ABSTRACT
To critique the West is to enter a trap. The trap of its identification. To identify a difference specific to the West is to participate unintentionally in its selfdefinition, its self-affirmation as an exception, similar to nothing else. One resolution seems to emerge: to escape from this trap, it might suffice to refuse the possibility of an identification with the West and to maintain that there is no “essence” of the West. This critical gesture risks masking the real effects of naming the West as an exception, and hence participating in the maintenance of its scheme of exploitation and destruction, and its perpetuation in a form that might be rendered literally imperceptible. Dilemma, puzzle, double bind … The identification and non-identification of the West amount to the same thing. Is there a way out of this trap? In shifting the focus from identification of one specific trait to that of a
relation, we can consider how the relation constructs itself over time, and how it might henceforth be qualified as specifically Western. Its fundamental characteristic is that it exhaustively searches for all possible means to deny the very existence of this relation, the existence of its constituent Two, to the advantage of the production of a relation of exception. The Western production of the relation as non-relation obeys the following logic: first, deny its
existence, second, take action so that the denial rings true. This takes the form of extermination, genocide, or the assignment of identities without a future, which is the soft variant characteristic of our “democratic” societies. Without a doubt, 1492 can be figured as the primitive scene of the modern West, as the epoch when the Western relation deteriorated. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain, then the Native American genocide.2 Each time, there was a denial not of an other but of a similar other – not exactly the Same, not exactly the Other. There is something mad in all this, a Western madness. But the madness is not without coherence. This is the source of the pro-
blem: the Western relation solidly links an anthropological project to a political project by way of a cultural project. Hence the following is devoted successively to Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edward W. Said and Naoki Sakai. For the political sphere is not a dimension that is closed upon itself, as a certain Modernity would have us believe, neither is it a “theater of shadows” nor an autonomous will. The political sphere is articulated as an anthropo-technique, from technologies that function to make space between the Self and the nonSelf, sovereign Subjects and the Subjugated, etc. There is certainly, as Naoki Sakai argues, a “humanist” scheme that works at a deeper level than the “national” sphere. An anthropo-technical humanism that results in what Naoki Sakai calls a “bi-polar configuration” – but a denied configuration. This raises a definitive question, or rather a worry: if the Western relation is
so bleak, the roots of evil so deep, how can one hope for the least amount of change? The least amount of remedy? Is it necessary to change civilization?
