‘Liberal Multiculturalism is the Hegemony – Its an

Empirical Fact’ – A response to Slavoj Žižek

by Sara Ahmed
19 Feb 2008 • Comments (7) • Print
Posted: General Issue [0] | Commons

In his plenary talk at the Law and Critique Conference

(2007)[1]1 Slavoj Žižek repeatedly asserted that liberal
multiculturalism – and its ‘politically correct’ premise of
respecting the other’s difference – is hegemonic. When
asked questions about this position from the floor, he
stated insistently that it was an ‘empirical fact’ that
liberal multiculturalism was hegemonic, and challenged
anyone to prove otherwise. I am writing this response as a
way of taking up his challenge.
It is worth stating from the outside how difficult it is to
begin with ‘empirical facts’ when trying to establish what
would be the best description of a hegemony, that is, the
dominant way of ordering things that reproduces things in a
certain order. Hegemony is not really reducible to facts as
it involves semblance, fantasy and illusion, being a
question of how things appear and the gap between
appearance and the real. To read hegemony we have to
distrust how things appear. Indeed, what is striking about
Žižek’s retort is how much his reading of ‘political
correctness’ and ‘liberal multiculturalism’ involved a
certain literalism, as if the prohibition of speech acts
that are not based on respecting the other’s difference are
‘really’ what is prohibited, or as if the prohibition is
simply real by virtue of being articulated within public
culture. So the speech act, ‘we must support [apoyar,
respaldar, admitir, estar a favor de] the other’s
difference’ is read as hegemonic, is taken literally as a
sign not only that it is compulsory to support the other’s
difference, but we are not allowed to refuse this support.
The speech act is read as doing what it says. In order to
re-consider the effects of such injunctions [madato, orden,
requerimiento] and prohibitions, I have introduced a new
class of what I call non-performatives: speech acts that do
not do what they say, and that do not bring into effect
what they name.[2]2 Could the speech work to create an
illusion that we do support the other’s difference, which
might work by not bringing such support into existence?
[esto también afecta la reciente ciudadanía de lxs otrxs, a
1
1. This conference was entitled, ‘Walls’ and took place at Birkbeck College, 14-16
September 2007.
See:www.criticallegalconference.com/programme.pdf [↑]
2
2. See Ahmed, Sara (2006). ‘The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism’, Borderlands.
vol 5, no 5.
partir de la ampliación de derechos, el reconocimiento
oficial y la potencia política y organizativa, en la medida
que supone la reconfiguración de nuevas restricciones, de
segmentación y desigualación en las posibilidades de
ejercicios de esos derechos y de acceder a los circuitos de
decisión, agencia y gestión institucional…]
So lets re-consider liberal multiculturalism as a fantasy.
In one of his famous examples, Žižek considers
postmodernism as a fantasy that extends forms of violence.
The postmodern organisation wants to be friendly, wants to
have the appearance of collegiality, wants not to be seen
as having authority over you. The postmodern leader wants
to be your friend, a follower amongst followers, we might
even say. Quite rightly, Žižek argues that such postmodern
forms of authority extend the violence of authority
precisely by concealing authority under the illusion of
friendship and civility. Force is all the more forceful
when it no longer appears as force. Feminist critics have
long taught us this point – that it is in intimate spaces
predicated on fantasies of equality, reciprocity and love
that violence is more structuring, as it goes unnoticed and
unnamed.
We can read multiculturalism as a fantasy in exactly the
same terms. The multicultural organisation wants to be seen
as diverse; as bringing everyone together; as respecting
difference, as committed to equality. Such an organisation
would use brochures of colourful faces; diversity would be
a sign of the very qualities or attributes of the
organisation. In other words, diversity becomes an ego
ideal. The multicultural nation also takes diversity as an
ego ideal, as if it has achieved diversity because of its
qualities or attributes. We can see this at stake in the
making of the multicultural nation: Britain is represented
as being multicultural because of its national character:
as being tolerant, open, loving, hospitable, and so on.[3]3
I would argue that multiculturalism is a fantasy which
conceals forms of racism, violence and inequality as if the
organisation/nation can now say: how can you experience
racism when we are committed to diversity? In my research
project on diversity in organisations, when Black staff
spoke about racism, organisations often responded by
pointing to their race equality and diversity policies, as
if these policies were the point. Black staff spoke of how
they deal with whiteness everyday and how diversity and
equality as organisational ideals get in the way of
reporting these experiences. You are asked to be a tick in

