Book Reviews

The Politics of the Veil. By Joan Wallach Scott. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007).
The headscarf worn by some Muslim women in the West as well as in the East, the North and the
South of the globe has become one of the hottest issues in the discussion over the problematic
coexistence of religious and cultural differences within and across borders. In which sense can
a headscarf represent a threat, and to whom and for what? These questions are in need of
explanation, given that the garment does not look dangerous, nor does it appear to be harmful
either to the wearer or to others. In a world where the variety of dress codes is endless and where
fashion designers are no longer able to provoke and shock the public with outrageous designs,
such obsessive focus on a headscarf is very remarkable indeed. The country where the controversy
began and has been fuelled for almost two decades is France. In 2005 the French government
passed a law that banned Muslim headscarves from public school; the legal ban, however has not
settled the issue or stopped the controversy, as The Politics of the Veil by Joan Scott shows in a
detailed and well-argued reconstruction of the querelle.
The first aim of Scott’s work is precisely to present the reader with a clear account of the long
controversy which developed in three different waves: in 1989, at the onset of l’affaire du foulard,
when a school principal refused access to school to two covered girls; and in 1994, when Minister
of Education Bayrou issued a directive to schools for banning all “ostentatious” religious symbols.
Despite the hot discussion and the many allegations brought against headscarves, presented as
a sign of religious invasion of the public sphere, of Arab/Muslim resistance to integration, of
family pressure over minors, and of gender discrimination in immigrant communities, these first
two waves of the debate did not stop actual toleration of the contested veil in school. In 2003,
finally, the Stasi Committee was appointed by President Chirac in order to study the problem
and propose a solution which was indeed reached with the previously mentioned law of 2005,
banning all ‘conspicuous’ sign of religious affiliation, hence excluding covered girls from school
admission.
Reconstructing this long story, Scott is careful to point out the background of French pol-
itics during this period. While many commentators have placed the affaire du foulard in the
international context of the growing worries about Muslim countries, in the Middle East, Africa
and Asia, and in the concern for Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, Scott thinks that these
factors played a less significant role than domestic politics. She emphasizes a strict correlation
between the outburst of the veil controversy and the growing popularity of Jean Marie Le Pen’s
National Front party, with its strong anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attitudes. The domestic
problem of responding to Le Pen’s challenge in 1989, 1994 and 2003 provides a much more
salient explanation for the timing and the growing rigidity of French institutions toward the veil
than international worries about Islam, fundamentalism, and terrorism. Yet, considerations of
domestic politics may explain the development of the confrontations, and the final decision for
intolerance, but they do not fully explain the highly divisive climate of the discussion which
cut across the traditional left-right opposition. Besides, even if French politicians felt that the
monopoly of meeting French anxiety about the nation’s identity could not be left to Le Pen’s
National Front, that still would not explain why it was the veil that became the target of the battle
for the Frenchness of the Republic.
Thus Scott goes on to unveil the complexity of the veil symbolism, tracing it back to the history
of French colonialism in North Africa, to the Algerian war and the expression of prejudiced
perceptions of Arabs, identified with Islam, and now equated with immigrants. Scott describes
the meeting of racism and secularism, whose special French interpretation mingles republican
ideas with nationalism, to produce the unique French laı̈cité. Laı̈cité should not be confused with
other forms of secularism, such as the American. The purpose of laı̈cité is less to defend religion
from state intervention and politics from confessional interference than to grant a public sphere
where the equality, interpreted as sameness of all citizens, could be granted.
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Equality as sameness, in turn, implies the exclusion of all differences marking particular affili-
ations, loyalties and membership. Stripped of all special differences, citizens would finally appear
as equal – that is, French – thus granting the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. Scott has an
easy time showing how the myth of universality and equal citizenship embodies the particularity
of French nationalism and effectively enables the exclusion of those who cannot be perfectly
assimilated to the French citizen ideal. As a result, the glorified universality of republicanism is
at the same time illiberal towards differences, and exclusionary to those belonging to groups not
fitting the ideal model of citizen, patterned after the French, Christian, educated white male. Here
Scott vividly exposes the apparent contrast between the French civilizing mission of backward
and inferior cultures and the acknowledgment that North Africans/Arabs/Muslims/immigrants
are in fact beyond civilization.
In this already complex background where colonial history and its imaginary, mixed with the
ideological self-perception of Frenchness, is caught in political struggles for right-wing votes, a
decisive element is also played by gender issues and sexuality. Scott has already brilliantly argued
that the colonial view of the Arabs is heavily gendered and laden with sexual projections both
on men and women. Now such deep-rooted colonial fantasies intertwine with the contemporary
language of women’s equality. A main argument in the veil controversy is in fact the concern for
women’s conditions in the immigrant/Arab/Muslim community. This argument had a dominant
role among leftists and feminists who joined the conservatives in the battle against the veil. Scott
subtly unmasks this pro-women and anti-veil attitude, and shows that, on the one hand, it is
based on the erasure of persistent French gender discrimination and inequality, and, on the other,
it superimposes a meaning of oppression, patriarchal imposition and backward sexophobia on
the headscarf choice, despite the veiled women’s declaration to the contrary. Most girls asserted
that it was their own choice to wear the veil and against their family’s wishes; yet their voices
were silenced and dismissed as irrelevant because women’s freedom was equated with a Western
version of freedom necessarily including sexual freedom. Religious expression, when Islam is at
issue, may be a choice, but not a free, autonomous choice; besides, it is a harmful choice because
it reinforces Islam’s oppression of women in the West and in the East. Hence it is a choice which
cannot be tolerated, and the choosers cannot be properly respected as agents, but only protected
as minors. Republican paternalism is thus envisaged as the right substitute for Islamic/Arabic
patriarchalism.
To sum up: Scott analyzes the politics of the veil in France as a French issue, overdetermined by
a number of different elements coming together against this rather minimal piece of clothing in a
general campaign for the French Republic, in its unique universal enlightened principles, and for
women’s liberation against the obscure and superstitious forces of backward religions and cultures
nurturing fundamentalism and terrorism. Scott’s work is a wonderful piece of scholarship both
in French history and gender and cultural analysis; it is well written and a pleasure to read, rich
in historical details and presentation of the intellectual milieu and idiosyncrasies. It successfully
shows that no issue can be properly understood if not placed in context, and considered in all of
its meanings which only a keen unpacking of history, society and gender symbolism can provide.
All that said, there are two questions left open by Scott’s analysis that engage the interest of
political theory and philosophy. The first is that the headscarf is an issue well beyond France:
not only in Western countries, but also in Turkey, North Africa, Iran and so on. The contextual
specificity of France does not explain the veil as a global issue. I would argue that a proliferation
of local narratives for the various contexts, though useful and important, would not capture the
transnational nature of this symbol. And here is the second question concerning the normative
response to the veil battle. I think that “what is to be done” with the veil cannot just be inscribed
in the unfolding of the mixture of contextual prejudices with ideologies and political strategies. I
hold that we need a proper normative reflection which must be put in a reflective equilibrium with
the contextual interpretation. Otherwise we run the risk of substituting local prejudices and biases
with other, possibly better, ideas; ideas which nevertheless, if not properly analyzed and argued
for, may well be valued implicitly and work similarly as presuppositions and prejudgments.
Anna Elisabetta Galeotti is Professor in the Department of Humanities at the Università del
Piemonte Orientale. Her most recent book is Toleration as Recognition (2002).


