ON THE EUROPEAN QUESTION
«ON THE EUROPEAN QUESTION»
by Gil Anidjar
Source:
Forum Bosnae (Forum Bosnae), issue: 55 / 2012, pages: 1327, on www.ceeol.com.
ON THE EUROPEAN QUESTION
Gil Anidjar
for Obrad Savić
A problem, Jean-Claude Milner recalled in his disconcert-
ing meditations on Europe, calls for a solution.1 A question, on
the other hand, calls for a response. Whereas a question implies
a subject, an addressee or interlocutor summoned to answer it, a
problem exists (or is said to exist) objectively; it is the case, in
other words, whether stated by anyone or not. Taking stock of
these distinctions, and of the need to interrogate them, toward a
proper understanding of “the criminal inclinations of democratic
Europe [les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique]” and
of its most notorious “question,” Milner fashionably advocates a
form of integration. He proposes to integrate and unify a vision
and a perspective that otherwise persist in strictly distinguishing
between problem and question, response and solution. Accord-
ing to Milner, what operates here and elsewhere in Europe is a
series of tactical, perhaps even spurious, distinctions, as well as
an unremitting attempt to eradicate all distinctions. And, as he
strives to negotiate between the two, Milner argues that we must
confront the fact that although a question may indeed call for a
response, more often than not, it is treated as a problem that re-
quires a solution. Such is the case at least, and most famously,
with the “Jewish Question,” which was repeatedly referred to as a
question indeed, but was ultimately followed by an infamous and
“final” solution.
Milner obviously recognizes that Europe – in which he makes
a point of including, in their difference, both “Old Europe” and
“the New World” – has had a number of problems, or questions
1 Milner 2003.
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14 Gil Anidjar
(I too will use the terms interchangeably and cumulatively), over
the course of its history.2 And Europe has been quite generous in
offering solutions to others, or unto them, at times going so far as
to promote the practice of extermination as its preferred solution
– another way to abolish all distinctions. But the Jewish ques-
tion is unique, Milner insists, because it ultimately occasioned the
invention of a new technology. This is a technology that aimed
exclusively at cleansing Europe of that alterity, which the Jews
were or were imagined to be. The gas chamber, in this perspec-
tive, is the singular technology that demonstrates the singularity
of the Jewish question. What is this singularity? Milner describes
it at once as a structure of illimitability and as a name, as a struc-
ture that conspires to produce that name (the name “Jew”) as a
problem.3 Thus, although there may be many problems, there is
only one name.
One might wish to remark that, as he distinguishes between
them, Milner is here attending less to Europe’s problems than to
Europe itself as a problem. It is not that the name “Jew” is the
name of a recurring, persistent problem then, but rather that that
name, along with others, points to Europe. Based on the very ti-
tle of his book, the bulk of his erudite argument, and his own
description of post-1945 Europe, Milner himself would be un-
likely to disagree. In fact, he explicitly suggests something quite
proximate to this interpretation. “For the first time in its modern
history,” he writes, “Europe no longer had the Jewish problem [le
problème juif] to resolve. It could finally pose, in realistic terms,
the problem of its unity [le problème de son unité].”4 Clearly
Europe has, or has had, a problem. But because this problem is
the problem of its own unity (which it addressed in construing
a number of – external or exteriorized, subjective or objective
– problems and subsequent solutions), it does not seem too far-
fetched to extend the claim and argue that Europe itself emerges
2 Aside from the “parallel” repeatedly evoked, or denied, between the
“Jewish question” and the “Muslim question,” which will occupy me in
the later part of this paper, there is the “Roma question” and of course the
“Woman question” (see Brown 2006). But one could also speak here of the
“race question” and the “colonial question” or, indeed, of what the French
call simply “la question,” namely, torture.
3 Milner uses the phrase “le nom juif” which might be translated with equal
accuracy as “the name ‘Jew’” or “the Jewish name.”
