-Shoah “Jewish question.” Since, even after the Shoah, the fraction of Jews that survived were not welcome in Europe, perhaps because they were a material reminder of Europe’s shame, the colonization of Palestine appeared to be the proper solution. Sadly, according to Arendt, this

solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and right-less by another 700 000 to 800 000 people.¹⁷

Arendt demonstrates how nineteenth-century states required homogeneity to establish and maintain “the nation” and thus could not possibly accommodate plurality or difference. Accordingly, the fault at the heart of the nation-state is the assumption that political community requires homogeneity, which comes in the form of nationhood or nationalism. The tragedy she identifies at the heart of the nation-state is that it cannot sustain itself without excluding others. She describes in excruciating detail how this process occurred in the past, the resurgence of which we are witnessing today. There are at present almost 70 million unwanted refugees (officially 26 million, with 4 million applying for asylum, and 40 million internally displaced persons), most of whose names, stories and identities are erased by being reduced to numbers.

In the case of the Shoah, the Nazi definition of nation (and linked to the state) was Aryanism or, in its exclusionary form, non-Aryans (which included Jews, Roma/Sinti, Slavs, Asocials, LGBTM etc.). In this case the nation-state can appropriately be redefined as the race-state. Anti-Semitism, according to Arendt, and racism more broadly, according to Butler, continues to have a genealogical force and continues to be the foundation of nation-states. Racism denies the basic fact of human plurality, and is constructed by way of a dynamic human/non-human (or less than human) binary. How this binary operates is clarified, among others, by Arendt’s analysis of the processes of dehumanisation.

The Race-Religion Constellation

In Parting Ways, published in 2012, Butler takes up Arendt’s analysis of dehumanisation and applies it to Israel. To sustain its faulty start Israel requires a citizenship law that is fundamentally anti-democratic, in addition to many other racist and exclusionary laws.¹⁸ I want to go beyond Butler and Arendt by turning to European (conceptual) history to explore the origins of this faulty start in the race-state and in many other anti-democratic political communities. My contention is that the faulty start, in Europe, Israel, and many other former European colonies, lies in the race-religion constellation which has been masked by the notion of the nation in the creation of the Westphalian state, and is masked today by the discourse of Europe’s “Judeo-Christian” myth or that of (post)-secularism.¹⁹ Racism, which has worn many masks across time and space, provides the “justification” for a rejection of plurality or cohabitation. Once unmasked this fundamental connection between the nation-state and racism results in what may be called the race-state.²⁰ It does so by denying the basic fact of plurality, creating zones of non-being and determining who should inhabit them. Its alternative proclaims that we all belong to a shared world, with our differences, which should be the basis of our social bonds as opposed to the “naturalised” category of race that has been racialised in the name of the nation-state. As Butler puts it in Parting Ways,

[t]his means that unwilled proximity and unchosen cohabitation are preconditions of our political existence, which is the basis of her [Arendt’s] critique of the nation-state (and its presumption of a homogeneous nation), and implies the obligation to live on earth and in a polity that establishes modes of equality for a necessarily heterogeneous population. (24)

In order to prove this, we turn to the European origins of the nation-state. An early answer to the question of what forms a political community and what binds its members, which greatly influenced the Westphalian paradigm, was given by Jean Bodin (1529–96), who argued that exclusion was key to the creation of a political community. The historical context of his claim were the fifteenth-century struggles about true religion when Europe was supposedly transitioning from the “Dark Ages” towards a more Enlightened and scientific world-view. Prior to the Reformation, the term vera religio (true religion) was synonymous with the Catholic Church and Christianity (or Christendom). All Christians had souls (the majority of men living in Europe); while Christian women were a “border” population;²¹ and all non-Christians (the minority) did not, and as such would be damned. These theological and political conflicts, which were at the centre of the struggle between the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformers in the seventeenth century,²² and led to the death of over 10 million people, symbolised the exclusionary binary between humans and non-humans, which is central to all forms of racism.²³

The solution to these violent conflicts was first conceived at the 1555 Peace of Augsberg which established the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion). Augsburg thus symbolises the faulty start of the nation-state—where nation is defined by one’s religion, which of course was fundamentally linked to one’s soul and humanity. This political peace, which created sovereign states with distinct theological-political constellations, enabled many of the non-Catholic denominations of Christianity to be accepted, at least in theory, as forms of true religion. Non-Christians were most often viewed as heathens, barbarians, uncivilised and lesser beings. The view propagated in Europe among theologians, whose political influence was still strong, was that non-Christians had a false “religion” and those in the Americas had “no religion,” both cases being inferior to Christians and possibly non-human.²⁴

