THE PATH OF XENOPHOBIA: FROM HETEROPHOBIA TO RESSENTIMENT

Alain BIHR [1]

INTRODUCTION

Let me introduce this presentation about xenophobia with a few general remarks in order to be able to have a rough idea of the theoretical stakes of any reflection on this phenomenon. Xenophobia, literally, refers to the fear/hatred of the Stranger. This simple definition is enough to make us aware of the ambiguous theoretical status of the notion. As a particular form of phobia, as a variant on very widespread feelings (fear, hatred, mistrust/rejection of the other), xenophobia requires a psychological approach and theorization, even psychopathological if need be. But because of its object, the Stranger, it goes beyond the strict area of competence of psychology, even in the broad sense. Indeed, the category of the Stranger is not a psychological category, or at least it cannot be reduced to simple psychological categories in general. On the one hand, it is not up to any of us, as subjects, to “decide” a priori who is a Stranger to us and who is not: the status of Stranger is defined in relation to a reference group, in relation to one’s culture (in the anthropological and sociological sense), in relation to one’s selective open- or closed-mindedness towards other groups and cultures. Those determinations do not fall within the choices, preferences, affinities, desires (conscious or unconscious) of any of us in particular, as individual subjects.

On the other hand, the Stranger has another (related) distinctive feature: as a possible object of hatred, which he is in and through xenophobia, he is shared, he is, so to speak, a collective prey. Indeed, we are never alone in fearing, hating, and rejecting the Stranger because he is a Stranger. Our phobia is combined and reinforced with the phobia of other individuals, those with whom I unite against the feared, hated and rejected Stranger. Finally, the last specificity of xenophobia: as much as, in a way, xenophobia depersonalizes its subject, until it becomes melted into a crowd that shares the same hatred, it also depersonalizes its object: xenophobia does not target the Stranger in his position of singular individual and subject, it targets him as a supposed typical (even archetypical) representative of a foreign group. Its fundamental paradigm is not the I/you opposition but the we/you opposition. Thus xenophobia appears from the beginning to be a twofold phenomenon, which can be studied and read in two ways. It can be described either as an ethno-psychological or as a socio-psychological phenomenon. On the one hand, it confronts us with the mechanisms of establishment of a phobic object, a process that psychiatry and psychoanalysis have taught us to know well. On the other hand, it confronts us with processes through which groups, communities, institutions keep out, push away, reject, or even oppress individuals or groups from other cultures and civilizations, precisely on the pretext of their exogenous character. Those processes fall within the categories of ethnology, sociology, political science, institutional analysis, or indeed economy. Thus, any reflection on xenophobia should use both of these types of conceptualization. Furthermore, it should attempt to articulate them and go beyond their unilateralism. In this sense, such a reflection is at the very core of the problems examined in this seminar on ethno-psychiatry.

Therefore, what I am about to offer you is, in a way, to follow the path of xenophobia, which is in itself a twofold path: it will lead us, on the one hand, from the most directly psychological aspects to the most directly sociological and political aspects; on the other hand, from its unconscious foundations to the formations that appear in the subject’s very consciousness. We will indeed cross, imperceptibly, the boundary that separates disciplines which still remain too narrowly divided by the delimitation of their respective fields and objects, by their conceptual approaches and their methods - disciplines whose specialists ignore each other most of the time, and even sometimes look upon each other with distrust and hostility. For it is not only in public that parochialism and, frankly, xenophobia pervade... This path will be composed of three stages, each dealing with a particular concept, each attempting to solve the problems encountered during the preceding sphere. We will thus examine in succession the three concepts of heterophobia, xenophobia and resentment.

