p arallax , 1998, vol. 4, no.

2, 25 33

The Cause of the Other 1

Jacques Rancie
re

M y argument does not exactly corres pond to the them e of the exchange of gazes
betw een France and A lgeria. It w ill not in fact deal w ith look ing at A lgeria or w ith
a body of know ledge about m odern A lgerian thought. M y concern is, rather, w ith
the re exive gaze w e turn back on ourselves w hen w e consider an other w hose presence
or absence m odi es the m eaning of the adjective `French and distances the `French
political subject from him or herself. I w ill therefore be speaking of w hat can, w ithout
provocation, be called `French A lgeria, and of the w ay in w hich the ties that w ere
knotted and then unknotted betw een the two terms at the S tate level knotted them
together at the political level, and thus gave rise to a speci c ordering of the relationship betw een the terms `Citizen, `French, `people, `man, or `proletarian. I w ill
attem pt to show how this knotting together has determined a relationship of alterity,
a particular relationship betw een sam e and other that lies at the heart of our citizenship: a concern for the other that is not ethical, but truly political.
The latter opposition is enough to indicate that m y intention is to re ect on the
relationship betw een this recent past and our present, to com pare two w ays of
ordering relations betw een sam e and other, national and foreign, included and
excluded. I w ou ld like to project a few of the questions that arise w hen w e consider
the knotting together of France and A lgeria on to the contem porary ordering of the
gures of alterity (the hom eless, the imm igrant, the excluded, the fundam entalist,
m an and hum anitarianism) that de nes our political eld, or our absence of a
political eld.
That a radical break has occurred betw een two cosm ologies of the political, or
betw een the two system s of relations betw een w orld, history, truth and hum anity
that de ne the rationality of the political, is so obvious that it is now di cult to speak
of the relationship betw een sam e and other. If w e reread the w ritings of those w ho
supporte d the A lgerian cause in 1960, w e are struck by the fact that w hen the
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre com ments on the theses of Frantz Fanon, and w hen
the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu speaks on the basis of his eld w ork, they argue in
terms of categories belonging to the sam e cosm ology. The w ar is seen as a language,
and as a language that speaks the truth of a historical process. A nd that truth-proce ss
is likened to a de nite system of relations betw een the sam e and the other: in the
course of the struggle, a `people w hose identity has been snatched away by colonial
oppression becom es that alteritys other. That `people is not returning to a particularity that has been denied; it is conquering a new hum anity. War is the unveiled and
inverted truth of oppression, and it is com pleting the break w ith a prim al identity.
1353 4645/ 98 $1200

1998 Taylor & Fran cis Ltd

parallax
25

Insofar as it ends the negation that w as colonialism, the w ar is a negation of the

negation. Colonial degradation ends w ith the conquest of a self w hich is new , w hich
can no longer go back to old particularisms and w hich leads to the new citizenship
of the universal. `Like som e tim e bom b, w rites Pierre Bourdieu,
the w ar is com pletely dem olishing social realities; it is crushing and
scattering traditional com munities such as the village, the clan or the
fam ily The peasant m asses w ho rejected the innovations o ered by
the West in the name of a sturdy tradition and conservatism, have
been caught up in the w hirlw ind of violence w hich is abolishing the
rem ains of the past.2

The voice of the m ilitant and that of the scientist, like those of the universalist
philosopher and the specialized scientist, can speak as one because their pronou ncem ents relate to the sam e system of reference points. W ithin this system , the w ar
constitutes an em ergent people; the em ergent people identify w ith the voice of a
truth; history is the m oment of a truth that asserts the closure of a historical form
(colonialism) as the subject that colonialism had w rested asunder becom es a voice
and a people. This system of relations betw een truth, tim e, identity and alterity is,
of course, far rem oved from the system s that govern todays analyses. That m uch is
obvious from the w ay in w hich a contem porary sociologist of Islam describes and
interprets for us a sim ilar phenom enon of `deracination . This is how Bruno Etienne
now explains the rise of radical Islamism:
The Nation-state is destroying com munitarian structures and accelerating the ight from the country side but cannot o er any credible
w elfare provision for individuals, w ho becom e anony m ous citizens.
The reception facilities o ered by the pious com munities, insofar as
they are spiritual com munities, do allow individuals to transcend their
deracination and sublim ate their frustration. 3

