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The emergence of blockchain technology is creating solutions to key issues that stateless people face. Stateless people and their communities are already discovering relief through blockchain, being able to be their own bank via cryptocurrency, incentivising community building with crypto tokens, using blockchain-built governance, and developing options for identification where there were none. Despite the promise that blockchain technology brings with it, there are notable challenges and dangers. There is an issue with how technology providers tend to be acquiescent to state authorities, rather than the vulnerable groups that stand to benefit the most from blockchain development. Harm may come from failing to receive input from the vulnerable groups, while incorporating from authorities entrenched or new discriminatory practices in regard to ethnicity, religion, origin, gender, nationality or lack thereof. To avoid this, stronger connections must be built between the blockchain sector and its most vulnerable users, to help develop technology on a fair and equitable basis. Statelessness compared to other forms of forced displacement Stateless people are among the most vulnerable and overlooked groups in the world, lacking basic human rights, including identification, freedom of movement, political rights, employment, education, and access to banking. Indeed, nationality remains a gateway to enjoying any rights. As Hannah Arendt famously wrote from her own experience of statelessness, nationality is a ‘right to have rights’.[1] Lacking it leaves a person in a limbo of vulnerability. Statelessness is a particularly vicious form of displacement, whereby one is made legally invisible in one’s own home, not welcome to stay and not exactly welcome to leave either. Being stateless should not be confused with being a refugee. The latter, for the most part, enjoy rights inherent in having a nationality and generally have an easier time of having such rights recognised, including in respect to international protection. Interestingly, the internationally recognised legal term ‘refugee’ originally derived from the experience of over 2 million refugees who were rendered stateless when the Soviet Union was established.[2] German minorities rendered stateless in the 1930s and 1940s were also in large part refugees, explaining why Hannah Arendt saw the two terms as intertwined.[3] Over time, however, these terms diverged in circumstance and common use; while the term ‘refugee’ became better known, the term ‘stateless’ became obscure. The fact that the stateless have no state actor that may put their interests on any agenda helps to explain this obscurity. Most contemporary cases of statelessness are ‘in-situ’.[4] In other words, most stateless people are stuck in the home domains that rendered them stateless, unable to become refugees and enjoy any refugee rights. State actors that manufacture statelessness tend to avoid calling this by its name, to avoid responsibility for it, worsening the information gap, visibility of the problem, and obstructing approaches toward its resolution. This can explain why 22 countries with mass statelessness do not have reliable data on this issue.[5] Since there is no authority above the state level in regard to legality—a monopoly that state actors enjoy absolutely—the tactic of any state actor in manipulating legal language to avoid responsibility is fairly effective. (This is a common state actor tactic that plays out in various ways, not just regarding statelessness, such as how Russia adamantly avoids calling its war in Ukraine by its proper name.) Using their advantages in law and information, state actors that manufacture statelessness en masse have a strong preference towards keeping the matter obscure, finding creative ways to obstruct the topic and circumvent international law standards relating to it.[6] Unlike what the media and films would make us believe, statelessness is not an accident wherein people fall through invisible cracks of legal contradictions or bureaucratic mishaps. Although such forms of statelessness exist, such as in some of the former Soviet Republics after the collapse of the USSR, statelessness is usually intentional, not accidental.[7] As the next section will discuss, much has to do with abuses that derive from the state-actor monopolies on legal identity documentation, notions of domestic belonging, and freedom of movement. All of these are tied to the modern predilection for fawning over nation-state sovereignty and its exercise of power. Lingering state actor absolute powers and monopolies It is never a good idea to place absolute monopoly or power in human hands. When we do allow it to happen, we tempt human frailties, asking for trouble. Despite the historic successes in the decentralisation of political power in countries such as Britain, the United States, and France, many aspects of social life remain centralised monopolistically in the hands of state actors. The monopoly on violence is not the only monopoly that state actors hold. To this day, there is no competition to state authority on questions of freedom of movement (post-WWI),[8] legal identification, criminality, and notions of rootedness and belonging. None of this, despite what the state actors would wish us to believe, is immutable and written in nature. Recent winds of technological change have brought serious challenges to some of the monopolies that state actors traditionally held—such as in the media, data, and currency (the advent of blockchain and cryptocurrency made decentralisation possible for the latter). Although state actors remain dominant in all of above spheres, their dominance has recently begun to encounter a healthy dose of competition, from both private enterprises and individuals. Authoritarian state actors bristle at the thought and struggle to find ways to regain control. As soon as they find ways to regain some of that control (eg internet censorship), there appear new ways to circumvent it (eg VPN). Blockchain also began to play a role in this regard, namely in decentralising website namespaces outside the control of any single entity, along with other related uses, allowing for censorship-resistant domains.[9] Statelessness itself in large part arises because of the abuse of power of two key state actor monopolies: 1) the notion of belonging to a territory; and 2) the issuance of legal identification. Both are still firmly in the grasp of state actors. Minorities are particularly vulnerable to misuses and abuses of these monopolies; it should be no surprise that 75% of the world’s stateless people are minorities on their own home territories, where they are made to feel unwelcome through the deprivation of nationality.[10] In other words, they are made to feel like they do not belong, and are not issued the same documentation as those who are branded as citizens/nationals.[11] Discrimination is at the very root of statelessness. People largely become stateless as punishment for who they are rather than for what they did: a person or their offspring can be deprived of a right to nationality simply for having a different ethnicity, perceived race or origin, religion, or gender (24 countries still do not allow women to pass on a nationality).[12] At the same time, the punitive infliction of statelessness, such as for political dissent, is also widespread. This form of statelessness was recurrent during the Cold War,[13] and very recently has seen a sharp resurgence in Bahrain, Nicaragua, Belarus, Uganda, Venezuela, and numerous other countries, including Western democracies.[14] People are increasingly being stripped of their nationality for having dissenting political views, being emphatically told that they do not belong for having such views. This goes hand-in-hand with revocation or refusal of renewal of legal identification. A serious alternative option to state actors’ monopoly in issuing legal identification is yet to arise. Nansen passports issued by the League of Nations, purposely designed for the flight of stateless refugees between 1922 and 1942, are a thing of the past.[15] It is far from certain that something like that could work in the 21st century, given the obscurity of statelessness, how unfavourable the political and socio-economic realities are for helping such people, and dependence on state actor cooperation in launching such a project (the UN, after all, is a forum for state actors). There are so-called ‘certificates of identity’, otherwise known as ‘aliens’ passports’, but these have limited use, are poorly known in application, and, most importantly, still depend on the state actors for issuance. As things stand, individual state actors and their appendages are the owners and controllers of our legal documentation. All passports have wording reflecting this fact: that it is the issuing government that is the owner of the passport, not the holder. Interestingly, the only exception is in the case of Queens and Kings of England, who do not need a passport because the British passports are issued in their names as heads of state. But even this exception is still perfectly in line with the state actor monopolisation of legal identification. The 20th century saw a growing centralisation of the power of state actors to identify and control the population, increasing to that end the use of identity documentation.[16] Increasingly, identity documentation became mandatory while its issuance did not become guaranteed or irrevocable.[17] Abuses of that centralisation of power resonate to this day, threatening human rights and domestic and international stability, with statelessness being an extreme form of that abuse. In the 21st century, governments in numerous countries around the world are increasingly targeting political dissidents, minorities, and other vulnerable groups, depriving them of identity documentation and putting them on a path to statelessness. A rising number of state actors, especially in the West, have introduced, brought back, expanded, or contemplated denaturalization laws.[18] The increasing insecurity of ‘belonging’ to only one state actor can partly explain a surge in the purchasing of additional citizenships among the rich. But very few can afford such protection, spotlighting the ethical perversion and inherent inequalities of state actor monopolies.[19] Protection, pathways to residence and even citizenship are sold by state actors, but when it comes to fulfilling the values that state actors preach so much about (human rights, justice, equality, democracy, etc), they treat the most vulnerable and persecuted populations very differently in these pathways. There is an urgent need for an accessible ‘Plan B’ for everyone, since there can never be guarantees of whether any government may turn abusive in the future. Governments are poorly positioned to provide such guarantees to their own nationals: any legal safeguards (if any are put in place) can be rewritten by a new political power, whether it comes in by force or elections. It does not help that the international instruments designed to protect human rights, such as the UN agencies, remain ineffective, while tensions between national groups attempting to dominate remain unresolved.