I.HETEROPHOBIA AS A DEFENCE MECHANISM AGAINST THE ANGST OF THE LOSS OF SELF

1. It may seem pedestrian to note that, as in every relationship with the other, but certainly with a particular intensity, the relationship with the Stranger is essentially ambivalent. However, in order to point out this ambivalence, one must disregard all the “secondary rationalizations”, be they xenophobic or xenophilous, that come on top of the spontaneous, immediate feelings created by the first encounter with the Stranger, affecting them, imparting them and eventually distorting them. Originally, the relationship with the Stranger reveals indeed its full ambivalence, its combination of attraction and repulsion.
 The Stranger, for the very reason that he is a Stranger, arouses at least my curiosity and my interest. The encounter appeals to my ability to open myself, in general, to the unknown, the new, the unseen and unheard parts of the world. It opens new horizons for me, it lets me sense the presence of another world, or at least another relationship to the world, it tears me away from the narrowness of my own world, of my own social and cultural identity. Straight away, the Stranger can charm me, seduce me or even fascinate me with his “difference”, his apparent strangeness, his exoticism (as: what I perceive as exoticism), through his ability to be or seem what I could probably never be and what I could barely or hardly seem to be.
 But the Stranger also arouses, right away, worry and distrust, like everything that is unknown. He is this other in whom I cannot find the image of myself, the confirmation of my own social, cultural, and even less, personal identity. He confuses me by blurring the spontaneous picture of humanity that I have spontaneously created (i.e. with which my own culture provides me). He puts me to the test of the relativity of cultural identities, denying the pretence of each culture to be the unique model of humanity. He is the one I do not understand or who I understand badly, the one who expresses himself in another language, the one whose actions and reactions are partly unpredictable, whose intentions are unfathomable. I still do not know what he wants, what he is looking for. This ambivalence of the immediate relationship with the Stranger is even reinforced by the fact that it is shared with the Stranger himself. Because I am myself a Stranger to the Stranger, inspiring him with the same mixture of attraction and repulsion that I have a hard time sorting out within myself. This can only add to the confusion that settles in me when I am with him: in summary, my own ambivalence towards him is reinforced by the perception of his ambivalence towards me. An initially ambivalent relationship, the relationship with the Stranger is also, a priori, an open relationship, i.e. a relationship whose fate is not sealed from the beginning. It can evolve in different directions:
 Towards opening up to the Stranger: welcoming and accepting him as a Stranger, his otherness being in this case perceived as an opportunity, as the occasion of a mutual enrichment in and through dialogue and sharing, of a common discovery of what unites us, beyond what makes us different or indeed separates us.
 It can also, conversely, turn out badly, lead to indifference or even to closed-mindedness, to denial and rejection of the other, to his being perceived as a threat to the collective and individual identity. At the end of this process, everything becomes possible. Actually, in most cases, the relation to the Stranger does not lose its initial ambivalence, and remains “in between”, in a combination of open- and closed-mindedness, of dialogue and distrust, of confrontation (not aggressive, however), and reciprocal ignorance. This only goes to underline further the singularity of xenophobia, its marginal and absolutely exceptional character within the range of possible relationships to the Stranger, which contrasts, however, with the extreme spread and generalization of this attitude. It makes the question about the reasons for xenophobia all the more essential. How can we explain this radical refusal to open up to the Stranger? How can we understand this fearful and hateful withdrawal, which, in the best of cases, constitutes a real self-mutilation, and in the worst, paves the way for genocide?

2.What psychoanalysis has taught us about phobia in general will provide us, if not with a direct answer to this question, at least with a hypothesis which will lead to a possible answer. The phobic symptom appears as an irrational and irrepressible fear inspired by an ordinary, indeed familiar, object, deed or situation. As such, it occurs in the clinical picture of various neuroses, indeed psychoses. It is, however, within the framework of what he has eventually identified as anxiety hysteria that the distinctive mechanisms of phobia have been most thoroughly studied by FREUD. Let me outline the two main points here:
 He analyses phobia as the result of the projection on an outside object of an affect of anxiety, separated from its representation by repression. Through this shift, the subject aims at binding this anxiety again, so that it can be mastered and that he can free himself from it through avoiding behaviour, keeping the phobic object at a distance. Phobia is thus a projective defence mechanism against anxiety.
 The phobic object is itself related to the repressed representation, following the usual mechanisms of displacement and condensation: it can have the value of a metaphor and/or a metonymy, or even a symbol. In other words, what is feared, hated, pushed away into the phobic object is an unconscious representation (or a complex of unconscious representations) of the subject, which is a cause of anxiety for him: it is an element of the psychological life of the subject himself, unacceptable for him, and made even more foreign by the process of repression.

My hypothesis is that xenophobia can be understood in this way - more precisely, that it can be analyzed according to the pattern of phobia in the psychiatric sense. It would result from the projection onto the Stranger of elements which belong to the subject but are repressed by him, that he does not want to know or the responsibility for which he is unwilling to assume, depending on the case, notably because they are a cause of anxiety, and from which he attempts to free himself imaginarily, since he cannot effectively free himself from them. Thus, what is feared, hated, rejected in the Stranger may merely be a part of ourselves that we refuse.

Before I elaborate further upon this hypothesis, I would like quickly to show how it sheds light on a paradoxical aspect of xenophobia, which has until now seldom been discussed, except by Jacques Hassoun. The Stranger who is targeted by xenophobia is necessarily close, and the closer he is, the more he is hated and rejected. This proximity should not be only and essentially understood as spatial proximity: the Stranger hated by the xenophobe is not only a neighbour, often living next to him, but also a Stranger who is as un-foreign as possible, so to speak, a Stranger who differentiates himself as little as possible, through his social and cultural features, from the group of belonging and/or of reference of the xenophobe. For instance, the assimilated Jew at the beginning of the century or during the thirties, or the North African or Turk in the process of integration - more than the Asian or even the black African, in present-day French society. We find here the difference that Jean-Marie Heinrich outlined the last time with (You) and (Them). This paradox can easily be explained within the framework of the preceding hypothesis: the closer the Stranger is - the more alike he is - the better he can be used as a medium on which to project the unacceptable in oneself, the easier it is to bind what one refuses in one’s self in him through displacement and condensation. If it is true that, through the Stranger, it is a part of himself that the xenophobe fears, hates and rejects, then the more identical the Stranger is to the xenophobe, the more easily he can serve as a xenophobic object.

