I. An Inter-Jewish Schism

Have Jews gone right-wing? Even as the question may seem simplistic or politically incorrect, it presupposes agreement concerning the meaning of “left” and “right” in our post-cold war world of ideological disorientation. The French political commentator Daniel Lindenberg, in his Le Rappel à l’ordre: Enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Call to Order: An Inquiry into the New Reactionaries) includes a chapter entitled in English “When Jews Turn Right.”[2] His analysis of the situation is categorical. Preferring to err on the side of caution, I have turned his assertion into a question.

But why in a French text does Lindenberg announce his foregone conclusion in English? A preliminary response may be that to have said the same thing in French, in a work essentially critical in nature, would have been as unacceptable as calling the Jews, as de Gaulle did in an infamous 1967 press conference, “an elite, arrogant, and dominating people.” Indeed, in the past thirty years of French intellectual and literary life, and in its media culture, it has become almost unthinkable to label oneself as a partisan of the right. If in France today one speaks of a droite décomplexée—a right wing that has gotten rid of its complexes—it is precisely because all sectors of the right have long been identified, fairly or not, with Vichy and Pétain. Thus if you announced you were on the right, you were immediately suspected of harboring xenophobia, of tending toward fascism—or of simply being an outright fascist. As René Rémond put it in his massive study of the right in France, “identification with the tragic Vichy years has led to a long-term discrediting of the right wing in the eyes of public opinion—a discredit from which it has taken the right decades to recover.”[3] Rémond adds that “Collaboration with the Nazis was far from being the sole prerogative of the political right. . . . One could find a great number of trade-union activists and socialists who rallied to the cause for a variety of reasons and motivations: pacifism, anticommunism, anticapitalism, etc.” And, on the other hand, “not everyone on the right was pro-Vichy” (232.).

The fact remains that in an ideological climate where that sector of the political spectrum has so long been associated with the wartime collaboration, claiming that Jews have shifted to the right comes down to insinuating they have accomplished their own conservative, “nationalist” revolution; it suggests that, after having been fervent partisans of internationalism and of universalism, they have turned away from the world and inward upon themselves, that they have immured themselves within a petty, fearful community. According to Jean Daniel, a progressive Jewish intellectual of the same stripe as Lindenberg, Jews have in the last decade descended into a “Jewish prison” (such is the title of this book)—a ghetto of their own construction.[4]

This brings us to a second possible response to why Lindenberg resorts to English. Putting the sentence that way ties French Jews to the post-9/11 American neoconservatives who, before switching ideological sides, had been active in the 1960s New Left. In this scheme of things, not only did French Jews en masse allegedly support U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. To make matters worse, they have allowed themselves to be Americanized, that is, sectarian. Indeed, in Lindenberg’s view, which presupposed a French national unity that spurns community particularisms, the American social model is characterized by fragmentation, balkanization. Such so-called American “communitarianism” is inevitably condemned as reactionary when placed next to the French republic’s model of assimilation—a progressive concept in Lindenberg’s judgment. French Jews—unlike their American counterparts who stem from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires—are divided half and half between those of Eastern European extraction and those whose forbears came from the Mediterranean basin. Thus Lindenberg, who is Ashkenazic, has a ready-made culprit on hand: Shmuel Trigano, a Sephardic intellectual whom he accuses of being guilty of no less than “Sephardist [sic] populism.”

But none of this should really come as a surprise. Beginning with their immigration to France when North Africa was decolonized in the 1950s, Sephardim have been perceived as the noisy, visible Jews, as opposed to the more discreet Ashkenazim already on French soil. Mutatis mutandis, they are the equivalent of the Ostjuden arriving in France starting in the 1880s: an embarrassing reminder of Jewishness that resisted dissolution into European modernity, civility, and plain old good taste à la française. In sum, they represented the disintegration of the identity elaborated by the native French Jew, who preferred the appellation “Israelite.”

However, when Lindenberg puts “Sephardist populism” (not to say separatism) on trial, the indictment is hardly limited to a denunciation of some terrifying “identity politics.” Indeed, it is not enough to accuse French Jews of “turning right,” of becoming sectarian, or of betraying the Republic, secularism, and traditionally muted Franco-Jewishness. Lindenberg suggests that French Jews have actually been exploiting a wave of antisemitism that first erupted around 2000-2001 (and largely attributable to Muslim youth). But that’s not all. Lindenberg’s charges are aggravated by the fact that this swell of antisemitism (and here his argument intersects with that of Guillaume Weill-Raynal, another Jewish polemicist) would in fact be nothing other than a more or less imaginary, ideological construction of Sephardic Jews, the ultimate aim of which is to justify baser, chauvinistic political penchants like those celebrated by the early 20th-century French nationalist writer Charles Maurras.

So how is one to make heads or tails out of such ideological hodgepodge? How do we resolve the paradoxes? After all, Maurras’s doctrine—calling for defense of Western, and French, cultural and racial purity—is explicitly shot through with antisemitism and xenophobia. And indeed, according to certain self-proclaimed “leftist” Jewish journalists and intellectuals, French Jews have somehow become fascinated by and attracted to a Jewish remake of the Maurrassian doctrine, a version in which Zionism figures as an “Occidentocentric” ideology that is vaguely fascist and frankly racist. Thus Jean Birnbaum also supports, in his cleverly-titled pamphlet Les Maoccidents,[5] the hypothesis of a 180-degree turn among French Jews: from the extreme left to the extreme right; from the Red East to the West; from Maoist political activism in the ’60s to the Maurassian Action Française.

Here is Birnbaum’s argument in a nutshell: in the mindset of pre-World War II antisemites, the Jews embodied cosmopolitanism, a borderlessness that posed a threat to the integrity of the French nation. Jews—hard-line partisans of a doctrine of belonging everywhere and nowhere, of unaffiliation—represented transgression of boundaries and limits. They were fantasmatic figures of excess, of the inassimilable as such. Indeed, according to Birnbaum, present-day intellectuals—such as Jean-Claude Milner, a Chomskyan linguist and former Maoist who has disavowed his commitment to what he now sees as revolutionary “easy universalism”—have quite simply converted to a kind of philosemitic and Zionist ideology of the superiority of Western culture. According to Birnbaum, when Milner denounced shortly after September 11 the principle of borderlessness embodied in the post-World War II expansion of Europe, he was reactualizing the metaphysics of identity dear to the Action Française—minus the antisemitism, of course.[6] Milner would thus have invented a kind of a Judeo-Maurrassianism.

For Milner, the Jews who in 1948 set up a political entity circumscribed within the boundaries of the traditional nation-state pose ipso facto an ideological challenge to the limitless expansion that is at the heart of the postnational European democracy, basking in the postwar Pax europea. This Europe without borders finds its dialectical counterpart in the limitlessness of jihad and the expansion of Islam. This expansionism is a detriment to the Jewish people, caught between the rock of European decline and the hard place of Muslim anti-Semitism.

Milner allows himself, then, to draw a paradoxical equivalence between peace and jihad. Pacifist and postnational ideologies would thus also find their counterpart in a terrorism that is every bit as transnational. Hence, for Milner, contemporary anti-Zionism in Europe and support for the Palestinians would somehow bear witness to the constitutive limitlessness of Enlightenment Europe—a limitlessness that is the direct heir to the genocidal expansionism of the Third Reich. In Milner’s hyperbolic vision, there’s no essential interruption between Nazi anti-Semitism and contemporary European anti-Zionism; no hiatus separating the exalted celebration of war by the Third Reich from the kratos without a demos of the seemingly unreal, polemophobic, anonymous bureaucracy that present-day Europe is, run by eurocrats in Brussels.[7] As the abhorred conveyors of a biblical “difficult universalism” (as opposed to the “easy universalism” of Saint Paul, Marx, or Mao—the distinction is Milner’s), the Jews somehow constitute an obstacle to the spread of European Enlightenment, somehow obstruct the bulimic pacifism of democratic Europe.

Even if Milner’s argument has its limits, Birnbaum’s hypothesis, infinitely more superficial on a theoretical level, fails to convince. If he is to be believed, the defense of Israel articulated by certain current French philosemitic intellectuals must be understood as a direct continuation of the pro-Western ideologies of the past—formations that were also, of course, antisemitic! Pro-Israel Jews and non-Jews in Europe today (Shmuel Trigano, Daniel Sibony, Éric Marty, Jean-Claude Milner, Pierre-André Taguieff, and Alain Finkielkraut, to name a few) would be mere puppets moved by the strings of an antisemitic and racist Western unconscious, and their philosemitism nothing more than the ugly mask of Occidentocentric racism. And the “real” Jews—the underdogs—would be the Arabs, or, rather, the second and third-generation immigrant youths living in the suburbs of France. The inassimilable Other for these philosemites is apparently Islam itself. Here, Birnbaum singles out Benny Lévy as the very exemplification of his hypothesis. Lévy (a.k.a. Pierre Victor, the nom de guerre by which he was known during his involvement with the Proletarian Left—before his “return” to Jewish orthodoxy) declared at the end of his life in 2003 that in order to mobilize and revolutionize the immigrant lumpenproletariat back in the ’60s, one would have to settle the nationalist squabbles dividing the Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians (Birnbaum, 62). Lévy can thus—and not without a sense of humor—brag that he invented the Palestinians to this effect.

Are we supposed to understand, then, that the Palestinian cause was the brainchild of a Jewish Maoist seeking to channel the revolutionary potential of Arab immigrants? Would Pierre Victor be none other than a little-red-book-carrying progenitor of the Palestinians in the same way that Moses the Egyptian created the Jews, according to the historical romance contained in Moses and Monotheism? If this Freudian Witz were true, then it would be one of the many dirty tricks history has played on the Jews. The Judeo-Maoists—i.e., yesterday’s de-Judaized revolutionary Jews—would have thus created the very conditions of possibility of the ideological about-face that was awaiting them a couple of decades down the line. That is, of course, provided (a) that this about-face has in fact taken place, and (b) that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has indeed been the determining factor in this ideological shift. (All the same, it is difficult to see how Benny Lévy’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism has anything to do at all with pro-Westernism or Maurrassianism.)