[20] New, creative solutions are needed to match or, better yet, outmatch the creativity of state actors in manufacturing problems like statelessness. Blockchain and its novel contributions have the potential solutions. Blockchain’s potential in addressing statelessness The 21st century brought with it increasing decentralisation on the back of a decentralised system that has no owner: the internet. Blockchain appeared next in that evolution with its decentralised validation system being a unique contribution. This breakthrough, nicknamed Internet 2.0, moves along the digital revolution from information access and content creation to the stage of democratised ownership, promising greater control over own data.[21] This new technology has many uses, most of which are untapped and difficult to imagine at this point of time. In terms of human rights, blockchain offers an opportunity to alleviate the dire effects of statelessness and other forms of forced displacement. It does so through the possibility of decentralised identification issuance, validation, and self-sovereignty, while also empowering the stateless in such areas as decentralised governance, financial inclusion, and access to the numerous other services where identification is required. Application of blockchain technology in human rights is already here, with solutions for the stateless already being developed and implemented. One of the largest and better known of stateless groups, the Rohingya, have already started to enjoy the fruits of this development in a number of areas, leveraging technology to overcome barriers of exclusion. A case in point is the Rohingya Project, a stateless-led initiative using blockchain capabilities to experiment with alternatives to state actor monopoly in identification.[22] The project initiated a blockchain-based inventory archive to preserve vital records of Rohingya people, and launched R-Coin, a crypto token that encourages community service work in an informal economy setting.[23] To advocate for blockchain technology and its responsible use, the Rohingya Project joined forces with Save My Identity[24] and CoalitionVE,[25] led by Venezuelans who have had problems accessing identity documentation due to malfeasance of Venezuela, and Apatride Network,[26] a stateless-led coalition in the EU. To that end, these four organisations of forcibly displaced people partnered up for a global advocacy project, Blockchain for Human Rights,[27] launched in April of 2024. The initiative connects blockchain actors to human rights, to help guide the development of blockchain technology toward intended good and away from causing harm—to fulfil the much-promoted goal in blockchain circles of ‘value-add’ to the world. Given that businesses tend to be more connected and acquiescent to state actors (including the ones that cause harm), it is a much-needed endeavour to recalibrate the imbalances of power through the sharing of knowledge, ground-level expertise, and connections. Various charities and humanitarian organisations have also recognised the benefits of blockchain, its efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and ease of transactions. Working under difficult and volatile conditions where differences in performance can mean differences between life and death, they have been amongst the first to adopt the new technology to improve their own line of work to maximise impact.[28] More effective performance is particularly important during times of crises, when state-actor bureaucracies and old ways of doing things can be too slow, costly, and / or inapt. This explains why, during the turbulent initial months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the humanitarian sector turned to blockchain-built cryptocurrency rather than fiat, to directly and quickly provide much-needed cash assistance to Ukrainian refugees and internally displaced people. The success of the initiative led Carmen Hett, Treasurer of UNHCR, to conclude: ‘The question is now, how can we do more of this? Because we know it works’.[29] The experience of vulnerable groups in Ukraine revealed how everything boils down to the question of identification in regard to access to human rights and humanitarian aid. There has been an incredible outpouring of aid to Ukrainian refugees after Russia invaded Ukraine, but some were left dangerously forsaken: Ukraine’s stateless people (many of whom are ethnic Ukrainians) have been unable to receive humanitarian aid and found it almost impossible to become refugees or even internally displaced. As reported by Ukrainian NGOs, it speaks disturbing volumes when Ukraine’s stateless make a decision to stay in a war zone, feeling ‘safer’ there, rather than face an outside the world with fear of having an inadequate form of identification or none at all.[30] This circumstance shows how state actors can fail in two respects to provide security to their own members: by failing to issue identification and prevent statelessness, then failing to recognise and resolve these issues. Both are rooted in the (mis)handling of identification. Given that state actors have held a monopoly on legal identification, the onus is on them to provide it without leaving anyone out. Yet, according to the World Bank, one billion people in the world remain without legal identification.[31] Lack of identification means lack of access to basic human rights. It also amplifies the vulnerability of affected people and places them at the mercy of human traffickers, corrupt officials, exploitative employers, and other unsavoury characters. Any form of identification can be a lifeline in such circumstances, and certainly better than having nothing. Given their discriminatory behaviour, cooperation from the malicious state actors who cause statelessness should not be expected, only the opposite. The pattern is similar across the world in different forms of mass statelessness, where stateless people, minorities, and other vulnerable groups are issued inferior form of identification or none at all. State actors struggle to adjust to the fast-pace, globalising, and multi-cultural nature of the 21st century. They continue to serve as opportune vessels for divisive ideologues, xenophobes, populists, and authoritarians (a problem that will unlikely be resolved, even for advanced democracies). Status-quo forms of documentation not only carry unnecessary risks and fragility, they are also vulnerable to state actor malpractices and irrational biases and discrimination. Blockchain-based systems of identification offer opportunities to address these critical flaws and can provide better data security in general, being notably more resilient to loss and forgery.[32] No human enterprise should trust itself with absolute and monopolistic powers. State actors themselves need to be helped in maintaining a healthier environment in identification. That alternative is now tenable with blockchain technology. Whereas before an argument could have been made that the state actor is a guarantor of someone’s identity by way of a centralised validation system (similar to the logic in fiat currency), today decentralised blockchain technology allows a viable alternative in identification that is already being put to good use. It is resolving some key problems faced by the stateless and other forcibly displaced people, and has the potential to resolve statelessness itself. Blockchain risks and hazards New technology always brings with it a set of concerns and growing pains. Serious problems can arise if developers of that technology ignore the characteristics, problems, and needs of its users. If the users are vulnerable groups such as the stateless or other forcibly displaced people, the stakes are considerably higher. For blockchain and digitalisation in general there are serious concerns going forward regarding the potential importation of structural discrimination into their development. This is already happening in different corners of the world, when state actors with discriminatory practices are involved. If precautions are not taken, the new technology may further exclude the already marginalized groups by accepting and incorporating that discrimination, causing significant harm and undermining human rights for everyone. Better connection is needed between the blockchain enterprises and its most vulnerable users. Akin to the rise of the internet, the learning curve is steep with blockchain, involving unpredictable missteps. In a decentralised system, there is no central authority to reset or restore private data keys, so the responsibility rests solely on the shoulders of the users to keep their ownership secure.[33] User negligence is relatively preventable, but problems like network outages, technical glitches, and hacking are more difficult to predict or prevent. They are a growing concern in blockchain that have no end in sight, involving numerous malicious actors eager to take advantage.[34] Hacking alone has caused widespread losses in billions of dollars over last several years, typically impacting crypto exchanges, wallets, and software. Blockchain itself being a more secure technology, hackers tend to find weaknesses in tools surrounding it, to that end utilising stolen passwords or private keys, keyloggers, phishing, and exploiting weak security protocols in software.[35] Blockchain’s still young yet complex development and continued dependence on other technology leaves a lot of room for the creativity of hackers and other cybercriminals. This is why so-called cold storage remains popular for avoiding these problems, ie, keeping data offline on a device like a USB stick or a disconnected hard disk drive. Blockchain-based digital identification has its own concerns. The stronger a form of identification is made by immutability and logging of all the metadata, the more pressing the question of who controls that solution becomes. Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, a leading blockchain project that has its own cryptocurrency and is developing a national ID system in Ethiopia, put it bluntly: ‘[In authoritarian regimes], it makes no sense to build identity solutions or blockchain solutions because there’s a high probability that those solutions are going to be abused and weaponized against the population’.[36] It is horrifying to imagine how much worse discrimination and harm in various countries would be with state actor access and control of a blockchain-based identification system. As already emphasised, any state actor, no matter where and when, has a susceptibility toward authoritarian tendencies. It is naïve to assume that political winds do not change. No place is safe from these tendencies.