1

BOUNDARIES. DIFFERENCES. PASSAGES.

HOMI K. BHABHA

"Boundaries. Differences. Passages": These three words signify

something more than our scholarly reflections, our conceptual ambitions. They
are signposts struck deep into the hard and stony ground, in those "contested
fields", that map the terrain of inter-cultural communication and transcultural
living. As heuristic devices, this trio of topoi – "Boundaries. Differences.
Passages" – have set our scholarly agendas, turned social injury into information,
opened up the norms of ideology to interpretation. But they provide us with more
than our objects of knowledge, our topics of research. As rhetorical figures or
figurative themes, these topoi project us into a future that provides a space for
forward thinking, innovative interpretation, and aspirational activism. They move
us from scholarship to sentiment; they direct us towards ethical horizons, those
feint glimmers of light that illuminate the factual discourses devoted to policy, and
the sententious prose of pedagogy. These keywords are tuned to the peculiar
habit of humanistic thought – the quest of the humanities – for the process of
poesis, for the craft of making, that reveals the literature, ethics, phenomenology.
The humanities do not propose an instrumental or causal relation between the
medium and the message, the object and its use, or technique and telos. The
humanities are effective in the education of the senses – and in the education of
elites and masses – because they produce knowledge 'at one remove'; they work
within that realm of "representation" where form turns into feeling, and an
aesthetic and ethical invocation of human experience creates a world of
theoretical concepts and intellectual conjectures.
The 'gap' between the pedagogical and the performative, between
disciplinary knowledge and the aesthetic or cultural experience (both are
important) creates an on-going, productive tension in the humanities between
what counts as subjective and what is objective, what is fact and what is value.
It is because of such epistemological and pedagogical tensions that the
humanities do not have a hard-wired principle or a method, but share a common
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project or purpose: this is the act of interpretation that leads to scholarly

interlocution, intellectual dialogue, and public debate for which the humanities are
renowned. It is these 'tension' in the production of humanistic knowledge that
establishes, in my view, the single most foundational contribution of the
humanities to social life. The humanities build communities rather than models.
Through interpretation, instruction and interlocution they create climates of
opinion. Like the weather, humanistic knowledge can be changeable, turbulent
and elusive. But does anybody seriously argue that we can do without air? In my
lecture, this evening, I welcome you to this peculiarly humanistic project of the
crafting of a community, of drawing an enabling boundary around us that may,
I hope, feel like a circle of light.
Boundaries, then, are the disciplinary barriers we traverse/transcend in
order to enter into interdisciplinary inquiries that establish "elective affinities", and
facilitate our encounters with cultural diversity on a comparativist and
cosmopolitan scale. In this sense, boundaries are liminal forms of definition.
It would be true, I think, to say that most of the research projects presented to
this Conference have in some sense or other, subverted, but not superseded,
that great boundary of modern times === the political border, and cultural frontier,
of the nation-state. I will not labour the obvious point, that we live in a global age
in which our existence is marked by the shadow-lines of sovereignty – be it the
sovereignty of the Self or the State – which do not hold sway with the same
authority and power as they once did in the age of Empire or the mid-twentieth
century decade of postcolonial independence – the Bandung moment. The
challenge of this conference is to think anew the concepts of "Boundaries.
Differences. Passages." so I shall not spend much time on the subject of what we
may call Dissemi-Nation, on which I have already written at length. On the
question of the 'subversion' of the nation-state – as purveyor and protector of
culture and consciousness – I take the rather disjunctive view that Michel
Foucault espoused when he wrote, in 1979: We are witnessing a globalisation of
 3

the economy? For certain. A globalisation of political calculations? Without doubt.