4 Milner 2003, p. 63.
ON THE EUROPEAN QUESTION 15
as a problem, that Europe is a problem. Still, rather than linger
on this more precise or felicitous formulation, and on the distinc-
tion upon which Europe ultimately founders between (internal)
problem and (external) question, Milner insists on identifying a
privileged question for Europe, one question in the midst of lesser
others, as if that question and that question alone were asked of
Europe, rather than speaking, broadly and together with others, of
Europe as such. Locating the singularity of the Jewish question,
and of the Jewish name, at the center of Europe, while occluding,
or at least deferring the undoing of that which he otherwise inter-
rogates (namely the distinction between question and problem,
between subjective and objective), Milner maintains a distinction
between the Jewish question and other so-called questions. He
separates Europe from its (different and divided, different be-
cause divided) problems and thereby avoids Europe, rendering
more distant the urgent task he otherwise sets for himself and for
us the task of understanding Europe as a question and a problem.
The art of separation
Arguably, if perhaps unintentionally, Milner’s position con-
stitutes an intervention in the troubled field of victim competition
(or even, in the current context, victim compensation). From this
perspective, it can be used to illustrate an argument made a few
years ago by Talal Asad with regard to the operations of politi-
cal power and, specifically, its relation to those it construes and
constitutes as “problems,” the different recipients of its multifari-
ous technologies. Power, according to Asad, does not merely nor
always seek homogenization, for it “works effectively through
institutionalized differences.”5 Distinguishing between victims,
“disaggregating subject populations in order better to administer
them,” is after all an essential instrument of rule. Not so long
ago, Michael Walzer attributed this particular instrumental skill
to “liberalism” and called it “the art of separation.”6 Rephrased in
Milner’s terms, one could say that Europe has all along sought its
own integrity, its unity or identity, but that it has done so through
different, at times exclusive, at times inclusive, technologies, the
institutionalization of others as “problems.” Since “the formation
5 Asad 1993, p. 264.
6 Walzer 1984.
16 Gil Anidjar
of a persecuting society,” at least, Europe has also persisted in
distinguishing between these different problems, producing hier-
archies, and geographies of alterity among and between distinct
groups and collectives or populations.7 Much remains to be un-
derstood here, but one could venture that at bottom there is little
that is particularly mysterious at work, little more, that is, than the
ancient and venerable technology of “divide and rule” – with a
distinctive style. As Talal Asad reminds us, there is no gainsaying
“the frequent hesitations and qualifications the European moral
conscience has displayed when confronted with its own cruel-
ties.” Yet such “a ‘bad conscience’ is no bar to further immoral
action, it merely gives such action a distinctive style.”8
But Milner is not merely attending to technologies of rule
(nor, for that matter, is Asad). He is also evoking the eradication
of all rule by way of extermination. This is objectively important,
obviously, and deserving of careful consideration. Yet we would
do well to recall once again that Milner himself describes the dif-
ference between a problem and a question in the precise terms
of objectivity and subjectivity. Whereas a problem calls for an
objective solution, we have said, a question posits a subject apt
to answer it. Whereas the latter is analogous to a mode of rule
where the ruled are interlocutors of sorts, the former articulates
a relation in which they are no longer so. The comparison could
be extended to a situation of (internal) order and one of (external)
conflict. Interestingly, one of Milner’s own examples is the patri-
otism of modern Jews (a devotion to the nation of their choice)
and their anti-Semitism vis-à-vis other Jews, outside Jews (the
Ostjuden, for example).9 Be that as it may, in order to understand
Europe’s “criminal inclinations,” in order to understand Europe,
it is these very distinctions or set of distinctions (between problem
and question, between objective and subjective, between internal
and external) that we must attempt to reconsider. In this spirit, I
would want to contend that, from the perspective of Europe, ex-
termination and administration, integration and disaggregation,
are part of the same art of separation, the same apparatus of pow-
er which names many names and consistently divides and rules,
distinguishing between problem and question, between objective
7 Moore 2007.
8 Asad 2006, p. 230.
9 Milner 2003, p. 50.
ON THE EUROPEAN QUESTION 17
and subjective, between internal and external. I will soon return
to an argument I have made at some length elsewhere around this
precise point, namely, that the distinction between an internal en-
emy and an external enemy has been constitutive of (the unity of)
Europe.