This text describes a process of breaking w ith tradition sim ilar to that argued for by
Sartre and Bourdieu thirty years ago. But the w ay in w hich it establishes its cause,
and the e ects it deduces from it, inverts the relationship betw een politics and truth
that underpinned their w ords: the relationship betw een w hat know ledge can say
about the w orld, and w hat politics can apprehend of it. The `cause of the deracination is no longer oppression and liberation. It is now an e ect that is equivalent to
both: the Nation-state w hich, as a m odality of the social bond, is the typical form of
m odernity. Deracination no longer produces the universality of a disappropriation
that has been inverted into an appropriation of the universal. It is no m ore than a
loss of identity, and a need to recover an identity. A nd the spiritual com munity
responds to that need. The process w hich, thirty years ago, w as supposedly forging
a revolutionary m an, is now supposedly forging a m an w ho w ants to transform the
religious law into the law of the political w orld. This inversion of e ects inverts the
political status of the object of social science: w hereas history w as once a process
that turned alienation into truth, local com munities based upon belief are all that
Rancie re
26

rem ain. The social is no longer the instance of the `manifest, or the site w here the
truth becom es a m eaningful political m ovem ent. It is the instance of obscurity once
m ore. But the obscurity of the belief that can establish bonds is now seen as the only
thing that can confer m eaning. It supplies social science w ith both its raw m aterial
and its m ode of validity, namely the relativity that distinguishes it from philosophical
teleologies of truth. Bruno Etienne goes on: `It is because groups require cohesion if
they are to survive that m eaning exists, and not the other w ay round.4
One could sim ply take note of the fact that the w orld has changed, or of the fact
that it is now impossible to bind the four terms `history, `truth , `people and `universal into a process that allow s truth to forge a w orld. We w ou ld then have to conclu de
that the possibility of constituting political objects and utterances w as bound up w ith
a cosm ology and a truth-regime that have becom e foreign to us. A nd w e w ou ld thus
condem n ourselves to having to speak of that political con guration in purely historical terms. A nd yet I w on der if it m ight not be possible to keep the question w ithin
the lim its of the political by de ning a di erent line of approach. The basic hypothesis
is as follow s: belief in a truth-regime is at least as m uch an e ect as the cause of a
given m ode of political subjectivation. If that is the case, w e no longer have to sim ply
com pare the illusions and disenchantm ents of history s relationship w ith the truth
that de nes possible political utterances. We can arrive at a positional com parison
of the political relationships betw een sam e and other that determine belief in a given
historical truth regime or regime of untruth.
I am therefore suggesting that w e displace the argument away from a `historical
analysis centred on the w ar/truth relationship and on the cause of the universal
produced by the twofold negation of the alterity of the other, and in the direction
of a political analysis centred on w hat m ade it possible to inscribe the political struggle
against the w ar, namely a certain sense of the cause of the other. I am using a term
w hich is, for us, o ensive. But it has alw ays been o ensive. To speak of the cause of
the other appears to refer politics to som ething it does not w ant to be, and w hich it
is right not to w ant to be, namely ethics. The w hole point is, how ever, to see that
the other can be included in politics in a non-ethical w ay. Ethics and politics thus
cease to be polar opposites, as they are in the norm al ordering of the relationship
betw een these terms, or w hen politics is seen as a realm of self-interested com munities
governed by their own logics of self-preservation, and ethics as the realm of a respect
for the other governed by principles that transcend political lim itations.
The question of the struggle against the A lgerian w ar, or the w ay in w hich successive
French governments w aged it, did pose a dilem ma: in w hat sense, if not an ethical
sense, could the cause of the A lgerians be our cause? Rem em ber Sartre s preface to
Frantz Fanon s L es D am ne s de la terre . It is a paraodoxical preface in that it introduces