This new definition of political community was formally institutionalised at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which led to the structuring of new states in the form of nation-states which shared an imaginary “naturalised bond.”²⁵ In other words, the bond of religion was racialised to justify why certain groups could not inhabit/cohabit the earth. This exclusionary “religious” binary is the origin of the race-religion constellation. Now, the contemporary secularised myth of the formation of states tries to deny the fact that, at its inception, the Westphalian nation-state was a religion-based racialised state. The original binary, now masked by the discourse of secularism, is the foundation of the complex category of “religion,” which according to Butler, with reference to the work of Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad, among others, cannot be spoken of as simply a non-problematic non-constructed category (like all binaries).²⁶ She acknowledges that the concept of “religion” is linked to the rise of Protestantism and the privatisation/internalisation of belief/faith. Likewise, she acknowledges, following Arendt, that Jewishness should not been equated with Judaism, as the latter refers to a “religious” praxis.²⁷

However, by the time of the French Revolution, when all things religious were challenged, these categories and their exclusionary binary were partially replaced by a philological classification system. The rise of the “new science” of philology was largely the result of the scientific developments of modernity and also played a central role in the founding mythologies of many new states.²⁸ As national communities throughout Europe sought to differentiate and unify themselves, shared cultural bonds—in which language played a critical role—became of primary importance.²⁹ This categorical shift was the first of many changes that signalled a movement away from “religion” towards science and secularism, which translated and naturalised the hierarchical classification of religious categories. This is the first step in the masking of the race-religion constellation.

Although they claimed to be scientific and free of theological influence, the new philological categories incorporated the previous “religious” categories. Exemplary of this incorporation was the term “Semite.” According to philologists, people could be classified as Semitic, Aryan, or Turanian. These categories began to gain popularity around the 1840s.³⁰ Both the category and its appellation were fashioned by the previously dominant religious categories. First used in 1781 by the German Orientalist August Schlözer, the term ‘Semite’ comes from Shemite in relation to the three languages spoken by Shem’s sons (Noah’s grandsons): Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew.³¹ Schlözer relied on a popular classification of the world’s peoples based on which of Noah’s three sons they descended from. Ham’s descendants are cursed because their father, Ham, sees his inebriated father, Noah, naked. Their curse, to be the “lowest of slaves” (Genesis 9:25), was linked to the phenotype of darker skin as a sign of inferiority. This “curse” was used to “justify” much of the barbarity of colonialism, especially by those who saw their Christian mission as one of “civilising” the African continent. Shem, the second son, depicted as “Oriental,” was the father of the Semites and settled in what would today be the Middle East, a border people. Japheth, the white son, with whom Europeans identified, was associated with Aryanism (which included parts of Asia) and European civilisation, as the name means to expand (or enlarge)—an association used to justify missionary activities and colonialism. These religious categories were thus reconfigured in terms of philological distinctions (e.g., Semites, Aryans) to create naturalised bonds whether of language, culture or history, and were eventually translated into the biological category of “race” which we associate with racism.³²

The point of revealing the constitutive role religion-cum-racial categories play in the foundation and maintenance of the Westphalian state is to show that from its inception it created “racialised” others. This constellation continues to manifest itself in Israel, Europe’s offspring as noted (uncritically) by Arendt, who internalised and thus normalised this European racism, as seen in her letter to Karl Jaspers in which she described the courtroom of Eichmann’s trial:

My first impression. On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the persecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would follow any order. And outside, the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. In addition, and very visible in Jerusalem, the peies and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all the reasonable people here.³³

In the case of Israel, both in the 1960s and now, this racism has both internal Jewish distinctions (Ashkenazim, Sephardim, etc.), as well as Jewish/non-Jewish (Palestinian, Christian, etc.), which are analogous to the distinction used in the Westphalian nation-state in the seventeenth century. In this sense, Europe’s post-Shoah offspring (i.e., Israel) is a mirror held up to the realities and conflicts of Europe—both then and now. While much can be said about the workings of the race-religion constellation, both in Europe and in Israel/occupied Palestine, the fundamental concern—which Butler addresses specifically with regard to the latter—is the exclusionary logic of the social bond of the Westphalian race-state that is based on a quasi-natural bond between people. By creating others, by naturalising constructed categories, the racist nation-state excludes whatever other it refuses to cohabit with. It prevents different groups from participating, from contesting and challenging the structure of the exclusionary system.³⁴ This exclusion is so deeply embedded that the excluded others often internalise their difference and accept that to be included they must assimilate—a process that is in fact impossible as their difference is “natural” and thus seemingly fixed or irreversible.