For now, I merely intend to underscore the fact that one
could argue endlessly over the status of victims, the hierarchy of
significance of their suffering, and the technologies (novel or an-
cient, exclusive or indiscriminating) deployed to attend to them.
It is of course essential to recognize the difference between vic-
tims, the different instruments and kinds of administration, domi-
nation, oppression and eradication to which multifarious groups
have been subjected over the course of time. Yet, the task of un-
derstanding, as Milner defines its, directs us first and foremost
toward the subject of Europe, toward Europe as a subject, and
specifically as a subject of power. It directs us toward the unity
and homogeneity that Europe has sought and continues to seek,
as well as to the unity it has achieved, however relatively and
however unwittingly. It requires that we attend to the differences
Europe has produced, as well as the difference it itself makes be-
tween objective problems and subjective questions, between in-
ternal others and external others, between assimilation and exter-
mination. Surely, Milner is correct in striving to understand that
which he singularizes, namely, the Jewish question. But as I have
already suggested, he is really attending to Europe “itself.” It is
therefore this Europe, the unity of which is a problem for itself,
and for which alterity is a problem and a question, that Milner
ultimately scrutinizes and criticizes. He is after the Europe that
seeks unity and integration simultaneously in the eradication of
difference and in the institutionalization of differences. As I see it
then, the issue is therefore not whether the Jewish question is sin-
gular, whether it can be isolated in relative or absolute terms from
the other problems that Europe has made or invented for itself.
The core of the matter is rather found in Europe as the articulation
of a number of questions, each deserving of attention but never
hermetically sealed from the other. The core of the matter is in
this relative integrity – one might refer to it as the transcendental
unity of European reason, in Europe as a problem and a question.
One could of course object here that Europe has long been
understood, has long understood itself, as a question. Perhaps
18 Gil Anidjar
even too much so. Rodolphe Gasché, for instance, writes that
“Europe’s practice of critically putting itself into question is ...
a regular subject of lament” and that “self-criticism is some-
thing quite unique that sets Europe apart.”10 This perception is
not void of justification. It may even be philosophically rigor-
ous. But, notwithstanding the fact that, by the very philosophical
standards here invoked, self-criticism, indeed, self-knowledge
may not even be possible, and keeping in mind that we found our
point of departure in Europe’s “criminal inclinations,” the often
self-congratulatory nature of its assertion, whereby Europe is the
privileged site of self-interrogation and reflexive criticism, risks
eluding an important dimension suggested again by Milner’s
meditation. As a question, Europe may indeed call for an answer.
But if Europe is a problem, does it not call as well for a solution?
Minimally, as it divides itself and reflects upon itself, formulating
subjective questions and objective problems, as it identifies inter-
nal strangers and external enemies, Europe seems to divide itself
from itself and thereby occludes that which in itself and in excess
of itself poses the very problem it is.11 Internal division is the
result (perhaps also the cause) of a reflective practice (Rodolphe
Gasché elsewhere called it, after Hegel, “the philosophy of re-
flection”), of a repeated attempt to turn upon oneself, to return to
oneself after having departed, taken one’s distance, from oneself.12
Emmanuel Levinas, in whom Milner finds much inspiration,
famously suggested that in contrast with Abraham, who departs
never to return, Ulysses is he whose distant journeys always sig-
nal that he has remained proximate to himself. This ability to
turn onto oneself by staying with oneself, the making of self into
an unwavering object of attachment and of consideration, would
10 Gasché 2009, p. 7.
11 Recalling “the characterization of black people as a Problem” in the United
Kingdom, Salman Rushdie once wrote the following, which provides mo-
re than a mere corrective for the argument Milner makes : “You talk about
the Race Problem, the Immigration Problem, all sorts of problems. If you
are liberal, you say that black people have problems. If you aren’t, you say
they are the problem. But the members of the new colony have only one,
real problem, and that problem is white people. British racism, of course, is
not our problem. It’s yours. We simply suffer from the effects of your pro-
blem” (Rushdie 1991, p. 138). I am grateful to Mayanthi Fernando for this
reference and for her attentive reading of this essay.