us to a book by w arning us that this book is not addressed to us. The w ar of liberation
w aged by the colonized is their w ar, Sartre tells us. This book is addressed to them .
They w ant nothing to do w ith us, and especially not w ith the hum anistic protests of
our beautiful souls. Our protests are the last form of the colonial lie that is being
shattered by the w ar: the truth of violence is its negation. The truth of the w ar can
thus be seen as a denunciation of the lie of ethics. The paradoxical thing about this
anti-ethical assertion is that, by excluding a cause of the other, it actu ally de nes a
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purely ethical and individualistic relationship w ith the w ar as such. Thus, the deserter
M aurice M aschino justi es his action in terms of the ethics of absolute freedom and
responsibility established by the very sam e Sartre in L E tre et le ne ant : `If I am m obilized
in a w ar, that w ar is m y w ar. It is m ade in m y image and I deserve it .5 Tw o
con icting Sartre anisms com e together here: a notion of history-as-truth that dism isses any ethics of a concern for the other, and a notion of freedom that m akes
the French governments w ar everyones business. The possibility of a truly political
m obilization that could break out of a dialogue betw een w ar and ethics alone, w as
therefore bound up w ith the possibility of a third utterance, an utterance capable of
saying: `this w ar is and is not our w ar.
The w ork of certain historians has recently rem inded us that the starting point for
the big dem onstrations that took place towards the end of the A lgerian w ar w as
17 October 1961. On that day, an A lgerian dem onstration called by the FLN in
Paris w as m arked by savage repression and a new s blackout on the num ber of victim s.
That day, w ith its twofold aspect (manifest and hidden), w as a turning point, a
m oment w hen the ethical aporia of the relationship betw en `mine and the other w as
transform ed into the political subjectivation of an inclusive relationship w ith alterity.
The crucial thing about the e ect of that day w as the w ay in w hich the questions of
the visibility and invisibility of repression becam e interwoven into the three relationships that w ere in play: the relationship betw een A lgerian m ilitants and the French
state; that betw een the French State and `us; and that betw een the A lgerian m ilitants
and `us. 6 From the French State s point of view, the dem onstration m eant that
A lgerians in struggle had em erged w ithin the French public space as political participants and, in a certain sense, as French subjects. The results of that intolerable event
are w ell know n: savage beatings and drow nings. In a w ord, the police cleared the
public space and, thanks to a new s blackout, m ade its own operations invisible. For
us, this m eant that som ething had been done in our country and in our name, and
that it w as taken away from us in two w ays. A t the tim e, it w as impossible even to
count the victim s. A phrase used by Sartre in his preface to L es D am ne s de la terre
helps us to understand, a co ntrario , the m eaning of that twofold disappearance: `The
blinding sun of tortu re has now reached its zenith, and it is lighting up the w hole
country . 7 Now , the truth is that this blinding sun never lit up anything. M arked and
tortu red bodies do not light up anything. We know that now , now that images from
Bosnia, Rw anda and elsewhere show us m uch m ore than w e w ere show n in those
days. A t best, our exposure to them inspires m oral indignation, a pow erless hatred
of the tortu rer. It often inspires a m ore secret feeling of relief at not being in that
other s shoes, and som etim es it inspires annoy ance w ith those w ho are indiscreet
enough to rem ind us of the existence of su ering. Fear and pity are not political
a ects.
It w as not the blinding sun that lit up the political scene in 1961. On the contra ry,
it w as an invisibility, the rem oval of som ething by the action of the police. A nd the
police are not prim arily a strong -arm repressive force, but a form of intervention
w hich prescribes w hat can be seen and w hat cannot be seen, w hat can be said and
w hat cannot be said. A nd politics is constructed in relation to that prescription.
Politics is not som ething that is declared in the face of a w ar that is seen as the
em ergence into truth of som ething truly historical. Politics is som ething that is
Rancie re
28