[37] Even if state actor takeover of blockchain is avoided, corporate monopolies can also be detrimental in harbouring an unhealthy concentration of power.[38] In their blind pursuit of profit, blockchain businesses are liable to overlook the harm that they may bring about without intending it. As Friedrich Nietzsche once put it, the banker, in the pursuit of narrow interests, functions by the same logic as a rock rolling down a hill. To the affected that suffer the consequences, it may make no difference whether harm comes from centralisation and malicious intent, callousness, or good intentions. Decentralised identification built on blockchain can help mitigate a number of issues like accidental loss, data security, or even hacking, by developing a more secure, reliable way of identity verification. Ultimately, however, everything goes back to the question of decentralisation and ownership. It is a prevalent question in the development of blockchain, a tug of war between those who standby decentralisation and those that seek more centralisation for its various perceived advantages (however self-serving). One of the biggest advantages of a decentralised system is its collusion resistance and, by its very definition, deterrence to monopolisation of power, political or otherwise. Viktor Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, concluded that: it is much harder for participants in decentralized systems to collude to act in ways that benefit them at the expense of other participants, whereas the leaderships of corporations and governments collude in ways that benefit themselves but harm less well-coordinated citizens, customers, employees and the general public all the time.[39]  That harm is magnified for those who are already on the margins of society, due to failures of centralised authority. At the end of the day, the good of blockchain depends on whether it will be able to maintain its decentralised nature. Conclusion It is important to recognise why forced displacement like statelessness exists and why uncountable millions suffer from it. Much has to do with the reality of how identification and notion of belonging are in a firm grasp of state actor monopoly, which is not always competent or benign. The stateless, who have been made stateless by no fault of their own, are desperate for solutions that technology like blockchain can offer. For the time being, these solutions may not be a panacea to all the woes of a lack of nationality, but they can soften the heavy blow of statelessness and other forms of forced displacement by addressing their primary burdens. Stateless people themselves are already taking matters into their own hands to implement these solutions, partnering up with blockchain actors toward that end, strengthening their own communities, and opening a route to a more liveable life. As with any technological advancement, there are shortcomings and dangers that need to be considered. In its current state, blockchain may not be for everyone, especially in light of its complexity and underlying risks in security gaps. Cybercriminals and other malicious actors are taking advantage of these complexities and gaps to their own benefit, tainting blockchain’s reputation. All of this serves as a deterrent for many, despite the noticeable advantages of the technology. This is why some in the humanitarian field are reluctant to use blockchain for fear of the repercussions that it could have in volatile environments like natural disasters or in conflict zones.[40] In such circumstances, the appetite is low for any additional risks associated with a technology that is still developing. In the pursuit of managing risks, there is much talk of regulating blockchain, ie, of increasing state actor control over the technology. Not much is said, however, of how that coveted control is itself problematic. The biggest threat remains the propensity of state actors to abuse their powers. History offers plenty of disturbing examples of how state actors utilised new technology to commit mass atrocities and other ‘crimes’ (the notion of crime being itself monopolised by the state actors). Few of history’s examples are as poignant as that of Nazi Germany, a regime that has used modern technology to systematically kill and enslave its own minorities and others. That state’s monopoly in identification played a critical role in that regard, through denationalisation laws and with the infamous use of identification badges for the Jewish, Roma, political dissidents, and other ‘undesirables’.[41] Every state actor’s ultimate powerplay is the punitive stripping or degrading of identification. Deplorably, it is still relatively easy for state actors to do this, rationalised by entrenched deference to nation-state sovereignty. Notions of belonging and the issuance of legal documentation are powerful tools that can shelter or break human lives. Effective preventative measures are lacking to make sure that such tools are not misused. Racism, xenophobia, sexism and other forms of discrimination will not disappear any time soon—if ever. Accordingly, they will continue to plague the socio-political nature of state actors, causing harm to the most vulnerable while leaving no guarantees who will be vulnerable next. This is all the more reason to mitigate these structural shortcomings by whatever means and opportunities possible, to support development of ‘Plan B’ alternatives to the current monopolies in place. There is a need for a healthier, more competitive environment in identification issuance, for which blockchain technology may help set the ground, in its various, competitive decentralised identification projects. None of this is to say that state actors’ role in legal identification can or should be completely overwritten. Blockchain’s cryptocurrency already co-exists with current fiat structures, creating a competitive alternative and giving people more choice and autonomy, especially when the state actor system fails (as it often does). Decentralised identification through blockchain can utilise established practices to build on, but to achieve a true value-add to the world, it is imperative that blockchain maintain the decentralisation philosophy it has been built on, to avoid the same problems that it is meant to address. Toward that end, it will be important for blockchain developers to connect less to the state actors that manufacture problems like forced displacement, and more to those who suffer from these problems. Blockchain itself stands to gain, as the experience of these vulnerable users can justify the rise of blockchain technology, expanding the positive and life changing experiences that these users already began to have. Aleksejs Ivashuk Aleksejs Ivashuk is the founder of Apatride Network, a coalition of stateless individuals, communities and stateless-led organisations working on addressing statelessness in the EU. He is also an associate member of European Network on Statelessness and serves on UNHCR's Advisory Board of organisations led by the forcibly displaced and stateless. In 2024, he co-founded the Blockchain for Human Rights consortium, bringing together stateless-led and exile-led coalitions to work together to advocate for responsible use of blockchain technology in digitization of identification. [1] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism  (Random House 1951)  chapter 9. [2]  Elizabeth White ,  ‘The Legal Status of Russian Refugees, 1921-1936’ (2017) 27(1) Comparativ. Zeitschrift fur Globalgeschichte und Vergleichende Gesellshaftsforschung 18-38. [3]  Arendt (n 1) chapter 9. [4]   ‘Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons’ ( UNHCR , 1 June 2014) < https://www.unhcr.org/dach/wp-content/uploads/sites/27/2017/04/CH-UNHCR_Handbook-on-Protection-of-Stateless-Persons.pdf > accessed 25 May 2024. [5]   ‘UNHCR Global Trends 2019’ ( UNHCR , 1 May 2019) < https://www.unhcr.org/flagship-reports/globaltrends/globaltrends2019/ > accessed 25 May 2024. [6]  Neha Jain, ‘Manufacturing Statelessness’  (2022) 116(2) American Journal of International Law 237-88.   [7]   i bid . [8]  White ( n 2 ) . [9]  Harry Kalodner et al , ‘An empirical study of Namecoin   and lessons for decentralized namespace design’ (2015) < https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/namespaces.pdf > accessed 25 May 2024. [10]   ‘Minorities, Discrimination and Statelessness’ ( OHCHR , 1 October 2021) < https://www.ohchr.org/en/minorities/minorities-discrimination-and-statelessness > accessed 25 May 2024. [11]  There is an important distinction between the two terms that plays out differently in different countries. In some countries, such as Latvia and Estonia, stateless people are called ‘non-citizens’ but are allowed, as a blank formality, to declare a non-functional ‘nationality’ in their identity papers that is equivalent to an ethnicity rather than any nationality. In the United States, stateless American Samoans are also called ‘non-citizens’ but hold a status of being American nationals with some special rights, like not having to pay federal taxes. Generally, the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘national’ are used interchangeably in different countries, furthering confusion and lack of consistency. [12]   ‘Access to nationality for women and girls essential for achieving gender equality and development: UN expert’ ( OHCHR , 3 October 2023) < https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/access-nationality-women-and-girls-essential-achieving-gender-equality-and > accessed 25 May 2024; (n 10). [13]  Julia Rose Kraut , Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States   (Harvard University Press 2 023). [14]  Adam Taylor , ‘The practice of revoking citizenship was tainted. Not anymore’   Washington Post  (Washington DC, 23 Febr uary 2023)  < https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/23/begum-uk-citizenship-nicaragua-bahrain/ > accessed 25 May 2024. [15]  ‘The passion, vision and action of Fridtjof Nansen, humanitarian extraordinaire’ ( UNHCR , 5 October 2022)  < https://www.unhcr.org/th/en/39149-the-passion-vision-and-action-of-fridtjof-nansen-humanitarian-extraordinaire.html > accessed 25 May 2024. [16] Jain (n 6). [17]  Brad Blitz and Caroline Sawyer  ( eds), Statelessness in the European Union: Displaced, Undocumented, and Unwanted  (Cambridge Univ ersity  Press 2011). [18]  Audrey Macklin , ‘A Brief History of the Brief History of Citizenship Revocation in Canada’ (2021)  44(1) Manitoba Law Journal 425-455. [19] Ayelet Shachar, ‘The Marketization of Citizenship in an Age of Restrictionism’ (2018) 32(1) Ethics and International Affairs 3-13. [20]   ibid. [21] Jagjit Signgh ,  ‘How blockchain technology revolutionizes digital ownership?’ ( Coin Telegr aph , 1 December 2023) < https://cointelegraph.com/explained/how-blockchain-technology-revolutionizes-digital-ownership > accessed 25 May 2024. [22]  Matthew Allen , ‘Swiss blockchain platform gives Rohingya identities ’  ( Swiss Info , 4 Apri l 2018)  < https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/refugee-crisis_swiss-blockchain-platform-gives-rohingya-identities/44020630 > accessed 25 May 2024. [23]  Saqib Sheikh , ‘The Invisible Man of the Visible World: How Blockchain Could Offer New Hope to Stateless Rohingya’  ( Coin Telegraph , 18 May 2020) < https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/the-invisible-man-of-the-visible-world-how-blockchain-could-offer-new-hope-to-stateless-rohingya/ > accessed 25 May 2024. [24]   ‘Save My Identity’ ( Save My Identity ) < https://savemyidentity.org/ > accessed 25 May 2024. [25]   ‘Coalition for Venezuelans’ ( Coalition for Venezuelans ) < https://www.coalicionporvenezuela.org/ > accessed 25 May 2024. [26]   ‘Apatride Network’ ( Apatride Network ) < https://apatride.eu/ > accessed 25 May 2024. [27]   ‘Blockchain for Human Rights’ ( Blockchain for Human Rights ) < https://bchain4hr.com/ > accessed 25 May 2024. [28]  Mathew Allen, ‘Charities and NGOs trial new technology to enhance performance’ ( Swiss Info, 20 February 20 18) < https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/blockchain-for-good_charities-and-ngos-trial-new-technology-to-enhance-performance/43907904 > accessed 25 May 2024. [29]  Joel Khalili, ‘In Ukraine, Crypto Finds a Purpose’ ( Wired , 15 March 2023)  < https://www.wired.com/story/ukraine-crypto-refugee-aid/ > accessed 25 May 2024. [30]  Aleksejs Ivashuk, Kanics Jyothi, and Sofiia Kordonets, ‘The forgotten victims of war: Ukraine’s stateless’ (2023) 72   Forced Migration Review 37-40 < https://www.fmreview.org/ukraine/ivashuk-kordonets-kanics/ > accessed 25 May 2024. [31]   ‘Identification for Development Initiative’ ( World Bank ) < https://id4d.worldbank.org/about-us > accessed 25 May 2024. [32]  Alex Hern and Skot Thayer , ‘Rohingya turn to blockchain to solve identity crisis’ Guardian (London, 21 A ugust 2018) < https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/21/rohingya-turn-to-blockchain-to-solve-identity-crisis > accessed 25 May 2024. [33]   ‘Crypto custody: a private key to success’ ( PwC , 4 November 2022) < https://www.pwc.ch/en/insights/digital/crypto-custody-a-private-key-to-success.html > accessed 25 May 2024. [34]  Florence G’sell and Florian Martin-Bariteau ,  ‘The Impact of Blockchains for Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law’ ( Council of Europe , 15 November 2022) < https://www.coe.int/en/web/artificial-intelligence/-/the-impact-of-the-blockchains-for-human-rights-democracy-and-the-rule-of-law > accessed 25 May 2024. [35]  Kevin George ,  ‘The Largest Cryptocurrency Hacks So Far’ ( Investopedia, 2 Decemb er 2023) < https://www.investopedia.com/news/largest-cryptocurrency-hacks-so-far-year/ > accessed 25 May 2024. [36]  Elizabeth Renieris , ‘Why a Little-Known Blockchain-Based Identity Project in Ethiopia Should Concern Us All’  ( Centre for International Governance Innovation , 7 December 2021) < https://www.cigionline.org/articles/why-a-little-known-blockchain-based-identity-project-in-ethiopia-should-concern-us-all/ > accessed 25 May 2024. [37]   i bid . [38]   i bid . [39]  Vitalik Buterin , ‘The Meaning of Decentralization’ ( Medium , 6 February 20 17)  < https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274 > accessed 25 May 2024. [40]  Allen  (n 28). [41]   ‘Jewish Badge During the Nazi Era’ United States Holocaust  Memorial Museum  ( New York, 2 February 2016 ) < https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-badge-during-the-nazi-era > accessed 25 May 2024.

Oleg Tistol is one of Ukraine’s leading contemporary artists, who works with stereotypes associated with Ukrainian everyday life and current affairs. His artwork cleverly juxtaposes Ukraine’s historical past with current issues through day-to-day imagery. The results are alluring and provocative, yet playful. However, since the beginning of the Russian invasion into Ukraine, Tistol has sought safety from the bombs by living in his basement art studio with his wife, daughter, and a friend. His art production has been greatly affected by this war and his unique perspective on ‘freedom’ and the release of the oppressive shackles of the Russian imperialistic narrative has had a profound effect on the work he now creates. This interview was conducted on 14 April 2022. Fig 1. March-22. Self-Portrait (Tistol 2022, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 140cm). © Tistol. Oleg Tistol : My apologies, the air raid sirens are howling now. There is noise from the street. Constance Uzwyshyn, for CJLPA : Tell us about the painting for the Journal ’s back cover (fig. 1). OT : The shadow was a very important theme for me before the war. Actually, we have lived with this feeling…the war has now lasted eight years [a reference to the initial invasion by the Russians in Donbas and annexation of Crimea in 2014]. That is why somehow this shadow is from the distant past, so I created a big exhibition from it (figs. 2, 3 & 4). This was a premonition, a photo document, a painting more important and striking than a photo. If I was going to do a portrait now of Peter, for example, I would make a shadow, and this would be more of a document than some other vision. Fig 2. Mariana (Tistol 2021, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 140cm). from Exhibition Oleg Tistol; Europe. 14 September – 14 December 2021, UkrEXIM Bank, Kyiv. © Tistol. Fig 3. Constance (Tistol 2021, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 140cm). from Exhibition Oleg Tistol; Europe. 14 September – 14 December 2021, UkrEXIM Bank, Kyiv. © Tistol. Fig 4. EN (Tistol 2021, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 140cm). from Exhibition Oleg Tistol; Europe. 14 September – 14 December 2021, UkrEXIM Bank, Kyiv. © Tistol. Now, about this painting (fig. 1). To think about art was very difficult during this last month. I asked my daughter Nadiya to draw my portrait because self-portraits are a problem (fig. 5). Someone must draw the shadow. This was a difficult period, but it was positive in a sense as we had not spent much time together earlier. Nadiya and I were in one studio together all month and I understood that my shadows are not superfluous or arbitrary. This is something very important and serious to me; it is sort of a document. It was a very cold-blooded documentation and is the way I am today…it is how I stand. It’s very important this shadow was done by Nadiya because throughout the month it was about survival and saving your life and those of your dear ones. This was the problem that had to be resolved and this is what the painting is about. What kind of war? You either feel it or you don’t. I don’t want to say anything about the war to the viewer. Either it’s there or it isn’t. Right now, I don’t want to say anything about the ‘katsaps’ [a traditional Ukrainian derogatory term for Russians].[1] I don’t want to say anything about the war. This is an issue for writers, journalists, and most of all, for the military. Fig 5. Nadiya Drawing the Shadow of Tistol for the painting, (March-22. Self-Portrait). © Tistol. CU: How would you translate ‘katsap’ into English? Is its very specific terminology impossible to translate? OT : ‘Katsap’ is in reality a Turkic word that has the meaning of ‘butcher’. This is an ancient term. Even Solzhenitsyn[2] called them this. In this context, it is the most appropriate term. I know this word from birth. Ukrainian villagers know this term. We thought this term stems from ‘tsap’. That is, an animal, sheep. But no. It means a killer. It means butcher. In Turkey, the butcher shops are called ‘kasap’.[3] This is not slang, and this is not an insult. I like very accurate cultural designations. And if I call a person by what they truly are, then you better understand the cultural context. CU: I see in this painting you are standing on a crate, could you explain this? OT : This is a very old Soviet crate. Perhaps it was some military item. I have had this in my studio for a very long time. There are instruments inside. Tools for work. Why this crate? I intuitively felt that I needed this crate. On one hand this could be a pediment for a monument. This is ironic. I understand that I can’t be a monument. But on the other hand, it provides an unevenness, an unpredictability. I am small, standing on this big crate. This does not even reflect fear, but an attempt to find our place. You understand that you are very small, that you are not confident in your place in any context. This was very important for me. CU : This painting is evocative, so strong! Your palette presents the colours of the Ukrainian flag and your blue self-portrait, your shadow of Tistol, stands proud as you gaze into the golden horizon calmly holding a cigarette. I am very moved by the piece and for me it represents the spirit of Ukrainians. Peter Bejger, for CJLPA : How should one work today in light of present conditions? You have had a very long and successful career. How do you continue to work, or perhaps not work, during this time of war? OT : I have made the paintings we were discussing (Shadow Paintings) as also nine small canvases (figs. 6 & 7). Today I was in the studio, and I understood that on some of these canvases I will do something completely different. In the next month I want to redo them. My career, my life, has transpired over 31 years in the Soviet Union and now, this summer, will mark 31 years in an independent Ukraine. The 24 August, the Independence Day for Ukraine, is almost my 62nd birthday. I had an exhibition in Lutsk and Lviv in 2020 and it was called Sixty Years of Independence . I was born on 25 August. The Lutsk Museum staged a large exhibit for me, opening on my birthday, and I decided to call it that. My entire life has been a struggle for my own personal independence and an observation of the history of Ukrainian independence. This has always been a part of my art. My first known paintings were based on ‘unification’, Khmelnytsky, and the Battle of Poltava.[4] It is called Reunion (fig. 8), which is my first well known painting.[5] Fig 6. Ai – Petri 2022, No.1 (Tistol April, May 2022, oil, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 100cm). © Tistol. Fig 7. April 2022 (Tistol April, May 2022, oil, acrylic on canvas, 25 x 25cm). © Tistol. Fig 8. Reunion (Tistol 1988, oil on canvas, 270 x 240cm). © PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv. After this painting, my artwork changed and was reactive to current affairs. Perhaps it would be shadows, or palms, or mountains, or perhaps God willing I will paint Peter with a Cat .