But a universalisation of political consciousness – certainly not.1
Political 'distortions', economic divisions that reproduce "colonial"
structures (Joe Stieglitz, IBM CEO), and ethical dilemmas of cultural
incommensurability, define the boundaries of our age of global transition (rather
than transformation). Here 'extremes' exist in a relation of antagonistic – and
agonistic – proximity (not polarity). The 'secular' liberalisation of the markets has
seen, side by side, the rise of xenophobia and religious fundamentalisms;
diasporic populations who live in the West, and participate in its modernising
public spheres and civil societies, are also amongst those who most fervently
advocate traditionalism and orthodoxy; Western governments who have become
spokespersons for the democratic ideal the world over, are themselves in thrall to
the profound intolerance, and lack of transparency, of the Religious Right
movements in their own countries.
These caveats to celebratory globalisation lead me to raise the important
issue of "global doubt". Global doubt, Amartya Sen argues in Identity and
Violence, is an essential component of the humanitarian ethics of an integrational
and inclusive polis. It leads him to a counterfactual evaluative judgement:
"the central issue is not whether a particular arrangement is better for all than no
cooperation at all … Rather the principle question is whether the particular
divisions to emerge, among the various alternatives available, are fair divisions,
given what could be chosen."2 Global doubt is not a form of luddite defeatism;
it is not a nostalgia for the nation-state of the Westphalian system. "Doubt" is a
hermeneutic of truth: it is a social practice that consists in self-inquiry, critical
intelligence, ethical-political deliberation, and social interlocution. It is the process
through which we test the truth-conditions, and the practical, pragmatic
consequences, of our acts as agents in the world. Global Doubt, in my view,
attempts to balance the 'benefits' of global transfers with the costs and outcomes'
of social transformation, while bearing in mind humanitarian ethics and the

1
Michel Foucault, "For an Ethic of Discomfort." Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954 - 1984
ed. James D. Faubion (The New Press: New York, 2000), 446.
2
Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence (W.W. Norton: New York, 2006), 135.
 4

politics of inclusion and equality. Doubt as a practice preceding action and

agency is a powerful third element in the dialectic of transfer and transformation
that creates the 'global' dialectic.
Languages of constitutional reform and public policy too often lack an
adequate vocabulary of global doubt that addresses the affective life of citizens
– their sense of public anxiety, ambivalence, uncertainty, indecision – as they
ponder choices in life and politics. These are the difficult, awkward passions of
the political life that are not easily classifiable as public 'virtues'. A renewed sense
of civic or civil belonging in a globalised age demands a language of inter-cultural
interpretation as well as the policy-oriented prose of social integration. It must be
a language rich in metaphor and imaginative power; a language that is resorts to
the ethical hermeneutic of doubt in order to sustain the public representation of
social conflicts and political contradictions.
The profound degree of internal contradiction and contestation explored in
Lidija Basta-Fleiner's project on the poesis of constitution-making in multicultural
Europe, is an illustration of the paradoxes of "doubt" that must be negotiated in
the creation of emergent political forms. Constitution-making as a cultural and
discursive mode of "will-formation" articulates a problem of radical liminality in the
central question posed by her research: "What would be the emergence of a
supra-national constitutionalism without a 'constitutional' demos." Basta-Fleiner
raises the issue of 'alterity' – whether it is signified as otherness, legal aporia,
jurisdictional unsettlement, or cultural incommensurability – at the heart of
constitution-making and the setting of legal and political standards. Aporia
occupies an axial position (not a decentred or marginal location) in the
construction of a liminal boundary of legality and culture. This differential "axis"
creates a cross-roads (chiasmus) at the very point at which one expects a
boundary to fix a limit, or integrate heterogenous elements or practices of cultural
identity into a primordial unity. The question of cultural identity revolves on this
axis of alterity: one eye turned towards it-self, the second looking other-wise.
The authority or integrity of the boundary – its relation to the pressures of
power and domination – depends, to a considerable degree, on this mobility and
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contingency that is constitutive of the liminal boundary – its axial alterity.