3
See my chapter, ‘In the name of Love’, The Cultural Politics of
Emotion, 2004, Edinburgh University Press for an elaboration of this
argument.
their box by smiling with gratitude, adding colour to the
white face of the organisation. Diversity as an ego ideal
conceals experiences of racism, which means that
multiculturalism is a fantasy which supports the hegemony
of whiteness.
In such a fantasy, racism is ‘officially prohibited’. This
is true. We are ‘supposed’ to be for racial equality,
tolerance and diversity, and we are not ‘allowed’ to
express hatred towards others, or to incite racist hatred.
I would argue that this prohibition against racism is
imaginary, and that it conceals everyday forms of racism,
and involves a certain desire for racism. Take Big
Brother and the Jade Goody story.[4] You could argue that
Big Brother’s exposure of racism functions as evidence that
political correctness is hegemonic: you are not allowed to
be racist towards others. But that would be a gross
misreading. What was at stake was the desire to locate
racism in the body of Jade Goody, who comes to stand for
the ignorance of the white working classes, as a way of
showing that ‘we’ (Channel 4 and its well-meaning liberal
viewers) are not racist like that. When anti-racism becomes
an ego ideal you know you are in trouble.
The prohibition of racist speech should not then be taken
literally: rather it is a way of imagining ‘us’ as beyond
racism, as being good multicultural subjects who are not
that. By saying racism is over there –‘ look, there it is!
in the located body of the racist’ – other forms of racism
remain unnamed. We might even say that the desire for
racism is an articulation of a wider unnamed racism, that
accumulates force by not being named, or by operating under
the sign of civility. This imaginary prohibition is taken
up as if it is real, which allows individuals to declare
that being racist is prohibited (the probation happens, but
that is not the point). Racism then becomes a minority
position which has to be defended against the multicultural
hegemony. The desire to be seen as anti-racist is taken up
as an expression of a prohibition, which is what allows
racism to be articulated as a minority position, a refusal
of orthodoxy. In this perverse logic, racism can then be
embraced as a form of free speech. We have articulated a
new discourse of freedom: as the freedom to be offensive,
in which racism becomes an offence that restores our
freedom: the story goes, we have worried too much about
offending the other, we must get beyond this restriction,
which sustains the fantasy that ‘that’ was the worry in the
first place. Note here that the other, especially the
Muslim subject who is represented as easily offended,
becomes the one who causes injury, insofar as it is the
Muslim other’s ‘offendability’ that is read as restricting
our free speech. The offendible subject ‘gets in the way’
of our freedom. So rather than saying racism is prohibited
by the liberal multicultural consensus, under the banner of
respect for difference, I would argue that racism is what
is protected under the banner of free speech through the
appearance of being prohibited.
In fact, I want to put my argument in stronger terms. I
would argue that the hegemonic position is that liberal
multiculturalism is the hegemony. This is why the current
monoculture political agenda functions as a kind of
retrospective defence against multiculturalism. The
explicit argument of New Labour is that multiculturalism
went ‘too far’: we gave the other ‘too much’ respect, we
celebrated difference ‘too much’, such that
multiculturalism is read as the cause of segregation, riots
and even terrorism. So now migrants must be British; we
must defence integration, as a defence against
multiculturalism, which in turn is what threatens the well-
being of the nation. We have a return to national pride as
a defence of Britishness, as if this is a minority
position. (One suspects that hegemonies are often presented
as minority positions, as defences against what are
perceived to be hegemonic, which is how they can be
presented as matter of life and death.) Take the following
quote from the Home Office report, Strength in Diversity:
‘In recent years we’ve focused far too much on the ‘multi’
and not enough on the common culture. We’ve emphasized what
divides us over what unites us. We have allowed tolerance
of diversity to harden into the effective isolation of
communities, in which some people think special separate
values ought to apply.’
Note also this involves a reading of the other as abusing
our multicultural love: as if to say, we gave our love to
you, and you abused our love by living apart from us, so
now you must become British. We have a double fantasy here:
both that migrants were respected or received with love (as
a description of the history of race politics in the UK on
suspect we are talking here about history as a national
fantasy, or the nation as a historical fantasy) [5]4, and

