Abstracts of Papers
Steven Corcoran:
Multiculturalism and Universality
My presentation will address the very strange paradox that today, just when it seemed a new multiculturalist politics heralded a glorious post-ideological era, we are no less embroiled in metaphysical fantasies than previously. Making reference to the work of Jacques Rancière, I will investigate the thesis that postmodern multiculturalist politics is but the latest, perhaps most sophisticated, version of the fantasy of the One, of a harmonious social totality. Indeed, what seems to have got lost in today's general political space is the logic proper to the very thing it is most inclined to shout from the rooftops, namely democracy itself. Since in externalising, through the propagation of the multiculturalist paradigm, the very instance of violence inherent to its operation, the contemporary political space effectively forecloses the logic of the singular universal, which Rancière argues is the real truth of the democratic event.
To put it another way, how do we account for the strange phenomenon that within this very political space, which gives the appearance of being on the verge of a new democratic, multiculturalist and postideological age, we bear witness to an alarming resurgence of fundamentalist identifications? Is the real political antagonism, as some would have us believe, between fundamentalist identifications and liberalist multicultural tolerance? Or is this form of struggle rather one which effectively functions to preclude the appearance of a more fundamental democratic logic? I will attempt to reinscribe this struggle in a different way, both to make it less self-evident and to redraw the divisions within the social field in a way that makes room for heterogeneous socio-political practices.
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