А Story That Does Not Bleed

Against Rubio’s genealogy of erasure, towards a politics of wounds

Almost a decade ago, I wrote an essay criticizing a conservative manifesto entitled “A Europe We Can Believe In,” also popularized as “The Paris Statement.” The manifesto was widely circulated among European online media without provoking much criticism. It was signed by various popular intellectuals and academics, the most famous of whom were Philippe Beneton, Remi Brague, and Roger Scruton. Back then, I thought I was analyzing a defensive document by already suffocating buffoons, a desperate action by the right wing, loudly sighing, during sleepless nights, beneath their cold, sweaty foreheads. The Paris Statement asked for a Europe of dialogue, of nations, of rooted culture. They were, as may be foreseen, truly terrified by the effects of the globalized world and migration, raving against the EU — that muddy stumbling block, the “false Europe” — in the name of the tireless ontological and historical vocation of the “real Europe.” And yet I sincerely believed that this was a polemic of somewhat marginal proportions. I certainly did not realize I was engaging critically with what turned out to be a painfully predictable future to come.

As I argued there — albeit in different terminology — was that this pure Europe has never existed. It was a psychopolitical project maintained by an elite overstating its own importance. Last week, Marco Rubio, the representative of the so-called ‘New World,’ stood before the leaders of the so-called ‘Old World,’ to tell a story quite similar. One we know all too well, by heart — as usually said — although one not equally heartfelt among all. It was the story of pilgrims and explorers, missionaries and discoverers; a story of Scottish and Irish pioneers, of Central European farmers seeking a dream of progress. Charitably, the story included his own bloodline, the pièce de résistance to his genealogical list of honorable causes and effects: “Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi of Casale Monferrato. Jose and Manuela Reina of Seville” were people who “could have never imagined that 250 years later, one of their direct descendants would be back here today, on this continent, as the chief diplomat of that infant nation.” In other words, Rubio told a story of heredity and continuity, of blood and honor, of the “unbreakable bond between the old and new worlds.”

This was, without a trace of doubt, an overly romanticized bedtime story that many of us, regrettably, are all too familiar with. There is nothing particularly odd about such a narrative; on the contrary. For all of us who grew up within the vague boundaries of the so-called ‘Old World,’ this is the textbook ‘truth’ with which generations have been — and continue to be — fed within our educational institutions, including those of higher education. For most of us, this is the story: one we hear from our close ones, from our screens, one we read about and through in newspapers and magazines, a story that fills most of our books, our plays, our art. If not explicitly, the narrative of our own grandeur operates as an underlying assumption in everything we encounter — a specter that substantiates our identity and our place in the world and in history. It is the story, in other words, that constituted and fixated our subjectivities.

In this story, there is no place for classes, for complexity, for intra- or intersocial differentiations. We are presented with the historical subject as such. There is, put differently, no room for anything other than a universalized subjectivity. Contrary to its own definition, however, the image shown is in fact a particularity claiming universality. You know these people. We all do. More accurately, we know their class.

Rubio’s claim, if I may summarize, is that the bodies gathered here today in Europe, just like the bodies gathered today there, in the United States, are connected to the bodies of past generations through something deeper than the politics of the present day, namely through “Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, and ancestry.” This point deserves, if I may, to be rearticulated in a slightly different manner. Rubio, as an honest and objective narrator, told the story as he sees it, no matter what you think. Its the way we are all taught to see it: the deserved global hegemony of the total civilization, one birthed by the Greeks, overbuild by the Romans, consequently inherited, refined and widely disseminated through and by the Christians, that inevitably culminates in the nation-state with its judicial apparatuses, and last but not least — in the capitalist economy, which these apparatuses serve. This is a civilization whose universality cannot be shaken by any claims of and for particularity.