This double 'axial' movement gives boundaries the flexibility for inclusion and
exclusion, closure and conflict, identity and intervention, injunction and
interpretation. Liminal Boundaries are binding and breachable, because of the
potential for strategically turning the spatial dynamics of identity-as-sameness
(the exclusion of difference) into the temporal dynamics of difference-as-the-
revision/relocation of identity as diversity (the creation of solidarities). Such a
liminal, constructivist boundary mimics the transformative and translational
movement of an aesthetic genre – for instance, the transformation of the
picaresque novel into the Bildungsroman – whose development is at once
re-cognizable and re-visionary, diachronic and disseminatory, maintaining the
tension between containment and contestation. It may be a long-stretch from the
boundaries of aesthetic genres to the limits of the law, but Andrea Büchler's
project is a case in point: What is the transitional boundary of integration – and
what should be the threshold of tolerance – in integrating the cultural practices of
migrant families into domestic family law? This interrogation positions the Law on
an inter-cultural cross-roads; the culture of legality is placed at the axial point of a
crucial issue: in what ways is it permissible to be, or belong, to a migrant family
under the eye of the Law?
Boundary-thinking – and boundary-breaking – as I have described the
process, bear some resemblance to Jörn Rüsen's concept of a "comprehensive
humanism" wrought through the master-narratives of mankind, "mankind" as a
trope – or topos – of cultural identity maintains a borderline existence, a dual
function, at once a master-narrative of humankind, and a historical and cultural
metonym of a specific diachronic image of 'mankind'. Such a humanism
negotiates the tension between "people's understanding of belonging to and
dissociation from the other, similarities and differences amongst them".
"Mankind" as master-narrative sutures the boundary between "cultural identity"
and the horizon of humanism; but it is a contingent boundary open to
diachronicity, revision and interpretation – as much as it provides closure and
identity. The "chance" of humanism beautifully reflects what I have proposed as
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'doubleness' of boundaries, caused by their axial constitution, which gives them

an aspirational and aesthetic efficacy. Hearing the word "chance" in Rüsen's title,
reminds me of his use of that very word – chance – in his wonderful essay on
Ranke. There, he suggests, that aesthetics "introduces the chance of autonomy
within the framework of historical determinism".3 It is, indeed, the "chance" of
humanistic identification that creates the possibility of an affiliation – through –
alterity or otherness affiliation – a non-sovereign solidarity – amongst those who
advance a "politics of difference".
Differences demand that we work across, or in-between, the separable
(at times separatist) pedagogies of class dialectics, race analytics, feminist
paradigms, media hermeneutics, minoritarian geopolitical locations. The Global
Icons project, presented by Lydia Haustein, proposes an inventive trans-cultural
conversation between iconic images, the global circulation of symbolic and
commodified capital, and the practices of youth identification – what she
picturesquely calls "tribal markings". Working across "the divides of various youth
groups in Tokyo, New York and Rio", she identifies the way in which the 'identity'
of an icon – a Che Guevara T-shirt for instance – can maintain a visual
'sameness' while signifying a cultural and interpretational 'difference' in each
urban-national location. This 'diacritical' reading of urban and iconic boundaries
shows up the range of values and meanings that can exist differentially within the
same practice, meaning, text or object. The nearness of difference – its
proximities – is as lethal and productive as any polarity of meaning or
significance. This resonates richly with Andreas Wimmer's fascinating project on
Ethnic Boundaries and Cultural Differentiation. The identification of 'difference'
– or the 'difference of identity' – may be a negotiation of 'degrees' on a scale of
cultural and psychic 'proximity' – rather than a dialectic of distance. "'Proximity',
beyond intentionality, is the relationship with the neighbour in the moral sense of
the term", Levinas writes of the encounter with the Other4; and Wimmer's skilfull
attention to the diverse and disjunctive sites that constitute the signifying chain of

3
Jörn Rüsen, Studies in Metahistory (Berghahn Books: Providence, RI, 1993), 140.
4
Emmanuel Levinas, Collected philosophical papers (Nijhoff: Boston, 1987), 119.
 7