Diasporic Political Communities

What, then, are the alternatives to the nation-state? What most of the alternatives—such as deterritorialized nation-states, ethnoscapes, cosmopolitics, borderlands—have in common is that they call into question the supposedly natural or historical bond that creates a community.³⁵ In the final chapter of The Racial State, David Goldberg states:

So what sort of state best represents the commitments of heterogeneities, demographically and culturally, politically and economically, socially and legally? What, in short, might be the shape of contemporary and future states, their principal modes of rule and representation, their social contours and lines of governance in the absence of and resistance to racist formation and in the aftermath of homogenizing logics?³⁶

This is the question both Butler and Gilroy address in conceptualising diasporic political communities as a means to go beyond the nation-state. By examining the tensions, resonances and potential of their respective diasporic imaginings, I explore what alternative diasporic political communities can provide in place of the exclusionary racist binary that is the faulty start and sadly the power of the nation-state.

For both Arendt and Butler, the alternatives are to be found in forms of polity that are open to plurality. Arendt explored several such options throughout her life. She considered the federation, where no single “nation” has absolute sovereignty, which raises the question of what differentiates one polity from another? Is there any sense in having borders and distinct states in this model? While Arendt was cautious about explicitly rejecting the state, which at present is the only guarantor of rights for those who belong to the nation, her proposal nonetheless refuses a system that only provides rights for an exclusive group. This is what Arendt means when she refers to the right to have rights, the right to belong, to be at home in the world. Nonetheless, Arendt holds on to the idea of “nations” as spaces of belonging, but as not linked to sovereign states with the power to exclude. What is clear to her is that democracy is incompatible with sovereignty. The former is based on inclusion, while the latter exerts its authority by means of exclusion. As Butler notes in Parting Ways, “Arendt could conceive of the Jews as a nation only as long as that national status did not give them sovereign power to decide with whom to govern the state, that is, a nation without a nation-state, a nation that could constitute a sphere of belonging within a polity structured as a federated plurality” (146).

By engaging in a dialogue with Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Arendt, Primo Levi, and Mahmoud Darwish (one could say, a “Semitic” dialogue between the children of Shem who perhaps have epistemic privilege as a border people), Butler proposes an alternative to the nation-state through her notion of Jewishness as the principle that affirms diasporic (galut/exilic) Judaism. This proposal, however, does not acknowledge the importance of the physical Eretz Israel where Judaism was born and shaped. Butler’s affirmation challenges part of the Zionist ideology, promoted by the state of Israel, that refuses to recognise the richness of diasporic Judaism. This is somewhat ironic as orthodox Judaism is a form of Rabbinic Judaism, which developed after the destruction of the Second Temple, that is, within the Jewish diaspora.³⁷

In January 2015, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appealed to European Jews to emigrate to Israel (to make Aliyah), based on the racist 1950 Law of Return which allows Jews to become Israeli citizens, which right is denied to many Palestinians who were born in lands occupied by Israel. He thus implicitly defined diasporic Judaism as a “fallen” or secondary form of Judaism. Butler rightly reminds her readers that her Judaism and that of more than half of world Jewry, whether in terms of ethics or religious praxis, affirms the ethics of diaspora Judaism that she defines as the principle of Jewishness or cohabitation. Jewishness rejects the view that Jews belong in Israel, that belonging requires unity and homogeneity, or a nation. By focusing on Jews “returning” to Israel, a place many Jews have neither been to nor have had any connection to over the past 2000 years (except in prayer references to Zion), political Zionism reduces Judaism to a limited and problematic notion of “return.” What Butler reminds us is that perhaps there is an alternative to the ideology of return, to the ideology of the nation-state that leads to exclusion, dehumanisation and the production of refugees.