All things being equal, that pro-Israel intellectuals have fundamentally become political reactionaries is also the hypothesis put forth by a young French Jewish philosopher, Ivan Segré.[8] Contrary to Birnbaum or Lindenberg, Segré (who is close to Benny Lévy’s son, René Lévy) styles himself as a juif de l’Étude, “Jew of [Torah] study.” This inter-Jewish conflict—upon whose attendant Latin Quarter skirmishes I am merely attempting to cast some light—is thus complicated by overlapping biographical, personal, and indeed Oedipal dimensions. It’s a veritable family affair. Shmuel Trigano taught rudiments of Hebrew to none other than Benny Lévy. In 2000, the latter founded, along with Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Lévy, the Institut d’Études Levinassiennes (Institute of Levinassian Studies) in Jerusalem. This is the very Finkielkraut whom Ivan Segré denounced as a pro-Western hack in his doctoral thesis—a thesis directed by Benny’s son René, the Marxist anti-Zionist philosopher Alain Badiou, and the late Trotskyite philosopher Daniel Bensaïd.

Indeed, as an acolyte of Badiou, who wrote a preface for one of the two volumes of his published dissertation,[9] Segré represents the synthesis of Benny Lévy’s two lives: involvement in the Proletarian Left, and conversion to Orthodox Judaism.[10] In The Philosemitic Reaction (La Réaction philosémite), Segré takes aim at Jewish and non-Jewish, French and other European intellectuals alike (he includes Oriana Fallaci on his list of offenders), for whom, in his view, Islamophobia and defense of Israel are two sides of the same coin. According to Segré, the intellectuals Lindenberg condemns as “communitarians” imprisoned in Jewish tradition are anything but that: on the contrary, they are traitors to an “authentic” Judaism insofar as they regard Western values as sacred, and to the extent that this very gesture of sanctifying Western values partakes of the history of anti-Semitism in France. It is thus in the name of this supposedly authentic Judaism that Segré lambasts these “communitarian” French intellectuals who, under the guise of denouncing anti-Semitism, revive Maurras’s nationalist doctrine.

We find ourselves, then, confronted with a constellation of texts and authors who all posit some kind of Judeo-Maurrassian conspiracy, or at the very least detect a Judeo-Maurrassian tropism among certain French and European intellectual defenders of Israel. As divergent as may be the textual and epistemological approaches of Lindenberg, Segré, Weill-Raynal, and Jean Daniel (one could add to this list the historian Esther Benbassa and the psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco), they all come, more or less, to the same conclusion: French Jews, taken in by Zionism, have veered right.[11] They’ve been Westernized.

Yet little consensus exists concerning what the term “right” could possibly mean in this context. Does being on the right entail rejection of the European Enlightenment (following the counter-revolutionary, antimodern posture of the early 19th-century ideologue Joseph de Maistre)? Or on the contrary, does it mean rallying to the cause of Western modernity in order to defend it from “Oriental obscurantism”? (This latter alternative identifies the right wing with the European colonists’ supposedly civilizing mission, placing it on the side of the arrogance of the Enlightenment.) Does being on the right mean seeing in the values of the West (which here includes Israel) a rampart against obscurantism?

Among the authors discussed here favorable to Israel, two contradictory possibilities emerge. (1) European Enlightenment thinkers are in their very essence hostile to the Jews; this is the position of Milner, Benny Lévy, and Trigano. (2) Inversely, the Jews and Israel are the guardians protecting the West and its Enlightenment legacy from being overwhelmed by a new wave of totalitarian obscurantism; Finkielkraut, for example, sees in advocacy of Israel a defense of France in both real and ideal terms, as an ethnically indivisible republic. Indeed, in Finkielkraut’s estimation, neo-antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric are the corollaries of a new kind of Francophobia accompanying the rejection of Western civilization.[12] Jean Birnbaum neatly sums up this division among those who defend Israel: “Some affirm that the West has built itself on the ruins of Israel; others assure us that Israel is the sentinel of the West” (Birnbaum, 84). The title of Segré’s text, The Philosemitic Reaction­ is disconcerting. Is he implying that love of Jews is reactionary? And if philosemitism is reactionary, would it not then follow that antisemitism is progressive? Or, simply, are we to hear in “reaction” the fact that certain intellectuals “react” (in a purely physical or mechanical, rather than ideological sense) to antisemitism by developing excessive fondness for Jews? The title is at the very least ambiguous. Reading Segré’s book, one gleans that “philosemitic” here means pro-Zionist, or pro-Israel. But we have to ask if the defense of Israel and of the Zionist project is in and of itself reactionary. Can such defense only be articulated from an anti-progressive stance? To put it bluntly: does being pro-Israel mean being on the right?

II. Israel, the Jews, & the Left: Primal Scene

Not content with analyzing current developments in this inter-Jewish conflict ravaging the cafés of the Latin Quarter, I’d like to trace our way back to the source of all these paradoxes and misunderstandings. For what is taking place today on the Parisian literary and intellectual scene is simply an acting-out, the manifestation of the turbulence gripping French Jewish consciousness ever since the creation of Israel.

We don’t have to start from the Six-Day War—and even less from the two Intifadas—to observe Israel’s being assigned to the reactionary camp. From its very inception, any defense of the Jewish state as a utopia-come-true aroused suspicion; and as soon as the left began identifying with anticolonial struggles in the 1950s, it distanced itself from Israel. Up until then, the new Jewish homeland had not only been perceived as the fruit born out of the struggle against the British Empire, it was also supposed to be the solution to the alienation of European Jewry. In other words, Israel could be seen as a manifestation of political progress within the terms of class warfare, or indeed along the lines of the various struggles for national liberation. Throughout the 1950s, however, the left construed Israel more and more as a henchman of political reaction. By 1965—two years before Israel’s territorial gains in the Six-Day War—Emmanuel Levinas had the following to say concerning the watershed events of 1948: “Founders of the state found themselves suddenly on the side of the colonizers. Israel’s independence was immediately called imperialism, oppression of the natives, racism. Reality didn’t measure up to utopia. . . . For perhaps the first time in their history, the Jews found themselves thrown in with all that was reactionary, and their hearts were torn between an instinctive sense of belonging and a progressivism just as unshakeable.”[13]

Let us turn our attention, then, to the primal scene of this alienated French-Jewish either-or, this split between trueness to oneself and fidelity to an ideal of progress. The division is not so much between the Jewish community and the republic (rehashing that tired accusation of constituting a “nation within the nation,” of harboring dual loyalties), as it is between attachment to Israel and identification with the left; between attraction to the social (even somewhat socialist) democracy which the Jewish state was at its inception and sympathy for the anticolonialist Arab nationalism that became a touchstone of the French left during the struggles for independence in North Africa.

Claude Lanzmann, in a recent larger-than-life memoir entitled Le Lièvre de Patagonie (The Patagonian Hare), recalls: On the eve of the Six-Day War, Les Temps Modernes—the journal founded by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir—launched an issue on the Arab-Israeli conflict that would ultimately clock in at some one thousand pages. Just before its appearance, Lanzmann, le Castor (i.e. “the Beaver,” Sartre’s hardly translatable nickname for de Beauvoir), and Sartre himself went to Egypt; they were invited there by Mohamed Hassanein Heykal, editor of Al-Ahram, an important national daily, as well as a personal friend of Nasser. We thus find our ambassadors of the Left Bank off on a mission to the Orient, visiting Cairo’s museums, the City of the Dead, Luxor, the Valley of the Kings. To top it all off, they took in the tantalizing spectacle of a belly-dance. The description of it treats us to an avatar of Flaubert’s courtesan Kuchuk Hanem—or perhaps a new Salomé. In any event, we are so privileged as to witness the death spasms of the French literary eroticization of the Orient, before the heavy hand of political correctness suffocated it altogether: “The most famous belly-dancer in all Egypt was whirling around the table. . . She took my hand and pulled me center stage, where I stood perfectly still, quite like a totem pole, under the eyes of Sartre, the Beaver, Ali. All the while, the gyration of her hips, the audacious thrusting and sudden withdrawing of her pubis, offered the latter to me and took it from me, unbearably.”[14]

Despite these very official distractions, Sartre—strangely preoccupied, overwhelmed by his various commitments—drowned in alcohol worries that revealed themselves to be more political than existential. On one occasion, the great writer, having unwound a bit more than may have been advisable, let it all out. “During our Egyptian trip, Sartre was visibly prey to tensions pulling him in two contradictory directions. His schedule was frenetic. . . and he let himself go at night by drinking excessively. . . . More than once, Ali and I had to lead him staggering back to his hotel suite. . . . One night, drunker than usual, as we were holding him up, he began to insult us in slurring voice, calling us ‘faggots’ and insinuating that we were the best example of a solution to the conflict” (Lanzmann 400).

So Judeo-Arabic homoeroticism was the solution to a conflict already two decades old! Why hadn’t anyone else thought of that before? Some fifteen years earlier, in his 1952 Saint Genet, to Jean Genet’s avowal that he could never have sex with a Jew, Sartre amusingly quipped: “Israel can sleep in peace.”[15] And yet, what comes out in the final analysis from these inebriated and sarcastic Sartrian ramblings is that if only the Jews and the Arabs would sleep together, everyone could sleep peacefully at night.

As demanded by the punctilious impartiality of an issue of the Temps Modernes, the Egyptian stay would be followed up with a trip to Israel, a country Lanzmann had already visited in 1952, four years after its independence. It was over the course of this first stay that Lanzmann, an assimilated Jew, had the following epiphany, which he later shared with Sartre and which led Sartre to revise the central argument of his Anti-Semite and Jew, which had it that Jewish existence itself was a dialectical response to their adversaries’ actions. Lanzmann realized “the Jews didn’t have to wait for antisemites to appear in order to exist” (248), thus discovering the particularity of being Jewish.

At this point in narrating their Egyptian epic, Lanzmann sketches the portrait of a Sartre flattered by Nasser’s invitation and drawn to the cause of Arab nationalism. But what about the “visible tensions pulling him in two contradictory directions” that he could calm only by emptying a bottle of booze every night? For Lanzmann, the problem was that Sartre was dragging his feet. He dreaded the idea of the trip to Israel: “Sartre was torn between his preference for the charming and splendid Egyptians who were our hosts, for the Arab cause in general, and unconscious anxiety at the idea of departure for Israel. I understood that for him I was a constant reminder of the impending journey, a kind of statue of the Commander for Don Giovanni, a guardian of Israel keeping watch lest we fail to maintain a minimum degree of impartiality. Thus I was preventing him from fully enjoying Arabic seductions” (Lanzmann 401).