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Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. By Wendy Brown. (Prince-
ton and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Tolerance is a strange virtue. This reviewer has always had an aversion to it, at least to the
idea of being its object. Imagine being tolerated. It’s like imagining being a bug that someone
has decided not to exterminate, at least for the moment. To be tolerated is to be deemed abject
without being abjected. Someone who is tolerated is allowed to reside on this side of a political
or communal border rather than the other side, even though most proper members of the social
order would just as soon exile him or her. When I tell my well-meaning liberal friends – or
even my very sophisticated theory-laden friends who have written a hundred books on Derrida
– that I am against tolerance, they look at me aghast. I try to explain myself. I spend hours
walking the streets of Chicago or New Orleans with them, trying to explain this aversion to
tolerance, to little avail, even when I cite the paradigmatic little book on the subject, A Critique of
Pure Tolerance, with essays by Robert Paul Wolff; Barrington Moore, Jr.; and Herbert Marcuse
(1965). In that delightful book (about the size of Frankfurt’s On Bullshit), the authors, “from
very different starting points and by very different routes,” arrive at the same place, concluding
that “the prevailing theory and practice of tolerance turned out on examination to be in varying
degrees hypocritical masks to cover appalling political realities (viii).”
Wendy Brown’s recent tour de force book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of
Identity and Empire, operates in the same vein but in much greater depth. It is a critique of
both liberalism and its dominant ‘virtue’ of tolerance. In it, Brown gives the reader ample
reason to reject tolerance outright but still she urges the reader to become “perspicacious about
the contemporary operations and circuitries of tolerance” so as to develop “a positive political
strategy of nourishing counterdiscourses that would feature power and justice where anti-political
tolerance talk has displaced them” (205). Tolerance per se is not a problem. What is the problem
is what it masks and how it is deployed, often to depoliticize and make disappear a history that has
given rise to conflict and threatening differences (threatening in so far as they might destabilize
identity and power relations) and hence to the ‘need’ for tolerance in the first place. Though she
doesn’t mention it, this is the same history that Edward Said saw giving rise to Orientalism. This
is the long and ugly political history that has given us the binary pair of ‘we’ civilized ones who
tolerate, while attempting to tame and colonize those ‘barbarians.’ The Greeks and subsequent
imperialists had no need for a virtue like tolerance, because the other was presumed to be inferior
and hence effectively and without any necessary ruses marginalized and subservient.
Brown’s history picks up the trail in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with humanist
counsels to tolerate heretics; it continues through a brief survey of the Reformation and then John
Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration,” which called for severing civil or political society from
religious life. “This sharp attenuation of the bearing of religion on everyday civil and political life
enables Locke in the same gesture to privatize religious belief, to render it an individual rather
than common matter” (31). This was a practical “strategy for peace that satisfied almost no
one at the time,” Brown notes, “given their passionate investments in religious orthodoxy and
absolutism and deep convictions about the exhaustive reach of religion” (32). Though it satisfied
no one, the strategy became the dominant one and is keenly felt, though Brown mentions it only
in passing, in the Rawlsian aversion to thick comprehensive doctrines that supposedly have no
place in public discourse. To make way for a pluralist society with citizens of many different
persuasions, the liberal solution is to privatize all the thick dimensions of what had heretofore
been political identity (consider the Puritan City on the Hill, the Jewish transnational identity,
Shariah, etc.) in order to stand as equal members in a liberal society. Tolerance discourses arise
with the emergence of nation-states and their concomitant declarations of the rights of men,
of citizenship, of equality. These rights are accorded to individuals who face the stark choice
between being an individual with all the rights of citizenship or being marginalized as a person
beholden to some other culture. Those whose identities remain thick and somehow transgressive
of the prevailing political order can only hope to be tolerated subjects, not unmarked citizens.
Liberalism overlooks the ways in which all identities are thick; it only remarks upon, that is,
marks, those whose identities are other than the supposedly neutral one of the unmarked citizen.