4
In one speech by Trevor Phillips, for instance, ‘We need a High-way
code for a Multi-ethnic Society’’ he evokes the colonial as a good
sign of British character: ‘And we can look at our own history to show
that the British people are not by nature bigots. We created something
called the empire where we mixed and mingled with people very
different from those of these islands.’ Empire here become proof that
British are ‘not bigots’, but are able to ‘mix and mingle’ with
others. Indeed, empire itself becomes a sign of a British tendency
towards happy diversity; towards mixing, loving and co-habiting with
others. The violence of colonial occupation is re-imagined as a
history of love (a story of mixing and mingling), whilst colonialism
itself becomes a happy sign of a certain national disposition. Here,
diversity, mixing and multiculturalism become happy insofar as they
are ‘gifts’ given by the British towards others. Phillips gave this
then that this love was abused. Migrants enter the national
consciousness as ungrateful. Ironically then racism becomes
attributed to the failure of migrants to receive our love.
The monocultural hegemony involves the fantasy that
multiculturalism is the hegemony. The best description of
today’s hegemony is ‘liberal monoculturalism’ in which
common values are read as under threat by the support for
the other’s difference, as a form of support that supports
the fantasy of the nation as being respectful at the same
time as it allows the withdrawal of this so-called respect.
The speech act that declares liberal multiculturalism as
hegemonic is the hegemonic position.
Notes
2. See Ahmed, Sara (2006). ‘The Non-Performativity of Anti-
Racism’, Borderlands. vol 5, no
5.www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol5no3_2006/ahme
d_nonperform.htm [↑]
3. See my chapter, ‘In the name of Love’, The Cultural
Politics of Emotion, 2004, Edinburgh University Press for
an elaboration of this argument. [↑]
4. For further discussion of the politics of Big
Brother and racism, see the editorial by Ashwani Sharma and
Sanjay Sharma, ‘Celebrity Big Brother Dialogues: The Global
Pantomime of Race’. site/2007/05/07/editorial-celebrity-
big-brother-dialogues-the-global-pantomime-of-race/ [↑]
5. In one speech by Trevor Phillips, for instance, ‘We need
a High-way code for a Multi-ethnic Society’’ he evokes the
colonial as a good sign of British character: ‘And we can
look at our own history to show that the British people are
not by nature bigots. We created something called the
empire where we mixed and mingled with people very
different from those of these islands.’ Empire here become
proof that British are ‘not bigots’, but are able to ‘mix
and mingle’ with others. Indeed, empire itself becomes a
sign of a British tendency towards happy diversity; towards
mixing, loving and co-habiting with others. The violence of
colonial occupation is re-imagined as a history of love (a
story of mixing and mingling), whilst colonialism itself
becomes a happy sign of a certain national disposition.
Here, diversity, mixing and multiculturalism become happy
insofar as they are ‘gifts’ given by the British towards
others. Phillips gave this speech on October 3, 2005, to
the Conservative party’s Muslim Forum.
See: www.blink.org.uk/docs/Trevor_Phillips_speech_Nov05.pdf
. [↑]
Tags: multiculturalism, zizek

speech on October 3, 2005, to the Conservative party’s Muslim Forum.

http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/02/19/%E2%80%98liber
al-multiculturalism-is-the-hegemony-%E2%80%93-its-an-
empirical-fact%E2%80%99-a-response-to-slavoj-zizek/
APPENDIX: MULTICULTURALISM, THE
REALITY OF AN ILLUSION
SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Hegemony is not really reducible to facts as it involves semblance, fantasy and illusion, being a
question of how things appear and the gap between appearance and how bodies are distributed.
To read hegemony we have to distrust [desconfiar] how things appear. Indeed, what is striking
about Zizek’s retort is how much his reading of ‘political correctness’ and ‘liberal
multiculturalism’ involved a certain [incuestionable] literalism, as if the prohibition of speech
acts that are not based on respecting the other’s difference are ‘really’ what is prohibited, or as if
the prohibition is simply real by virtue of being articulated within public culture. So the speech
act, ‘we must support the other’s difference’ is read as hegemonic, is taken literally as a sign not
only that it is compulsory to support the other’s difference, but we are not allowed to refuse this
support. The speech act is read as doing what it says. In order to re-consider the effects of such
injunctions and prohibitions, I have introduced a new class of what I call non-performatives:
speech acts that do not do what they say, that do not bring into effect that which they name.
Could the speech work to create an illusion that we do support the other’s difference, which
might work by not bringing such support into existence?