Let us pause to consider the richness of these remarks that constitute, provided we pay sufficient attention to the actual signifiers, a political psychoanalysis of Sartre; perhaps even more forcefully, they adumbrate a metaphysical psychoanalysis of the ambiguities inherent in the left’s position vis-à-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Note the anxiety that attaches itself to Israel; the charm of Egypt and of the Arab cause; and the statue of the Commander. Lanzmann, or, as Milner would put it, “le nom juif” (the Jewish name or signifier), functions here as the incarnation of the Law, the “guardian of Israel,” the brake on, or obstacle to, the plenitude of jouissance, sexual enjoyment. Israel, in other words, figures as a super-ego reminding France, and Europe, of their guilt. We have already encountered these problematics in the marvelous, and now classic, study by Éric Marty of l’angoisse du bien [the anxiety of goodness] in Jean Genet’s oeuvre. However, though Sartre justified the recourse to terrorism (he condoned in particular the Munich attacks on Israeli athletes during the Olympics), unlike Genet he remained prey to an inner split with respect to what he termed—well before Jean-François Lyotard introduced the term into the philosophical lexicon—the “Judeo-Arabic différend.”[16] Concerning Sartre’s pangs of conscience, Lanzmann’s testimony is invaluable: despite his support of Algerian, and then Palestinian terrorism, France of the 1970s owes Sartre “a debt for not having known violence perpetrated by small extremist cells ready to imitate their Italian or German counterparts” (Lanzmann 416).[17] However, there is no better synthesis of the moral, or indeed metaphysical, dilemma confronting Sartre, and perhaps the left in its general posture towards Jews and Israel, than the following exhortation from his introduction to the special issue of Les Temps Modernes, articulated in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict that had exploded in the region, and in the context of Israel’s abandonment by de Gaulle: “Let us not forget that these Israelis are also Jews” (Lanzmann 406).

Israel, a mere slit of earth and sand, indifferent to the lavish splendor of the Orient, where a great man, even if he is Jean-Paul Sartre, is only—to use Sartre’s own phrase from his autobiographical Les Mots—“a man made of the same stuff as all other men, equal to other men and to whom any one at all is equal” (Lanzmann 215). “Upon our arrival, we were welcomed,” Lanzmann writes, “in the midst of a jovial, genial, and democratic chaos. The Israelis who invited us had done their best, but their means couldn’t possibly rival those of the Egyptian head of state” (Lanzmann 403). These lines contain a bitter assessment: to the egalitarian disorder of the young Israeli social democracy, Sartre would have preferred the sumptuous order of Nasserian power. To the egalitarian Jewish demos, the French Communist Party’s fellow traveler would have preferred the pomp and circumstance of an Arab autocrat.

The stay in Israel was a fiasco, or at least that’s the impression one gets reading Lanzmann’s memoirs.[17] Sartre refused to meet any Israelis wearing army uniforms (including women, laments Lanzmann, ever the ladies’ man, and who in this respect proves to be a bit more Don Juan than statue of the Commander), on the pretext that they were objective allies of American imperialism. Lanzmann retorted that to disavow the very raison d’être of the Israeli nation, i.e., “the reappropriation of power and violence by Jews,” amounted to willful misapprehension of Israel’s historical significance. In the end, the future director of the documentary Israel, Why returned to Paris, leaving Sartre and the Castor behind him.[18]

To conclude, I would like to ruffle the feathers of these Jewish leftist intellectuals, pamphleteers and ideologues, who attribute to their pro-Israel homologues racist, “Occidentalist,” “communitarian,” or Maurassian tendencies. To do so, I shall call to my aid Caroline Fourest, a feminist commentator who can hardly be suspected of harboring right-wing sympathies; she is a critic of the alliance between the far left and Muslim fundamentalism, and author of a study, Brother Tariq, that prefigures Paul Berman’s Flight of the Intellectuals by carefully picking apart the double-speak practiced by the all-too-groovy Muslim cleric Tariq Ramadan, as well as delving into his links to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.[19] In La Tentation obscurantiste (The Temptation of Obscurantism), in turn, Fourest identifies an obscurantist tendency presently operating at the very heart of the left, a tendency that had earlier produced the fellow travelers, the “useful idiots,” of communist totalitarianism.[20] Fourest’s conclusion is that the left suffers from a structural split into an anti-totalitarian movement on the one hand, and on the other a “third-worldism” that is the legacy of the anti-colonial struggles of yesteryear and that today manifests itself as an antiracism, antiglobalism, multiculturalism. In her view, nothing suggests that the objectives of these two factions necessarily coincide. Anti-totalitarian leftists would logically take a dim view of their third-worldist fellows who flirt with totalitarian, autocratic, or theocratic regimes and ideologies—all in the name of defense against neo-colonialism and Western racism. The anti-totalitarian left Fourest claims as her own ought to be dismayed by the support the other left brings to fundamentalist ideologues, on the pretext of combating the arrogance of Western civilization. This support, for example, sacrifices feminist principles on the holy altar of multiculturalism, as one sees in the strange tolerance third-worldists lavish upon the veil or the burqa. Yet condemning the various regimes that trample on the rights of man and woman suffices to have one immediately branded a party to West’s essential racism or a dupe of its colonial unconscious. At base, what Fourest laments in her attack on the third-worldist left is simply the latest avatar of the “treason of the intellectuals”—of the elite’s dalliance with a new form of totalitarianism.[21] Contrary to Ivan Segré’s hypothesis, the traitors here are not the so-called Judeo-Maurrassians, but the leftists accommodating Islamic fundamentalism, who write off the values of liberty and equality as collateral losses presumably made up for by advances towards a new equitable world order.

I’ll conclude, then, on a note that is only partially tongue in cheek. I began by asking if French Jews have veered off to the right. I described the assault by certain French Jewish polemicists on defenders and supporters of Israel. Then I interpreted the violence of these attacks as a symptom of the continuing shock undergone by Jewish consciousness starting in the 1960s, when Jews found themselves torn between faithfulness to Israel and loyalty to progressivism. Let us, then, consider the following: in his book, La gauche et l’égalité (The Left and Equality), Jean-Michel Salanskis defines the left as structured by a “critique of power taking the form of a critique of man’s humiliation at the hands of transcendence.”[22] From this definition, Salanskis derives a paradoxical postulate: it is necessary “to eliminate entirely the communist episode from the left,” for this episode partakes of the crushing of the people by one man who can “become the keystone of the world, restoring the attributes and the aura of royalty” (Salanskis 37). If Salanskis is right, wouldn’t it be just as legitimate to ask our difficult question of the left—in its third-worldist, multicultural, antiglobalist and antiracist iteration, i.e, the left that has cast lovesick glances at Stalin, Mao, Castro, Guevara, Nasser, Arafat, Khomeini, and more recently at Chávez and Ramadan? Wouldn’t we be as justified in asking if it isn’t that left that has veered to the right?

Notes

[1]The French version of this essay will appear in the French Jewish monthly L’Arche, 633, February 2011. Special thanks go to my friend Alan Astro for his invaluable suggestions and collaboration in making this essay easier to read for an English-speaking readership.

[2]Daniel Lindenberg, Le Rappel à l’ordre: enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002).

[3]René Rémond, Les droites en France (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982) 231.

[4]Jean Daniel, La Prison juive (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2003).

[5]Jean Birnbaum, Les Maoccidents: un néoconservatisme à la française (Paris: Stock, 2009).

[6]Jean-Claude Milner, Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique (Paris: Verdier, 2003).

[7]Pierre Manent, La Raison des nations: Réflexions sur la démocratie en Europe (Paris: Gallimard, 2006).

[8]Ivan Segré, La Réaction philosémite, ou la trahison des clercs (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes), 2009.

[9]Segré, op. cit.

[10]On the singular path followed by Benny Lévy, see Milner, L’Arrogance du présent: Regard sur une décennie 1965-1975 (Paris: Grasset, 2009).

[11]Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias, Les Juifs ont-ils un avenir? (Paris: Hachette, 2002) (see in particular the postface); and Élisabeth Roudinesco, Retour sur la question juive (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009). See also Esther Benbassa, “How One Becomes a Traitor” in Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Francophone World, ed. Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller (London: Routledge, 2009).

[12]Amongst his many writings on this topic, see Finkielkraut’s Au nom de l’autre: Réflexions sur l’antisémitisme qui vient (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).

[13]Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile liberté : Essais sur le judaïsme, 2d ed. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 287.

[14]Claude Lanzmann, Le Lièvre de Patagonie (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 399.

[15]Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (London: Heinemann, 1988), 203. For a critique of Sartre’s reading of Genet and the Jews, see Éric Marty, Bref séjour à Jérusalem (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).

[16]On Sartre and the Arab-Israeli conflict, see Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). One finds in this study some of the most elucidating and comprehensive analyses of Sartre’s and the French left’s ambivalences with respect to this conflict, torn as they are between commitment to anticolonial politics and a sense of historical responsibility to the Jewish people; consider the difficulty for them of construing Zionism and the creation of Israel as both a national liberation movement and a “colonialist” phenomenon.

[17]The account Judaken offers of the stay in Israel is more positive. We should note that Lanzmann praises Sartre’s prudence with respect to terrorism and regrets his reticence vis-à-vis his time spent in Israel, whereas Judaken, who is a historian, paints a picture of Sartre as a supporter, unlike the revolutionary left, of Palestinian terrorism, but who is all the same rather enthusiastic during his trip to Israel.

[18]Claude Lanzmann, dir., Pourquoi Israel (Israel, Why), Cinéart, 1973.

[19]Caroline Fourest, Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan (New York: Encounter Books, 2010).

[20]Caroline Fourest, La Tentation obscurantiste (Paris: Grasset, 2005).

[21]Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1928).

[22]Jean-Michel Salanskis, La gauche et l’égalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009).

One of the main objectives of this issue is to bring together a number of publications that span Europe. After the Iron Curtain aka the Wall had come down, and the USSR disintegrated, there was hope that the academic communities that had existed on both sides of the Curtain would find each other. The ideological megalomania of the Cold War had cheated these academic communities (with some notable exceptions) from the opportunities to collaborate and to be exposed to each other’s paradigmatic and theoretical richness. Almost 20 years later, this hope has only partially materialized. The communicative lines have not been opened sufficiently, and the different national and regional academic spaces have remained too closed, sometimes even too isolationist. The materiality of the Wall might have disappeared; but there is still an immaterial divide that keeps these academic communities apart, based on sets of restrictive ideas of what Europe and European academia is (and is not). This issue can only offer a very humble contribution to overcoming this divide, for instance by including texts from Bulgaria, Poland, and the Czech Republic, some of which explicitly thematize the post-communist configuration (see for instance Reifová’s review of ‘Past for the Eyes’ and Kozlowski essay ‘Out of post-communism’).