declared in the face of policing, de ned as the law that prescribes w hat em erges and
w hat is heard, w hat can be counted and w hat cannot be counted.8 Now , it has to
be rem embered that, o cially, the A lgerian w ar w as not a w ar. It w as a police
operation on a large scale. The political response w as therefore a response to the
`police aspect of the w ar, and that is not the sam e thing as a recognition of the
historical validity of a w ar of liberation. From that point onw ards, there becam e
possible a political subjectivation that did not take the form of external support for
the other s w ar, or of an identi cation of the other s m ilitary cause w ith our cause.
This political subjectivation w as prim arily the result of a disidenti cation w ith the
French state that had done this in our name and rem oved it from our view. We
could not identify w ith the A lgerians w ho appeared as dem onstrators w ithin the
French public space, and w ho then disappeared. We could, on the other hand, reject
our identi cation w ith the State that had killed them and rem oved them from all
the statistics.
Insofar as it is a political gure, the prim ary m eaning of the cause of the other is a
refusal to identify w ith a certain self . It is the production of a people di erent from
the people seen, named and counted by the State, of a people de ned by the w rong
done to the constitution of a com monality that w as constructing an other com munal
space. A political subjectivation alw ays implies a `discourse of the other in three
senses. It is, rstly, a rejection of an identity established by an other, a degrading of
that identity, and therefore a break w ith a certain self . Secondly, it is a dem onstration
addressed to an other that constitutes a com munity de ned by a certain w rong.
Thirdly, it alw ays contains an impossible identi cation, an identi cation w ith an
other w ith w hom one cannot in norm al circum stances identify: the `wretched of the
earth or som e other object. In the case of the A lgerian w ar, there w as no identi cation w ith those ghters, w hose m otives w ere not ours, or w ith those victim s, w hose
very faces w ere invisible to us. But an identity that could not be assum ed w as included
in a political subjectivation in a rejection of an identity.
This rejection of an identity could becom e the principle behind a political action,
and not m erely som e form of com passion, for one speci c reason. The political selfdi erence corres ponded to another di erence, namely the juridico-Statist di erence
that had been inscribed for hundreds of years as the di erence internal to French
identity. I refer to the di erence betw een a French sub ject and a French citiz en w hich
w as inscribed by the colonial conquest as the di erence internal to the juridical
determination of being French. The French state had proclaim ed the end of that
di erence at the beginning of June 1958. The point is that its policem en once m ore
underlined it heavily on that day in October 1961 by m eeting out a repression that
di erentiated betw een som e `French people and others, and by distinguishing
betw een those w ho did and did not have the right to appear w ithin the French public
space. The State therefore m ade it possible to subjectivate the self-di erence of our
citzenship, or a gap betw een juridical citizenship and political citizenship. That selfdi erence of French/A lgerian citizens could not, how ever, be subjectivated by ghters
involved in a w ar of liberation w ho w ere now determined to w in their A lgerian
identity throu gh w ar. We, on the other hand, could subjectivate it as w e w ere caught
betw een two de nitions of citizenship: the national de nition of m em bership of the
French nation, and the political de nition of citizenship as a w ay of counting the
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29

uncounted. This did not create a politics for the A lgerians. But in France it did create
a political subjectivation, or a relationship betw een included and excluded in w hich
no subject w as speci cally named. Yet perhaps that nameless subjectivation of a gap
betw een two citizenships did nd a name a few years later in an exem plary form ula
for an impossible identi cation: `W e are all G erm an J ew s . That impossible identi cation
inverted a name that w as m eant to stigmatize by turning it into the principle behind
an open subjectivation of the uncounted, but it did not politically confuse them w ith
any representation of an identi able social group. W hat is it that gives the political
sequence punctuated by M ay 68 w hich som e imbeciles insist on interpreting as a
m utation in m odes of behaviour and m entalities its speci city? It is, I think, the
rediscovery of w hat lay behind the great subjectivations of the labour m ovem ent,
and of w hat w as lost betw een the sociological identi cation of a class and the bureaucratic identi cation of its party. It is the rediscovery of w hat a political subject
( proletarian or otherw ise) is: the m anifestation of a w rong, a counting of the uncounted, a form of visibility conferred upon som ething that is supposedly non-visible or
that has been rem oved from visibility.
It could of course be said that these considerations, w hich should be reciprocal, are
com pletely self-centred. I said that I w ou ld be speaking only of French form s of
identi cation of w hat w as at stake for the A lgerians. But I think it is just as important
to grasp the speci c form of the inclusion-exclusion relationship that established the
lim itations of this political subjectivation. This appropriation of the invisibility of the
dead bodies that had been taken away w as obviously a w ay of not seeing them , and
of constructing an A lgerianness w hich w as no m ore than a category of French political
activity. One m ight argue that there w as a strict correlation betw een this occultation
and the discourse of the A lgerian revolution. For that discourse, the face of the
A lgerian ghter w as sim ply the pure face of a w ar that w as destroying oppression,
and of the virgin future to com e. The abstraction of the other thus corres ponded to
the abstraction of the sam e. On the one hand, the sole relationship authorized by
the discourse of a w ar of reappropriation w as one of external support for the identity
that w as being constituted. On the other hand, the internalizing relationship w ith
the other de ned by French subjectivation of the gap in citizenship w as con ned to
the French political scene. A w ar to appropriate a historical identity and the politics
of subjectivating an impossible identity m erged, even though there w as no strong
political link betw een the two. The leaders of the A lgerian struggle and anti-war
activists thus found them selves colluding in the political erasure of the singularity of
the ght. That erasure had, how ever, diametrically opposed political e ects in A lgeria
and France. In the A lgeria that w on its independence, it m eant a brutal confrontation
betw een discourse and reality as w hat had been denied or repressed returned in so
m any form s. It m eant the unm ediated con ict betw een the people of the State s
discourse, and a population confronted w ith its sociological and cultural reality. For
those w ho lost the w ar, on the other hand, it helped to rede ne a setting for the
political subjectivation of the uncounted. One m ight therefore say that the political
pro ts from this `cause of the other w ere reaped here, and one m ight express the
paradox in the ethical tem inology of an unpaid debt. I think, how ever, that it w ou ld
be m ore pro table to think in terms of amnesia, and to m easure the long-term
implications of that amnesia for our present.
Rancie re
30