My point is double here. First, I agree with the category of “non-performative,”

but with a twist: it is a performative, even a very efficient one, but a different
one than it claims to be. There are other theoretical notions we can use to
describe this duality: “pragmatic paradox,” the gap between the “subject of the
enunciated” and the “subject of the enunciation,” ”double bind”; there are
nonetheless differences between these notions. “Double bind” implies an
unbearable [insoportable] subjective tension (the proverbial mother who
explicitly enjoins her son to go away and start an autonomous life, but whose
message between the lines is a desperate call to stay with her; the father who
tells his son to act autonomously, so that if the son effectively does it, her
thereby asserts his subordination to his father, since he followed his injunction),
while the “non-performative” works smoothly [suavemente, diplomáticamente],
enabling [activando, habilitando] you as it were to have a cake and eat it, i.e., to
assert your superiority over the Other in/through the very gesture of
guaranteeing his equality and your respect for his difference.

When I claim that multiculturalism is hegemonic, I only claim that it is

hegemonic as ideology, not that it described the reality of predominant social
relations – which is why I criticize it so ferociously. So when Ahmed writes that
“multiculturalism is a fantasy which conceals forms of racism, violence and
inequality,” I only can add that this goes for every hegemonic ideology. I do not
confuse ideological fantasy/illusion and fact – they are confused in reality: the
reality of what Ahmed calls “civil racism” can only function through (in the guise
of) the illusion of anti-racist multiculturalism. And, furthermore, an illusion is
never simply an illusion: it is not enough to make the old Marxist point about
the gap between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the
particular interests that effectively sustain it – as is so common amongst
politically-correct critics on the Left. The counter-argument that the form is
never a ‘mere’ form, but involves a dynamic of its own which leaves traces in the
materiality of social life, made by Claude Lefort and Jacques Rancière, is fully
valid. After all the ‘formal freedom’ of the bourgeois sets in motion the process
of altogether ‘material’ political demands and practices, from trade unions to
feminism. Rancière rightly emphasizes the radical ambiguity of the Marxist
notion of the gap between formal democracy with its discourse of the rights of
man and political freedom and the economic reality of exploitation and
domination. This gap between the ‘appearance’ of equality-freedom and the
social reality of economic and cultural differences can either be interpreted in
the standard symptomatic way, that is the form of universal rights, equality,
freedom and democracy is just a necessary, but illusory expression of its
concrete social content, the universe of exploitation and class domination. Or it
can be interpreted in the much more subversive sense of a tension in which the
‘appearance’ of egaliberté, is precisely not a ‘mere appearance,’ but has a power
of its own. This power allows it to set in motion the process of the re-articulation
of actual socio-economic relations by way of their progressive ‘politicization’:
why shouldn’t women also vote? Why shouldn’t conditions at the work place
also be of public political concern? and so on. If the bourgeois freedom is merely
formal and doesn’t disturb the true relations of power, why, then, didn’t the
Stalinist regime allow it? Why was it so afraid of it? In the opposition between
form and content, the form possesses an autonomy of its own – one can almost
say: a content of its own. – Back to Ahmed, how, then, does multiculturalism as
fantasy function?

In such a fantasy, racism is ‘officially prohibited’. This is true. We are ‘supposed’ to be for racial
equality, tolerance and diversity, and we are not ‘allowed’ to express hatred towards others, or to
incite racist hatred. I would argue that this prohibition against racism is imaginary, and that it
conceals everyday forms of racism, and involves a certain desire for racism. Take Big Brother
and the Jade Goody story. You could argue that Big Brother’s exposure of racism functions as
evidence that political correctness is hegemonic: you are not allowed to be racist towards others.
But that would be a misreading. What was at stake was the desire to locate racism in the body of
Jade Goody, who comes to stand [posición] for the ignorance of the white working classes, as a
way of showing that ‘we’ (channel 4 and its well-meaning liberal viewers) are not racist like that.
When anti-racism becomes an ego ideal you know you are in trouble.

The prohibition of racist speech should not then be taken literally: rather it is a
way of imagining ‘us’ as beyond racism, as being good multicultural subjects
who are not that. By saying racism is over there –‘look, there it is! in the located
body of the racist’ – other forms of racism remain unnamed, what we could call
civil racism. We might even say that the desire for racism is an articulation of a
wider unnamed racism that accumulates force by not being named, or by
operating under the sign of civility.