These inclusions bypass a mere token representation of the Eastern European countries. Many of the texts deal with issues that are related to the question of what kind of Europe will eventually come into being through the different integration processes. A first cluster of articles focuses on notions of citizenship and participation, continuing the search for new and deepened articulations of the European democracies. The Santana / Carpentier essay, the review of ‘Citizenship and Consumption’ (by Kaun), and the ‘Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything’ (review by Fuchs) all deal with the renewed role (and its problems and limitations) of citizenship. This is complemented by the emphasis on govermentality, and how in a neoliberal context new forms of (self)regulation appear. Here I need to mention the reviews of ‘Discipline and liberty’ (by Boddin) and of ‘Better living through Reality TV’ (by Vandenbrande).

A second cluster deals with issues of representation. Ibroscheva’s essay on the mediations of gender, Dietze’s essay on occidentalist visual politics, Reifová’s review of ‘Past for the Eyes’ and Dhaenens’ review of ‘Screened Out. Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall’ look at the representational processes that circulate in Europe (and beyond), linking them to analyses of their emancipatory potential. Also Biltereyst’s chapter on new censorship studies, looking into ‘the boundaries of acceptable representations’, touches upon these logics and their problems.

These texts, together with the Fetzer / Johansson essay on political media discourse, and the reviews on ‘Magic in the Air’ (by Garmendia Larrañaga) and ‘The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture’ (by Ponte) offer a broad perspective about the potentialities and the threats of the new and expanded Europe. They offer us horizons and utopias that might not always be achieved, but are worth pursuing and articulating.

“A framework has been devised between Britain, America and Australia in which [Britain] will take the frontline role in Afghanistan”, a senior defence source told the newspaper. “The aspiration is that the Australians will take over command of Multi-National Division South East”…

Soon after, some senior military men in Australia expressed some dismay that this should be projected given that the Australian army was quite incapable of handling this. In fact, the British are apparently planning to bring home many of the 8500 troops there within three months and most of the rest six months later (Simon Walters, zmag.org, 14 July 05). The US and Britain seem fairly desperate to get a lot of their troops out soon – a leaked memo published in the Christian Science Monitor of 11 July 2005, reported plans to reduce Coalition forces in Iraq to 66 000 by mid-2006. (These currently total 160,000 including 138 000 US troops.) Maybe it isn’t so much the 1950s that we are being led back to as a re-run of some of the spectacular events of the failed invasion of Turkey some 35 years even before that.

There may not be much of an Australian army to combat the forces of darkness around the globe, despite the hubris displayed by Howard. There seems to be even less of an Iraqi army. Why would there be, when the nation is occupied – not so much by foreign armies as by multinational companies and their mercenaries – so the only position is of collaborator. Patrick Cockburn quotes Mahmoud Ottnar as having commented that the Iraqi army was full of `”ghost battalions” in which officers pocket the pay of soldiers who never existed or have gone home. “I know of at least one unit which was meant to be 2200 but the real figure was only 300 men… the US talks about 150,000 Iraqis in the Security Forces but I doubt if there are more than 40 000.” (15 July 2005) Due to the rise of grassroots resistance this is not surprising – in Iraq civilians and police have died at the rate of more than 800 a month between last August and May this year.

Keeping the troops in Iraq costs the USA US$5bn a month, although ‘reconstructing’ the damage they have done has earned US$9.1bn for Dick Cheney’s former firm Halliburton already and there is a new contract for another $5bn on the way from the American government.

Everyday life in Iraq is extremely difficult, with dysfunctional hospitals and communications, rationed electricity – and oil, even – and widespread corruption. Saul Landau wrote on 14 July 2005:

in March 2003 George W Bush ordered the US military to break Iraq. The Us arsenal destroyed the electricity and water supply, damage sewage treatment and other vital sanitary facilities and pulverised bridges, other public places and thousands of homes. On May 1 2003 dressed in a jump suit, Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and announced “Mission accomplished.” His critics including myself laughed at such braggadocio. We misunderstood him. He had accomplished the standard post World War II US military mission. He broke another country… (z mag 14 July 2005)

The same view is expressed by Hani, a young Iraqi woman in her twenties: ‘They came to take they did not come to give. And now people are attacking each other and there is a struggle inside. It’s getting worse because you can’t repair what is broken inside.’(Provencher)

While the G8 was meeting discussing poverty and climate change -both things arguably centrally connected to the operations of global capitalism, another forum was going on almost unreported in the mainstream media. John Pilger quotes from Arundhati Roy’s statement at the Istanbul World Tribunal into the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States, Britain, Australia and others.

“We are here to examine a vast spectrum of evidence that has been deliberately marginalised and suppressed, its legality, the role of international institutions and major corporations in the occupation, the role of the media, the impact of weapons such as depleted uranium munitions, napalm and cluster bombs, the use and legitimising of torture…This Tribunal is an attempt to correct the record, to document the history of the war not from the point of view of the victors but of the temporarily anguished.” (http://www.zmag.org)

Arundhati Roy has historically researched what Churchill said in 1937:

I do not agree that a dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

In 1969 then it was not too hard for Golda Meir to say: “Palestinians do not exist.”

Palestine like Iraq was once a secular bulwark in the Middle East. But just as Hamas has taken over from the PLO, so have fundamentalist currents triumphed over a large degree of freedom from religious coercion for women in pre-war Iraq.

Australia is also of course very much part of Asia, and is currently working on whether John Howard’s earlier opposition to signing a Treaty of Amity and Co-Operation with the members of ASEAN can be overcome in the interests of accessing a market of 500 million people with a combined output of $850bn (and notably the Chinese demand for uranium). The Treaty outlaws pre-emptive attacks on neighbouring countries. Howard “initially refused to sign the non-aggression pact because he said it was a relic of another era and would conflict with Australia’s other treaty obligations” – guess to whom (Australian 26 July 2005).

And meanwhile Condoleezza Rice has refused to attend the late July ASEAN Regional Forum in Laos in what looks like an American downgrading of relations with Asia (other than the current American participation in the resumption of talks about North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme on terms a little less dogmatic than insisting that North Korea – along with Iran, and Iraq a few years ago, was “the axis of evil”).

Australian foreign policy and alliances tied to the other side of the world have of course in the wake of the recent London bombings led to calls for much more stringent security, including the prospect of a national ID card, and greater powers for security forces. During the last phase of the Troubles, the IRA came close to blowing up the Tory Cabinet of Margaret Thatcher at Brighton, and damaging 10 Downing Street with a missile. Various Prevention of Terrorism Acts did nothing to prevent this, but how further measures are to be introduced, including asking Universities to report research applicants they suspect are linked to terrorism. In the USA, the Patriot Act was rushed through in 2001, although the 1998 anti-terorist legislation offered ample powers. These have since 2001 mainly been used to intimidate individuals, notably Attorney Lynne Stewart this year. This is also beginning to happen in Australia which lacks such draconian laws, with a student at Monash University (Australian, white and a Muslim convert) studying terrorism being interviewed by the Federal Police. The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee has said they will not countenance government interference with academic work and its CEO John Mullarvey says, ‘The same goes for imposition of security in Universities: we are not in a police state.’ However, John Howard is reported in the same article as commenting: ‘Our legal systems are very similar and we intend to look very carefully at what the British do and if there is something in that for Australia then we will be very happy to pick it up’ (Australian 27 July 2005, 33).

Meanwhile in Iraq life remains a daily terror of struggle for survival, let alone the ability to rebuild and reconstruct their lives, for much of the population.

I’m grateful to Michael Ryan for inviting me to serve as guest editor to this special evolutionary issue of Politics and Culture. Michael and I share an interest in integrating evolutionary research with literary and cultural theory. While discussing our shared interests, we have identified a number of important points on which we do not see quite eye to eye. So, Michael should not be held responsible for any of the ideas I express, though of course, he can be held responsible for giving me this opportunity to express them. Similar considerations apply to the relations between the guest editor and the contributors to this volume. We are all independent thinkers working in complex theoretical areas that have not yet been reduced to precise measurement. The chance that we would all agree on every main contention is vanishingly small. Even so, most or all of us would agree that humans have evolved in an adaptive relation to their environment and that as a result they share many species-typical dispositions that constrain their political and cultural behavior. Within that broad area of consensus, the essays here offer a good many divergent and sometimes conflicting ideas. Clearly, not all these ideas could be correct. Nonetheless, in my own judgment, all the essays are serious, well-informed, and thoughtful. They should richly reward the reader’s attention.

Some of the authors contributing to this volume were trained chiefly in the humanities and others trained chiefly in the sciences. Despite differences in style, most of the contributors would, I think, regard their efforts as part of a unitary intellectual culture. Several contributors make reference to E. O. Wilson’s concept of “consilience”: the idea that nature is a unified causal whole and that knowledge, also, can and should be unified. The scientists extend their explanations into the range of topics that have traditionally been the provinces of the humanities: religion, politics, history, and the arts. The humanists assimilate scientific knowledge and embrace the standards of epistemic validity that regulate the evaluation of evidence in the sciences. With respect to the idea that science can produce objective knowledge, many of the contributors to this volume, scientists and humanists alike, would distinguish their perspective from that of theorists who subordinate scientific knowledge to poststructuralist epistemology and ideological critique.

The call for papers for this special issue offered two options: (1) free-standing essays and reviews; and (2) contributions to a symposium on the question: “How Is Culture Biological?” (Michael Ryan proposed this question, and I thought it a good one.)

Authors contributing primary essays to the symposium on the question “How Is Culture Biological?” were limited to 3,000 words. The authors of primary essays were invited to respond to each other’s essays, and that invitation was extended also to anyone else who wished to write a response. Responses to each primary essay were limited to 1,000 words. Authors of primary essays were given the opportunity to write rejoinders to the responses, with no word limit on the rejoinders. The whole symposium—primary essays, responses, and rejoinders—is the final section in the volume. Both primary essays and responses to them are ordered alphabetically by the authors’ last names. Biographies of respondents are provided the first time the respondents appear in the sequence of essays and discussions. Biographies of authors contributing primary essays are included also with the primary essays.

The free-standing essays and reviews had no word limits and no stipulations about possible topics. As it turned out, the essays fell into five main categories: (1) the evolutionary paradigm shift; (2) politics and ethics; (3) religion; (4) literature; and (5) music. Some essays could equally well be included in two or more categories. Nonetheless, grouping the essays into categories should make it easier for readers to sort through them and select essays on topics in which they are particularly interested. The abstracts included at the head of each essay serve the same purpose.

Contributors were free to use whatever citation style they liked best.  The variants cluster around three major styles: MLA, APA, and Chicago Humanities Style. MLA involves parenthetical citation (author-title) keyed in to a Works Cited. In MLA style, date of publication appears at the end of the item in the list of Works Cited. APA also uses parenthetical citation (author-date of publication); in the References, date of publication appears after the author’s name. Chicago Humanities Style uses endnotes and provides full bibliographic information the first time any item is cited, with shortened forms thereafter.

