The ‘anti-gender alliance’ – the subject of our previous book, Anti-Genderism (Anti-Genderismus, 2015) – encompasses the Vatican as well as a number of related conservative Catholic groups devoted to the defence of tradition, family and the sanctity of private property. But its actors also include the Catholic women’s movement in Poland; a number of evangelical churches around the world; La Manif Pour Tous (‘The Demo for Everyone’) in France; Pegida in Germany (‘Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident’); entire political parties, such as Alternative für Deutschland (the AfD) in Germany, Rassemblement National (‘National Rally’, formerly Le Front National) in France, and Geert Wilders’s Partij Voor de Vrijheid (‘Party for Freedom’) in the Netherlands; organized groupings of ‘concerned parents’ who campaign against the alleged ‘sexualization of children’; neoconservative men’s rights campaigners and other identitarian movements; self-appointed defenders of the ‘right to life’; conservative environmentalists; assorted masculinist and high-profile journalists and bloggers calling themselves scholars or scientists; and outright fascist entities such as the extreme-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).
For these rather heterogenous constellations and actors, the push-back against modernization, sexual diversity, gender theory, migration, and Islam (all together) form a potential platform for coalitions. They offer points of entry even within the educated, liberal spectrum. What is actually conjured is a version of ‘the people’, an entity that is being contaminated by things alien to its essence and whose existence is threatened by a superfluity of foreigners. This is the threat the aforementioned mobilize when they claim to be safeguarding the values and achievements of the West, of Christianity, of the Enlightenment against ‘Islamization’ and against the purported ‘genderization’ of the Western world; against fundamentalist terror and ethnic ‘swamping’; against migrants and refugees; against intellectual elites; against freedom of academic speech; against ‘liars’ in the press; or against the state and its representatives tout court. The favored method is shutdown (first cultural and subsequently legal and political) as a way of defending the achievements of whichever ‘we’ is at stake – the nation, the people, the nuclear family, Christianity – against outsiders. The world is interpreted in Manichaean dichotomies, in antagonisms between inside and outside, and these are aligned with distinctions between the valuable and the valueless, between those who may live and those who may not.
It is a revolt that builds upon – or breathes life into – the notion that the state’s task should be to protect the interests, the morality, the lifestyles of its ‘own’ group, regarded as the only one with legitimacy or an entitlement to stake any claim. The state, such is the constantly repeated complaint, is failing to fulfil that obligation. Instead, ‘the establishment’ extends its hand not to our own people but to the outsiders, allocating cheap housing and social welfare to refugees and adding insult to injury by urging us to practice compassion. ‘The system’ is guilty of betrayal. In this sense, the sometimes preposterous agitation against migrants, ‘Islam’, ‘dirty Green and lefty do-gooders’, and equally against what the German activists call the ‘genderistas’, must also be counted as part of a well-orchestrated vendetta against the establishment and a release from the affective and linguistic norms of politically correct behaviour that, in the last instance, has as its target the abolition of liberal democracy itself.
In pursuit of that goal, these groups mobilize patterns that have sedimented into society’s unconscious over centuries: forms of segmentation and distinction between human beings for the purposes of stigmatization, exclusion or segregation, along with the xenophobic hostility located deep in the foundations of modern societies.
The ‘enlightened fundamentalism’ (Liz Fekete) of the European populist right is not only to be found in the instrumentalization of women, lesbians, gay men and other ‘minorities’ on behalf of xenophobic policies; it also informs the antagonistic and embattled attitude that typifies toxic racist speech. Regarding feminism, the front line is dual and contradictory. A particular form of feminism is co-opted for populism’s own ends – on the one hand, to agitate against migration, Islam and the foreigners; on the other, to wage war on particular other feminisms, namely those that interrogate hegemonic gender and sexual norms. Western achievements such as the legal near-equality of the sexes or the criminalization of sexual violence, but even more importantly the concepts of gender duality, heterosexuality and family, are defended against both outward and inward enemies: outwardly against those whom the culturally essentialist imagination sees as uncivilized and retrograde, or as an uncontrollable sex mob, and inwardly against the ‘genderistas’ and queers who, so the story goes, wish to force their ideas of how to live gender and sexuality down ordinary Germans’ throats. The othering of those considered alien, with the intention of keeping them at a distance, is therefore directly connected with the vilification of sexual and gender minorities and dissident feminists. The AfD and Pegida go into battle not only against the ‘Islamization’ of the West, but also against what they call its ‘genderization’.
We see here the revival of unequivocal friend-enemy dichotomies, the demonization of the other, and an insistence on the supposed self that must be defended against all that is alien to it – the return of concepts that in Germany are strongly associated with Nazi discourse, such as Volk, ‘nation’, or ‘race’, along with a recourse to ‘homeland’, ‘culture’, and ‘identity’. There is talk of foreigners ‘crushing’ or ‘flooding’ our country, destabilizing our social systems, flouting our values, and unfairly receiving things that rightly belong to ‘us’ alone. All this indicates just how drastically the boundaries of what can be said have shifted towards the authoritarian and neoreactionary, away from an orientation towards democracy, universal human rights and political pluralism. Disrespect, hate speech and verbal derision, threats of violence, and violent acts including racist murders have become firm components of social coexistence – a brutalization of civic life. This crude discourse manifests a grammar of harshness, of imputation and suspicion, of ostracism and obloquy, all of which increasingly define commentary in the public sphere. It is a way of thinking interested neither in analytical precision nor in critiquing the parochial partiality of one’s own perspective. It is also a way of thinking that disregards the individual person and the circumstances in which they find themselves, that ascribes characteristics, totalizing them and making them synonymous with the person as a whole; one that distills social verdicts out of abstractions and locates itself on the moral high ground above those it has identified as responsible for the hated state of affairs.
This is a language that is both unambiguous and global and that is not the language of dialogue and nonviolence, the language of democracy and freedom, the language of conversation between different people who are nevertheless one another’s equals. The Future of Difference is our attempt to counteract this violence, which is as epistemic as it is lethal, for it is the language of disaster, which, as Maurice Blanchot put it many years ago in The Writing of the Disaster, ‘ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact’.28
‘When time stops, truth can be declared.’
– Joan Wallach Scott1
The night of New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne, it is supposed, simply ‘speaks for itself’. ‘Cologne’ – the incident – has become an epochal signifier. All of us claim to know exactly what transpired that night. Now, when we speak of ‘Cologne’, we are invoking an event generally understood to have a clear, well-defined shape. We all know, don’t we, that women were sexually harassed en masse on the streets of a German metropolis. Furthermore, the harassment was carried out by non-German men, that much seems certain: by migrants or foreigners. Some would even confirm it was carried out specifically by ‘Nafris’, the North Rhine-Westphalia Police Department’s internal designation and radio shorthand for ‘criminals of North African descent’.2