The best example one can imagine of this are the presidential elections in
France a couple of years ago when Jean-Marie le Pen made it into the second
round: reacting to this racist-chauvinist threat, the entire “democratic France”
joined their ranks behind Jacques Chirac who was reelected with an
overwhelming majority of 80%. No wonder everyone felt good after this display
of French anti-racism, no wonder people “loved to hate” le Pen: by way of
clearly locating racism in him and his party, the general “civil racism” is
rendered invisible. In a homologous way, there was, in Slovenia, around a year
ago, a big problem with a Roma (Gipsy) family which camped close to a small
town. When a man was killed in the camp, the people in the town started to
protest against the Roma, demanding that they be moved from the camp (which
they occupied illegally) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc. As
expected, all liberals condemned them as racists, locating racism into this
isolated small village, while none of the liberals, living comfortably in the big
cities, had any everyday contact with the Roma (except for meeting their
representatives in front of the TV cameras when they supported them). When
the TV interviewed the “racists” from the town, they were clearly seen to be a
group of people frightened by the constant fighting and shooting in the Roma
camp, by the constant theft of animals from their farms, and by other forms of
small harassments [acoso, tormento] from the Roma. It is all too easy to say (as
the liberals did) that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of the
centuries of their exclusion and mistreatment, that the people in the nearby
town should also open themselves more to the Roma, etc. – nobody clearly
answered the local “racists” what they should concretely do to solve the very real
problems the Roma camp evidently was for them.

One of the most irritating liberal-tolerant strategies is to oppose Islam as a great

religion of spiritual peace and compassion to its fundamentalist-terrorist abuse
– whenever Bush or Netanyahu or Sharon announced a new phase in the War
on Terror, they never forgot to include this mantra. (One is almost tempted to
counter it by claiming that Islam is, as all religions, in itself a rather stupid
inconsistent edifice, and that what makes it truly great are its possible political
uses.) This is liberal-tolerant racism at its purest: this kind of “respect” for the
other is the very form of appearance of its opposite, of patronizing disrespect.
The very term “tolerance” is here indicative: one “tolerates” something one
doesn’t approve of, but cannot abolish, either because one is not strong enough
to do it or because one is benevolent enough to allow the Other to stick to its
illusion – in this way, a secular liberal “tolerates” religion, a permissive parent
“tolerates” his children’s excesses, etc.

Where I disagree with Ahmed is in her supposition that the underlying

injunction of liberal tolerance is monocultural – “Be like us, become British!” I
claim that, on the opposite, its injunction is cultural apartheid: others should
not come too close to us, we should protect our “way of life.” The demand
“Become like us!” is a superego demand, a demand which counts on the other’s
inability to really become like us, so that we can then gleefully “deplore” their
failure. (Recall how, in the apartheid South Africa, the official regime’s ideology
was multiculturalist: apartheid is needed so that all the diverse black tribes will
not get drowned into our civilization…) The truly unbearable [insoportable] fact
for a multiculturalist liberal is an Other who effectively becomes like us, while
retaining its specific features.

Furthermore, Ahmed passes between two forms of racism which should be

distinguished. First, there is the “reflexive racism”: we use our non-racism to
distinguish ourselves from the racist other and thus to castigate them in a racist
way. More precisely, one should distinguish, in a kind of spectral analysis, three
different modes of today’s racism. First, there is the old fashioned unabashed
[descarada] rejection of the (despotic, barbarian, orthodox, Muslim, corrupt,
oriental…) Other on behalf [en nombre de] of the authentic (Western, civilized,
democratic, Christian…) values. Then there is the “reflexive” Politically Correct
racism: the multiculturalist perception of Muslims or Balkans as the terrain of
ethnic horrors and intolerance, of primitive irrational war passions, to be
opposed to the post-Nation-State liberal-democratic process of solving conflicts
through rational negotiations, compromises and mutual respect. Racism is here
as it were elevated to the second power: it is attributed to the Other, while we
occupy the convenient position of a neutral benevolent observer, righteously
dismayed at the horrors going on down there. Finally, there is the reversed
racism: it celebrates the exotic authenticity of the Balkan Other, as in the notion
of Serbs who, in contrast to the inhibited, anemic Western Europeans, still
exhibit a prodigious lust for life – this last form of racism plays a crucial role in
the success of Emir Kusturica’s films in the West. – Second, racists themselves
become a “threatened [amenazada] minority” whose free speech must be
protected, i.e., they

use the prohibition as evidence that racism is a minority position which has to be defended
against the multicultural hegemony. Racism can then be articulated as a minority position, a
refusal of orthodoxy. In this perverse logic, racism can then be embraced as a form of free
speech. We have articulated a new discourse of freedom: as the freedom to be offensive, in
which racism becomes an offence that restores our freedom: the story goes, we have worried too
much about offending the other, we must get beyond this restriction, which sustains the fantasy
that ‘that’ was the worry in the first place. Note here that the other, especially the Muslim
subject who is represented as easily offended, becomes the one who causes injury, insofar as it is
the Muslim other’s ‘offendability’ that is read as restricting our free speech. The offendable
subject ‘gets in the way’ of our freedom. So rather than saying racism is prohibited by the liberal
multicultural consensus, under the banner of respect for difference, I would argue that racism is
what is protected under the banner of free speech through the appearance of being prohibited.