This broad perspective towards the critical opens up a wide variety of objectives and uses of the critical. Following Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals, we can distinguish between critical projects that serve specific hegemonies, and critical projects that try to mediate between these hegemonies and other (potentially counter-hegemonic) discourses. Obviously, the third cluster of critical projects then consists of the counter-hegemonic discourses themselves.

One consequence of this basic typology is that the critical cannot be equated with the counter-hegemonic. The signifier ‘the critical’ is part of a play of resistance and incorporation, where a diversity of societal projects formulate claims towards the critical and where other projects in their turn retaliate by launching counter-claims about their being ‘truly’ critical. In other words, the critical is always ideological, as it uses specific political reference points and utopias. These ‘not-places’ and ‘never-to-be-places’ provide the critical with its ultimate horizons, whose phantasmagoric realization serve as its breeding grounds. Given the multitude of potential reference points, the critical functions as a floating signifier, that can be articulated in different, even contradictory, discourses. One example –in this issue of Politics and Culture- can be found in Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft’s article, and the discussion on the position of the critical towards secularism and religion.

But this is not the only complication that the critical has to face in relation to the counter-hegemonic. As argued elsewhere (see Cammaerts & Carpentier, 2009), a social order is not constituted by merely one hegemony, but by a network of articulated hegemonies, that (sometimes) interlock, and mutually enhance and enforce each other. In order to be successful, or even understandable, critical projects need their anchorages into that social order, which implies the unavoidable acceptance of some (components of) these hegemonies in order to resist other hegemonies. When critical projects attempt to tackle multiple hegemonies at the same time, they tend to become radical, which brings about the risk of total disarticulation from the social and the consequent loss of their discursive strength.

The need for anchorage into the social provides the critical with its worldliness but also renders the critical always particular, partial and cultural. Theo Jung’s historical approach towards the critical (or what’s left of it) in this issue of Politics and Culture only bears witness of this cultural situatedness. But at the same time, the anchorage of the critical into the social does not make it comfortable, as it dislodges and deconstructs other components of the social. This situates the critical in a dialectics of reaffirmation and disapproval, of compliance and resistance, of stability and change. Its ‘negative’ side nevertheless remains one of its main characteristics, which is often aimed against the taken-for-granted and against what is considered to be at the heart of the social.

Not surprisingly, these attempts to de-doxify the social can sometimes become articulated as social threats, which legitimises the fierce reactions, social sanctions and criminalisations that the critical then has to face. In this issue of Politics and Culture we can find an example in Sina Rahmani’s article on the history of the Black Block, but also Leo Strauss’ “Persecution and the Art of Writing” (discussed in Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft’s article) provides us with an example, as it describes how philosophers like Maimonides hid meanings in their texts to avoid persecution. As these two examples show, the critical is sometimes confronted with (state) apparati that attempt to protect their ideological projects through the use of (state) violence, showing that hegemonies are still protected by the use of force if this is deemed necessary.

However relevant the (analysis of the) discursive struggle over the critical is, the broad approach behind it triggers the risk of radical relativism and nihilism. Arguably, many critical projects close to Cultural Studies have been discursive (and activist) watchdogs of a series of universalised values, like human rights, social justice, democracy, and peace, without neglecting the constructed nature of their universalisation processes and the situatedness of their articulations. So it comes as no surprise that one of the essays in this issue, written by Rob Leurs, looks at the discourse-theoretical toolbox and what its non-essentialism can offer to Cultural Studies. But at the same time these universalised values do provide the anchorage of the critical into the social, their importance strategically and temporarily fixed to disrupt other certainties and to critically demonstrate the prices paid for the lack of the radicalised realisation of human rights, social justice, democracy, and peace (without wanting to produce an exhaustive list).

To give two examples: First, Said’s call for intellectuals to speak truth to power, so crucial to our academic activity, not only presupposes access to this truth (however constructed truthfulness might be) but it also requires an anchorage into social justice and power, where structural power imbalances become important enough to be scrutinised and publically exposed, however difficult that might prove to be. Another example is Mouffe’s call for the hegemony of democracy. Strongly attached to diversity and fluidity, Mouffe simultaneously privileges the democratic as an anchorage point, as this democratic horizon allows for the conversion of antagonisms into agonisms. The attachment to the basic principles of democracy thus become the starting point of a critical project that meticulously analyses how conflict is ignored and pushed to the outsides of society, only to come back with a vengeance.

These examples also make it clear that there are many sites and locations of the critical and its anchorage points. And this again brings me to this issue of Politics and Culture, as a number of essays investigate how the critical is deployed in several locations. Philosophy (addressed in the articles written by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft and Rob Leurs) and activism (discussed in Sina Rahmani’s article) have already been mentioned. Two other articles, written by Sebastian Nestler and Fien Adriaens, look at popular culture as a site for the critical, while Daniel Ashton looks at education and Heather Davis studies the role (community) arts practice can play. Together with a series of book reviews, these essays show how the critical remains a free-floating enterprise and a crucial site of human agency, paradoxically made possible by the fluidity of the social and by the partial fixation of the critical through its anchorage into the social.

References

Cammaerts, Bart, Carpentier, Nico (2009) ‘Blogging the 2003 Iraq War: Challenging the Ideological Model of War and Mainstream Journalism?’, OBS*, 3(2), http://obs.obercom.pt/index.php/obs/article/view/276.

Mouffe, Chantal (2005) On the political. London: Routledge.

Said, Edward (1996) Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Vintage.

At risk of being obviously unfashionable or unfashonably obvious, the problem with food in the world today is capitalism. Particularly, it is a form of capitalism that imposes uniquely local but ubiquitously global forms of market sovereignty over more and more aspects of our lives. Food, which names the spectre of one of the great crises of the 21st century, offers a particularly acute nexus of the power of and struggle against this omnicidal sovereignty. After all, everyone eats (or is prevented form eating) and the thematic of food stretches from our most basic ontological and epistemological categories (nature/culture, raw/cooked, wild/civilized, internal/external, tradition/science) to the infinitely complex and bitterly material relations of power in a globalizing world. Food speaks to the way emerging forms of global power influence all levels of life, from the genetic makeup of seeds to the ownership of land. From the gendered dynamics of agricultural labour to the persistence of neocolonial monoculture and cash-crop cultivation. From the infuriating inequalities of global trade to the tension between transnational corporation, international organizations, the transforming nation-state, and global and local social movements. From the homogenized foodscapes of urban Wal-Mart Supercentres (where Americans buy the single greatest proportion of their food) to the cultural and body politics of (over/under)eating (fast and slow). We encounter all of these and everything in between through the prism of questions of resistance, as unavoidable as they are inexorable: collectivist or individualist? Localist or globalist? Reformist or revolutionary? Utopian or apocalyptic?

For to speak about food is to always already speak about the future ((See Szeman 2007 on globalization and futurity.)); today it is to speak about the future in the shadow of its global foreclosure. As Frederick Jameson (2003) notes, as capitalism of a particularly neoliberal variety saturates our weary planet, when (it believes) all its historic enemies have been vanquished and all its territorial frontiers mapped, at the proverbial “end of history,” we begin to witness the “end of temporality:” the reduction of human social time to the unremitting now of free-market expansion where all alternative futures are already rendered impossible by cultural and material constraint. For Jameson, as well as critics like Henry Giroux (2004), this arrest of time within a bankrupt neoliberal utopianism is not just a matter of macroeconomic policy but a lived and everyday politics, something that is experienced, felt and culturally practiced. From the reticulation of the world in networks of national, personal and micro-credit debt to the intensification of localized forms of patriarchal oppression under intensified conditions of social and structural violence to the politics of food which are the subject of this issue, the emerging forms of global market sovereignty make political the rhythms of everyday life as never before ((Co-editor Scott Stoneman and I have explored this thematic more thoroughly in our treatment of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation, as a “panopticon of time” (forthcoming (2009) in the McMaster Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition Working Paper Series). The recognition of the interconnectedness of global political economy, everyday life and food has long been a theme in feminist scholarship and activism – see Mies 1986)).

This special issue is about just this mutation of sovereignty, as well as the demands for another, very different form of food sovereignty that would contest it. The contributions, each in their own unique way, take up the question of power and resistance in a moment confusing in its complexity, terrifying in its dangers, and electrifying in its potentials. By and large, they tend to approach this new form of sovereignty as neoliberalism, a term now familiar the world over as the economic ideology (and political, social and cultural theology) of free-market supremacy (See Harvey 2005).

But, as leading food critic Julie Guthman points out in the interview she provides for this issue, neoliberalism is never universally applied. Like Aihwa Ong (2006), who speaks of neoliberalism as a mobile and mutable set of technologies of governmentality [3], Guthman insists we look to its local implementations if we wish to be precise in understanding our adversary. Yet that which ties these diverse global iterations of neoliberalism together is not merely their ideological commitment to free-markets, deregulation, privatization and the bolstering of the repressive arm of state at the expense of the welfare arm (see Bourdieu 1999). While the ideology is important, the actual mechanics of how neoliberalism (and the form of capitalist sovereignty it champions) is globally coordinated is equally crucial for us to grasp, especially at a moment when the future of neoliberalism is by no means certain (though rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated). And this mechanics goes by the name so familiar to us now as another of those great crises of the 21st century: finance. And like the crisis of food, the crisis of finance is fundamentally a crisis of the future.

II. The peril of finance

As political economist Michael Perelman points out in his interview in this issue, the financial crisis that now throttles the world cannot be separated from the latest flare-up (at least in the global Northern imagination) of a food crisis which both he and feminist philosopher and historian Sylvia Federici (also interviewed in this issue) note is endemic to capitalism and its necessary corollary, (neo-)colonialism. Capitalism’s history is haunted by genocidal famines caused by the violent severing of indigenous peoples and peasants from their land (and the extinction or appropriation of their accumulated agrarian and ecological wisdom) in order to create plantations and displaced (thus vulnerable) workforces (Davis 2001). This is a process which, as Federici points out here as elsewhere (2005) relied (and relies), in both centre and periphery, on the systematic destruction of women’s social power and knowledge and the production of racial divisions (see also the work of Vandana Shiva).