[6] (figs. 9, 10 & 11). Now, my paintings will be something different and I delight in this. I like cultural attributes! That is, thirty years ago when I was explaining the meaning of Reunion , and Ukraine’s independence, very few understood the history of Ukraine. Even twenty years ago only a few understood, or knew, the history of Ukraine. I like the current discussion about Ukraine because of the war. I like the international context because everyone understands what is happening. The word katsap[7] is not an insult. No emotions here. It is an enemy. This is an attempt to delineate major cultural positions. Now everyone understands that Ukraine is very close to Western Civilisation, though I think there is only one civilisation. The war is cultural. A war between culture and anti-culture. What we have in this context from Russia is really a great error on the part of the global community. That is, the error has been committed during the last 200 years on what they see is ‘the great Russian culture’. It is really a cargo cult culture process.[8] It imitates cultural processes, but it is done from completely different motivations. Fig 9.Peter with Erik (Tistol 1997, oil on canvas, 90 x 75cm). © Peter Bejger. Fig 10. Roma Kusznir with Nestor (Tistol 1997, oil on canvas, 140 x 55cm). © Roma Kusznir Hunter. Fig 11. Konstanzia Yu with Sushi: A Fragment from the Project for Money (Tistol 1995, oil on canvas, 80 x 60cm). Private Collection. PB: I would like to ask you about identity. Ukrainian identity, and Russian identity. Perhaps you can explain your views on identity and the growth of Ukrainian identity since Ukraine’s independence. OT : This is my personal interpretation: Ukrainian identity is not ethnic. It is about territory and cultural identity. On the Maidan in 2014,[9] there was a huge banner that proclaimed, ‘Freedom is our Religion’. Everybody immediately understood that the first trait for Ukrainians is the striving for individual freedom. And thus, I am now against Ukraine joining the EU. I don’t want to end up in a union with the French, Hungarians, and Germans. I want to be in one union with the British, the Canadians, and Americans. We have one mentality. I name these countries as those of personal freedom and individualism, the weight of the individual is very important. I don’t like these bureaucratic countries. I am from Kozak[10] roots. This is an identity, striving for personal freedom, and that is why I speak sternly about civilization. As for Ukrainian identity, this was understood very clearly during the war. There were very few people in Kyiv during the first month of the war and we all became very cognizant of one another, just like we did during the Maidan. People immediately asked each other, ‘How can I help you?’. People were very solicitous to one another. All these volunteer services were very well organised, and we all looked after each other. This is the behaviour of free people. These are very straightforward values, and we have a union of people for whom these values are common. Somebody who has different values becomes a collaborator or leaves. This is an ancient village culture. And what is Ukrainian culture? A pursuit for more interaction and a beautiful, joyful life. I now identify myself as a folkloric artist. Not by coincidence, we chatted earlier about the group DakhaBrakha.[11] This is folk music, ethno. Nadiya began her career as an ethno singer. I now feel that I am a very straightforward, let us say, ethno folkloric artist. What I do is folk, which has a relationship to European civilisation, to American. I am interested in these cultures, these cultural processes. Why do we need art? So, life would be beautiful. Fig 12. Wine, from Series of Food (Tistol 1988, mixed medium, 55 x 53cm). Private Collection. PB: In the future, after this war, what is to be done with Russia? Russia is a neighbour. How do you live with this? OT : Seriously, over the last 100 years, there were four names for Russia. First there was the Russian Empire to 1917. Then it was called the RSFR, then SSSR, then the RF. Four names in just over 100 years. Geographic boundaries changed. Doctrines changed. But all in all, it remained the same. In the future, we can’t talk about a country called ‘Russia’. We don’t know how many countries will emerge from it. What their relations will be. I am certain of this, because I am a very big specialist on katsaps. From 1984 to 1986, I was in the Soviet Army in a special unit in the nuclear forces. Yes, a specialised nuclear unit. It didn’t even have a name, just a number: 31600. This number was on my military document. Nothing else was noted, and there were no references to aviation or rocket forces, only the number. They only took people from the deepest and middle part of Russia. I ended up there because I was an artist with higher education. They needed a specialist. All the other thousands of personnel were from the Urals, or Siberia, the same people who recently did what they did in Bucha.[12] I lived with them for two years in one barrack. I left from there a conscious Ukrainian. This did not happen after art school in Kyiv, nor after the art academy in Lviv, but after the Soviet army. I lived with them in close quarters, these katsaps, for two years in one setting, I understood we were aliens from different planets and two completely different cultural worlds. This is why I easily prognosticate their behaviour and their future. They will have many problems and will battle among each other. And for us geographically in Ukraine, we will have to control all this. They will be killing each other for quite a long time. Someone will call himself a chief or a leader and they will be battling each other. They will be battling for resources, food, or anything, and we will have to control this. I don’t see any other variant. This can’t be considered bad or frightening. God gave us this kind of neighbour. This is how it will end. There is no other variant. What is most important is to drive them away from us and not interfere. I think our war will end in Chechnya. It all started in Chechnya[13] and will end there. They [the Russians] strongly dislike Ukrainians, but they hate the Chechens more. Whether they want it or not, it will end there. They will have to resolve their internal problems and I am absolutely sure of that. There are already the first signs of this. After Ukraine, the weakest link is the Caucasus. This is why for many years I painted the canvas Kazbek (fig. 13), and why I gave explanatory texts to that from the Kobzar by [Taras] Shevchenko[14], from the poem ‘Kavkaz’ (The Caucasus).[15] Fig 13. Caucasus-12 (Tistol 2001, oil on canvas, 100 x 100cm). © Zenko Foundation. Everything is written there. Now Shevchenko is better understood in a broader sense. I was reading Shevchenko every day in the army. This book was like a Bible to me, and I read the entire library of his work. Every day a little Shevchenko was psychotherapy for me. This is why I consider myself an autochthone, not considering my complex ethnic background. I am a typical Ukrainian because culturally this is the most important book for me and now everybody understands this. CU: In your opinion, what is the identity of a Ukrainian? OT : To be Ukrainian is a conscious choice. If you want to live on this territory, with the rules we live by and with, you quickly become a Ukrainian. For example, the first guy who died on the Maidan was Serhiy Nigoyan,[16] an Armenian. He read Shevchenko. He was born into an Armenian family in Ukraine. He simply was Ukrainian: by mentality, behaviour, and the cultural code. You see this in 2014 in the Revolution of Dignity, known as the Maidan. This is dignity. This is not honour. Every Ukrainian has this feeling of dignity because otherwise you couldn’t live with yourself among your own. Dignity unites us. This is reflected in behaviour by me and Nadiya. I very much like to engage with my equals, that is people who have similar values. This is a characteristic trait, something that is passed from one person to another, and you find this very much in Shevchenko. There is everything there about human dignity. This is a key Ukrainian term. This Revolution of Dignity, this is very important to study. We now have to carry it forward. PB: We talked about Ukraine and Russia, now I would like to discuss the international community. You know that in the West now there are assertions we are in a post-national phase. We also search for identity, but it is often not built on national principles. This is a question about the role of nationalism and international relations. How can the international community support your struggle in Ukraine? There are very complex processes happening now in the West regarding nationalism and identity. I would like to hear your thoughts on what you see in the West and the international community. OT : First of all, there is not one fascist in the Ukrainian parliament. Not one communist. So, the problem of nationalism: we don’t have ethnic problems here. What can you say about a country whose president is Jewish? Our Ukrainian nationalism is geographically cultural. There is a problem here in terminology. This word ‘nationalism’ in the Western world is very negative and I understand this. If this is about racism, then this is frightening but we don’t have this problem. I mean this is a very minor problem that is almost not discernible. Now after 30 years when someone calls themselves a nationalist, this refers to a battle with a foreign enemy. One enemy. There is one enemy. You have to be very clear here with terminology. Ukrainian nationalism is not ethnic. It is absolutely not ethnic. I understand that American problem. I understand French historical problems. Here it is completely different. We are forming a cultural nation, and what other term can we choose but nation? I like the American project, an artificial nation. A group of wise people gathered together to create a nation of the future. This is the project of the United States. This is not a technical dream, but a cultural dream. This is the same for Ukraine’s battle for national identity. This has an American sense in the national. When the national anthem is played, people of all colours stand. They are united for a way of life. This is the American dream. The Ukrainian dream is freedom and dignity. Period. Fig 14. Vita Brevis (Tistol 2021, oil, acrylic on canvas, 260 x 200cm). © Tistol. CU: How would you define who Ukrainians are? OT : Exotic! We are all exotic. I accept this. I know who I am, and from where I originate, and this is interesting for me and informs my creativity. However, this exoticism is very important within the civilizational process. That is, the rules of behaviour among people and cultural exchanges. Culture is simply the exchange of beauty. For what? For peaceful and fortunate co-existence. How does the so-called Russian culture differ? It is an instrument of expansion. In the beginning they bring you Dostoyevsky, and later a tank will arrive. Absolutely! Look at the map of this war. Look at where the katsaps have fathered and then where they are fighting. This