The thing to do here is to supplement Ahmed’s presentation with different,

unexpected, examples which render visible unexpected consequences and links
of her theoretical propositions. Notice the paradox of Chomsky here: he wrote a
preface to a book by Jean Faurisson, a holocaust-denier, defending the right for
the book to be published. Chomsky made it clear that he is personally disgusted
by Faurisson’s reasoning; his problem is that, once we start to prohibit certain
opinions, who will be next in line? The question is thus: how to counteract the
fake liberal prohibition of racism? In the Chomsky mode, or by replacing it with
a “true” prohibition?

Another unexpected example: according to Jean-Claude Milner, a unified

Europe can only constitute itself on the condition of the progressive erasure of
all divisive historical traditions and legitimizations: consequently, the unified
Europe is based on the erasure of history, of historical memory. Recent
phenomena like holocaust revisionism, the moral equation of all victims of the
WWII (Germans suffered under the Allied bombardments no less than Russians
and Englishmen; the fate of the Nazi collaborators liquidated by the Russians
after the war is comparable to the victims of the Nazi genocide, etc.), are the
logical outcome of this tendency: all specified limits are potentially erased on
behalf of abstract suffering and victimization. And – this is what Milner is
aiming at all along – this Europe, in its very advocacy of the unlimited openness
and multicultural tolerance, again needs the figure of the “Jew” as a structural
obstacle to this drive to unlimited unification; however, today’s anti-Semitism is
no longer the old ethnic anti-Semitism; its focus is displaced from Jews as an
ethnic group to the State of Israel: “in the program of the Europe of the 21st
century, the State of Israel occupies exactly the position that the name ‘Jew’
occupied in the Europe before the cut of 39-45.” In this way, today’s anti-
Semitism can present itself as anti-anti-Semitism, full of solidarity with the
victims of the holocaust; the reproach is just that, in our era of the gradual
dissolution of all limits, of the fluidification of all traditions, the Jews wanted to
built their own clearly delimited Nation-State – here are the very last lines of
Milner’s book: [2]

If modernity is defined by the belief into an unlimited realization of dreams, our future is fully
outlined. It leads through the absolute theoretical and practical anti-Judaism. To follow Lacan
beyond what he explicitly stated, the foundations of a new religion are thus posited: anti-
Judaism will be the natural religion of the humanity-to-come.

Is Milner, a passionate pro-Zionist, not relying here on the same logic as

Ahmed? Are, in his view, Jews not caught in the same paradoxical predicament
as, say, the British Muslims: they were offered all the civil rights, the chance to
integrate into our society, but, ungrateful as they are, they persisted in their
separate way of life? Plus, like Muslims, they are perceived as over-offendable,
seeing everywhere “anti-Semitism”… Milner’s point is thus that the official anti-
anti-Semitism, prohibiting it (recall the case of David Irving), is the form of
appearance of secret anti-Semitism. – Back to Ahmed’s line of argumentation:
the hegemony of multiculturalism is thus not a direct hegemony, but a reflexive
one:

the hegemonic position is that liberal multiculturalism is the hegemony. This is why the current
monoculture political agenda functions as a kind of retrospective defense against
multiculturalism. The explicit argument of New Labor is that multiculturalism went ‘too far’: we
gave the other ‘too much’ respect, we celebrated difference ‘too much’, such that
multiculturalism is read as the cause of segregation, riots and even terrorism.”