3.The preceding interpretive hypothesis of xenophobia is obviously still far too broad to be satisfying. We especially have to specify from what particular anxiety the xenophobic subject seeks to free himself, and correlatively, why this anxiety is fixed on the Stranger. In order to tackle this question, we first have to resort to a broader category, that of heterophobia, phobia of the other, without that other necessarily being a Stranger. Heterophobia, at least to my knowledge, is not, strictly speaking, a clinical category: actually, I borrow it from a sociologist, Albert Memmi, who introduced it in order to analyze the complex of relationships and representations that racism constitutes. However, psychiatry has long described certain phobic symptoms that provide a particularly good illustration of heterophobia: here I am thinking about contact phobia, which Pierre Lagarde mentioned in one of the two clinical cases he told us about in December. Considering the very broad character of the phobic object in this case (the other), we can expect that the anxiety that it derives from and counters is itself a broad anxiety. I am going to make the assumption that this anxiety is no less than the anxiety of the loss of self. I am fully aware that when I speak of anxiety of the loss of self, I subject the concept of anxiety, in the classic psychiatric and psychoanalytical sense, to a displacement. Here we are not dealing, or at least not only and not immediately, with a libidinal anxiety, but rather with an existential anxiety. I can only hope to convince you of the heuristic impact of this hypothesis with the following explanations. The anxiety of the fear of self lies, strictly speaking, in the very heart of the human condition. Indeed, as contemporary philosophy - especially the existentialist movement - has ceaselessly proclaimed, man does not content himself with living like an animal, he is a being that ex-ists, from the Latin ex-stare (stand outside of), that is, precisely, a being who constantly stands outside of what he is, at a distance from himself, never in a position to own himself completely, always partly losing himself as soon as he owns himself or thinks he does- that is, to be one with himself. It seems to me that psychoanalysis says nothing different when it defines man as a being of desire, characterized by lack, constantly escaping himself. The anxiety of the loss of self is nothing but the reverse side of the desire to be oneself, to form a unity with oneself, to ensure one’s identity and stability, a desire that is always frustrated, whose operations are eternally destined to be compromised, and thus a desire which is always revived, with its unavoidable share of anxiety. This broad existential anxiety is obviously going to take shape through the incidents of the subject’s relationships with others. We will encounter some typical examples later on. It is also in the light of these incidents that this anxiety either grows or diminishes - without ever disappearing entirely.

At any rate, I will defend the hypothesis that heterophobia, the phobia of the other, is a projective defence developed by the subject against the essentially fantasized prospect of the loss of self, an eminent cause of anxiety. Generally, this loss can be fantasized in two different ways:
 On the one hand, as a separation with oneself, the loss of what constitutes my self, in other words as alteration, becoming-other, practically alienation (becoming-foreign). We can already see xenophobia looming here, but let us not hasten in our analysis.
 On the other hand, as the abolition of every separation with the other, the fusion-confusion with the other, in other words as a both pervasive and corrupting otherness of our own identity, as the being-other able to absorb us. Here again, we are close to xenophobia. Apparently, it is essentially in this latter guise that the fantasy of the loss of self seems to be at the core of heterophobia. This is what contact phobia notably illustrates. But here we can make the assumption that the other thereby rejected and kept at bay undergoes that fate also because he represents what I myself fear to become, he represents a possible form of my own alteration, indeed alienation. In short, by keeping the other at bay, refusing his contact, the heterophobic subject attempts to ward off both the spectres of his own becoming-other and of a possible being-other.

Heterophobia, indeed, revolves around an anxiety of separation, a twofold anxiety, since it is simultaneously the anxiety of the presence of a separation (fear of being separated from oneself, and in a broader sense of what makes one’s identity) and/or the anxiety of the absence of separation (fear that the separation between one and the other might be abolished). The notion of separation obviously presupposes the existence of a border. It is precisely this border which causes a double anxiety to the heterophobe: because of its possible absence, which would pave the way for a confusional connection with the other, but also because of its presence, of the limit it points out, whose possible crossing would nonetheless place the subject in a position where he might lose himself. Here, I find again the “cord” that Pierre Lagarde has woven around this notion of border and limit at the end of his presentation. Let me point out that, in the case he has described at length to us, precisely a case of contact phobia, what particularly caught my attention is the phobia of the window. Indeed, when you think about it, a window has this twofold and ambiguous character, in the sense that it is a separation... and that it is not one (or barely): it is therefore particularly suitable for representing the double anxiety of the presence of the separation and of its absence, which I place at the core of heterophobia. There is another characteristic symptom of heterophobia which this case of contact phobia illustrates perfectly, but which has perhaps not been stressed enough by Pierre Lagarde: it is the obsession with what is “propre” (“clean”). We should take the French word “propre” in its triple meaning: tidy and stainless, object of property (“own”), and, finally, what refers to a being, ensures his constitutive identity. Contact phobia is indeed not only the phobia of the stain, it is also and more importantly the phobia of the loss of what belongs to me and the phobia of the alteration of what I am: those are manifestations of the anxiety of loss of self. What is actually the stain itself, deep down? On the one hand, it is a trace that the non-me (the others, the world in general) leaves on me, as soon as the separation between the world and me is not ensured anymore - and we know that, strictly speaking, this separation is impossible. On the other hand, the stain is what threatens to alter me seriously, what degrades me, what makes me lose my dignity, almost what can make me unrecognizable by the others and even by myself, in other words what introduces a separation between me and myself (here between me and the narcissistic image I have of myself). We find again this twofold anxiety of the absence and presence of separation.

4.What I have just said about heterophobia in general obviously works for xenophobia in particular. But I have to go on further with my hypothesis, in order to point out and define the specificity of the latter. For xenophobia is the hatred of this particular category of “others” that is the Stranger. This is the time to remember what I was saying about the category of the Stranger in my introduction: that is, it is not only or even fundamentally a psychological category, but rather and primarily an ethnological or sociological category. We can therefore assume that the objects of xenophobic projection are elements of the social experience of the subject, by which I mean conscious and unconscious elements of the way the subject experiences society: his relationships with the other members of his group of belonging and/or reference, his relationships with the social institutions, his relationship to society in general and its future.

