7/27/2019 Laclau Et Al - Discussion http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/laclau-et-al-discussion 1/6 Discussion Andreas Huyssen; Homi Bhabha; Jacques Rancière; Ernesto Laclau October , Vol. 61, The Identity in Question. (Summer, 1992), pp. 78-82. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0162-2870%28199222%2961%3C78%3AD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J October is currently published by The MIT Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/mitpress.html . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Thu Jan 31 22:32:11 2008
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Audience: This is addressed to Andreas Huyssen. Until the very last comments
you made, it seemed that your recuperation of nationhood was not about
political, electoral expediency, but about trying to be in step with what is
happening in terms of national cultural politics in a unified Germany. My
concern is that German national culture in the twentieth century is not
just any European national culture-just as American national culture
understood, racially speaking, in its dominant hegemonic sense, is not just
any European-derived national culture. Those of us who belong to peoplesthat have been trampled over by either one or the other, or both, thus
have serious doubts about the option you're posing. I understand that the
left in Germany has historically had serious problems in terms of estab-
lishing a social base, but I don't quite see how what you're posing is a real
alternative, particularly given the dangers involved.
Andreas Huyssen: I share those kinds of concerns. At the same time-and I'mnot very far at this point in my thinking about the question of nationhood
and national identity in Germany-I have tried to critique a certain taboo
on the left and to show the necessity of opening up a debate on thequestion. No more, no less. I think this is as far as I would go. I could
argue that there should be and that there will be a different kind ofGerman national identity than the one that has been dominant in the past,
and I emphasized at the beginning of the paper that if there were a
productive discussion of national identity in Germany, then the recent
history of Germany (that's why I started by focusing on the various anni-
versaries) will have to remain strongly inscribed within it. Where such a
discussion would lead in terms of electoral politics I have no way to predict;one may very well argue that it might not lead very far. The issue, however,
has to be addressed. Evasion will only strengthen conservative definitionsof nation.
I also agree with you when you say that German national culture is
the same time as we raise this question, for example, in Germany, how can
we think about drawing upon libidinal investment in nationhood in a
constructive way? Is there a way to imagine a nonracist, nonrepressive
libidinal investment?
ndreas Huyssen: That is the question I'm posing with the paper: Do we have to
identify the politics of desire with racism and oppression? I have not, as I
suggested, found an answer for this. But I'm convinced that the question
has to be asked in order to create alternatives. If it does not get asked,
then that kind of political terrain is left to those who are occupying it so
successfully now.
Ernesto Laclau: What keeps some room for hope in the question of German
nationalism is perhaps that today the ideological changes are taking place
in an overdetermined context. That is to say that German national identity
is being asserted in a context very different from that of the emerging
European nationalism of the nineteenth century. The fact that present-
day national identities are being asserted in the context of the construction
of the European Community gives to progressive forces room to maneu-
ver. I agree with you that negating the reality of a strong German identity
is nonsensical. Someone like Habermas was, I think, much happier in theFederal Republic when he was part of a "Westernized," European identity.
Today he must live with the brute fact of German nationalism, and he is
clearly uncomfortable. But I think that the assertion of a German identity
can take place in a variety of ways, not all of them producing reactionary
effects. The overdetermination of the contexts within which this identity
is asserted is what counts, and , as I said earlier, the context of the European
Community puts some important limits on the development of a purely
xenophobic politics.
Andreas Huyssen: Ernesto's comment is very pertinent here. European unificationcontains and alters the ways in which national identities in Europe will be
constructed in the future. The relationship between nation and nation-
state is already no longer what it used to be. But let us not fool ourselves.
Even if the sovereign nation-state disappears, it will only have been dis-
placed by a larger unit-"Europev-that may very well act like a tradi-
tional nation-state toward other parts of the world. And internally, I don't
think for one minute that older national identities will simply disappear
with European unification. Th e widely divergent reactions to the Gulf War
in England, Germany, France, even Czechoslovakia showed how national
histories still determine the thoughts and actions in different parts ofEurope.
Audience: My question is related to postcolonialism and the origins of self, origins
of the other-things that Homi Bhabha addressed. In the process of
enacting equality, do you have the right, the social right, to imagine,
vocalize, and author a sense of "I"-whether collectively or individually
-that would exist in isolation from your history of racism and coloniali-
zation? Because, it seems to me, this issue of postcolonialism doesn't deal
with the whole problem of a homogeneous, postcolonial world. I just
wanted to know if you could elaborate.
Homi Bhabha: It would be precisely the response of a once-colonizing world now
to see a homogenized postcolonial world. That is why it's very important
to mark various different sites of the "1"'s enunciation, as I attempted to
do today. You can turn to Derek Walcott or Toni Morrison or Sonia
Sanchez and see how the question of race and history and identification
was being negotiated at each one of those sites. So the very idea of a
homogeneous, postcolonial response would feed yet again into a kind of
polarization. If we think of the Gulf War, we could address the example
of what appeared from a certain distance to be a coordinated, homoge-
neous response on the part of the-1'11 use the word-Third World. There
was opposition to the Gulf War from India, from Pakistan, and from most
African countries. Yet, as opposed to this, what was interesting in eachone of those responses was the way in which the Gulf War was being used
by groups of peace protesters in each country to oppose their own domi-
nant and, in many cases, undemocratic regimes. So the Gulf issue was
being used in very differently negotiated ways. Further, I think one of the
most interesting nonhomogenizing effects in many Third World countries
was the surfacing of a desire actually to identify with loss. The identifica-
tion was not with Saddam Hussein, with his kind of political regime, but
with other sorts of things: with death, with despair, with desires to mod-
ernize which would in some senses be to destroy. So there are a number
of ways in which that opposition to U.S. policy might be seen to be invar-iant, but it is not. That's the really important issue. It's too easy to homog-