I totally agree with the general principle that “hegemonies are often presented
as minority positions, as defenses against what are perceived to be hegemonic
positions” – Today’s celebration of “minorities” and “marginals” IS the
predominant majority position. I would only add a series of other examples, like
the neocons who complain about the terror of liberal Political Correctness,
presenting themselves as protectors of an endangered minority. Or take those
critics of patriarchy who attack it as if it is still a hegemonic position, ignoring
what Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago, in the first chapter of The
Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand,
has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” – is still ignored by
those Leftist cultural theorists who focus their critique on patriarchal ideology
and practice. Is it not the time to start to wonder about the fact that the critique
of patriarchal “phallogocentrism” etc. was elevated into a main target at the very
historical moment – ours – when patriarchy definitely lost its hegemonic role,
when it is progressively swept away by market individualism of Rights? What
becomes of patriarchal family values when a child can sue his parents for
neglect and abuse, i.e., when family and parenthood itself are de iure reduced to
a temporary and dissolvable contract between independent individuals? (And,
incidentally, Freud was no less aware of this: for him, the decline of the Oedipal
mode of socialization was the historical condition of the rise of
psychoanalysis.) [3] In other words, the critical statement that patriarchal
ideology continues to be today’s hegemonic ideology IS today’s hegemonic
ideology – its function is to enable us to evade the deadlock of the hedonist
permissiveness which is effectively hegemonic.
On February 7 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury told BBC Radio 4′s World at
One that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK “seems
unavoidable”: the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not
relate to the British legal system, so that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law
would help maintain social cohesion. He stressed that “nobody in their right
mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes
been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme
punishments, the attitudes to women as well”; however, an approach to law
which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be
said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely
irrelevant in the processes of the courts – I think that’s a bit of a danger”.
Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural
loyalty or state loyalty”. The issue of whether Catholic adoption agencies should
be forced to accept gay parents under equality laws already showed the potential
for legal confusion: “The principle that there is only one law for everybody is an
important pillar of our social identity as a Western democracy. But I think it is a
misunderstanding to suppose this means people don’t have other affiliations,
other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and that the
law needs to take some account of that.” People may legally devise their own
way to settle a dispute in front of an agreed third party as long as both sides
agree to the process. Muslim Sharia courts and the Jewish Beth Din come into
this category: the country’s main Beth Din at Finchley in north London oversees
a wide range of cases including divorce settlements, contractual rows between
traders and tenancy disputes; in a similar way, Muslims should be allowed to
choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia
court. [4]

However, with all my sympathies for Rowan Williams, I think the devil hides in
the details of his proposal, where the old dilemma of group versus individual
rights explodes with a vengeance. Williams is careful enough to emphasize two
limitations of his proposal: (1) individual Muslims should retain a choice: they
should not be forced to obey Sharia, but just allowed to choose it; (2) Sharia
should be implemented only in certain areas, applying norms which are not in
conflict with the general law (marital disputes, not amputations of hands for
theft…). But if we fully follow these two principles, then nothing radical really
happens: if some group of people want to regulate their affairs in a way which
adds new additional rules without infringing upon the existing legal order, so
what? Things get problematic the moment we move a step further and concede
to one’s particular ethnic-religious community a more substantial role of the
unsurpassable roots of one’s existence.

This is what makes the issue of universal compulsory education so hot: when
liberals insist that children should be given the right to remain part of their
particular community, but on condition that they are given a choice, for, say, the
Amish children to have an effectively free choice of which way of life to choose,
their parents’ or the “English,” they would have to be properly informed on all
the options, educated in them – however, the only way to do this would be to
extract them from their embeddedness in the Amish community, i.e., to
effectively render them “English.” This also clearly demonstrates the limitations
of the standard liberal attitude towards the Muslim women wearing a veil: they
can do it if it is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their
husbands or family. However, the moment women wear a veil as the result of
their free individual choice, the meaning of wearing a veil changes completely: it
is no longer a sign of their direct substantial belonging to the Muslim
community, but an expression of their idiosyncratic individuality, of their
spiritual quest and protest against the vulgarity of today’s sexual commerce, or a
political gesture of protesting the West. A choice is always a meta-choice, a
choice of the modality of the choice itself: one thing is to wear a veil because of
one’s immediate immersion into a substantial tradition; another thing is to
refuse to wear a veil; yet another thing is to wear a veil not out of substantial
belonging, but as an act of ethico-political choice. This is why, in our secular
societies of choice, people who maintain a substantial religious belonging are in
a subordinate position: even if they are allowed to maintain their belief, this
belief is “tolerated” as their idiosyncratic personal choice/opinion; the moment
they present it publicly as what it is for them (a matter of substantial belonging),
they are accused of “fundamentalism.” What this means is that the “subject of
free choice” (in the Western “tolerant” multicultural sense) can only emerge as
the result of an extremely violent process of being torn out of one’s particular
life-world, of being cut off from one’s roots.