I am now going to make the assumption that what is at the core of xenophobia is the anxiety that the experience of the social scene generates, or more exactly the way in which this experience specifies the anxiety of the loss of self by reactivating certain childhood anxieties. This is what the second part of my presentation will deal with.

II. XENOPHOBIA: THE SOCIAL SPHERE AND THE FIGURE OF THE STRANGER

Several authors have formulated the hypothesis that the social sphere is unconsciously experienced as a metaphor of the family sphere, that, for instance, society as a whole is fantasized as an almighty Mother, both tyrannical and beneficent, whereas the social authorities are fantasized as a Father, guardian and guarantor of the Law, but also occasionally likely to take advantage of or even break the Law. In that case, the subjective experience of the social sphere would inevitably cause an anxiety that reactivates those related to the experience of the family sphere. This anxiety is reduced or, in contrast, grows, depending on the objective circumstances, i.e. according to social processes that are not directly related to the stakes and conflicts of the family sphere. Let us take a closer look.

1.Psychoanalysis has taught us among other things that the childhood experience of the family sphere is a necessary source of anxiety, of a multiform anxiety. First, abandonment anxiety. The total dependence of the child (especially the new-born) on his parents generates the fantasy of the parents’ almightiness (especially the mother), and also causes inevitable frustrations for the child. Both of these elements added up lead to the apparition in the child of the fantasy of abandonment. This abandonment anxiety is, among other things, at the root of the fantasy of the bad/evil Mother. This anxiety finds itself reinforced by the reactive aggression of the child towards the parents and by the guilt which comes with this aggression.

Next, the anxiety of destruction of the mother, which Melanie Klein has stressed. This anxiety is linked precisely to the aggression that the child develops towards his mother as a reaction to the frustrations that he undergoes because of his dependence, and that he tends to interpret as manifestations of the lack of goodwill from the mother. This aggression generates the fantasy of destruction of the mother, a fantasy that obviously contradicts the love that the child feels for his mother and that the mother feels for him. Because it generates such a fantasy, this aggression becomes a source of anxiety and guilt.

Lastly, castration anxiety: at least in boys, an anxiety generated by the threat of castration by the father (in most cases itself fantasized), therefore anxiety of loss of the penis as sexual object, especially as an object related to the desire and seduction of the mother. Castration anxiety is thus related to the desire of breaking the Law of the Father (incest prohibition). What we have here is, in various forms, the anxiety of the loss of self. This is especially the case for the anxiety of destruction of the mother and the anxiety of castration, where it appears as an anxiety of the loss of the object which the subject, in both cases, turns into a narcissist attribute, i.e. an essential element of his own psychological constitution. We should point out here that the fear is indeed about alteration and not otherness, the potential introduction of a separation (of oneself with one’s self) and not the absence of a separation with the other.

2. We can, at least up to a certain point, make an analogy between the situation of the child in the family sphere and the situation of the adult in the social sphere. I will indicate the limits of this analogy, which will partly contradict the conclusions I am going to draw from it, at a later point. They will force us to see these conclusions within a broader framework.

This analogy is primarily based on the dependence of, in one case, the child on his parents, and in the other, the adult on the institutions in charge of maintaining the social order, ensuring its reproduction, and in a broader sense on the society in general or the partial group whom he belongs to. It is this dependence which, in the case of the child, can lead to the fantasy of abandonment and the anxiety that comes with it, as well as to the fear of the destruction of the mother which would deprive the child of his chosen love object. In the case of the adult, this dependence leads to:
 on the one hand, the fear of a possible exclusion from the group. This exclusion can go from banishment to pure and simple elimination, a fear that inevitably reactivates the anxiety of infantile abandonment
 on the other hand, the fear of destruction of the social authorities, or even the whole social order, which would no less threaten his individual existence, a fear that can be seen as a symbolical equivalent to the fear of the destruction of the mother.

An analogy can also be made between the ambivalence of the feelings of the child towards the adult and that of the feelings of the adult towards the social authorities: an ambivalence that, each and every time, is rooted precisely in a situation of dependence. For the child, and even more so for the newborn, the parents are a source of both pleasures and frustrations, notably because they do not fulfil all of his desires, and they forbid the fulfilment of some of them - this leads to a combination of love and hate, which in turn generates anxiety (notably, fear of the destruction of the mother, fear of punishment by the father) and also guilt. A complex of attitudes and affects characterizes the adult in his relationships to the social authorities, who represent, to him, both an authority that gives him the chance to live (be taken care of, protected, recognized, etc.) and a cause of frustrations, notably prohibitions, or indeed oppression. What can be feared here is, again, the destruction of these authorities (especially as, furthermore, this destruction is wanted) and also their repressive reaction to any show of hostility towards them.

This analogy is finally justified by the fact that the social law, which is guaranteed by the social institutions, is obviously a metaphor of the Law that the father represents for the child, and that the complex of affects and representations which leads but also overwhelms the child in relation to the latter (desire to break the law, anxiety in the face of punishment - castration), can be traced to the adult within his relationship to the social law and the authorities that defend it.