12 Gasché 1986.
ON THE EUROPEAN QUESTION 19
be what distinguishes Europe (since that is what Ulysses stands
for), which thus appears to be endowed, as Gasché asserted, with
a rare attribute and perhaps a unique quality, the ability to engage
in critical, self-critical and philosophical interrogation, the ability,
finally, to know itself. “If ‘know thyself’ has become the funda-
mental precept of all Western philosophy,” writes Levinas, “this is
because ultimately the West discovers the universe within itself.
As with Ulysses, its journey is merely the accident of a return.”13
Much as a question that invites no real answer but only a solution,
the journey would be a mere incident, an incidental detour, that,
in Levinas’ indictment at least, remains profoundly solipsistic.14
Jacques Derrida says as much, in his account of Levinas, stating
that “those who look into the possibility of philosophy ... are al-
ready engaged in, already overtaken by the dialogue of the ques-
tion about itself and with itself; they always act in remembrance
of philosophy, as part of the correspondence of the question with
itself. Essential to the destiny of this correspondence, then, is that
it comes to speculate, to reflect, and to question about itself within
itself. This is where the objectification, secondary interpretation,
and determination of the question’s own history in the world all
begin.”15 Whereas the question should turn to an interlocutor, the
kind of objectification here described only turns to and upon itself,
incessantly returning to itself. The journey is thus a mere incident.
And the interlocutor is of no consequence. It should therefore be
clear why, for Levinas at least, history is “a blinding to the other”
and “the laborious procession of the same.”16
Still, Derrida rightly asks “whether history can be history,
if there is history, when negativity is enclosed within the circle
13 Levinas 1990, p. 10.
14 Zygmunt Bauman, invoking Ulysses’ Greek name, asserts the exact obver-
se, though with a comparable result as to Europe’s identity. In this version,
Europe is that which must discover, invent, or conjure itself. Hence, the
tales are numerous in which “Europe was invariably a site of adventure.
Adventures like the interminable travels undertaken to discover it, invent
it or conjure it up; travels like those which filled the life of Odysseus, who
was reluctant to return to the dull safety of his native Ithaca since he was
drawn by the excitement of untasted hazards more than by the comforts of
familiar routine, and who was acclaimed (perhaps for that reason) as the
precursor, or the forefather, or the prototype, of the European” (Bauman
2004, p. 3).
15 Derrida 1978, p. 80-81.
16 Ibid., p. 94.
20 Gil Anidjar
of the same, and when work does not truly meet alterity, pro-
viding itself with its own resistance. One wonders whether his-
tory itself does not begin with this relationship to the other which
Levinas places beyond history” (94). What Derrida points to, in
other words, are the operations of a division within the self. Keep-
ing to Levinas’ terms, the imperative to know is after all directed
at a self that is lacking in knowledge, for whom the object of
knowledge is at once contained in the self (albeit unbeknownst to
it) and in radical excess of the self as well (“the West discovers
the universe within itself”). What, then, is the self, and what the
other? Or, to recall Milner’s formulation, what is the question,
and what the problem? The subjective and the objective? The di-
visions that we have been seeking to undo, and which may even
be said to undo themselves, nonetheless persist in their reitera-
tions, beginning with the gap between the subject and the object
of knowledge. Is the self here a subject or is it its objects? Is it
not rather “the medium of reflection”?17 Divided from itself, yet
unknown to itself – for what, or which, is the self it should know?
– Europe may finally appear as an increasingly fragile subject of
(self-)knowledge.18
Furthermore, whether we are attending to an originary divi-
sion of self and other and to its reiterations, or to iterations of
multiple divisions (self/other, subject/object, inside/outside, and
so forth) matters less here than the urgency of attuning ourselves
to the faltering nature of Europe, to its questions and to the dis-
tinctions it makes between, the hierarchies it produces among,
its problems. For although it has sometimes been treated, as we
saw, as a question in certain contexts (mostly philosophical or
juridico-political contexts), Europe has yet to be singled out as
a problem in need of a solution. Nor has the question of Europe
been quite formulated in terms of who the interlocutors might be
that are likely to answer it. Indeed, upon whom is it incumbent to
answer the European question?