Yet it is total civilization that, as he insists, has to enclose itself to survive its own glory. Why, you may ask, does Rubio want to enclose this universal civilization, to fortify it? Well, as it happens, now everyone wants to be part of the universality it produced. And, paradoxically, this universality is not for everyone. This is, perhaps, the perversity that undoes his claims. If the West (understood as a paradigmatic resiliency between the ‘New’ and the ‘Old’ worlds) is truly universal — if its values, its culture, its achievements are such for all humanity, no less — then why borders, why exclusion, why more armies, more weapons, more death? Why the desperate defense of purity? The answer, as already hinted, is that this supposedly total civilization was never universal to begin with. It was always the property of some, violently and cruelly imposed on others. Not solely outside, but even within.

Contrary to what one might expect, while reading the transcribed text or watching the recording of the speech, what Rubio said made the day. The audience (read: the highest echelons of power) applauded, but not so much for Rubio as for themselves. It was their image held up front, so they could not do otherwise. In this sense, the questions we must ask are, “Whose bodies can be thought of as heirs to this triumphant, hyperhistorical legacy?” “Whose ancestors are considered viable engines of this story?” “Are there bodies that don’t fit into it — those who were here or there, prior to our arrival, as well as those who deserved to be brought by power, forcibly expelled, or shamelessly murdered?” What I am asking, as insistently as possible, is the following: Could it be the case that, by evoking the triumphant specter of Europe’s past glory, Rubio attempts to justify, authorize, legitimize, and ultimately to revive the overarching right over the world of a very isolated group of people alive today — that is, his group?

In any event, the story Rubio told in Munich is neither new nor original. Quite the opposite — it is the oldest story in and of the “West,” the origin story of the almighty “Occident.” But to understand what it does — how it works, what this story tries to achieve whilst its renewed quest for eternity, whom it wounds and surely whom it serves — we need to look closely at its building blocks. Like any other story, this story is eager to become history. Like any other story, this story, in its pretense of universality, diminishes other stories, especially those in stark contrast with it. I appeal to us to push this story as far as we can to reveal the specters it summons and all other stories it erases. The global far-right (exemplified by figures like Marco Rubio, but loud everywhere from Budapest to Brazil) is on a spree to modify, mutate, and ultimately mutilate our collective political imaginary. They do not flinch while rewiring what we want or are capable of wanting, how we see ourselves and our shared future here, on this planetary home of ours, or what we, perhaps, owe each other.

As I see it, within Rubio’s speech are at play at least three distinct governmental dynamics that need to be examined if one is to inquire critically into this telling document of our times. The first and most obvious one is of a biopolitical nature: the panic about migration as a threat to “the future of our people”; the obsession with borders, with purity, with the biological survival of the nation, the latter constituted by a specific type of bodies, those of European descent. The second, more implicit than openly stated, is of a psychopolitical nature: the attempt to reshape desire as such — the “necessary” shift from global cosmopolitanism to tribalism, from guilt to pride, from openness to closure.

The third, more or less latent, yet the most productive and future-oriented, is of ecopolitical nature: the repression of the biophysical, planetary whole; the refusal to acknowledge that climate change, pollution, pandemics, and extinction know no borders. A list, no doubt, brought into existence mainly thanks to his group, that is, his class. The ruling classes — of which Rubio and whoever is the writer of the speech are honorable members — with their endless wars, their endless murders, their endless accumulation know no borders. They flow across them as easily as capital, as freely as weapons, as effectively as the toxins they pump into the air and water. Nevertheless, we all know borders are not for them; they are merely from them.

If I have lately focused predominantly on the ecopolitical aspects and their implications, it is not because they are the most important governmental dynamics. Neither am I ignorant of the fact that those three do, in the end, collapse into each other. Instead, it is because of my conviction that precisely this regime of power is what drives our present and more or less will dictate our future. It will be the imperatives of the environment that will necessitate new ways of framing and exercising the bio- and psychopolitical dimensions of the power to come.

The unbearable climate conditions faced by many do not care about the applause Rubio received. The fires do not halt at the ruling classes’ borders, nor do floods await the approval of citizenship. The deserted lands that fed generations, now deeply poisoned or cracked, will perhaps struggle to recognize the astuteness of legislative power. Only those running in their wake have to. And we must identify here the fear animating his speech: the fear of the flows of devastated, broken people. Solely those well-fed are to move around.

