Contesting The Exclusive Nation and the Republican Subject: for a New Universalism and Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Nations invent themselves by excluding others, both outside their erected boundaries and within. Under Louis XIV, the excluded within, made to guarantee the nation's one-ness, included religious, gendered, and sexual others. This structure is still operative in France, with its abiding myth of a universal Republican subject that proclaims equality and rejects difference. Considering the alterity of Arabs and Muslims, women and queers, I argue that France, threatened by a crisis of identity, should embrace a “new universal,” and a cosmopolitan idea(l). These contain some promise for constructing a porous, inclusive nation where multiplicity is the condition for unifying identification.

Keywords:

• Cosmopolitanism
• Nation
• Others
• Alterity
• Republicanism
• French Republic
• Subject
• Subjectivity
• Universalism
• Egalitarianism
• Enlightenment
• Muslims
• Queers
• Women

Notes

Notes

1 See ARTINFO; Chrisafis; and http:tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/culture/20090923.OBS2202/la-maison-de-l’histoire-de-france-franchit-un-pas.html. Web. 23 September 2011.

2 But “the same,” for example, the French nobility, also objected to the monarchy's absolutism and insisted on the germanic model of an elected monarchy, whereby nobles selected one among their number. The emblem of this contestatory position is the Comte de Boulainvilliers; see Foucault (1996) and Bell.

3 See also “orientals” that is, Ottoman Turks (Bély), as well as the Chinese whom Louis tried to convert (Choisy).

4 For Bouhours, the French are more impressive than the Romans, since linguistic subjection has preceded—and paved the way for—military and political conquest (27).

5 I do not engage the question of the Terror as peripheral or central to the Revolution—though the peripheral view provides an alibi for asserting the Revolution's purity.

6 France made constant accommodations with the Church, which ensured with the Concordat (1801) that Christian holidays were at the heart of national identity. The Church has had the privilege of establishing religious institutions in every diocese (Bauberot 128ff).

7 France was the last European nation to give women the vote (in 1945), and then mainly in the belief that their religious conservatism would counteract the rise of communism. France has among the lowest number of elected women in Europe.

8 Agacinsky claimed that there was one human universal; its definition was men and women, and that the denial of this universal difference, not the acknowledgement of sexual difference, had relegated French women to their second-sex status (Kramer 121).

9 In the first affaire du foulard (1989), the Conseil d’Etat ruled that the expression of religious belief by clothing was protected so long as students did not prosyletize (Bowen 272–274). After 9/11, however, this ruling was overturned.

10 That sense of permanent exclusion is documented by “other” French writers, even the most successful; see Ben Jelloun and Derrida (1996).

11 A cosmopolitan ethics predicates negotiating our relations to othernesses; see Garber et al.