For Perelman, the current crisis in food is partly a result of the havoc created as the trillions of dollars fictitious wealth, generated ex nihilo by increasingly complex financial instruments at the highest (elite, white, northern, urban) echelons of the increasingly integrated and borderless global market, rush in and out of national economies and speculative investment in food “commodities.” These tumultuous torrents of digital wealth introduce an unprecedented volatility in the local and global price, affecting consumers and producers and undermining the state’s ability to regulate either finance or food. The final effect is, almost everywhere, the ongoing enclosure of the commons, a process stretching back to the earliest days of capitalism and colonialism. Historically, it refers to the way hereditary land tenure and communal land ownership was violently stripped and common lands and resources where brought under private ownership (usually to be transformed into profit-generating enterprises focused on creating commodities for long-distance trade). More conceptually, enclosure refers to the way all those shared aspects of our lives, those relatively organic values of human collectiveness (like food, from growing to sharing/trading to eating) are rent asunder and replaced or overcoded by the hegemonic measure of money (DeAngelis 2007). Nothing speaks more nauseatingly to the exploitation inherent to the overvaluation of monetary (capitalist) wealth at the expense of what almost every person on earth would classify as “real” social wealth than the image of (mostly brown) farmers starving while harvesting luxuries like coffee or bananas as (mostly white) hedge-fund and bank managers dine on cosmopolitan exotica after a day of hallucinating digital dollars

Finance is a hegemonic sphere of human action of superhuman complexity, a chaotic network of frenzied cyborgian human-computer relations that even its most prodigious acolytes do not fully understand, especially in its sociological implications (LiPuma and Lee 2004). It is, however important to attempt a rudimentary sketch how finance works, beginning with its origins, in relation to food and sovereignty.

Finance is money to the power of money, a compounding and intensification of the abstraction of social value already at work in money in a capitalist society (see Nelson 1999). All money is, at base, a claim upon the future (specifically, future labour) and it has its roots in food. The earliest currencies issued represented claims against the coming year’s harvest, underwritten by the authority of the state, which allowed farmers to purchase necessary materials in advance (Ferguson 2008). Since its earliest anthropological origins money has always had a crucial relationship to both food and sovereignty – indeed, it may even be the case that, in many non-capitalist economies, money’s primary purpose is precisely to mediate food and sovereignty. Even through to the birth of industrial capitalism in the 19th century currencies were often tied, de jure or de facto, to the price of staple agricultural commodities (grains, salt, etc.), mediated or controlled by central state authorities. As Karl Polanyi (1944) (among others) notes, the commodification of food (and the policies which sought to defend society from this commodification) was a crucial struggle in he transition to capitalism [4]. It is this subordination of the deep and rich value of food (in the broad sense of social and cultural values as well as the narrow sense of its economic worth) to the cyclopean value of money-the way all those aspects of the socioculture which surround food become increasingly commodified-that characterizes the differential implementations of food neoliberalism around the world and connects them through a global web of unfettered digitized financial transactions.

Finance refers generically to the way money in a capitalist society is mobilized and, in particular, to the way money flows in and out of forms of investment. These forms include the more familiar stocks and shares in corporations and government bonds but increasingly produces huge amounts of value from the FIRE sector: finance (in this limited sense, speculative investment), insurance and real estate (Henwood 1998). Trade in commodity (a financial category which tellingly encapsulates all “gifts” from the earth from crude oil to timber to food) “futures,” the politics of agricultural debt and financing, and the speculative nature of land ownership and rent are too complex to parse here, but all hint at the deep imbrications of finance in the global food chain. It is, however, necessary to point out that finance always and everywhere relies on the modern nation-state (and, some would argue, vice-versa) to offer a modicum of necessary “external” regulation to a system that is fatally volatile and to repress or provide life-support to various populations whose labour is at the heart of the social wealth upon which finance builds its magnificent les in the sky (see Harvey 2006).

Finance, is, as David Harvey (2006) puts it, capitalism’s “central nervous system,” the way an otherwise self-contradictory machine of reckless accumulation “thinks” or reflects on all those processes of exploitation under its sovereignty and contrives its own spread. Beyond simply (through crucially) redistributing surplus value across an integrated capitalist economy the system of financial circulation enables “market signals” (price fluctuations, profit margins, labour costs, indications of militancy, political stability, etc.) from nerve endings across capitalism’s global body feed into this monstrous brain and trigger global financial markets to discipline wayward economic nodes. For instance, should a nation-state actually heed the demands of its people and, say, guarantee food sovereignty, it could expect a brutal flight of increasingly mobile capital, the extreme and nearly immediate devaluation of national currency, the fire-sale of government bonds, and an inability to access the transnational credit upon which countries from North to South now depend. Similarly, the spread of biotechnology cannot be separated from the power of finance in the shares (and derivative securities) of biotech firms like Monsanto, its hold on research and development and the increasingly privatized university sector, the circuit of international debt and currency speculation which weaken country’s regulatory ability, force them to advance land privatization schemes, and encourage them to adopt biotech schemes in an effort to appear economically “modern” and worthy of credit. The recent global debacle created when speculative capital rushed out of financialized debt and into bio-fuel producing grains (leading to prohibitively expensive food prices in many underdeveloped zones) is a good indication of how finance ties together seemingly unconnected areas of a world saturated with capitalist value in an evolving web of exploitation and volatility.

The way in which financialized neoliberalism creates this global network of disciplinary technologies has been referred to by Massimo DeAngelis (2007) as a global “fractal panopticon” within which, like in its Foucauldian precursor, subjects (which in this case range form international NGOs to state bureaucracies to civil society to individuals) come to complete in disciplining themselves and conforming to the normative desires of transnational capital. This panoptic power, as readers of Foucault (1977, 1978, ) will know, is not merely punitive but also encourages a financial “care of the self.” In the fractal panopticon, subjects as large as nation states and as small as individual people are encouraged to develop a properly neoliberal subjectivity, largely based, as Randy Martin (2007) points out, on the astute management of that great privatization and instrumentalization of social problems: “risk.”

Crucially, this is accomplished not merely by the global flow of commodities, government bonds, and the stocks and shares of transnational corporations but by the redoubling of the abstraction of social wealth these things are already supposed to represent – namely, the trade in futures and other “derivatives:” bets on the future rise and fall of the prices of these underlying securities (rather than purchasing those securities outright). At the brink of the recent financial meltdown, the global trade in (over-the-counter) derivatives was (conservatively) estimated at over $683.7-trillion, roughly 11 times the gross-domestic product of the entire planet [5]. The now infamous “credit-default swap” and “mortgage-backed security” are only the tip of an iceberg of financial wizardry where the actual human, material relations on which the global economy is based (like food) disappear into commodities then disappeat again into financial indicators, then disappear yet again into speculation, and so on.

We are, however, remiss to relegate this accumulation of “fictitious value” to the realm of pure fantasy: like all stories it has real, and in this case deadly, social power (King 2003). The over-production of financial wealth, though it produces massive global volatility whose fallout we are only today beginning to feel, is crucial to the way global capital everywhere forecloses on the future, always already overshadowing the lived experience of futurity. This is perhaps most clearly seen and affectively felt through the constraints on life imposed by debt (from state bonds to mortgages to microcredit schemes) but is also a function of the way financial logic of risk management “hedges” against any unforeseen eventuality (except all-out system failure – see LiPuma and Lee 2004) and eliminates or subordinates those spheres of autonomy and solidarity that could be the seeds of a different tomorrow.

This new form of power, one geared towards a control over not only the present but the future as well, represents, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000 and 2004) argue, an emerging form of global sovereignty, one that is as expansively global as it is intensively local. It is a sovereignty which seeks a form of control that is not territorial but biopolitical in the sense that is seeks less to create stable borders (rather, it creates multiple borders between and within the jurisdiction of the nation-states whose own sovereignty, as we have seen above, is typically subordinated to that of transnational capital – see also Balibar 2004) and more to intervene in all aspects of our lives, submitting them to a logic of commodification and neoliberal restructuring. It is a system which runs on war and inequality and the terrifying unfairness of it all, one which requires next to no justification because of its success in exercising power through the apparently anonymous and unaccountable technologies of finance (LiPuma and Lee 2004) and because it is neither a conspiracy nor a ruling class (though it does involve both). Rather, it is a hyper-contagious viral logic (McMurtry 1999) which answers only and always to its pathological (and, as we are now coming to realize, ecologically omnicidal) imperative to spread deeper and wider, to every corner of the globe and into every crevice of our being, down to the very elemental bios of our existence.

III. The promise of food sovereignty

The delineation of concepts above provides only a rough and insufficient sketch of the complexity of the matter. But it does serve to situate claims to food sovereignty within a broader paradigm of capitalist sovereignty, one that goes beyond a more surface reading of “neoliberalism” and which gestures towards the latter’s place within capitalist development both structurally and historically. Food today is a key example and component of this system and, as the articles and interviews in this volume attest, a key site of struggle at the junctures of the global and the local, the personal and the political, the individual and the collective, the autonomous and the determined, the past, the present and the future.

It is for this reason that the activism around food sovereignty is so crucially important. As both Federci and Raj Patel (in this issue) point out, claims to food sovereignty [6] do not simply rehearse older notions of the sovereignty of the nation-state, nor do they reflect xenophobic or exclusively local struggles. Instead, sovereignty here refers to demands for autonomy, solidarity, dignity and the fundamental rights of people and their communities to decide the future of the food they grow and consume as a form of material democracy. As Bethany Turner notes in her analysis of the contemporary Maize movements in Mexico in this issue, food sovereignty is not an anachronistic retreat to pre-global authenticity but reflects, both in theory and practice, a globalization from below which mobilizes new communication technologies to build a network of global solidarity strong enough to support both broad-based coalitions as well as lay the transversal foundations of another form of food interconnectedness not based on the vicissitudes of the free market. Such internationalism reflects the promise of a critical cosmopolitanism of overlapping, “territorialized” or “balkanized” jurisdictions of food responsibility hinted at by Patel (this issue) and in Emily Johansen’s reading (also this issue) of two recent novels on food politics. Also in this issue, Kelly Bronson’s photo essay speaks to the similar dreams of farmers and activists in Canada’s bread-basket province of Saskatchewan resisting the corporate biotechnological colonization of (the potential for) independent and sustainable farming practices.

Yet as other contributors point out, the politics of food sovereignty are about not only the collective struggles of those we typically understand to be food producers, but also the common resistance of food consumers and the individual, subjective aspects of this process. For Karine Vigneault, local food movements in the North develop new global modes of responsibility based on their unique and evolving relationship to the past, present and future of geographic terroirs or nature-cultures within which they cultivate and from which they draw their sustenance, a theme echoed by Mike Mikulak’s thoughts on the political, ecological and social importance of backyard gardening and heritage seeds.