While Butler does not refer to Levinas in making this claim, it is worth doing so, as Levinas affirms this alternative as the “essence” of Judaism without Butler’s political commitments. In “The Trace of the Other” he writes: “To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca we wish to oppose the story of Abraham who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land, and forbids his servant to even bring back his son to the point of departure.”³⁸ According to Levinas, it is the ancient “Greek” way to focus on a return to the same. By contrast, the Jewish way, following Abraham, is to leave, to live with the unknown other, and not to be obsessed, as Ulysses was, with the return home. This is the basis of Levinas’s ethics of alterity, an ethics of the other that rejects sameness/return. And I base my referring to Israel as Europe’s prodigal son, or its true offspring, precisely on this distinction. But why does Levinas, like so many others, refuse to acknowledge this? Butler poses this question in Parting Ways by citing Levinas’s words from Difficult Freedom: “Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel mean for Jewish thought a return to oneself in every sense of the term, and the end of an alienation that lasted a thousand years” (42). By basing its Zionist political ideology on return, and by explicitly and implicitly devaluing diasporic Jewish life, and sameness, by making non-Ashkenazi Jews secondary citizens and dehumanising Palestinians—the state of Israel embraces the Greek/Ulysses paradigm of the nation-state of homogeneity/assimilation. How can Levinas justify this Jewish/Zionist exceptionalism, embracing return and rejecting his ethics of alterity?

Levinas’s failure to apply his own ethics to the Israel-Palestinian context, his view of Palestinians as “faceless” and as inhabiting a zone of non-being, is not lost on Butler (38). She finds solace and hope in Said, who appreciates “the importance of sustaining a diasporic condition for a new polity, one in which identity never fully returns to itself, where identity remains cast out in a web of relations [Arendt] that cannot eradicate difference or return to simple identity?” (50–51). Because Levinas’s ethics embraces an alternative paradigm to the homogeneity of the race-state, but his politics does not, Butler explores political alternatives, whether those symbolised by Abraham, mixity, cohabitation or Jewishness, in the work of other thinkers such as Arendt, Levi, Darwish, and Said. The most promising in this respect is Said’s notion of mixity or impurity as a way of belonging in the diaspora³⁹ (which she also sees as embracing Levinas’s actual ethics), as it asks “whether that idea of an ethics of alterity—an alterity that is built into the identity itself—can become a basis for a new political vision” (217).

It is important to note that this new political vision rejects the faulty logic of the nation-state. Butler claims that life in the diaspora, among non-Jews, led to a different kind of ethos. She is honest enough to recognise that this ethos has two faces. On the one land, living as the outsider/other can lead to fear, anxiety, and paranoia (which she doesn’t connect to Arendt’s parvenu, the depoliticised relation to the other as protector rather than partner). On the other hand, living with others—with difference—can force us to actually think about what kind of ethos is necessary to be at home with the alterity within us and between people:

How do you live in a world that is truly mixed racially, mixed religiously? Where you live next to someone you never chose? Where you come up against people from various backgrounds? Where there is not necessarily a common background or common understanding? That struck me as the non-separatist tradition in Judaism that I valued and that I sought to continue. So, in a way, my politics are profoundly diasporic. (215)

The alternative Butler proposes acknowledges the plurality that is the factual reality of the twenty-first century rather than trying to return to the nation-state in which nations are organised according to exclusionary categories such as race and religion. It is, in other words, the ethos “forced” upon the Jews in the diaspora which promoted cohabitation with others with whom one doesn’t necessarily share “common” or “naturalised” qualities.⁴⁰ Butler thus argues for a notion of identity that welcomes alterity and allows for difference to belong and be at home within the self. Analogous to the creation of space for alterity in ipseity, is the call to create space for difference in the world. Her claim is not normative, that we should make space for alterity, but rather pragmatic and rational. Plurality is the reality, and we cannot escape it. No walls or borders can really prevent contact with difference, which both surrounds us and is within us. In Arendtian terms, cohabitation cannot be seen as a choice.

What makes this problem more specific and directly links Israel to its European patrons or founders, is the use of a religious category to demarcate racial exclusion in its definition of itself as a nation. This is precisely what we must avoid according to the lesson Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann highlights. We cannot seek to establish unity/sameness by means of the elimination of difference.⁴¹

For Arendt one reason why genocide is radically impermissible is that we have no choice with whom we cohabit the earth. A diverse population always precedes us; and it is always plural, multilingual, and spatially distributed. No group or community can claim the earth for itself (24). But when one group does so, it adheres to the logic of racialisation—whether tied to a nation, a religion, a culture, biology or skin-colour. However, once these exclusionary categories are enforced they create seemingly naturalised bonds.⁴² As such, racism is the rejection of plurality, the fact that we must all share the earth.

