The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

Political Discomfort

Diagnosis 21 PoliticalDiscomfort As this book moves along, it will become clearer that my actual forays into the chaos of unreason provide opportunities to rethink the Enlightenment’s concept of reason and the social order this concept has grounded. I am far from being the first scholar to do so, of course. My thinking owes much to Michel Foucault’s early work, for example, and has found inspiration more recently in that of the Foucault scholar Lynne Huffer.And I do not mean to imply that the Enlightenment has ever constituted a homogeneous philosophy , that it was never uncontested from within, or that it wasn’t altered by the material conditions that enable thought in the first place. The mind lives in the world, and the world is a mess. Precisely, the problems I raise have to do with the ways in which modes of thought have played out in people’s actual lives, including my own. Yet for someone like me, who was not only raised in France but trained as a scholar of French literature and culture, to criticize the Enlightenment may still raise political suspicions.True, before Jacques Derrida and the deconstruction of Cartesian thinking, a great deal of the political opposition to the Enlightenment came from a brand of extreme-­ right ideology rooted in its historical hostility to the French Revolution and the republican regime that emerged from it in fits and starts. Without getting lost in details , let’s just say that the new right-­ wing nationalism that appeared in the 1890s argued against the influence of Kantian philosophy, against“Man” as an abstract, universal concept, and in favor of a kind of organic rather than contractual culture rooted in what Maurice Barrès called“the land and the dead” (“la terre et les morts”), a nation beyond the control of individual, rational subjects. The opposition between two incompatible ideas reached its first frenzied peak during the Dreyfus affair, which famously pitted Barrès against Emile Zola and laid out two camps that were to fight each other for supremacy in the twentieth century. It would be shortsighted, however, to think that the demise of Nazi Germany has relegated irrational notions of culture to religious extremism and the political fringe. Case in point: the fascinating, if utterly depressing, controversy that is, as I am writing this, unfolding around the building of a so-­ called victory mosque at Ground Zero in Manhattan. Forget even that Park51, as the project is called, is neither a mosque (it’s really a kind of Muslim YMCA with a prayer room) nor at Ground Zero (it’s two blocks north of it). I’m not going to reargue the issue. What interests me here is 22 Diagnosis how opponents of the project, whether cynical exploiters of popular anger or their gullible followers, are sometimes perfectly ready to admit that Muslims have a right to build the cultural center there but that it would be insensitive to do so. More forceful terms may include“affront,”“offense” and “disrespect,” and what all have in common is that they pertain to emotion rather than thought. So much so, in fact, that the conservative New York Times commentator Ross Douthat penned a column about the tension between “Islam and the Two Americas.” This is what he writes: There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what language you speak, what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run. An America where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America where the newest arrival to our shores is no less American than the ever-­ so-­ great granddaughter of the Pilgrims. But there’s another America as well, one that understands itself as a distinctive culture, rather than a set of political propositions. How “culture” is defined against (liberal-­ democratic) politics makes Douthat’s column something Barrès could have endorsed. Needless to say, Douthat favors such a culture, the one populist conservatives have been calling “the real America,” over the abstract principles on which the nation was founded. Of imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Sufi cleric who is “behind the mosque” (Muslim leaders and deciders, like the Jews of old, are always “behind,” it seems, as if hiding something as well as themselves), Douthat says,“By global standards, Rauf may be the model of a ‘moderate Muslim.’ [Note the quotation marks.] But global standards and American standards are different.” This historical tension between a contractual...