As tantalizing as the promise of local food initiatives are, however, Gwendolyn Blue points out that the saturation of neoliberal governmentality in North American culture and society leaves no practice, no matter how radical, untouched by its ideology of individualism and consumerism and its hostility to collective projects outside a commodified frame, a conclusion echoed by Chad Lavin’s piercing critique of best-selling food-politics super-hero Michael Pollan. To this we can add the forms of economic and racial privilege which have so far characterized many local food movements in the North, as well as the way their champions elide the reality that, as Sylvia Federici points out (in this issue), poor people the world over, especially women, have been engaging in small scale personal and community gardens since time immemorial, an abject material basis on which all other forms of economics and exploitation rest.

Yet Blue continues that local food movements are not merely reproductive of global capitalist sovereignty. Rather, they represent always already incomplete and unsatisfactory attempts to contest this power at the level of life itself. This biopolitical imperative, as Mikulak notes, is inherent to the politics of food. After all, food is among the few elemental substances of human life on which all other social, cultural and political structures must rely, recalling Bertolt Brechts famous dictum “first bread, then ethics,” reminding us that, as Georgio Agamben (1998) suggests, beneath all forms of modern sovereignty, even (and perhaps especially) the sovereignty of global financial neoliberal capitalism, lies the hauntingly emaciated figure of “bare life” or the animal-existence of human beings to which the most precarious, exploited and disenfranchised subjects of our global (dis)order are increasingly and horrifically reduced [7].

Against this omnicidal hegemony of capitalist value, against the subordination of all value to money under the discipline of finance, food sovereignty echoes a demand to reground value in the negotiation of human needs through democratic and autonomous community organizing. As Patel suggests (in this issue, as well as in Patel, Balakrishnan and Narayan 2007), food sovereignty calls for a “right” to food which is not merely a privilege to be granted (and withdrawn) by a nation-state but a demand for another world in which rights are the product of a complex, evolving, immanent solidarity. The abstract question of a world beyond all “top-down” sovereignty is pointless; food sovereignty “from below” and the utopian rights it demands are not mere fantasy but practices which articulate a shared horizon of social movements the world over. They are a common scream against hunger and exploitation, a way for our movements to find each other in the dark and “ask questions as we walk” [8]. Though our strategies may range from planting backyard gardens to taking state power to coordinating local food coops to enforcing international law to serving free food in urban cores to fighting the racism and sexism on which the system thrives, food sovereignty can animate our shared imagination based on the value of food not as a commodity, but as a social process and our elemental ontological commons.

Such an imagination has the potential to shatter the illusory value of capital and the ideology of neoliberalism which overvalue the luxury and idleness of the few at the expense of the starving, indebted and overburdened many. Food sovereignty can move us beyond more abstract notions of “multitudes” by grounding our conceptualization of global interdependence and the promise of democracy in the lived material practices of breaking bread. It can enrich our analysis of class, race, gender, colonialism and globalization by insisting that food politics is about more than personal consumer choice, that it is a matter of bringing to birth new forms of political power. It also moves us beyond the facile politics of apocalyptic primitivism with its perverse and racist fantasies of population collapse and recreational biopolitics. Though it is open, as all things are, to cooptation, it is the responsibility of scholars and activists alike to probe the limits of the concepts and practices of food sovereignty with an eye enabling them to speak to one another and chart the considerable challenges we all face.

Endnotes

[1] See Szeman 2007 on globalization and futurity.

[2] Co-editor Scott Stoneman and I have explored this thematic more thoroughly in our treatment of Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation, as a “panopticon of time” (forthcoming (2009) in the McMaster Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition Working Paper Series). The recognition of the interconnectedness of global political economy, everyday life and food has long been a theme in feminist scholarship and activism – see Mies 1986

[3] For an elaboration of governmentality see Gwendolyn Blue’s contribution to this issue.

[4] This was, for instance, a main ideological contention between economic defenders of the ancient regime in France (notably, the physiocrats whose name derives from their insistence that land and its ability to grow food – under proper aristocratic management – is the source of all value) and the bourgeois revolutionaries who, in dialogue with emerging economic thinkers like Adam Smith, based a whole system of property, law, philosophy, morality, and, arguably, scientific epistemology on the elemental value of (nominally) free labour (typically someone else’s) and the productive power of monetary exchange. Such a devaluation of food and land and the subordination of inherited title and feudal rank to the universal power of money, not coincidentally, allowed for the intensification of the enclosure of peasant lands and the development of urban workforces (and the emergence of new forms of labour and population discipline) so crucial to the birth of capitalism. See Federici 2004 and Perelman 2000.

[5] Statistics on derivatives are notoriously unreliable given that they are both poorly regulated and extremely ephemeral. These come from a 2008 report from the Bank of International Settlements (retrieved March 22, 2009 from http://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy0811.htm). Global GDP figures are from the International monetary Fund’s 2008 World Economic Outlook (retrieved March 22, 2009 from http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2008/01/weodata/WEOApr2008alla.xls).

[6] The notion of food sovereignty is articulated differently in different venues but is widely influenced by the statements over the past 10 years by Via Campasina (Peasant Path/Way/Life), the movement of peasants, indigenous people and their allies around the world. See http://viacampesina.org/main_en/index.php

[7] Yet the history of food politics reveals Agamben’s eurocentrism: where he takes the Nazi Holocaust to be the signature moment of modern biopolitics and the stark horror of bare life, the horrific conditions of (neo-)colonialism and the famines it created do far more to teach us about the nature of modern sovereignty – see, for instance, Mbembe 2004. Indeed, such a historical approach also lead us away from the unrealistic total evacuation of agency and complete social death on which Agamben’s theory rests. Similarly, Federici (2004) has made clear that the origins of biopolitics are intimately tied to the tangled growth of modern capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism, key elements of which included the witch-trials of the 16th-17th centuries and the truck between the centre and periphery of technologies of bodily and population-oriented discipline and social dispossession.

[8] This language derives from John Holloway’s (2005) meditations on the wisdom of the Zapatista movement of the indigenous Maya of Chiapas (Mexico).

Works Cited

-Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

-Balibar, Etienne. 2004. We the people of Europe? Reflections on transnational citizenship. Translated by K. Swenson. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

-Bourdieu, Pierre. 1999. Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. Translated by R. Nice. New York: The New Press.

-Davis, Mike. 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London andNew York: Verso.

-De Angelis, Massimo. 2007. The beginning of history: value struggles and global capitalism. London: Pluto.

-Federici, Sylvia. 2005. Calliban and the Witch: Women, Capitalism and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

-Ferguson, Niall. 2008. The ascent of money: a financial history of the world. New York: Penguin

-Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Pantheon Books.

_____. 1978. The history of sexuality. Translated by R. Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books.

_____. 2003. Society must be defended: lectures at the Colláege de France, 1975-76. New York: Picador.

-Giroux, Henry A. 2004. The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the eclipse of democracy. Boulder & London: Paradigm.

-Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

_____. 2004. Multitude : war and democracy in the age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press.

-Harvey, David. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

_____. 2006. The limits to capital. 2nd ed. London and New York: Verso.

-Henwood, Doug. 1998. Wall Street: how it works and for whom. London and New York: Verso.

-Holloway, John. 2005. Change the World Without Taking Power. New Edition. London: Pluto.

-Jameson, Fredric. 2003. The End of Temporality. Critical Inquiry 29:695-718.

-King, Thomas. 2003. The truth about stories. Toronto: Anansi.

-LiPuma, Edward, and Benjamin Lee. 2004. Financial derivatives and the globalization of risk. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.

-Marazzi, Christian. 2008. Capital and language: from the new economy to the war economy. Translated by G. Conti. New York: Semiotext(e).

-Martin, Randy. 2007. an empire of indifference: American war and the financial logic of risk management. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.

-Mbembe, Achille. 2004. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1).

-McMurtry, John. 1999. The cancer stage of capitalism. London: Pluto.

-Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale. London: Zed.

-Nelson, Anita. 1999. Marx’s concept of money: the god of commodities. London and New York: Routledge.

-Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

-Patel, Raj. 2007. Stuffed and starved: markets, power and the hidden battle for the world’s food system. Toronto: Harper Collins.

-Patel, Rajeev, Radhika Balakrishnan, and Uma Narayan. 2007. Exploration on human rights. Feminist Economics 13 (1):87-116.

-Perelman, Michael. 1987. Marx’s crisis theory: scarcity, labour and finance. New York and London: Praeger.

_____. 2000. The invention of capitalism: classical political economy and the secret history of primitive accumulation Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

-Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political & Economic Origins of Our Time. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

-Szeman, Imre. 2007. Imagining the Future: Globalization, Post-Modernism and Criticism. In Metaphors of Globalization: Mirrors, Magicians, and Mutinies edited by M. Kornprobst, V. Pouliot, N. Shah and R. Zaiotti. New York Palgrave.

Since the subject of this issue of Politics and Culture is food and the continuing struggle by the dispossessed and disenfranchised to manage their own food, the diversely disciplined contributors to this issue have necessarily persuaded themselves that it is important, now, to intervene in what Walter Benjamin called the “fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist” (Benjamin 254). Demanding food sovereignty means taking food seriously as a question of justice, survival and sustainability, and of how to imagine radically democratic registers of political and economic participation. It also means thinking about food in terms of the pedagogical. As Julie Guthman notes in her interview in this issue, food is becoming an increasingly important object of study among the privileged class of educators and intellectuals who, Guthman insists, bear the responsibility to “reflect on potential levers of transformation” rather than gorging on the capital which accompanies the rhetoric of prescribing what to eat.
The privatization of social concern that has driven neoliberal cultural politics at the “end of history”, or what Giorgio Agamben terms the “lasting eclipse of the political” (Agamben 121), has left a social and cultural vacuum in which the collective agency required to build living alternatives to contemporary global gastropolitics is left gasping for air. Filling this vacuum are, on the one hand, radical movements like Via Campesina that assert the “right to have rights,” or the right to “act together concerning things that are of equal concern to each,” (Arendt 296) in relation to the vital labour of growing and raising food. On the other are notions of consumer sovereignty which offer what we might call an “informational” model of imagining the subjectivity of the consumer: if consumers are informed adequately and accurately about the sublimely large networks of neoliberalized and protectionist profit and supply that constitute the global food system, if they are educated in the exploitative conditions of food production (as well as revolutionary efforts to undo these conditions), they might adjust their consumption habits and, in so doing, effectively join in the “crude” struggles whose absence stunts the growth of “refined and spiritual things.”