Western secular law not only promotes different content of the laws subjects are
compelled to obey than religious legal edifices, it also relies on a different formal
mode of how subjects relate to legal regulations. This is what misses the simple
reduction of the gap that separates the liberal universalism from particular
substantial ethnic identities to a gap between two particularities (“liberal
universalism is an illusion, a mask concealing its own particularity which it
imposes onto others as universal”): the universalism of a Western liberal society
does not reside in the fact that its values (human rights, etc.) are universal in the
sense of holding for ALL cultures, but in a much more radical sense: in it,
individuals relate to themselves as “universal,” they participate in the universal
dimension directly, by-passing their particular social position. The problem with
particular laws for particular ethnic/religious groups is that not all people
experience themselves as belonging to a particular ethnic/religious community
– so apart from people belonging to groups, there should be “universal”
individuals who just belong to the state law. Apart from apples, pears, and
grapes, there should be a place for fruits as such. – The catch is here that of the
freedom of choice given to you if you make the right choice: others should be
tolerated if they accept our society –

this involves a reading of the other as abusing our multicultural love: as if to say, we gave our
love to you, and you abused our love by living apart from us, so now you must become British.
There is a threat implied here: become us, become like us (and support democracy and give up
the burqa, so we can see your face and communicate with you like the ordinary people we are) or
go away. /…/ Migrants enter the national consciousness as ungrateful. Ironically then racism
becomes attributed to the failure of migrants to receive our love. The monocultural hegemony
involves the fantasy that multiculturalism is the hegemony. The best description of today’s
hegemony is ‘liberal monoculturalism’ in which common values are read as under threat by the
support for the other’s difference, as a form of support that supports the fantasy of the nation as
being respectful at the same time as it allows the withdrawal of this so-called respect. The
speech act that declares liberal multiculturalism as hegemonic is thus the hegemonic position.

If we formulate the problem in these terms, the alternative amounts to: either
“true” multiculturalism, or we should drop the universal claim as such. Both
solutions are wrong, for the simple reason that they are not different at all, but
ultimately coincide: “true” multiculturalism would have been the utopia of a
neutral universal legal frame enabling each particular culture to assert its
identity. The thing to do is to change the entire field, introducing a totally
different Universal, that of an antagonistic struggle which does not take place
between particular communities, but splits from within each community, so that
the “trans-cultural” link between communities is that of a shared struggle.

Notes
[1] Sara Ahmed, “‘Liberal Multiculturalism is the Hegemony – Its an Empirical Fact’ – A
response to Slavoj Zizek” (unpublished manuscript).
Furthermore, the liberal-multiculturalist’s opposition to direct racism is not a mere illusion
whose truth is the protection of racism: there is a class-coded dimension in it of which Ahmed is
aware, directed against (white) working class fundamentalism/racism/antifeminism.
[2] Jean-Claude Milner, Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, Paris: Éditions
Verdier 2003, p. 126.
[3] One of the feminist strategies (especially in France and Italy) is to admit that the paternal
authority is disintegrating, and that late capitalism is approaching a globalized perverse society
of “pathological narcissists” caught into the superego call to enjoy; but to claim that, to counter
this lack, a new figure of authority is emerging “from below,” unnoticed by the media – the
symbolic authority of the mother which has nothing to do with the traditional patriarchal figure
of Mother – a new mother is here which doesn’t fit the existing ideological coordinates. The
problem with this solution is that it as a rule amounts to descriptions of and generalizations of
actual cases of (single and other) mothers who have to take care of children – in short, it reads
as (sometimes almost Catholic-sentimental) description of heroic and compassionate single who
keep children or the family together when the father is absent. Such an approach doesn’t really
confront the key question, that of the Name-of-the-Father. That is to say, the Name-of-the-
Father plays a key role in structuring the symbolic space, sustaining prohibitions which
constitute and stabilize desires – what happens with this role with the maternal authority? Also,
for Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father only functions when recognized – referred to – by the
mother, i.e., for him, the Name-of-the-Father is a structuring principle for the entire field of
sexual difference – one can well imagine a lesbian family/couple raising children where,
although there is no father, the Name-of-the-Father is fully operative. So what happens with
sexual difference, as well as with the symbolic function of the father, with the rise of the
maternal authority?
[4] It is interesting to note that the Evo Morales government in Bolivia is pursuing a similar
goal: it set itself the task of exploring the possibilities of combining the legal order of a modern
state with old native practices to resolve conflictual situations.

Art: Les Helmers