any boundary illuminates the ethics and politics of proximity. "Social closure,
political relevance, cultural differentiation, historical stability" – these strategic
boundary-lines of division and displacement break-open to reveal a chromatic
scale of identifications across the 'diacritica' of cultural proximity that can result
in social polarisations.
A humanism of "proximate differences" that sets out to achieve
intercultural communication – lets call it cultural inter-locution – must take a
leap of 'chance' into an area of 'inter-subjectivity' governed by no dominant
culture, no masterful dogmatism of the value of a singular or sovereign ideology
of difference. It is this leap that defines the value of 'differentiations' through the
performance of inter-cultural dialogue, without assuming polarities or binarisms of
cultural belonging. Such interlocutions exist in a realm of human inter-est which is
not enunciated on one side or the other of a pre-constituted, primordial
difference, but uttered through a "third position" in-between cultural possession
and trans-or inter-cultural performance: "something which inter-est, which lies
between people and therefore can relate and bind them together."5
Intersubjectivity (as the site of intercultural communication), does not ground its
claims to equitable 'rights and representations' on the sovereignty of cultural
identitarianism. Inter/trans-cultural interlocution finds its insight and its inspiration
in what Maurice Merleau-Ponty once envisaged as "a logic of human coexistence
which does not make any event impossible [while creating, at the same time,]
… a system in which at any moment no problem is separable from the rest."6
"Differences" must never become "islands of identity"; they are most
useful and beautiful when the metaphoric and conceptual imagination conceives
of them as archipelagos of identification – related systems of land and sea,
islands and water flowing into each other, coastline and cresting wave in
profound conversation. Islands, nations, communities, groups, individuals:
lifeworlds of diverse ecologies and ethicalities, different cultures and customs,
washed by the same sheet of water, but deeply, if fluidly, connected by the

5
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1998), 182.
6
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic (Northwestern University Press: Evanston,
1973), 153-4.
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shared sea of history. Islands in an archipelago are part of a signifying system,

every identity at once secondary and supplementary to the other in a chain of
dependence and dissemination. Each coastline has its characteristic markings,
each eco-system its singular character, each culture its individuating qualities,
each song its own burden and rhythm. However, here there is no single sense of
wholeness; here there is no primordial form of totalisation or 'truthfulness'.
[...]
Agamben beautifully illuminates my concept of intercession when he
explains that

"Next to similitudo (resemblance) there is similutas, that is the fact of

being together (which also implies rivalry, enmity); and next to similare
(to be like) there is simulare (to copy, to imitate … to feign). To grasp
not the resemblance but rather the simultaneity … is the restless
power that keeps [us] together and constitutes [our] being-in-
common."7
Cultural inter-locution takes place through the process of "be-halfing" oneself,
through the axis of splitting, in the encounter with an-other assymetric subject,
or disjunctive cultural practice or community […]. This […] brings us to the cross-
roads-within-the boundary where, through the intercessive agency of "being-in-
common" we are in the position to re-vise, re-cognize, and restructure our
interests and our causes. In his posthumously published essay Humanism and
Democratic Criticism, Edward Said argues powerfully for an "intercessive"
humanism that intervenes in "history as an agonistic process still being made…"8

"… always and constantly the undocumented turbulence of unsettled

and unhoused exiles, immigrants, itinerant or captive populations for
whom no document, no adequate expression yet exists to take
account of what they go through … . Humanism, I strongly believe
must excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant barely
surviving groups, the kind of testimony that doesn't make it onto the
reports …"9

7
Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: notes on politics (University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, 2000), 98-9.
8
Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Columbia University Press: New York,
2004), 25.
9
Ibid., 81.
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This is not a philanthropic or sentimental speech-act in favour of the oppressed

waiting patiently to be emancipated and represented. To suggest this, is to strip
the oppressed of the complexity of their conditions, and to suggest that they are
not subject to the assymetrical power-structures of "proximate differences", or
that language of suffering speaks spontaneously "for itself" without the thought
of an-other through whom it makes an appeal, and in so doing, attempts to make
common cause of being-in-common. The intercessive subject also stands on a
boundary pierced by the "axis of alterity" resulting in the anxiety and
disorientation that results when you find yourself on the cross-roads of history,
on the very edge of making a choice, taking a measure of the liminal boundary of
being:

When does a life bend towards freedom? Grasp its direction? …

Maybe through a teacher: someone with facts with numbers with
poetry
Who wrote on the board: IN EVERY GENERATION ACTIONS FREES
OUR DREAMS …
An intercessive approach – freedom … through a teacher, a fact, a poem,
a number – is essential in achieving some sense of what it means to strive for
'equality-in-difference'. The phrase comes from Etienne Balibar's brilliant
discussion of what is at stake in the minoritarian movements of our times: "an
equality that is not the neutralisation of differences [universalist equalisation,
based on a notion of a level playing field] but the condition and requirement of the
diversification of freedoms."
There are few writers who understand the task of "the diversification of
freedoms" with the same interventionist – to say nothing of intercessive – passion
as the French Tunisian philosopher and political activist Albert Memmi. No-one
knows better the experience of self-fragmentation in the service of speaking
intercessively on behalf of others. To shadow the suffering of the oppressed has
been a lifetime's mission for Albert Memmi.
[…]
It is Memmi's hope that these 'partial sketches' will lead to a future portrait of 'the
dominated peoples of our time':
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"We have by now learned that oppressed people resemble each other.
Their own peculiar features and individual history aside, colonised
people, Jews, women, the poor show a kind of family likeness: all bear
a burden which leaves the same bruises on their soul, and similarly
distorts their behaviour. A like suffering often produces similar
gestures, similar expressions of pain, the same inner paroxysms, the
same agony of the same revolt."10
To suggest that the colonised, Jews, women, and the poor share "a like
suffering" immediately raises the spectre of a sentimental solidarity. A claim to
"resemblance" across group interests and identities based on analogies of affect
– similar gestures, similar expressions of pain, the same inner paroxysms –
smacks of the "culture of complaint" or the "vanguard of victimage". Both these
phrases recall the controversial culture-wars of the '80s and 90s fought in the
name of "a politics of difference". After 9/11 there has been a revival in attacks on
some of the themes of those times – area studies programmes are now under
investigation by a special parliamentary commission that has been charged to
investigate the culturally relativist and anti-patriotic sentiments of various 'foreign
study' centres and curricula with 'postcolonialism' singled out for special scrutiny.
The politics of difference engages with a corpus of institutional issues as diverse
as curricular reform, cultural defense cases, national and international 'state'
security, bi-lingual education, and hate speech.
Memmi's concept of 'family likeness' – the phrase is obviously alive with
Wittgensteinian associations – provides us with an interesting revision of the
assumptions and arguments associated with currently influential accounts of the
"politics of recognition". The kind of "resemblance" between oppressed group-
identities that Memmi proposes as a "family likeness" depends less on a pre-
given 'commonality' of cultural value and more on the construction of what he
calls a "community of condition". This is a phrase that comes from his essay
Negritude and Jewishness, which proposes that "the similarity" in the condition
of most oppressed peoples is a "movement of distinction which alone will allow
the false and restricting unity to be disposed of in recognition of the several

10
Albert Memmi, Dominated Man: notes toward a portrait (Orion Press: New York, 1968), 16.
 11

facets of black [and Jewish] reality"11. How can the movement of distinction be
prevented from turning into an anodyne pluralism? Does 'distinction' describe the
weave of cultural differences and intersections as they break out of any false or
restricting unity, or does it describe Memmi's critical practice? Let me provide you
with an example from Memmi's essay:

It would be sufficient for me … to point to the hypothesis that there is

a similarity in the conditions of most of the oppressed peoples … Of
course, these parallels do not do away with the specific meanings of
each word, [that describes the identification of Jews and Blacks] and
of its contents, for the main reason that, beyond the similarities, the
differences between the conditions and the traditions are of the utmost
importance. The oppression of the Jew is not the same as that of the
black man, nor as that of the colonised nations. Neither, by the way, is
that of each black man with that of all black men. And, furnished with
these ideas and with the common tools, it is up to the blacks to make
their own inventory. We can only propose the questions: How does
one characterize the contents of Negritude, or more exactly from now
on, of each Negritude? If it is agreed, as I proposed, that Negritude is
only the degree of conformity [and hence of normative deviation or
non-conformity] of each black man to the collective personality of the
group, one can see that this would be an essentially dynamic concept
with several variables. What part will the negative and the positive
aspects play each time? Will we be able to describe and to define a
coefficient of Negritude in the way that we found the coefficient of
Jewishness?12