is in the Russian-language territories. They are there where they thought they would be greeted. The Russians are not being greeted; they are being killed. But they came to where Russian is spoken. As for the Ukrainian cultural process, Ukrainians dissolve into the world and know themselves from the inside that they are Ukrainian. This is for the children, the family, the parents. This is very important. When you are on the street you should be like everyone else, you respect those among who you live. This is a very important cultural trait, for a true culture. This is when you offer people some sort of beauty and you accept their beauty. Something very important happened during this war. I have long felt this and so have many others also. Perhaps this doesn’t sound very polite, but many Ukrainians absolutely don’t care what the world thinks of them. Thirty years ago, when I was in Switzerland, I was addressed, ‘Oh you’re Russian’. I quietly listened and then said, ‘Oh, you are German’. They were offended. I asked why you are offended. ‘You write in German, speak in German. You are German’. It is different now. If, after thirty years of Ukrainian existence, and the war, somebody in Switzerland doesn’t know about Ukraine, I wouldn’t bother to explain. I will not speak. I am not interested. Now about the world context of Ukrainian culture, for example, for me, my favourite writers are Hemingway and Shakespeare, and my favourite music from my youth was by the Rolling Stones, Genesis, and Led Zeppelin. I was formed by all this. Well, I may be considered ‘exotic’, but for me all people are exotic. The more exotic the persona, the more interesting they are. If there is a trait in a person that I do not have, that is interesting for me (fig. 15). Fig 15. Alien-25 (Tistol 20, acrylic on canvas, 140 x 120cm). © Zenko Foundation. PB: I have a last question…a question on trauma. Ukraine is experiencing a tremendous trauma now with the war. Every nation has their own trauma. How does art deal with trauma? How can Ukrainian artists deal with this trauma? OT : It’s actually the reverse. We have had 300 years of frightening trauma living one way or another within Russia. What is happening now: this trauma is like cutting off diseased parts. We are removing the trauma. The issue is sin. For example, I served in the Soviet army. If someone asks me about this time, I say I was a collaborator. Forty years ago, I was a collaborator and there was no other alternative. The issue is that these ‘Russian’ ‘victories’ from the past were done by the hands of Ukrainians and they were the best components of the ‘Russian’ army. Now, this trauma, meaning Russification…I am delighted is no more. A year ago, I got into a taxi and Russian ‘chanson’ music would have been playing.[17] I no longer hear that. The trauma will not be with Ukrainians, it will be with the Russians. Those who call themselves Russian, will have a horrible trauma. It will be similar to what the Germans experienced in 1945. For Ukrainians, we will be exiting a trauma. It will never be necessary to explain why it’s not worth reading Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. We no longer have to participate in the propagandistic lie of the ‘Great Russian Narrative’. Now everything has become clear. This problem of trauma: I no longer want to paint canvases of ‘unification’ or Russians. I am no longer interested. There are very many people from my circle, and my family, who now have to decide what to do with all those books of katsap classical literature. What should we do with these books? It is not necessary to just carry them out to the garbage. We need to tear off the covers so children will no longer read them. This is escaping the trauma. No matter how horrible this may sound…for eight years we couldn’t throw out the books, because books are a treasure. But you have to understand that this is a horrible thing. It traumatises the mind. You can’t give children Mein Kampf to read. You can’t do that. It’s the same here. This cultural cleansing is already being felt. There will be no need to pass legislation on language. Speak any language you want. It’s just important you don’t carry these ideas of slavery. So, this would no longer be the case. We have transcended the trauma. You can see this in people on the streets. You see this in social media, everywhere. Done! No more trauma. No more doubts. Nobody will no longer wonder if we are Europe, or not Europe. It’s obvious we are Europe. This is geography. I would like to add a summary. This is very important. You may think this sounds horrible and cynical, but this war is very useful. This war had to happen. You don’t want war, you absolutely don’t want it, but it had to happen. We have to await the end, and there may be more frightening events, but this addresses the issue of cleansing. We have to win in this cleansing. And we will win, definitely. Fig 16. Europe (Tistol 2012, oil, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 200cm). © Tistol. In an informal discussion after the interview Tistol described the current mood in Kyiv. OT : Well, it is more intensive now…there is a curfew and I have to still get to my mother. As for life here now, every day it’s getting better and more peaceful. Cafes are reopening. People are coming out. There are still fewer people or children on the streets. But it is somehow better. The first month (after the start of the war) was very scary. But I understand how much we all love Kyiv. It was an absolutely empty Kyiv then, with the anti-tank barricades. I was very happy we didn’t leave. There was a very important feeling that we had to live through all this here. I am now almost a Kyivite. I never before felt I was a Kyivite. I was from Vradievka. From Mykolaiv. I always felt I was a Southerner, now I feel that I am a Kyivan artist. Fig 17. Europe - 2 (Tistol 2020, oil, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 200cm). © Tistol. This interview was conducted by Constance Uzwyshyn and Peter Bejger. Constance Uzwyshyn is an expert on Ukrainian contemporary art. She founded Ukraine’s first foreign-owned professional art gallery, the ARTEast Gallery, in Kyiv. Having written a masters dissertation entitled The Emergence of the Ukrainian Contemporary Art Market , she is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge researching Ukrainian contemporary art. She is also CJLPA 2’s Executive Editor and the Ukrainian Institute of London’s Creative Industries Advisor. Peter Bejger is an editor, filmmaker, and writer based in San Francisco. He was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Ukraine, where he wrote and produced a documentary film on Secession-era architecture of the city of Lviv. Previously, he lived in Kyiv for several years, where he worked as a journalist, media consultant, and cultural critic. [1] Regarding issues of Ukrainian versus Russian identity, the reign of Russian Tsar Peter I is considered by historians a crucial phase in the development of Russian imperial narratives and the appropriation of Ukrainian history, heritage, and culture by a centralising colonial power. See < http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CP%5CE%5CPeterI.htm > accessed 22 May 2022; Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History , (2nd ed, University of Toronto Press 1994) 160-7. [2] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a notable Soviet dissident and spoke out against communism. He raised awareness of the brutality of the repressive Soviet Union, particularly the Gulag system. He was imprisoned in the Lubyanka prison and then was sentenced to an eight-year term in a hard labour camp. [3] Turkish word ‘Kasap’ noun means killer, slaughterer, meatman. [4] Cf. Serhii Plokhy (ed), Poltava 1709: The Battle and the Myth (Harvard University Press 2012). [5] Cf. Kristian Gerner, ‘The Battle of Poltava as a Realm of Memory and a Bone of Contention’ (2009) 31(1/4) 679-693. [6] In the mid-1990s, Tistol created Ukrainian Money Project . This project coincided with Ukraine producing its own currency: a reference to Ukraine’s independence and the step away from Russian domination. Tistol’s money project embodies Ukrainian contemporary stereotypes and historical references. He specifically plays with intaglio printing to achieve a subtle offset print and cleverly adds vignettes, numerals, and lettering to create his own version of money art. [7] This is a play on the terms Fascism and Russia. Cf. Timothy Snyder, ‘The War in Ukraine has Unleashed a New Word: Ruscism’ The New York Times Magazine (New York, 22 April 2022) < https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/magazine/ruscism-ukraine-russia-war.html > accessed 6 May 2022. [8] In another interview, Tistol elaborates on the cargo cult cultural process, stating that ‘I think the majority of people now sadly realised that one is a culture and a cultural process and the other a cargo cult operation to abolish Mariupol in truth. All people finally understood this’. See ‘КИЇВ. МАЙСТЕРНЯ ОЛЕГА ТІСТОЛА, БЕРЕЗЕНЬ, 2022’ ( YouTube , 30 March 2022) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3RfiIRUxmI > accessed 30 March 2022. [9] The Maidan, also known as the ‘Revolution of Dignity’, was a mass political protest in late 2013 and into 2014 in Kyiv that overturned a pro-Russian government and set Ukraine on a pro-European course. [10] Alternative spelling of Cossack. [11] DakhaBrakha is a world-music quartet from Kyiv that tours extensively and has a achieved a global audience with their unique ‘ethno-chaos’ style.. [12] Flora Drury, ‘Ukraine launches hunt for Russian soldiers accused of Bucha war Crimes’ ( BBC News ,29 April 2022) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61269480 > accessed 2 May 2022. [13] See Andrew Higgins, ‘the War that Continues to Shape Russia, 25 Years Later’ New York Times (New York, 10 December 2009) < https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/world/europe/photos-chechen-war-russia.html > accessed 6 May 2022; Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya (University of Chicago Press 2007). [14] Taras Shevchenko is Ukraine’s national poet, an artist, and a seminal figure in the development of Ukrainian national consciousness. Kobzar is Shevchenko’s first collection of poems and a powerful expression of Ukrainian cultural rebirth.. [15] Rory Finnin. ‘Mountains, Masks, Metre, Meaning: Taras Shevchenko’s ‘Kavkaz’’ (2005) 83(3) The Slavonic and East European Review 396-439. [16] See ‘Remembering Heroes of Euromaidan: Serhiy Nigoyan’ ( YouTube , 25 January 2019) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYUIB0s1YJI > accessed 1 May 2022. [17] Russian chanson music derives its ballad-like music by using prison slang and references to criminal life and hardship; it appeals to emotional sentiment to a loved one.