While Gilroy approaches the conceptualisation of diaspora from the perspective of the Black Atlantic, his goals as well as sources are similar to Butler’s in her conceptualisation of Jewishness.⁴³ As he writes: “The term diaspora identifies a relational network, characteristically produced by forced dispersal and reluctant scattering.”⁴⁴ Likewise, he condemns the diverse causes of the dispersion of peoples (e.g., war, poverty, oppression, colonialism, capitalism, slavery) but not necessarily all of its after effects.⁴⁵ The latter can ideally lead to an opening up of one’s “culture,” a claim that both Said and Butler affirm. “Diaspora as a concept,” he writes, “therefore, offers new possibilities for understanding identity, not as something inevitably determined by place or nationality, and for visualizing a future where new bases for social solidarity are offered and joined.”⁴⁶ Gilroy refers to the alternative bonds in terms of forms of belonging that are not linked to fixed roots, territories or stable boundaries. In this vein, he explores the idea of movement as a challenge to the powerful metaphors of soil and blood.⁴⁷ The strongest resonance in their respective conceptualisations of diasporic imaginings relates to diasporic identity-formations.

Like Butler, Gilroy is interested in an ethical or political episteme that potentially arises from a diasporic experience.⁴⁸ This diasporic consciousness or awareness ideally leads to an alternative type of identity:

The reproduction of a diaspora consciousness, in which identity is focused less on the equalizing, proto-democratic force of common territory and more on the social dynamics of remembrance and commemoration defined by a strong sense of the dangers involved in forgetting the location of origin and the process of dispersal.⁴⁹

With regard to the question of origins or of return, it is clear that Butler and Gilroy differ. While Butler explicitly rejects this possibility, because the manifestation of its possibility destroys this ethic, Gilroy keeps this possibility open. In this vein, his conceptualisation has more potential as it must be conceivable to maintain a diasporic consciousness without remaining dispersed. He also adds, referring to James Baldwin’s refusal to be identified as a victim (either because of his skin-colour or sexual orientation), that this consciousness has its own pitfalls of becoming fixed rather than embracing its relationality. Evidence of this pitfall can be found in the national ethos in Israel which defines it as the permanent victim, and thus incapable of perpetrating crimes against Palestinians. Butler identifies this pitfall in Levinas’s essentialisation of the Jews who become “the model and instance for this preontological persecution” (46); the eternal victims incapable of transcending the binary and being both victims and perpetrators.

While clearly defined in reaction to the limitations of identity formation imposed by the race-state, Gilroy takes us further than Butler with regard to the “content,” the changing same, of a diasporic identity. “Consciousness of diaspora affiliation stands opposed to the distinctly modern structures and modes of power orchestrated by the institutional complexity of nation states.”⁵⁰ For Gilroy, the concept and consciousness of diaspora allows one to challenge the so-called natural bonds of the “race”-state. Diasporic imaginings are fundamentally anti-essentialist and can never be fixed. And yet they are also not accidental or always changing. To capture this Gilroy refers to Leroi Jones’s 1967 notion of the changing same;⁵¹ “the same is retained without needing to be reified.”⁵²

While neither Butler nor Gilroy thematises the notion of impurity, its connection to diasporic imaginings critical of the race-state is not accidental. The birth of the nation-state in Europe, whether one dates it to 1555, 1648 or the eighteenth century, is connected to the desire for a pure homogenous national religious community (for Catholics a state free of Protestants and vice versa, without even considering the “impurity” of non-Christian races). It is also worth noting that these events resulted in the first wave of “religious” refugees in Europe—the Huguenots, the French Protestants, who were born in a Catholic territory that did not tolerate their beliefs/practices and were thus forced to seek refuge elsewhere. The link between purity and homogeneity has its roots in the Christian heritage of European nation-states, a political-theological desire that was violently enforced in all colonised lands. As an alternative to this, Butler and Gilroy posit a racial impurity that is treasured rather than destroyed:

Against this choice stands another, more difficult option: the theorisation of creolisation, metissage, mestizaje, and hybridity. From the viewpoint of ethnic absolutism, this would be a litany of pollution and impurity. These terms are rather unsatisfactory ways of naming the processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse and avoid capture by its agents.⁵³

Diasporic imaginations destabalise and challenge the need for the purity and homogeneity of fixed notions of identity.