A Wittgensteinian echo is apparent in the distinction that Memmi makes

between minority groups identified at the level of 'names' and words as opposed
to "contents" – an unusual way of thinking of the distinction between culture-as-
ontology, and culture as an imaginative, semiotic or ethical practice in
conversation with "other" defining and diversifying discourses and protocols. It is
at this point that Memmi's insistence on 'inter- and intra-cultural communication'
develops a discourse that is intercessive, in the sense in which I developed the
term to signify a political and ethical practice that enables cultures to discover
what it means to "belong-in-common", without necessarily being like each other –

11
Ibid., 38.
12
Ibid.
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a representational solidarity of semblance rather than 'identity'. In playing the

language-game of naming, Wittgenstein suggests, "Don't say that there must
be something common to them all or they would not be called games … For if
you look and see you will not see something common to all, but similarities,
relationships …".
[…]
Memmi's language-games of emancipatory identifications proceed with
caution and casuistry. He 'separates' each aspect of the naming of Negritude or
Jewishness in a manner congruent with Wittgenstein's theory of family
resemblances which suggests that

"a name only signifies what is an element of reality … we see

component parts of something composite … We see a whole which
changes (is destroyed) while its component parts remain unchanged
… These are the materials from which we construct that picture of
reality."13
Memmi's portraits produce a dynamic of resemblance "with several variables"
through a process of "splitting"; for in order to achieve family likeness, he writes,
"it will be necessary to split the concept of Negritude, as I was obliged to split that
of Judaism."14 Such 'splitting' is not merely a dry, definitional exercise, a splitting
of linguistic hairs. For if the role of figurative language is crucial to cultural
stereotypes, hate-speech, the clash of civilizations, all contested by the politics
of difference, then Memmi's linguistic and discursive analyses demonstrate how
"a movement of distinction" will free us from the pieties and proscriptions of the
"politics of identity". Memmi makes this very point when he writes that

… [D]espite its appearance, Negritude does not correspond to a racial

community, but to a community of condition, which is a condition of
oppression under the [mythical] pre-text of race … the ethnic response
of the black man to the ethnic accusation of the white. We find the
same global and probably provisional response in most of the
colonized who have grown into … pseudo ethnic solidarity to counter
the ethnic contempt of the colonizer.15

13
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell: Oxford, 1968), 59, 29.
14
Memmi, Dominated Man 35.
15
Memmi, Dominated Man.
 13

Memmi's preferred procedure of group identification is a 'movement of

distinction', which neither polarizes cultures nor totalizes them. Such a political or
discursive movement demands a dual-mode of identification – a "coefficient of
Jewishness or Negritude." […] This mode of identification as the 'coefficient' of a
'community of condition' allows for relations of equality within and across
communities – majoritarian or minoritarian – such that one can go, as Memmi
describes it, "beyond the false problems of all or nothing, of total acceptance or
total rejection."16
If the movement of distinction leads the minority subject beyond 'total
acceptance or total rejection', it also makes possible a form of 'family likeness'
amongst minorities that emerges as partial identification. A shared sense of
collective agency against suffering but borne out of it, need not be based on a
quasi-ontological claim to the sovereignty of a particular 'cause' or political
identity as embodied in a primordial class subject, or race subject. What might
seem like 'old hat' to some, is now jauntily sported, once again, by those who will
persuade us that we live in a world that is "after theory" and ought to take us
back to the Lukacsian marxist future, or others who are convinced that our post-
colonial age has seen the return of an immeasurable Deleuzian Empire!
[…]
In Memmi's view, the process of partial or split identifications renounces
the 'right to sovereignty' of any one group in order to achieve a community of
condition across several. […] This is part of a larger discussion, but let me quickly
suggest some associated arguments that I have tendentiously, though not
untruthfully, made my own. Freud's seminal chapter on Identification in "Group
Identity and the Ego" describes group 'identification' in mimetic terms as an
"infection or imitation" – a kind of semblance or "looking alike" in which "one ego
has to perceive a significant analogy with another on one point" – a point of
affiliation that belongs to no-one singularly but is an intersubjective construction