A s I have said, the m ost useful w ay to com pare our present w ith the period of anticolonial and anti-im perialist struggles is not to draw a contra st betw een a tim e of
historical faith and a tim e of generalized relativism. The dom inant discourse tells us
that political activity is being constantly underm ined by a disillusionm ent w ith such
faith. It describes an inverted inevitability w hich, by re-establishing fact after fact,
has supposedly destroyed political activitys faith in history. We have supposedly
m oved from the imm ediate disillusionm ent of the Third-World ist illusions of the
1960s to the discovery of the G ulag in the 1970s, to the discovery in the 1980s that
not all French people w ere involved in the Resistance and then, in the w atershed
year of 1989, to the discovery that the French Revolution w as not w hat w e thought
it w as. Political activity has therefore been orphaned, and there is no longer anything
to m ake it a w orld. I have tried, for m y own part, to show that w e m ight have to
take the opposite view: rather than com paring a triumphant truth regime w ith a
disenchanted truth regime, w e should be com paring one alterity status w ith another.
Politics does not exist because of som e faith in the triumphant future of em ancipation.
Politics exists because the cause of the other exists, because because citizenship is
not self-identical.
We do not have to look far to see w hat happens w hen w e forget that di erence. A
consensus identi es the political subject know n as the `people w ith a population that
is broken dow n and then reconstituted into groups w ith speci c interests or a speci c
identity, and the political citizen is identi ed w ith a legal subject w ho then tends to
be identi ed w ith an econom ic subject w ho is a m icrocosm of a m acro-circulation
and an incessant exchange of rights and civil capacities, of consum er goods and the
com mon G ood. This is also a product of or a com plem ent to the consensual
utopia: this is the breaking point w here the little econom ico-juridical m achine takes
on the appearance of the excluded, of those w ho have lost their `identity because
they have lost their goods and because `the social bond has been broken. Petitions
for identity are a negation of the citizenship that includes the other. They can take
two form s: the com munitarian form that asserts only the rights of the Same, and the
religious form that requires only obedience to the law of the Other. Then there is
the pathetic corolla ry of com munitarianism s and fundam entalism s: the `universalism
that fully identi es citizenship w ith a juridical status de ned by the State, and rarely
m isses the opportunity to com bine the principles of secularism w ith the discreet
frissons of racism , or the defence of the rights of peoples w ith the fever of w ars or
reconquest. There is also the hum anitarianism that is de ned as the cause of a naked
hum anity, as the defence of hum an rights that are identi ed solely w ith the rights
of the victim , w ith the rights of those w ho do not have the m eans to assert their
rights or to use them to argue a politics; in a w ord, a `cause of the `other that
retreats from politics to ethics, and is then com pletely absorbed into duties towards
the su ering. U ltim ately it plays into the hands of the geostrategic policies of the
great pow ers. 9
The Franco-A lgerian past cannot be analysed sim ply in terms of the distribution of
pro ts and losses. The dissymm etry of the A lgerian question had imm ediately contra dictory e ects. But that dissymm etry w as not sim ply a m atter of a task that had been
left undone. It w as inherent in the knot that bound together the logic of w ar and
the political logic characteristic of colonization. In a w ar, there is no cause of the
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31