The contrast drawn in this image is between past immigrants of European descent who went to build a future, a whole ‘New World,’ and those presently fleeing solely for their lives. The latter want to preserve themselves as a biological entity, while the former were willing to sacrifice everything for something greater than themselves. Not that the case is such, but how they perceive it.

Rubio’s ancestors crossed oceans, cultivated and settled “empty plains,” built nations. In his story, they were the agents of history — founders, creators, heroes of unmatched proportions. Their descendants, by implication, are no different. Today’s migrants, on the contrary, cross deserts and crowd into camps. They drown in the same Mediterranean their ancestors crossed in a different direction, or even more troubling, are of the same origin as those Rubio’s ancestors enslaved so they can build their nations. In Rubio’s telling, this second group is not one forged by agents but by threats — a force that “threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.”

What has changed, one might dare to ask? Surely not the act of migration? What changed, it seems, is the direction. When Europeans migrated outward, it was seen as the exploration of the unknown, the establishment of settlements, and the dissemination of civilization. When non-Europeans migrate inward, it is called invasion, crisis, or war on our culture. The first was the expansion of the universal, while the second is seen as the contamination of the particular. It is a discursive current, a dangerous one for that matter.

We arrived at the heart of the story within the story. A heart that does not bleed. This is, as one might call it, the false imaginary in Rubio’s genealogy. His ancestors were not founders because they were European. They were founders because they were first to tell, first to solidify a story, thus erasing everyone there before — these other people with their own stories. The “empty plains” he speaks of were not empty. They were full of people who named those plains, the surrounding rivers, the faceless stones. But that does not count now, does it?

Moreover, today’s migrants are not threats because they are non-European. They are threats because they arrive in a world where the story has already been told, where the borders have already been drawn, where the “empty” spaces have already been filled with the only viable meaning. They arrive not as founders but as supplicants, not as heroes but as problems, not as subjects but as objects of history; that is, someone else’s story. And Rubio’s speech is designed to keep them that way.

But here is the truly historical irony Rubio and the European establishment cannot see: the very forces that his ancestors have put in motion and brought across oceans are pushing today’s migrants across borders. Not the same forces — not exploration, not adventure, surely not the pioneer spirit — but the forces of dominion, extraction, and accumulation. The ecological crisis is not a natural phenomenon that can be mocked in their halls, on their stages, in their speeches. It is the logical consequence of five centuries of expansion that Rubio and his peers boldly celebrate. The fossil fuels that powered the Industrial Revolution, the factories that made possible the “New World,” the technologies that portrayed Rubio’s ancestors as heroes — these all are now returning to ridicule their pretenses for grandeur.

These devastated people are, in a much more literal sense, the consequences of a history Rubio and the rest refuse to acknowledge, one arising beneath their comfortable world of no consequences, of no accountability. The present migrants carry in their bodies the painful logic of a system that promised universality but delivered only more devastation, more death, more extraction and appropriation. There, amid this strange irony and against these false stories, is where our new politics needs to root itself if we are to survive.

The leaders of this new authoritarianism speak tirelessly of the body, don’t they? The body of the nation, the purity of the people, the blood of our ancestors — yet they seem terrified of the actual flesh, of the way it sets everything in motion. The actual flesh leaks. It runs around, yes, it mixes. It ages through exchange; it wounds. It desires what they claim it should not desire. The body politic they imagine is not a living body at all, but a corpse — embalmed, deified in its stillness, dead.

We need a politics that can love the living body instead, a politics of the wound, of the incessant leak, of the pursued mixture. A politics acknowledging that the only bodies worth having are the ones that constantly mutate, in other bodies, yes; those that constantly modify themselves and the world as their only way of being, mutilating their flesh in the process — and that keep going anyway. These bodies are not in the world, they are — as Arendt puts it — of the world. And this means our bodies, just like any other bodies, are always amid this machinery of exchange and dependencies. A machinery that the Rubios and the likes are not the sole owners of. This world is not theirs, nor is history.

All the people I love are hybrids.

And so are you.