By way of conclusion, I want to stress that, while Butler asks us to go beyond the nation-state to combat the political reality of refugees, it is Gilroy who makes clear that this challenge to the nation-state will also be a direct challenge to racism. However, the nation-state is the lynchpin of the neo-liberal Western powers. Diasporic imaginings offer an alternative ideal of political community that is not defined in terms of an exclusionary binary. Rather than desire purity, homogeneity, roots, and fixed identities, diasporic imaginations offer impurity, heterogeneity, various routes and non-binary identities. While my focus here has been on the racial nation-state, it is clear that diasporic groups also internalise the racism that these states feed off. As such it is not only the race-state that needs to be dismantled.

Gilroy believes that diasporic imaginations have the potential to challenge both the structures of power and their internalisation. This seems almost too good to be true. Homogeneity and purity are not only necessary myths for creating the race-state, they also serve to internally destabilise excluded groups by forcing them into a “one-size fits all” mode.⁵⁴ This serves to promote the idea that there is homogeneity where there isn’t, as well as setting up a classical divide-and-conquer-catch-22 situation between different excluded groups fighting for recognition. As W.E.B. Du Bois reminds us, “race” is a dynamic concept: if we are to challenge it we must not reduce it to a static binary.⁵⁵ And yet this reduction is precisely what its different manifestations in the nation-state enable. The race-state is perhaps best envisioned as Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the underworld. However, the race-state isn’t the hound of Hades, it is the hound of white supremacy. As long as we do not go beyond the nation-state, we will continue to live in a world with a growing refugee population, rampant racism, and injustice. The diasporic imaginings of Butler and Gilroy, among others, are hopefully a small step in the right direction of its eventual dismantling and transformation into what will eventually be more humane political communities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anya Topolski

Anya Topolski is associate professor in philosophy at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her chief field of research is the critical philosophy of race. Her recent books include Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) and Is There a Judeo-Christian Tradition? A European Perspective (De Gruyter, 2016). Her recent articles include “The Race-Religion Intersection: A European Contribution to the Critical Philosophy of Race” (Critical Philosophy of Race, 2018); and “Good Jew, Bad Jew: ‘Managing’ Europe’s Others” (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2017).

Notes

1. Žižek, Aloni, Badiou, and Butler, What Does a Jew Want, 206.

2. Dickinson and Morgan, “Dwelling in Diaspora,” 137.

3. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279; See also Butler, “Hannah Arendt’s Challenge to Adolf Eichmann.”

4. Gordon, What Fanon Said, 19–46.

5. Butler, “Why Preserve the Life of the Other?”; Butler, “Legal Violence: An Ethical and Political Critique.”

6. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism; Esposito and Kalin, Islamophobia.

7. Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?, 76.

8. Butler, “Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS.”

9. Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel”; Dayan, “Neozionism.”

10. Butler, “Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS.”

11. Topolski, Arendt, Levinas and the Politics of Relationality, 52–53.

12. Butler, “Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS.” And since the passing of the Nation-State Law in the Knesset on July 2018 this is even more explicit. https://knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/BasicLawNationState.pdf.

13. www.pewforum.org/2016/03/08/israels-religiously-divided-society/pf_2016-03-08_israel-01-02/.

14. In addition, the BDS describes itself as “an ‘anti-normalization’ politics,” which is precisely what Butler seeks not only in terms of Israel/Occupied Palestine but also with regard to gender and “grievability” binaries.

15. Topolski, “Race-Religion Constellation,” 58–81.

16. Bashir and Busbridge, “Politics of Decolonisation,” 388–405.

17. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 289.

18. Butler, Parting Ways, 142. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

19. See Asad, Formations of the Secular; Jansen, Secularism, Assimilation; Mahmood, Religious Difference; Topolski, “Genealogy of the ‘Judeo-Christian’ Signifier,” 267–84.

20. See Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class; Mills, Racial Contract; Goldberg, Racial State; Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race, 129–46.

21. Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race, 129.

22. Ward, True Religion.

23. Grosfoguel, “What Is Racism?” 9–15.

24. Topolski, “The Race-Religion Constellation.”

25. Anderson, Imagined Communities.

26. Butler et al., Power of Religion, 114.

27. For more on this question, see Louis Klee’s article in this issue, “Exilic Alliance: Diaspora, Cohabitation, and Translation in Judith Butler’s Parting Ways.”