I hereby formulate the hypothesis that it is from this set of anxiogenic representations (exclusion by the social group, destructive aggression against social authorities, repressive reaction of the latter, extending and reactivating the childhood anxieties related to the family sphere) that the xenophobic subject seeks to free himself by projectively fixing them on the Stranger. In this operation, the Stranger is set up and transformed into a metaphorical, indeed symbolical and almost mythical figure. On the one hand, some of his real features are selected and at the same time de-contextualized in order to become the metaphorical (symbolic, mythical) equivalent of the anxiogenic representations of the subject. On the other hand, and with the same aim, the projection adds to this mutilated picture of the Stranger a certain number of features that are completely foreign to him, so that in the end the figure that the Stranger has been transformed into is probably very meaningful to the xenophobe, but has little left to do with the real individual (or group) targeted. And it is this figure of the Stranger - in which and behind which the real Stranger is hidden - that the xenophobe fears, hates, rejects. But what is this new figure of the Stranger? It is without doubt what the subject is afraid of becoming, but also what he would like to be but cannot because it is forbidden (by the social authorities, as Father figure) and that he consequently forbids himself to be. Let us expand on these two points.

To the xenophobe, the Stranger firstly represents what he may fear to become one day, that is precisely someone foreign to the social group to which he belongs himself. I mean by that:
 someone who is excluded, marginalized, kept out, left to his own devices, who is not (anymore) part of the group of reference, for whom it is forbidden or at least difficult to take part in normal social life, thus deprived of a number of normal attributes of the members of the group, in short a being in a state of dereliction
 also, someone who is punished, physically, socially and symbolically made inferior, target of disgrace, scorn or hatred of the whole group, whose identity of reference is denied, who cannot take part in the power of the group of reference of the xenophobe and its members. We can hear, in each case, the echo of the double anxiety of abandonment and castration.

Inversely, to the xenophobe, the Stranger represents just as well what he would like to be himself but that he cannot be because it is forbidden by the social authorities, and that he forbids himself to be, because of anxiety and guilt. That is essentially:
 the one who attacks the symbolic equivalent of the Mother on the social sphere, that is society itself as a whole and with its own identity, therefore the one who works on the subversion of the social order
 more fundamentally, the one who breaks the Law of the Father, thereby attacking the very foundation of the social order. Of course, we have the echo of the subject’s own desires of breaking the law, which bear the stamp of taboo and guilt, as well as the echo of his aggression towards the social authorities and the social order in general. Let us point out that we are dealing with an often mentioned paradoxical feature of xenophobia and racism: the tendency to overestimate the Stranger (contrasting his massive depreciation), the tendency to attribute to him formidable power. Hence the common fantasies about the (generally male) Stranger’s sexual activity, his power of seduction and the threat he constitutes to girls’ virtue and the fidelity of wives, etc. Indeed, the xenophobe himself cannot escape a certain ambivalence towards the Stranger: the latter represents, unconsciously, both what he would like to be and what he forbids himself to be. His rejection and hatred of the Stranger matches his jealous admiration towards him.

3. My analysis is based on the idea that the experience of the social sphere is, generally and, in a way, as a matter of principle, a cause of anxiety and guilt for the subject, thereby reactivating the complexes of affects and representations related to the anxiogenic and guilt-inducing experience of the family sphere. As a matter of fact, the experience of the social sphere also depends on this sphere itself, on the way it is structured, of the processes that produce it, the contradictions and conflicts that undermine it, upset it and tend to destroy it. In other words, objective processes (economic, social, political) which, depending on the case, make the feelings of anxiety and guilt, which the experience of the social scene can give birth to or reactivate in any subject, grow or diminish. It is time to say a few words about them now. I will deal mainly with the socio-historical processes that are likely to increase the reactions of anxiety I have been describing, and thus to reinforce the tendencies to xenophobia.

a) This will first lead me to return to the difference between “societies without history” (still called primitive societies) and “historical societies”. It is probably even more accurate, with Lévi-Strauss, to adopt the terminology of “cold history” societies (which transform themselves only slowly) and “hot history” societies (which can experience quick, sometimes catastrophic, upheavals). In relation to the former, the latter have three major features that are likely to reinforce the xenophobogenous mechanisms, especially as they have become more and more marked throughout history.

The first feature is the opening up to other societies, other political organizations, other civilizations. This opening up takes place under the effect of the development of both market relations and politico-military confrontation over control of the territory and its resources. This opening up confronts the members of the various societies with other lifestyles, other rules, other beliefs, other gods, etc. but also with the concurrence, or even the prospect of domination by the Stranger. In short, it puts them to the ever trying test of otherness, and furthermore a potentially hostile otherness. Open to other societies, in a both cooperative and conflicting manner, historical societies are also divided societies, fragmented and torn into hierarchies and rival social groups (castes, orders, classes), fighting over the appropriation of material wealth and political power. These groups conflict because of their lifestyles, the way they are, their moral, political, religious (etc.) representations. They establish highly powerful material, institutional and symbolic barriers between them. In other words, historical societies generate endogenous figures of otherness and foreignness while they find themselves constantly faced with the necessity of reconstituting the political and symbolical unity that their division denies. From this twofold point of view, xenophobia appears as a system that is necessary for the symbolic economy of historical societies: it enables the reconstitution of social unity by exporting internal divisions and conflicts, hiding the internal origin of the latter - for which exogenous figures are held solely responsible.