other. The cause of the other exists only w ithin politics, and it functions there as an
impossible identi cation. To forget that contra diction, w hich is know n as the `A lgerian
w ar, is to forget an internal alterity: the di erence internal to citizenship that is the
m ark of politics. We know that, in France, amnesia has returned in the form of the
`immigrant problem and new outbreaks of racism . Like others, I have w ritten elsew here that the `immigrant w ho is the target of these outbreaks is the m igrant w orker
of the past w ho has lost his other name: `work er or `proletarian. A nd having lost
that political subjectivation, he nds himself reduced to having only the identity of
the other, to being a m ere object of pity or, m ore com monly, hatred. I think w e
now have to com plete that analysis. W hat m ade the political identity of the `work er
or the `proletarian operational w as the disjunction betw een political subjectivity and
social group. A nd that disjunction w as the result of an openness to the cause of the
other. It is that w hich allow s that a subject such as the `work er or the `proletarian
to be divorced from the identity of a social group w hose self-interests bring it into
con icts w ith som e other group, and to becom e a gure of citizenship. To forget
A lgeria is to forget one of the fractures that shatter social identities and give rise to
political subjectivations. It is di cult to be politically active `in a w ar. But being
politically active is alw ays di cult. A nd those extrem e situations in w hich politics,
w ar and ethics m ake the question of the other an aporia are also the crucial situations
that allow us to think of the fragility of politics.
T ranslated b y D avid M acey

N otes
1

This text is a transla tion of Jacq ues

Ranc ie re, `La cause de lautre , lignes, 30
(Fe vrier 1997), pp.36 49.
2
Pierre B ourdieu, `Re volution dans la re volution , E sprit ( Janu ary 1961).
3
B runo Etienne, L Islam ism e R adical (Paris:
H achelle , 1987), p.142.
4
Etienne, L Islam ism e R adical , p.143.
5
M aurice M aschino, L e R efus (Paris: M aspero,
1960), p.179.
6
Throu ghou t the rem ainder of this text,
`we/us sim ply refers to a political generati on
tak en as a w hole.
7
Jean-Pau l Sartre, `Prefac e in Frantz Fanon,
L es D am ne s de la terre (Paris: M aspero, 1961),
p.26.
8
For a m ore detailed discussion, the read er
is referre d to m y L a M e sentente (Paris:
G alile e, 1995).
9
The B osnian question is an exem plary
instance of this displacem ent of the position

of the other. It show s that the gure of the

su ering other does not in itself lead to a
politics bec ause this other, unlike the A lgerian
or Vietnam ese other, w as not our other and
did not de ne our citizenships relation ship
w ith itself. Every e ort to launch a political
struggle for B osnia has consisted in the
attem pt to get away from m ere dem and s for
aid for victim s, and to de ne a com m on
interest on the basis of the dichotom y, w ithin
su ering B osnia itself, betw een two notions
of com m unity : the idea of a fair distribution
of populations and identitities, w hich still
subscribes to the `police logic of the
aggress or, and the idea of the m em berless
com m unity of those w ho assum e the pure
contingen ce of being there together , and
w hose only principle of distribution is the
principle that founds politics: the equality of
every one w ith every one else.

Jacq ues R a ncie re is Professor in the Departm ent of Philosophy at the U niversity
of Paris VIII, w here he teaches aesthetics and politics. H is books include T he N ights
of L ab our: T he W orkers D ream in N ineteenth- C entury F rance (Tem ple U niversity Press,
1989); T he I gnorant S cho olm aster: F ive E ssay s on I ntell ectual E m ancipation (Stanford
Rancie re
32

U niversity Press, 1991); T he N am es of H istory : O n the P oetics of K no w ledge (University of

M innesota Press, 1994); and O n the S hores of P olitics (Verso, 1995).
D avid M acey is a freelance translator and the author of L acan in C ontexts (1988)
and T he L ives of M ichel F oucault (1993). H e is currently w orking on a biography of
Frantz Fanon to be published by G ranta in 1998 and on a dictionary of critical
theory to be published by Penguin Books.

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