28. Marchand, German Orientalism.

29. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class; Goldberg, Racial State.

30. Kalmar and Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews; Kalmar, Early Orientalism.

31. Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions.

32. Topolski, “The Race-Religion Constellation.”

33. Arendt to Jaspers, April 13, 1961, in Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 434–36.

34. Mills, Racial Contract; Goldberg, Racial State; Balibar, We, the People of Europe?; Topolski, Arendt, Levinas and the Politics of Relationality; Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race.

35. This is a question well framed and explored in Anthias, “Evaluating ‘Diaspora’.”

36. Goldberg, The Racial State, 240–41.

37. Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland.

38. Levinas, “Trace of the Other,” 355.

39. See Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 199 note 27, which shows that Said is also a foundational source for Gilroy.

40. A few pages earlier Butler does refer to what is shared—grievability—but even this is lost when the other is dehumanised. Again, she draws on the mourning rituals of Judaism, shiva, which force us to affirm life—all life, to which she adds the importance of Israelis learning to grieve for Palestinian lives and Muslim lives—even when faced with the intense pain of losing a loved one (21).

41. According to Arendt, Eichmann thought that he and his superiors might choose with whom to cohabit the earth and failed to realise that the heterogeneity of the earth’s population is an irreversible condition of social and political life itself. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 277–28.

42. Yet, and this remains one of the most puzzling claims Arendt makes in her reply to Gershom Scholem in 1946, published in The Jew as Pariah, page 246, which Butler rightly struggles with, is that she refers to the fact of being Jewish (and a woman) as physei rather than nomos. How is it possible to reject the link between nation and state, or race and state, as in the case of Europe and Israel, and view race/religion as naturally constituted rather than as a social construction? Butler’s “solution” is to read Arendt’s notion of physei as “subject to cultural construction” (Parting Ways, 133), which allows her work on gender, on Israel/Palestine, and on Jewishness, to come full circle. Thus for Butler being Jewish, like being a woman, is a naturalised social construction.

43. Gilroy draws his idea of diaspora from a variety of sources including: “The Diaspora of a Diaspora: The Case of the Caribbean - Robin Cohen, 1992”; Alcalay, After Jews And Arabs; Clifford, “Diasporas”; Boyarin and Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora. For more on this, see Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora.” In Black Atlantic, Gilroy writes: “Critical space/time cartography of the diaspora needs therefore to be readjusted so that the dynamics of dispersal and local autonomy can be shown alongside the unforeseen detours and circuits which mark the new journeys and new arrivals that, in turn, release new political and cultural possibilities” (86).

44. Gilroy, Identity and Difference, 318.

45. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 206: “The themes of escape and suffering, tradition, temporality, and social organisation of memory have a special significance in the history responses to modernity. From this source they flow into the work several generations of Jewish cultural and religious historians, literary and philosophers who have delved into the relationship between modernity and anti-Semitism and into the roles of rationalism and irrationalism in the development of European racist thought. In these settings the same themes are associated with the ideas of dispersal, exile, and slavery. They also help to frame the problem of simultaneous intra- and intercultural change which has engaged Jewish thinkers in Europe from eighteenth century onwards.”

46. Gilroy, Identity and Difference, 304.

47. Ibid., 317.

48. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 80–81: “I want to state that diaspora is still indispensable in focusing on the political and ethical dynamics of the unfinished history of blacks in the modern world. The dangers of idealism and pastoralisation associated with this concept ought, by now, to be obvious, but the very least that it offers is an heuristic means to focus on the relationship of identity and non-identity in black political culture.”

49. Gilroy, Identity and Difference, 318.

50. Ibid., 329.

51. Jones, Black Music.

52. Gilroy, Identity and Difference, 335.

53. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 3.

54. At certain points in the recent past, British racism has generated turbulent economic, ideological, and political forces that seem to have acted on the people they oppressed by concentrating their cultural identities into a single powerful configuration.

55. As quoted in Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 111 (originally in Du Bois, The Negro, 52). “Race would seem to be a dynamic and not a static conception, and the typical races are continually changing and developing, amalgamating and differentiating. We are studying the history of the darker part of the human family, which is separated from the rest of mankind by no absolute physical line and no definite mental characteristics, but which nevertheless forms, as a mass, a series of social groups more or less distinct in history, appearance and in cultural gifts and accomplishment.”