Historical societies add a third and even more difficult test to these two: historical alienation. By this I mean that societies enter history through the process by which their fate escapes them, seems to respond to obscure forces over which their members have no influence left, when it actually results from the deeds and activities of all their members. These deeds and activities combine in such a way that the general result escapes the control, and simply, the awareness of the individuals and the groups who make up society: in short, their own collective work (society and its fate) is something that becomes foreign to the social forces. This can be explained by the development of the division of work, by the separation it creates between the activity and the individual’s interest, on the one hand, and the collective interest and the general fate of society on the other hand, by the aforementioned division of society in rival groups (castes, orders, classes) - the whole being in relation with the development of the market mediation of the act of work. On all of these points, Marx and Engels have left decisive pages in the first part of The German Ideology.

Thus, within historical societies, the social sphere becomes foreign to individuals, they become, to a certain extent, foreigners to their own world. We grasp immediately how such an experience can reinforce the anxiety of being excluded, marginalized, left behind, in short the anxiety of abandonment: here, more than ever, the Stranger onto whom this anxiety is displaced by projection embodies the figure of what we fear we might become, or even what we have already become and refuse to acknowledge and be anymore - precisely, a Stranger to our own world.

b) These various features are shared by all historical societies. However, they are to be found even more intensively within present-day capitalist societies.

On the one hand, they contribute to the world’s market unity, and the world market puts all social groups, all cultures, all civilization areas to the test of their universal confrontation. Nowadays, nobody can escape encountering the Stranger: the social sphere has today spread over the whole world and confronts everyone with multiple foreign figures, whose number grows continuously.

On the other hand, capitalist societies are class societies, in other words societies in which the individual’s social status is not settled once and for all by his birth or by unchanging institutional rules, like in societies of castes and orders. Therefore, they make individuals face a permanent instability of social situations, in particular the spectre of their own relegation, of their own fall, of their own decay. The anxiety of exclusion and of belittlement can only be reinforced. Finally, within these societies, historical alienation is greatly worsened. All social activity is subordinated, through a set of mediations (from the legal system, the state, the media, etc.), to the unbridled flow of capital. It is an unbridled flow in the sense that no one controls it anymore, neither the big trans-national industrial and financial conglomerates that are nonetheless its direct agents, nor the States that act as its administrators to their respective populations, nor these populations themselves who are subjected to its “iron hand” in all its rigour and impersonality. The social sphere, indeed, appears more and more as a machinery of worldwide dimensions, able to mercilessly crush or exclude any of us. We can see how such a situation is likely to reactivate the anxiogenic image of the bad/evil Mother, as well as the reactive aggression and infantile guilt which are linked to it.

But capitalism does not only intensify the processes, shared by all historical societies, through which the experience of the social sphere is transformed into an anxiogenic experience, thus making it an often traumatic experience for a number of our contemporaries. It adds two specific processes, which make the subjective conditions of this experience even worse. The first one is the recurrence of the crises within the capitalist economy. Not only does the operating of this economy create, through its very dynamics and its fluctuations, the conditions of permanent instability of the individuals’ material situation, but, periodically (every thirty or forty years), it undergoes structural crises which entail challenging all the preceding, social, institutional and economic balances. Such structural crises in turn damage the psychological stability of the individuals themselves: they are submitted to an intensified pressure from competition and confronted with unemployment and social insecurity. Thus their future becomes uncertain, when it does not confront them with the spectre of the fall into misery and exclusion, which are obviously anxiogenic perspectives, likely to reactivate the anxiety of the (social) loss of self. As we are currently going through such a period, and that we can see its social as well as mental consequences on a daily basis, I shall not insist further.

In addition to that, we have the effects of the chronic crisis of meaning which plagues capitalism. I had the opportunity to give a lecture on that subject last year in this very seminar, entitled “The ordinary traumatism”. Let me simply remind you that, by “crisis of meaning”, I mean the lack of symbolic order in capitalist societies, the inability of most of them to offer/impose on their members a framework of references (standards, values, ideas) which would allow them to give meaning to their existence, i.e. to find a place in the world, to communicate with others, to build a personal identity. I cannot come back to this analysis in detail here. I will only point out that, to me, this lack of symbolic order is also deeply anxiogenic, generating a multiform feeling of alienation: for want of a symbolic framework of reference, the subject becoming at once foreign to the world, to others, to himself. In short, by making the social sphere undecipherable, transforming it into an incomprehensible and disturbing universe, impenetrable and elusive, this chronic crisis of meaning reinforces all the psychological mechanisms that generate heterophobia and even xenophobia.

III. RESSENTIMENT AS REACTIVE SYNTHESIS

1. I am now moving on to the last part of my lecture. Indeed, my analysis of the mechanisms that generate the hatred of the Stranger is not yet complete. Because the preceding developments, which have enabled me to go from the general category of heterophobia to the more relevant category of xenophobia, the latter being rooted in a few major social processes, reveal a double limit and a double difficulty.

First, about the conclusions we can draw from them. I have indeed successively shown that the experience of the social sphere is always, in a way, likely to reactivate the complex of anxiety, reactive aggression and guilt that is formed with the experience of the family sphere, and, as a result, likely to fuel xenophobical reactions; then, that the processes of historical societies can only intensify these mechanisms; finally, that capitalist societies, through different means, reinforce this determinism. Obviously, these general processes hit individual and social groups with varying intensity, according to their position within the social hierarchy, but in the end, nobody is protected from their material and psychological, real and imaginary consequences. Thus the conclusion: we should all be xenophobes, at least potentially.

