antipopper

I almost totally lost it yesterday. Not only did French parliament vote to ban the Muslim hijab in public schools by something like a 16:1 ratio, but I lost a long and involved post about it.

The short of it: when huge portions of the Left cannot differentiate its debates about the politics of religion from “civilizing”, State-happy adventures in repressive colonialist “justice”, when they opportunistically place those who have endured murderous Islamic fundamentalist regimes in the appalling position of being “authentic informants” to provide the grist for the racist discourse of “they mistreat their women”, when they actually picket schools to keep Muslim girls out of the public education system, it is cause for genuine despair. It isn’t civilization under siege, but civilization doing the sieging.

If French socialists are supporting this under the banner of “secularism”, this action is to secularism as George Bush’s imperial rhetoric of “freedom” is to freedom, and further proof that the deep ethical cleavages that are disintegrating the old idea of “the Left” follow the contours of philosophical allegiances to, or escape from, the State. This isn’t, as Steven Shaviro has recently charged, to do with the somewhat misplaced anarchist fetishisation of the State as the source of all evil (at the expense of acknowledging Capital), but grappling with (conscious and unconscious) investments in the State as the actor of uninterrogated narratives of progress, to which both social democracy and socialism subscribe.