This is the text of the Introductory Address read at the conference on temporary exhibitions held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen on 22 November 2017 and organised by Sylvain Amic, Director of the Musées métropolitaines de Rouen. I am pleased to have been asked to give an address on the topic of loan exhibitions, because I edited The Ephemeral Museum , the book which Francis Haskell was working on during the last year of his life, and I shared his concern—his alarm—at the way in which the priorities of European and North American galleries and museums have altered.   At the same time, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that, as a senior member of the curatorial staff of several major museums—in Oxford, in London, and in Washington DC—and as the Director of the National Gallery in London between 2008 and 2015, I have not been able to do anything to halt the steadily increasing dominance of the temporary loan exhibition over the older ideal of the ‘permanent collection’, of the ideal of the collection as a sort of public treasury of art, which was certainly the idea behind the foundation of the National Gallery, as also the British Museum and many such institutions worldwide.   ‘Steadily increasing dominance’ is no hyperbole. The clouds in the sky provide the best example of something moving so constantly that it is hard to mark the successive stages and therefore difficult to notice how much has actually altered. The changes that Francis Haskell had noticed have in fact continued steadily since the publication of his book. Here are some examples from my own experience.   25 years ago, if you were visiting a major museum, whether in San Francisco, Copenhagen, or Budapest, you would not normally have bothered to check whether a famous work of art in that collection was on display. You would have assumed that it would be. 15 years ago, it would have been prudent to check. Today, it would be mad not to do so.   And here is another test: 25 years ago, if you announced to friends in London that you were proposing to visit the Victoria and Albert Museum, or told friends in Washington that you were hoping to spend some time in the National Gallery of Art, it would not have elicited the response ‘What’s on?’, or ‘Oh, are you going to see the show of so and so’, which is what you will almost always hear today.   And then again, and most significantly, 25 years ago it would have been considered very extraordinary for a National Gallery to clear out a large number of its rooms to make space for a temporary exhibition, but, over the last 15 years or so, this has been quite common. It happens regularly in the National Gallery in Washington, and it has happened several times in the National Gallery in London: with the big Velazquez exhibition shortly before I became director, with the Veronese exhibition while I was director, and with the Michelangelo and Sebastiano exhibition since I retired.   There are other ways in which one can monitor the increase in the importance attached to loan exhibitions. Many institutions smaller than those I have mentioned so far, such as the Frick Collection in New York, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Wallace Collection in London, and the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, were founded with the idea that they would remain the same or much the same, and also often with an injunction against any work being lent. But, despite this, almost all of these institutions have found a way to accommodate loan exhibitions.   And it is no exaggeration to claim that, if any museum is now thought to be ‘moribund’ or ‘sleepy’, the first remedy to be prescribed is to introduce or greatly enlarge a program of loan exhibitions. The trend is not inhibited by the obvious unsuitability of the space available. The most extraordinary example of this is the Villa Borghese in Rome, where our ability to appreciate some of the most beautiful interiors in Europe has often been sacrificed for the display of temporary loans.   I want to analyse here what has been happening in the UK, and chiefly in London, not only because it is what I have observed most closely but also because it is influential on the practice elsewhere in Europe.   In London, the most remarkable change is to be observed in the Tate—as the Tate Gallery is now known. For many years the works on exhibition in Tate Britain were rotated on an annual basis so that there was no ‘permanent’ collection at all. This was not popular and there has been something of a reaction against it, but in Tate Modern today everything is either a ‘display’ or a loan exhibition. It may be that this development has been encouraged by the large gaps in Tate’s holdings of modern art, when those holdings are compared with those to be found in Paris, Berlin, or New York. These gaps would be immediately apparent were a chronological arrangement of the permanent collection to be attempted.   What may have originated in a pragmatic solution to a British problem has come to be considered as an exemplary curatorial solution for the display not only of modern but of nineteenth-century art. The most recent imitator is the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, which is abandoning its previous lucid chronological arrangements in favour of a series of short-lived displays with startling juxtapositions.   I am dwelling on institutions devoted to the presentation of modern art deliberately, because one of the biggest changes since the publication of The Ephemeral Museum  has been the increasing popularity and institutional enthusiasm for contemporary art. In the United Kingdom you cannot easily obtain a grant for improving the display of Old Masters or ancient art unless you do something to demonstrate its contemporary relevance—which is most easily achieved by ensuring that a living artist add something to the display. The prestige attached to the contemporary can only encourage the tendencies which Francis Haskell most feared.   In the UK there is of course a long tradition of museums and galleries being open to the public free of charge—a concept not entirely unknown in France, as I have found on recent visits to Dijon. Fundamental to this tradition is the idea that these institutions belong to the public rather than to the state. This is not the place to explore the complicated question of museum governance and the British distrust of state control which resulted in the establishment of trustees. But it explains why there was a public outcry when some of London’s institutions decided to impose entry charges—so much so that all political parties now regularly declare themselves to be opposed to those charges.   However, since the publication of The Ephemeral Museum , there has been a massive change in museum funding, perhaps especially in the UK where the government grant has been drastically reduced almost every year for nearly a decade. Commercial activity to compensate for this has greatly increased. Finding sponsorship had already become a large part of a director’s job towards the end of the 1990s, and it has become steadily more important ever since. Sponsors understandably require publicity, and reliable major publicity can only be obtained by a museum with a temporary exhibition or a new building. (The press notice obtained by acquiring one of the greatest paintings of the sixteenth century—Titian’s Diana and Actaeon —was minute beside the coverage devoted to the Leonardo exhibition.)   Once the National Gallery has entered into a partnership with Credit Suisse, has secured Shell’s support for the Rembrandt exhibition, has persuaded private foundations to pay for a new roof and new curator, and has increased its revenues by enlarging its shops, by mounting small paying exhibitions, and by hiring out galleries for parties, then no Government—even a Labour government with a strong belief in funding public services which have been starved by the Conservatives—would seek to revert to former arrangements. Once institutions have learned to help themselves, they will have to live with the unanticipated consequences.   One needs to put this in the context of public amenities generally—at least in the United Kingdom. In front of the National Gallery there is Trafalgar Square which was created as a breathing space and, as it were, an assembly room for the use of the general public. The Mayor’s office, in collusion with Westminster’s local government officials, uses it as a space which can be hired. Much the same attitude is taken to London’s parks and commons. Across the river there is London’s largest concert hall, the Royal Festival Hall, built with public funds for the public, but now so full of shops and cafés that it resembles the retail labyrinths of the modern airport and the quality of its architecture is completely invisible. There has been very little protest at this ugly commercialisation.   What is happening may perhaps be best described as a shift from the Museum and Gallery as Library to the Museum and Gallery as Theatre. No one ever expected theatres to provide performances free of charge, but such remains the case with libraries, even in countries where you normally pay to enter a museum. One might expect the director of a great library to be a person of great learning, but the director of a theatre is expected to be an impresario—if possible one with ‘charisma’.   The British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the National Gallery are still thought of by many of us as something akin to a National Library (indeed, the British Library was not so very long ago embedded in the British Museum). Of course, they remain places where you may go to educate yourself and where you can usually find the unique or rare work which you wished to consult. You can drop into the National Gallery to see a familiar masterpiece; the very definition of a masterpiece must surely be something that you revisit. But these museums are now gradually becoming more and more like theatres where something new and exciting will be found. Indeed, in the case of the Victoria and Albert Museum, a large amount of the gallery’s energy appears to be devoted to the most popular elements in the performing arts. You enter the National Gallery without charge, but you may find that a great work by Raphael or by Van Eyck has been inserted into a paying exhibition or lent abroad as a reciprocal loan (as was the case sadly when I was Director), or indeed to raise money.   