The fact that this conclusion is so extreme shows that it is, at least partly false: this is why I have used the conditional to introduce it. Before I duly rectify it, I would like to point out that the exaggeration might not be as big as it seems, if we consider that our century will go down in history and the memory of humanity as having inaugurated the era of universal massacres, from the two world wars to the various genocides (Armenian, Jewish, Gypsies) to colonial wars. The common denominator of these massacres was precisely the reputed foreign character of the victims in their torturers’ eyes. Needless to say, from Bosnia to Rwanda, this series of slaughters continues. And each and every time, they massively enlist not professional killers, but ordinary individuals, who, overnight, find mortal enemies in their neighbours, whom it becomes urgent to banish or even, quite simply, to shoot on the spot. Far more than common sense, as Descartes, the hopeless rationalist, thought, it is today xenophobia that is one of the mostly widely shared things in the world, so to speak.

Nonetheless we are not all xenophobes in reality, and even during the worst situations, when xenophobic hatred is let loose and that the hunt for the Stranger is officially open, we always find at least a minority of individuals who do not go in for the kill, and furthermore, take upon themselves to defend potential victims, at the risk of becoming one of them. Hence the inevitable question: what makes it possible to resist the mechanism that leads to xenophobia, whose workings I have just presented? And, inversely, what is lacking in the xenophobe that makes him yield to these mechanisms?

The second limit of the preceding developments on xenophobia lies in their principles. Indeed, the whole analysis is based on the analogy between the social sphere and the family sphere, or rather on the consideration of the social sphere as a metaphorical double and therefore an unconscious possible extension of the family sphere, the first being thus able to reactivate and reinforce the anxiety, the reactive aggression and the guilt that the second leads to. But this analogy has its limits, as I pointed out when I introduced it.

I have already marked these limits when I pointed out that the social sphere is home to autonomous processes - I mean processes which do not directly involve psychological mechanisms, processes which are independent from the games and stakes of the desires of the individual subjects, but which are, on the contrary, liable to significantly affect the attitudes and behaviour of individuals, in short, what Freud called “die Kultur” (culture). I have in mind especially the processes of development of the division of work, the division of society into castes, orders and classes, historical alienation, etc.

But the analogy also finds its limit insofar as the opposite is just as true, i.e. the individuals can, at least up to a certain point, affect the dynamics of the processes that shape the social sphere. In other words, the analogy between the situation of the child in the family sphere and the situation of the adult in the social sphere finds its limit in an essential difference between the two: whereas the child does not have the possibility to alter the family sphere, the adult has the possibility to alter the social sphere, not directly through his own means, but by uniting with other individuals with this end in view. This is what is called the political struggle, a collective and organized struggle.

And it is more than likely that this ability acquired by the individual to have the slightest of holds on the social sphere through political struggle, has consequences for his psychological economy. More precisely, I am formulating the hypothesis that it is through this means, of the at least partial control of the social sphere, that participation in a political struggle can enable the individual to resist the xenophobic drift we have just analyzed.

This hypothesis attributes to political struggle a virtue, which will be discussed here. On the one hand, this struggle is able to thwart the effects of some of the social processes which intensify the anxiety affects, which I have previously pointed out - in particular, the effects of the process of historical alienation but also of the crisis of meaning.

On the other hand, and it is especially on this point that I would like to insist here, the benefits of this struggle are not only or even primarily real, objective and material for the individuals who take part in them: they are first and foremost psychological. This struggle enables them, indeed, to convert the affects of anxiety, aggression and guilt into active forces, thereby keeping them from becoming reactive forces.

I use these opposed concepts of “active” and “reactive” in the meaning that Nietzsche has given them, and that I shall state again now. For Nietzsche, a feeling, a passion, be it negative like anxiety, is active as long as the individual can convert it into a power of criticism (of the world) and a power of creation (of a work, of a meaning), into the basis of the revolt against the reality that has given birth to him and of the will to work on its transformation, i.e. as a power of assertion of the self: what makes it possible to assert oneself actively. Inversely, as soon as the negative affects cannot be acted out, actively unloaded, become principles and moments of an action (which transforms reality) that mediates them and metamorphoses them, they can only be “ressentis”, i.e. at once passively lived, experienced by the subject with all their negative (destructive) power, endlessly ruminated on, turning into a toxic substance that poisons the whole mind. And they can only discharge themselves through a process of projective catharsis, through an “imaginary revenge”, in Nietzsche’s words, attacking some ’bad objects” that are held responsible for one’s own disgrace. This is exactly the mechanism of formation of what NIETZSCHE calls ressentiment, and whose similarity with the Freudian analysis of the genesis of neurosis, and notably of phobic neurosis, is striking.

Thus, the hatred of the Stranger appears to be a particular form of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment. Analyzing it from this category will enable me to supplement the approach with the description of the contents of consciousness that xenophobia generally gives rise to. This way, we can get closer to the point where its exploitation by the political discourse becomes possible and understandable.