16
Memmi, Dominated Man, 38.
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achieved through the act of identification.17 Such a semblant relationship does

not assume a need for a "pre-existing sympathy", Freud argues, but does require
an identification/affiliation that hangs "on this one point". This partial identification
comes to represent the beginning of a new tie18 – the 'family likeness', if you will,
of group identification. So the 'one point' is in fact neither originary nor singular;
it is a pivot of partial-identification that inaugurates a 'new tie' that is collective,
a condition of community, without demanding a foundational fealty to an origin,
an ontology, or sovereign 'difference'.
[…]
The problematic of "semblant solidarity", […] has a conceptual and
metaphoric genealogy in my earlier concepts of "proximate differences",
the "archipelago cultures" and, most recently, in the intercessive address of
difference. Much of this is summed up in an essay Memmi wrote in 1968,
devoted to issues in global ethics relating to the lives of foreign workers.
The essay ends with Memmi's reflection on what it would mean to "arrive at rights
and a morality which are actually universal; that is to say to consider the entire
planet as a really single society."19
[…]
Whether Memmi is writing about the perversities of colonial power
relations, or the complexities of gender relations in his essay on Simone de
Beauvoir, he is of the view, that it is the proximity or intimacy of difference
– "where so many groups, each jealous of its own physiognomy, live side by
side" – that constitutes the enabling, of agonising conditions of freedom.
Semblance, or fellow-feeling, is made possible because "the subject sees himself
as others see him – which will enable him to support himself in a dual situation
…"20 of inter-locution and intersubjectivity … within the fragile framework of the

17
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (W.W. Norton: New York,
1975), 136-7.
18
Ibid., 136.
19
Memmi, Dominated Man, 137.
20
Memmi, Dominated Man, 268.
 15

imaginary relation to the other, and it hangs on that very uncertainty."21 This,
you will remember, is the process by which the splitting of Jewish or Black
identity, for instance, allows for family likeness to engender new ties of affiliation
by espousing political or 'interests' other than its own. The importance of
establishing an intersubjective realm is beautifully made by Balibar's belief that
"the value of human agency arises from the fact that no one can be liberated or
emancipated by others, although no one can liberate himself/herself without
others."22
Albert Memmi twists the thread of 'family likeness' even further until it feels
like a hanging-rope around your neck, dragging you to confront your diabolical
twin. The ethical value of human agency, Memmi seems to be saying, arises
from the fact that no one can liberate herself or himself without also confronting a
dire, asymmetric 'commonality' upon which the banality of evil carries out its
edicts of exclusion, oppression, suffering. For the perversity of power is such that
it demands a mutilated mutuality, and emancipation requires that you look into
that mangled mirror in order to make your historic choice to be free and fair.
Surviving the boundaries and limits of living "side by side", even in relations of
deep antagonism, requires one to confront what seems like an impossible, if
indispensable truth: "In other words, either [the oppressor/r] no longer recognises
the [oppressed/], or he no longer recognises himself." To this we may now add:
"Either the oppressed recognises the family likeness of others or she no longer
recognises herself."23
For such are the unsettling conditions of the fate of freedom – between
enemies and friends – that I have shared with you this evening. It is from the
turbulence of wars, occupations, segregations and evictions that I dare to hope
that some form of semblant solidarity might emerge. In these times of the
unsettled energies of place I search for a sign of the proximity of 'difference' that
will settle into a design for living with shared borders and contrapuntal histories.

21
Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis ed.
Jacques Alain Miller (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988), 181.
22
Etienne Balibar, "Subjection and Subjectivation," in Supposing the Subject ed. Joan Copjec
(Verso: London and New York, 1994), 13.
23
Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Beacon Press: Boston, 1967).
 16

If oppression and destruction can tear down walls and destroy frontiers, then why
can't those gates remain open, those spaces be resettled, in times of peace?
Is there no place for aspiration? No voice for intercession?
Today, I fear, it is as if hostility brings us closer to our neighbours, in a deadly
embrace, than hospitality ever seems to do.
The door of history is neither open nor closed; it is our shared
responsibility to do with it what we will.