The approach I wish to take here and the divisions to which
I will be attending have everything to do with the European ques-
tion, understood along the lines of Milner’s meditation (no one
knows what the stronger “name” is, Milner points out, whether
it is the name “Jew,” or the name “Arab” or “Muslim.” Only Eu-
17 Gasché 1986, p. 62.
18 See Asad et.al. 1997.
ON THE EUROPEAN QUESTION 21
rope seems to know).19 Underscoring as well the fact of a ques-
tion which has failed to be asked, I have said that Europe fails to
emerge as a question, as a problem. This is so precisely because
of the questions or problems it construes within itself and in dis-
tinction from itself. Instead of “asking” the Jewish question again
and seeking to resolve it, then, instead of performing that division
anew and isolating it still from other problems – and most urgent-
ly an allegedly novel “Muslim question” – as if these were deriva-
tive or secondary, I seek to reflect on the European question. And
I begin from the premise that therein lies Europe’s long sought
unity (“unity is already here,” as Milner writes): the different,
famous or infamous questions and problems that have occupied
Europe, that continue to occupy it in fact, are best understood
as iterations of one European question.20 Again, there is nothing
particularly mysterious here, for another way to formulate all this
would simply be to assert that, for all its self-criticism, and per-
haps because of it, Europe is that for which others are a problem.
It is in this way that Europe is itself a problem, a problem for
itself, and indeed a lingering question.
The enemy’s two bodies
Recall that, according to Talal Asad, power does not merely,
nor always, seek homogenization, for it “works effectively through
institutionalized differences.”21 “Disaggregating subject popula-
tions in order better to administer them” was one of the forms
the institutionalization of difference has taken in Europe and, of
course, elsewhere as well. What is rather more particular about
Europe is the way in which institutionalization has marked and
distinguished power itself. The distinction of spheres (diagnosed
by Max Weber) and the explicit separation of powers (claimed
by liberal democracy) into executive, legislative, and judiciary
are illustrative of this tendency or inclination. And one could lin-
ger here on the analytic and, again, institutional distinction be-
tween, say, economics and politics, whereby the political ideal of
equality is somehow seen as immune to the assaults of economic
inequalities fostered by a particular regime of property. No less
foundational, and perhaps even more so, is the so-called separa-
19 Milner 2003, p. 78.
20 Ibid., p. 81.
21 Asad 1993, p. 264.
22 Gil Anidjar
tion of Church and state, the “secular” premise whereby religion
and politics must be kept apart. Here too Europe has claimed a
Sonderweg, one which I do not think needs to be fundamentally
questioned. For what has happened in Europe is something quite
different from an iteration of the king/prophet distinction found
in some older traditions. The ongoing division of the world that
distributes assets between the Emperor and the Pope, the Church
and the State, and later religion and politics, is not only a singu-
lar contribution of Europe, one it has articulated for itself and
inflicted on others through a variety of missionary and colonial
practices. It is also constitutive of Europe’s unity, a unity Europe
has sought but failed to find at its very core.
To take but one more example: it is well known that sov-
ereignty, though a principle of adamant unity (it is “indivisible
and nontransferable”), has in fact been divided in the figure of
the king’s two bodies.22 I shall not try to settle the matter of this
figure’s persistence nor indeed that of its historical reach. I would
however suggests that it prefigures or simply installs another di-
vide that separates between sovereignty and democracy, the “in-
coherent splitting of sovereignty between the people and the state
in liberal democracy” which constitutes “the contradiction at the
heart of this political form.”23 Such contradictions and divisions
make it important to identify the structural poles toward which
sovereignty and rule are directed, and particularly so when their
lingering effects remain with us to this day. The questions, or
problems, that have been occupying us throughout thus become
constitutive elements, as well as indicators of internal splits at
the heart of Europe. Thus, whereas Michel Foucault posited the
criminal as the obverse of the sovereign, I have suggested that
we attend as well to the “enemy’s two bodies,” the division of a
dual figure that, constituted by and constitutive of the theologico-
political that defines Western Christendom, splits into a theologi-
cal enemy and a political enemy.24
The question of Europe, in this perspective, the European
question lingers quite precisely as the division Europe “itself”