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In its early moment, tolerance was a political expedient that accommodated heretics and other
religious outsiders. Only recently, Brown notes, “has tolerance become an emblem of Western
civilization, an emblem that identifies the West exclusively with modernity, and with liberal
democracy in particular, while also disavowing the West’s savagely intolerant history” (37).
Now tolerance becomes a token that brokers the West as the civilized order, “delimiting what
is ‘tolerable’ and therefore legitimate for imperial conquest cloaked as liberation” (ibid.). The
bizarre irony is that, cloaked in the garb of tolerance, the West empowers itself to wage war on
those who are deemed intolerant and illiberal. We tolerant ones can only tolerate what is tolerable,
not those who have exiled themselves from the civilized order, including those who deviate from
acceptable norms to an extent that destabilizes the social order.
The subject of tolerance is in a precarious position, a part of, but always apart from a political
community; a borderline subject in a position that has political antecedents that are difficult to
discern in the ways that liberal tolerance discourse focuses on affective responses to the other.
As Brown argues, the language of tolerance serves to naturalize what has been hierarchized
politically. “An object of tolerance analytically divested of constitution by history and power
is identified as naturally and essentially different from the tolerating subject; in this difference,
it appears as a natural provocation to that which tolerates it” (15). The language of tolerance
can be read as a sign of this political history even as it serves to cover over this history. Brown
notes that tolerance becomes a discourse of depoliticization, sometimes by taking what are really
political phenomena and treating them as emotional and personal problems that call for respect
and sensitivity to others, not justice for others. At other times it serves to culturalize politics or
to deem barbaric those who are ruled by their own culture as opposed to those civilized/liberal
people who enjoy but are not ruled by culture (20–21). Liberals estimate themselves as “above
it all” when it comes to culture. Their conceit is that their own universal values are above and
beyond particular cultural norms. They might enjoy a little culture – Shakespeare anyone? – but
they are not ruled by it in the way that the Other is. “In its self-representation as the sole political
doctrine that can harbor culture and religion without being conquered by them, liberalism casts
itself as uniquely tolerant of culture from its position above culture” (23). It is this conceit, and
this masking of power relations, that Wendy Brown’s book lays bare.
The book’s seven chapters provide an array of theoretical vantage points as well as a few
case studies to make its case. Brown provides a wonderfully nuanced and rich reading of the
history of the discourse of tolerance. There is no one-size-fits-all analysis here. In chapter three,
for example, she teases apart how it is that liberal cultures disparage Jews and women, but in
distinctly different ways. The Jewish question becomes one of tolerance in so far as the Jew can be
tolerated so long as his or her religious framework moves from being a quasi-national identity to
a private religious framework. The Jew becomes tolerable when Jewish solidarity is depoliticized
and privatized. But women do not present themselves, at least in the way that liberalism represents
them, as a potentially separate group. “Any essential similarity in women does not imply their
political or social relatedness, their intragroup affinity of solidarity. To the contrary, this gendered
sexualization establishes women’s natural place in the heterosexual family; it produces them as
different from men but not as a solidaristic people or nation” (70). The women question is seen as
one of difference with the possibility – at least for Christian, heterosexual women – of attaining
formal legal equality. In her nuanced way, after this compelling analysis of the distinction between
the Jewish and the women questions, Brown writes that “we cannot be completely satisfied with
this formulation,” so she assiduously moves to a different ground to understand the question of
women. This ground is the way in which “female difference” is cast in a heterosexual order “as a
difference of inherent subjection” (72). Where tolerance functions to keep groups on the border
of a social order, women can be included as members because they have already been subjected
and subordinated – “sexualization functions as a more relentlessly subordinating discourse and is
therefore precisely what permits women’s enfranchisement as political equals ” without the risks
of substantive equality or “a challenge to the masculinist, heterosexual, and Christian norms at the
heart of the putative universality of the state” (73). Women who uphold the state’s Christian and
heterosexual norms are welcome as equals; politically embraced because they allow themselves
to be subjected sexually, they serve to further entrench those norms.