A kind of limit case for consumer sovereignty, understood as an evolution from naive subject to savvy world citizen, is the SixthSense, a “Wearable Gestural Interface” device designed by Pranav Mistry of the MIT Media Lab. (http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/index.htm) The device is a fully-integrated Personal Digital Assistant (or PDA) which mediates the wearer’s every interaction with their daily environment. One of the more striking features of the gadget is that it carries a projector outfitted to display information—including live news broads and information culled from various internet sources—onto objects in the user or wearer’s immediate vicinity. The type of cyborg consumer sovereignty this prototype allows us to imagine is one in which the screen-ing of the world, a virtualization of the topography of everyday experience, opens onto a certain liberal utopian fantasy: enhanced with the power to project onto a box of cereal or bag of chips the relevant information he or she needs to make sound decisions, the shopper-as-subject becomes the reliable and reassuring check on an otherwise unsustainable level of deregulation and corporate autonomy. This technological fantasy is underwritten by the dream of a world where all social problems are overcome by the sound choices of informed individuals.

This aligns nicely with the basic presupposition of liberal thought: that the individual, and more precisely the individual’s capacity for a rational expression of autonomy, is the foundation of all politics, or (under neo-liberalism) all prosperity. But can consumer sovereignty be said to act as a “potential lever of transformation”? As a concept and political practice, consumer sovereignty and the privilege of knowing are not only insufficient solutions for the corporate logic which has wrought our present global food crisis and made entire populations disposable, it is the very ideological source of this inequality. Instead, it operates as a normative or regulatory ideal which forecloses radically cosmopolitan ethical considerations regarding food and food crises. To posit the educated autonomy of the consumer against the necropolitics of the current food system amounts to what Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux term an “[e]rsatz democracy of consumers” (221), attenuating leftist food politics and undermining the fight of groups like Via Campesina against the vampires of neoliberal globalization like Monsanto, Wal-Mart and Cargill.

Julie Guthman, Michiel Korthals and Clive Barnett et. al. have insisted that such gestures to the primacy of individual decision-making at the supermarket—while by no means irrelevant to food politics—are part of a desperate rear-guard action to preserve extant modes of biopolitical governance and colonial privilege against emerging movements for sustainable food cultivation and circulation. The limitations of this conceptualization of the shopper-subject should be considered in terms of what Deborah Britzman calls a “resistance to learning” provoked by knowledge which is “ felt as interference or as a critique of the self’s coherence” (118). Indeed, Sharon Todd writes that the most common response to the weight of responsibility implied by witnessing the depth of one’s usurpation of the Other is “a powerful attempt to squirm out,” to escape the pedagogical move which attempts to unseat the student’s attachment that teaches him he need not feel remorse (94). This necessitates the radical generosity of “making education inconsolable” (49). Todd finds evidence in the experience of guilt of the self’s problematic attempt to flee the sort of knowledge which unsettles its attachment to a certain subjectivity. “[G]uilt emerges,” in her account, because responsibility for the freedom of the Other (and indeed for the future as Other) “demands too much of the self” (110).

Today the dispossession underpinning all forms of corporate food cultivation appears to be producing a global epidemic of starvation and hopelessness. The most “dramatic” and “tragic” symptom of this hopelessness, for Indian feminist and ecological activist Vandana Shiva, is the escalation of suicide rates among Indian peasants “employed” by that most elemental thing, the land, yet facing a “crisis of survival” as a result. Since the monopolization of seed distribution began in 1997, 25,000 peasants in India have committed suicide. In India, there has been a concerted effort by the state to reinscribe statistics regarding farmer suicide along intelligibly “neoliberal” lines: reports purporting to apply “scientific analysis” have insisted that the causes are psychological, not economic, and that much can be done to address the problem by requiring farmers to “boost up their self-respect (swabhiman) and self-reliance (swavalambam).” To what extent can competing notions of sovereignty be said to act as the hidden linkage between farmer suicides, the contemporary politics of disposability and the struggle for a sustainable system of participatory economics in food production?

Food is the “quintessential consumable,” in the words of contributor Chad Lavin, not only because it has the unique property of actually being ingested, or because (even when not eaten expressly for this purpose) it exists to fuel the body, but because the nourishment and pleasure food provides has a singular character, a certain sovereignty, and is vital to the formation of community. If we trust Sharon Todd’s point that “the other commands the subject into being and in so doing inaugurates responsibility,” if we agree with her reading of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas which suggests that responsibility for the other is not just a phenomenological possibility, but “the very structure of subjectivity” (109), then it follows that for a regime of power as destructive as neoliberalism to persist, it has to either continue to suppress an inaugural yearning for justice or effectively restructure subjectivity through pedagogical tropes such as consumer sovereignty.

Works Cited

-Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.
-Appadurai, Arjun. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
-Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. Cleveland: Meridian, 1958.
-Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
-Britzman, Deborah P. Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998.
-Giroux, Henry A., and Susan Searls Giroux. Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.
-Shiva, Vandana. “The Suicide Economy Of Corporate Globalisation.” ZMag 19 Feb 2004 15 Mar 2009 <http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/1865>.
-Todd, Sharon. Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003.

"A framework has been devised between Britain, America and Australia in which [Britain] will take the frontline role in Afghanistan", a senior defence source told the newspaper. "The aspiration is that the Australians will take over command of Multi-National Division South East"…

Soon after, some senior military men in Australia expressed some dismay that this should be projected given that the Australian army was quite incapable of handling this. In fact, the British are apparently planning to bring home many of the 8500 troops there within three months and most of the rest six months later (Simon Walters, zmag.org, 14 July 05). The US and Britain seem fairly desperate to get a lot of their troops out soon – a leaked memo published in the Christian Science Monitor of 11 July 2005, reported plans to reduce Coalition forces in Iraq to 66 000 by mid-2006. (These currently total 160,000 including 138 000 US troops.) Maybe it isn’t so much the 1950s that we are being led back to as a re-run of some of the spectacular events of the failed invasion of Turkey some 35 years even before that.

There may not be much of an Australian army to combat the forces of darkness around the globe, despite the hubris displayed by Howard. There seems to be even less of an Iraqi army. Why would there be, when the nation is occupied – not so much by foreign armies as by multinational companies and their mercenaries – so the only position is of collaborator. Patrick Cockburn quotes Mahmoud Ottnar as having commented that the Iraqi army was full of `"ghost battalions" in which officers pocket the pay of soldiers who never existed or have gone home. "I know of at least one unit which was meant to be 2200 but the real figure was only 300 men… the US talks about 150,000 Iraqis in the Security Forces but I doubt if there are more than 40 000." (15 July 2005) Due to the rise of grassroots resistance this is not surprising – in Iraq civilians and police have died at the rate of more than 800 a month between last August and May this year.

Keeping the troops in Iraq costs the USA US$5bn a month, although ‘reconstructing’ the damage they have done has earned US$9.1bn for Dick Cheney’s former firm Halliburton already and there is a new contract for another $5bn on the way from the American government.

Everyday life in Iraq is extremely difficult, with dysfunctional hospitals and communications, rationed electricity – and oil, even – and widespread corruption. Saul Landau wrote on 14 July 2005:

in March 2003 George W Bush ordered the US military to break Iraq. The Us arsenal destroyed the electricity and water supply, damage sewage treatment and other vital sanitary facilities and pulverised bridges, other public places and thousands of homes. On May 1 2003 dressed in a jump suit, Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and announced "Mission accomplished." His critics including myself laughed at such braggadocio. We misunderstood him. He had accomplished the standard post World War II US military mission. He broke another country… (z mag 14 July 2005)

The same view is expressed by Hani, a young Iraqi woman in her twenties: ‘They came to take they did not come to give. And now people are attacking each other and there is a struggle inside. It’s getting worse because you can’t repair what is broken inside.’(Provencher)

While the G8 was meeting discussing poverty and climate change -both things arguably centrally connected to the operations of global capitalism, another forum was going on almost unreported in the mainstream media. John Pilger quotes from Arundhati Roy’s statement at the Istanbul World Tribunal into the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States, Britain, Australia and others.

"We are here to examine a vast spectrum of evidence that has been deliberately marginalised and suppressed, its legality, the role of international institutions and major corporations in the occupation, the role of the media, the impact of weapons such as depleted uranium munitions, napalm and cluster bombs, the use and legitimising of torture…This Tribunal is an attempt to correct the record, to document the history of the war not from the point of view of the victors but of the temporarily anguished." (http://www.zmag.org)

Arundhati Roy has historically researched what Churchill said in 1937:

I do not agree that a dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

In 1969 then it was not too hard for Golda Meir to say: "Palestinians do not exist."

Palestine like Iraq was once a secular bulwark in the Middle East. But just as Hamas has taken over from the PLO, so have fundamentalist currents triumphed over a large degree of freedom from religious coercion for women in pre-war Iraq.

Australia is also of course very much part of Asia, and is currently working on whether John Howard’s earlier opposition to signing a Treaty of Amity and Co-Operation with the members of ASEAN can be overcome in the interests of accessing a market of 500 million people with a combined output of $850bn (and notably the Chinese demand for uranium). The Treaty outlaws pre-emptive attacks on neighbouring countries. Howard "initially refused to sign the non-aggression pact because he said it was a relic of another era and would conflict with Australia’s other treaty obligations" – guess to whom (Australian 26 July 2005).

And meanwhile Condoleezza Rice has refused to attend the late July ASEAN Regional Forum in Laos in what looks like an American downgrading of relations with Asia (other than the current American participation in the resumption of talks about North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme on terms a little less dogmatic than insisting that North Korea – along with Iran, and Iraq a few years ago, was "the axis of evil").

Australian foreign policy and alliances tied to the other side of the world have of course in the wake of the recent London bombings led to calls for much more stringent security, including the prospect of a national ID card, and greater powers for security forces. During the last phase of the Troubles, the IRA came close to blowing up the Tory Cabinet of Margaret Thatcher at Brighton, and damaging 10 Downing Street with a missile. Various Prevention of Terrorism Acts did nothing to prevent this, but how further measures are to be introduced, including asking Universities to report research applicants they suspect are linked to terrorism. In the USA, the Patriot Act was rushed through in 2001, although the 1998 anti-terorist legislation offered ample powers. These have since 2001 mainly been used to intimidate individuals, notably Attorney Lynne Stewart this year. This is also beginning to happen in Australia which lacks such draconian laws, with a student at Monash University (Australian, white and a Muslim convert) studying terrorism being interviewed by the Federal Police. The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee has said they will not countenance government interference with academic work and its CEO John Mullarvey says, ‘The same goes for imposition of security in Universities: we are not in a police state.’ However, John Howard is reported in the same article as commenting: ‘Our legal systems are very similar and we intend to look very carefully at what the British do and if there is something in that for Australia then we will be very happy to pick it up’ (Australian 27 July 2005, 33).

Meanwhile in Iraq life remains a daily terror of struggle for survival, let alone the ability to rebuild and reconstruct their lives, for much of the population. ]]> http://www.politicsandculture.org/2005/09/04/editorial/feed/ 0