construes between a Jewish question and a Muslim question. Not
22 Brown 2010, p. 51; and see Kantorowicz 1997.
23 Brown 2010, p. 51; Brown here relies on Marx’s famous text “On the
Jewish Question.”
24 Foucault 1977; Anidjar 2004.
ON THE EUROPEAN QUESTION 23
only does Europe divide itself between these questions (complex
hierarchies and geographies of alterity), it also occludes the pro-
found belonging – from Cordoba to Sarajevo, or from London to
Venice and Palermo – of both Muslim and Jew in Europe and as
Europe.25 It ignores the unity of these questions in the location of
their emergence. What I am arguing, therefore, is simply that the
two questions are one. Not because we could easily collapse the
two into one “Semitic” question (although there are some fruit-
ful paths to explore therein), but rather because our focus should
remain on the subject of the question, the subject of power, as it
were, which constitutes itself upon the distinction between the
“body mystical” and the “body politic,” between the theological
and the political, between Shylock and Othello.
Consider that, true to the lines along which Milner traces the
(objective) problem and the (subjective) question, the enemy is
divided between the internal and external enemy. For most of its
history, Europe produced gradations of alterity, and of hostility,
whereby the Jew was the internal and theological enemy, whereas
the Muslim was its external and political enemy.26 The pattern
had been in place at least since Abelard and Aquinas, who con-
ceived of the Muslim enemy as void of theological reasoning. But
it will here suffice to recall that, although Shylock and Othello are
both strangers to the city of Venice, their foreignness registers in
a different, asymmetric manner. The Merchant of Venice, in fact,
constantly reminds us of Shylock’s religion, and though he is also
said to belong to a tribe of remote origins, his association is with
Venice: Shylock belongs to Venice and in Venice he stays. Oth-
ello, on the other hand, is defined by his political associations, his
military leadership, and ultimately, by his proximity to the Turk
whom he has fought and with whom, as a Moor, he is ultimately
identified. He is “The Moor of Venice” (as the play used to be
called). And while it would not be quite accurate to argue that
Shylock is defined by religion and Othello by race, these vectors
nonetheless illuminate the difference between the two characters
across the numerous similarities of the plays. Indeed, the ac-
knowledgment that Shylock and Othello have much in common
25 See e.g., Menocal 2007; Alcalay 1993; Matar 1998; Mahmutćehajić 2000;
Mahmutćehajić 2003.
26 What follows is a summary of the argument I make in Anidjar 2003.
24 Gil Anidjar
begins with Shakespeare himself, making the two plays highly
susceptible to comparison.
However, if this comparability has been noted, it is remark-
able that the wealth of Shakespeare studies has dedicated very
little to attend to it in any substantive way. The questions raised
by the proximity between the two enemies have yet to be noted,
let alone answered. Equally important, if not more so in our con-
text, is the significance of a dramatic association between Jew
and Muslim, which was repeatedly raised as a threatening specter
throughout the history of Christendom. From early Christian re-
actions to Islam as a new form of Judaism, by way of the associa-
tion of Jew and Muslim as undermining Christendom, and all the
way to what Hegel called “the religions of the sublime” (namely,
Judaism and Islam), there have been countless instances – but no
sustained consideration – of anxieties about Jews and Muslims,
or of the subsequent will to dissociate between them, in the Chris-
tian imaginary and in Christian political practice.