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 Book Reviews 439

In later chapters, Brown seems to channel Foucault, clearly a major influence, with discussions
of tolerance as governmentality and genealogies of how “we are civilized and they are the
barbarians.” But she departs from Foucault in arguing that, despite the pervasiveness throughout
society of tolerance discourse as governmentality, “the state remains the fulcrum of political
legitimacy” (83). Ultimately, she wants to hold the state – and the likes of George W. Bush –
accountable and not let accountability disperse into some Foucauldian field.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of tolerance to criticize is the one that kept me talking through
the night with my friends about the problem of tolerance – the way it has come to seem to be
such an innocuous and important element of a multicultural society. In a country with hundreds
of different ethnicities and creeds, how can we not afford to be tolerant? The background to
this worry is that, as liberalism supposes, we are likely to hate and want to kill the other. The
background is a conception of citizenship as individualized, passive, and isolated, with people
barely able to contain their aversion to each other (88). “Tolerance is countenanced not to dissolve
the hatred but only to forestall the crime” (ibid.). And here is where I find one of Brown’s most
significant contributions: not as yet another criticism of power and hierarchy, but a concern for
another kind of politics that gets washed away in a discourse that equates good citizenship with
passivity toward others, with making nice rather than with political engagement as citizens. Note
this powerful passage:

The retreat from more substantive visions of justice heralded by the promulgation of
tolerance today is part of a more general depolitizication of citizenship and power and retreat
from political life itself. The cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes
a rejection of politics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and
addressed, a domain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation, a domain
in which differences are understood as created and negotiated politically, indeed a domain
which “difference” makes up much of the subject matter (89).

The result is a political sphere that grows ever thinner with citizens left to withdraw into their
private identities, especially as the public sphere divests itself of anything laden with meaning
and purpose. The thinner that public life becomes, the more a threat is felt from those with thick
identities, namely those different from the supposedly thin liberal ones.
The practical expedient of tolerance, as Locke articulated it, served to provide a safe place
for religion; but it also served to sever citizenship from communal identity. With Hobbes and
Descartes, the citizen of the social contract is disembodied, dehistoricized, and imagined as
constituted anterior to and outside the fray of culture, history, society or religion. But of course
this is all a Hobbesian delusion, and the effects of this delusion, as Brown effectively argues,
when backed by the coercive power of the “liberal” West is today a war on terror, a war on
unregenerates who refuse to be tolerated.

Noëlle McAfee is a Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University. Her
books include Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (2000), Julia Kristeva (2004) and Democracy
and the Political Unconscious (forthcoming).


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