2. It is indeed subjective powerlessness or objective inability to act, or to react, i.e. to make a genuine action out of the reaction to the world, which transforms the affects of anxiety, of reactive aggression and of guilt into an attitude of ressentiment. Even more than Nietzche, his commentator Max Scheler, the author of a book whose title, Ressentiment, is self-explanatory, insists on this essential point: “In order for it (ressentiment) to exist, these feelings (revenge, envy, jealousy, malice, etc.) should be particularly virulent and be accompanied by the feeling of powerlessness as to their translation into acts, so that they “embitter”, just because of physical or moral weakness, or with the fear or the anxiety that the other person inspires”. In this sense, like Nietzsche, we can call ressentiment a “revolt” (purely reactive) of the weak, of the powerless, what he calls the “slaves”: ressentiment always accompanies the inability to become a real actor in one’s own existence. This is how various traits of the “man of ressentiment” can be explained:
 Starting with the endless rumination of his ills and misfortunes, real or imaginary, with his inability to forget them or go beyond them, which makes them all the more painful. Nietzsche places great emphasis on this inability to forget of the man overcome by ressentiment.
 But also his remonstration, his constant and general dissatisfaction, his permanent and undetermined complaint. The man of ressentiment never stops moaning, driven by the feeling of a deep and general injustice against him: the whole of reality and existence are unfair to him, and they constitute a personal insult to him. Max Scheler sums up these first two aspects well when he characterizes ressentiment as an “obscure, rumbling, restrained exasperation, independent from the activity of the self, which little by little generates a long rumination of hatred or animosity without a precisely determined hostility but full of infinity of hostile intentions.”
 Hence his spirit of revenge, a combination of hatred and jealousy, of grudge and envy, often to be found worldwide. For where there is pain and unhappiness, there must be a culprit. Hence the accusation of the other, held responsible for one’s own powerlessness and guilty of being superior to him: of having taken his place, of benefiting from privileges which he does not have access to, of founding his happiness on our own unhappiness, of having the right to the consideration that he should be receiving, etc. And it is the very existence of the other, perceived as an usurper, which is intolerable for the “man of ressentiment”.
 All this implies, finally, a narcissistic overinvestment of oneself and of the other, which relies only on the rejection and the hatred of the other (the different one). The man of ressentiment has a vital need to belittle the other in order to grow, to recover his self-respect and the respect of the others - it is in this respect that he is essentially reactive. As Nietzsche also says, the basic maxim of his ethics is: “You are bad, therefore I am good”. This is how the “dangerous explosive material” of ressentiment, in Nietzsche’s words, is formed. Populist and xenophobic demagogy draws from and feeds itself from this very substance. It is thematised into a drama, whose highlights are always the harrowing description of the misfortunes that overwhelm the people, the hateful designation of strangers, whose parasitic presence soils and corrupts the healthy body of the people, as responsible for this collective misfortune, and finally the redemptive (because it is purifying) prospect of their elimination, which is the only thing that can give the people their identity and their power back, and thus their self-esteem.

CONCLUSION

As a conclusion, I want to mention what two workers, supporters or voters of the Front national, said upon being asked about the reasons for their partisan position.

The first claimed: “We feel like immigrants here, at home”. This claim illustrates perfectly, in condensed form, some of my analyses. We especially find the echo of the anxiety of the loss of self (loss of one’s own image, of self-esteem, of self-respect), of the anxiety of the potential abolition of the border between “we” and “them” (immigrants), of the anxiety of the assimilation to an other, an other that is supposed to be an inferior being: in short of the anxiety of alienation, for if we end up being an immigrant in our own country, “at home”, then this country is not our own anymore, it does not belong to us anymore, it is not our country anymore.

As for the second, in order to justify his xenophobia, he told the following thing: “when you keep being rejected everywhere, you have to blame someone”. This is another symbolic reflection which could be used to sum up the mechanism of ressentiment, as it sums up all of its main features so well. For:
 “being rejected everywhere” is having no own place, no place for yourself, in which you can both assert yourself and be recognized - it is therefore having no identity or value whatsoever, or at least having your identity and your value denied
 “being rejected everywhere” also means being subjected to the law of someone who is more powerful than you, against whom you can do nothing, over whom you have no influence, it is having no control anymore over one’s existence and the world in general.

So when the anxiety of the loss of self is coupled with the feeling of a complete inability to control the situation, when the resulting aggression cannot be used against the true causes of a situation, if only because we do not know them, the path lies open for this powerless and blind rage which makes you look for someone on whom you can unload the weight of what overcomes you, by overcoming him in turn. The only thing left to do is indeed to “blame someone”, and first the one who represents (metaphorically or symbolically) what I refuse to be or to become, or else to determine with the figure of the Stranger my own undetermined uneasiness, my own discontent with myself, my own anxiety.

This analysis, however, does not mean giving up all hope of opposing the crazy “logic” of xenophobia. It also shows the possible point of inflexion of the latter. Admittedly, we have no hold over the anxiety of the loss of self, which is rooted in the human condition. We cannot either, at least immediately, reduce the infantile anxieties linked to the experience of the family sphere. However, we can consider reorganizing the social sphere in such a way that its experience does not reactivate and worsen these anxieties. This can be the (probably long-term) goal that an emancipatory political action can and should set, aiming to establish the conditions of a collective control over social processes, which is no other than the project of an accomplished democracy. Above all, such action offers the immediate advantage of avoiding the reactive conversion of all these anxiety affects into an attitude of ressentiment. It is in this direction, in a political action that aims to establish the social conditions of collective and individual autonomy that we have to look for the possibility of containing the “hatred of the Stranger”.

[1] Alain Bihr, as of now (october 2005) teaches sociology at the University of Franche-Comté (Besançon, France). He was formerly a lecturer in sociology at the University of Haute-Alsace (Mulhouse, France). Prior to that, he taught philosophy in high school for about twenty years.