We know well that the possibility of an alliance between
Jews and Muslims raised anxieties within Europe, indeed, within
Christendom at large. We also know that the possibility of such
an alliance was simultaneously conjured and denied. Thus again
Shakespeare, who makes the comparison between Jew and Moor;
who depicted Shylock as black (“jet” in contrast to “ivory,” his
daughter, “fair Jessica”), and has Othello cast himself “Judean”
(in one version at least); and who returns to similar themes of
fathers and daughters, marriage outside the fold, anxieties of for-
eignness, and the exercise of violence as opposed to the virtues
of justice. Yet despite these proximities, Shakespeare did write
two distinct plays, plays which have been received as distant and
remote from each other, and hardly worthy of comparative study.
As Shaul Bassi summarizes the situation, “the common theme
of the stranger in Venice appears to have been considered less
compelling than a series of powerful critical categories that have
traditionally set The Merchant of Venice and The Moor of Venice
apart: comedy vs. tragedy, religion vs. race, theology vs. politics,
and, crucially, Jew vs. Muslim,” and “while an unprecedented
number of studies have accordingly made of Shylock and Oth-
ello Shakespeare’s most topical characters, it remains unquestion-
ably difficult to analyze them in the same breath.”27 Everything
27 Bassi 2011, p. 232-33.
ON THE EUROPEAN QUESTION 25
is therefore as if there were two questions, two distinct problems
which do not reflect on the subject who seeks their “solution,”
here Shakespeare, there Europe. And the enduring controversies
surrounding the staging of Shylock, the paradoxical frequency of
such staging notwithstanding, have only confirmed that even ha-
tred – or opposition to it – is not distributed equally. In the space
of these inequalities, in the persistence of these asymmetric ques-
tions, it is once again Europe that emerges as a problem.
The muslim question
Is there, then, a Muslim question? It should be clear that
the least of my intentions is to minimize the presence of Islamo-
phobia, much less to deny the plights and challenges that con-
front Muslim communities in Europe. But rather than single out
a “Muslim question,” I have tried to argue that the succession of
“questions” allegedly raised in Europe should not lead us to iso-
late each as if it were the site of an objective problem (Europe is,
after all, notorious for dispensing “solutions”), or the occasion for
analogies and comparisons that suggest either history’s constant
returns or produce doubtful reductions. We should first recognize
that the identification of a question as such already partakes of an
uninterrogated assumption, an earlier distinction whereby “Eu-
rope” and, in this case, “Muslims” are thought of as distinct and
separate. There is no reason to concede such distinction. In fact,
there are numerous historical reasons to refuse and refute it. Fi-
nally, there are philosophical and political reasons to turn each of
these questions back onto Europe, and more precisely, to argue
that they all partake of the European question.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam – to preserve for now these “re-
ligious” labels – have been a part of Europe since the latter began
to emerge in the Middle Ages (some might argue that Europe as
such appeared even later on the historical scene, which further
underscores the formative role played by the actors or factors
that have been construed as questions or problems). There are a
number of short-hand headings or sub-headings to illustrate the
matter, beginning with the “Jewish-Christian dispute” and the
Crusades to the Holy Land, the Arabic translations of Greek sci-
ence, the conversions, expulsions, or emancipation of the Jews,
the real and/or fantasmatic presence of the Ottoman Empire at the
26 Gil Anidjar
heart of Europe, and all the way to the colonial incursions on the
Islamic world (and obviously beyond), which include the particu-
larly charged importance of the Holy Land, now Israel/Palestine.
And then there were the Muslims (Muselmänner) in Auschwitz.
None of these are mere accidents of Europe, or markers of alter-
ity. They constitute Europe as what it is and has been. They tes-
tify to the co-presence of the “Jewish question” and the “Muslim
question” at the heart of Europe. More important, they make clear
that Europe itself – starting from the fact that it treats these ques-
tions as if they were entirely discrete and extraneous in relation
to each other and to Europe – is a problem, or indeed a question.
Whichever it is, and whether it calls thereby for an interlocutor
(shall we call it a “true partner for peace”?) or for a solution, it
is no doubt looming still. And particularly so when considering
what Milner reminds us of, namely, the criminal inclinations of
democratic Europe.
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