I do not wish to be alarmist. If the modern museum directors are no longer likely to be scholars, that does not mean that they will not be sympathetic to scholarship. If the modern museum director is going to be a modernist, that need not mean that they will always be averse to older art. The curator who prefers organising loan exhibitions to cataloguing the permanent collection may still be making a major contribution to art history. I do not regret the Barocci exhibition, nor indeed ‘Sacred made Real’ (devoted to Spanish polychrome sculpture), mounted during my Directorship at the National Gallery, both of which, I believe, altered the way that the history of European art is understood. The Ephemeral Museum was entirely fair on this point. One could even read parts of it as an exposition of the huge contribution to art history made by the loan exhibitions held in Italy and France in the first half of the twentieth century. But it is not only getting harder to mount really worthwhile exhibitions designed to alter, rather than to meet, popular taste; there is also more and more pressure to mount exhibitions which are primarily mercenary in motive.   Francis Haskell certainly would have liked to put the clock back. In private he even allowed himself to wonder whether, if a terrible accident were to occur, it might not have the beneficial consequence of forcing institutions to reconsider current loan policies. I have listed many reasons why the likelihood of a return to the situation that prevailed in the 1970s or 1980s is now improbable: the increase in institutions hoping to mount exhibitions and thus demanding ‘loan-backs’; the decline in government funding, stimulating dependence on sponsorship, which in turn requires the publicity achieved by popular exhibitions; the priority given to modern and contemporary art. But suppose there was a terrible accident to a great work when on loan. Damage to the works of art that has been occasioned by loan exhibitions has been very successfully suppressed, but a really large accident might affect the way that works of art are insured.   Without Government indemnity, most large loan exhibitions in the UK would not be possible, especially so-called blockbusters with extensive international exhibitions. The threat on the part of the current [as of 2017] Republican administration in North America to abolish the National Foundation for the Arts, which supplies indemnity, is a real one. In Europe there could be a similar reaction, and indeed in the UK there have long been officials in the Treasury who have worried about indemnity. These worries could lead to a sharp reduction in loan exhibitions and conceivably to a supervisory board deciding on which exhibitions were most eligible for government support.   Who knows who would be appointed to such a board! Perhaps there would be someone there who would propose that it was desirable to identify those works which any member of the British public and every British schoolchild should normally be able to see. But given the political pressure to do more for the regions, touring exhibitions of such works might well be high on the list of those exhibitions which would be encouraged. In addition, political support might be given to the idea of global ‘soft power’, following the French example. This is of course conjecture. But any forecast of the future should take into account the fact that loan exhibitions can support more explicit political agendas than those that have prevailed until now in the United Kingdom. Sir Nicholas Penny   Sir Nicholas Penny is an art historian and former Director of the National Gallery. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, and was keeper of the department of Western art at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. He is an alumnus of St Catharine's College, Cambridge.

Axel Rü̈ger is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts. He is a former Director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Mesdag Collection in The Hague. He was educated at Cambridge as well as in Germany and Canada, and has written books on Chinese and Japanese art. We live and die by our programme. If we don’t have exhibitions we may as well close. — Axel Rüger Axel Rüger, former Director of the Van Gogh Museum, joined the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) as the CEO in 2019. What should have been a celebratory period for the RA and a glorious time to be the man in charge, just after the RA’s 250th Anniversary in 2018, quickly descended into mayhem as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold early last year. For the cultural sector, the pandemic has been damning. Museums, galleries, theatres, and concert halls alike have had to adapt swiftly to spare themselves from financial collapse. The RA ‘tries to generate money normally with exhibitions that appeal to a broad public’, and yet it is an ‘eternal struggle to make money’, says Rüger. The greatest public health crisis of our lifetimes has greatly worsened matters for museums. National and international travel restrictions have severely curtailed visitor numbers and, as Rüger explains, there is ‘not an exhibition in the world that can really make money with 20 percent of its visitors’. In response, the RA has had to reduce costs of numerous kinds, and it has been forced to limit the ambition of the exhibitions and events that would draw the public back to the halls of Burlington House. Travel restrictions have also prevented some paintings from being borrowed, such as for the Francis Bacon exhibition (May 2021), which has consequently had to be scaled back. Rüger has been forced to make decisions about ‘how long it is viable’ to keep exhibitions open. ‘We are driven by the exhibitions programme’, he says, and the challenge will be to ‘retain integrity’ as the RA begins to ‘grow again’.   Fortunately, Rüger assures me that donations to the RA have not changed much during the pandemic. ‘[M]any loyal supporters have remained loyal and donated’, although some have understandably had to say, ‘not right now’. Indeed, ‘friends have been remarkably loyal’, and the RA is ‘still in a lucky position from donors’. Despite these positive lifelines, Rüger predicts, in our interview in October 2020, that the RA will lose £12 million in 2020. The RA does not have a ‘regular grant or funding agreement with the government’ but ‘has made use of the job retention scheme’. Many staff have been furloughed to cover some of the running costs of the institution while it waits for renewed revenue from exhibitions. Rüger tells me how the RA is ‘proud of its independence’ but had ‘applied to the cultural recovery fund where you could apply for up to £3 million as a one-off grant: help in the short term [to address the current] cash calamity’. The RA’s application has since been successful.   Moving to discuss the exhibitions themselves, Rüger explains that they are ‘always planned several years out’. Nonetheless, current circumstances are prolonging the wait for some exhibitions which have had to be ‘shunted along for next year and so on’, and two have been cancelled entirely. Rüger is still hoping to present seven exhibitions in the next year, ‘but none of them is really new. They have been on the cards for some time’. Regarding whether any upcoming exhibitions will be inspired by the pandemic, Rüger feels strongly that ‘it is too soon […] We need to distil what is good art from the pandemic’, he says, adding that the RA is ‘here to offer a place of aesthetic enjoyment, reflection, and solace. We are too deep into it. We will need a little bit of time and some clear water after the pandemic. What will that world look like? Some people think we need to change fundamentally’. On whether art produced from the pandemic will reflect health, death, and dying, Rüger is optimistic that it will ‘be more about how we live in our world’. ‘One of the worst things’, says Rüger, is that, during the pandemic, ‘we were banned from doing […] what we as a cultural society do best: providing a community, inspiration, and beauty’. So, he has no current plans to devise exhibitions about the pandemic. Until society has had enough time to heal, the RA will focus on its opportunity to provide a space for escapism.   The RA is, however, certainly moving with current societal waves. Rüger asserts that the RA is ‘trying to be more inclusive’ and that it ‘wants to try harder’. He adds that diversity ‘needs to be reflected by who we are’ with a ‘more diverse body of Royal Academicians and amongst our staff. We need to think and get more perspectives’. Taking place in winter for the first time, last year’s Summer Exhibition demonstrated the RA’s active efforts to be inclusive and to showcase artists from a broad range of backgrounds. Rüger highlights the rooms curated by Isaac Julien CBE of his own work. I ask Rüger what he thinks are the most effective ways in which   we can integrate the study and understanding of global art in the Western canon of the history of art. His response is thoughtfully engaged with the Decolonise Art History movement. ‘Northern Europe’, he says, ‘has a great history of museums and galleries. We in Europe and particularly Northern Europe, because of our colonial past, have a certain paternalistic attitude’. Looking forwards, Rüger is keen to increase diversity at the RA. ‘We need young art historians to go into the field who are from different backgrounds, to look at art with different perspectives. As a German, I have a different experience from my British colleagues, but as a middle-aged white man I can only be open-minded, [and] not bring those views’.   Our conversation then turns to discussion of the RA’s relationship with politics more broadly. Rüger has a clear stance on the institution’s position. He asserts that ‘the role of the Academy should be a platform for allowing debate and exchange, rather than taking a firm stance. Different opinions should be expressed through the art on the walls’. In other words, Rüger’s vision for the RA is that the art speaks for itself and encourages viewers to contemplate political ideas and debates. He tells me that it would be futile to try to impose a political stance on the institution, because ‘as a group of artists, [the Academicians] will never agree on anything at the RA. The only area where I can see the Academy taking a firmer stance is art education and art in the curriculum’. Rüger concludes, on this matter, that the role of the museum is multi-purpose, with a responsibility to provide a space where people can disconnect and enjoy the beauty of art, as well as contemplate current affairs. Rüger highlights the power of the museum, especially during the pandemic, and especially of artists, whom he praises for being able to ‘help us express emotions that we may not be able to express ourselves’.   Our interview comes to an end with Rüger revealing his vision for the RA in the coming years. I ask him if he intends to push the RA in a more modern direction, and what genres of exhibition he thinks London audiences will gravitate towards when they open again. He asserts, ‘I think the Academy should definitely be contemporary. We have living artists after all’. Acknowledging his audiences, he continues: ‘[P]eople, as they become older, tend to be more conservative. But we also have the schools’. There is evidently a fine balance to be struck between appealing to both the RA’s younger and older demographics. Rüger is sensitive to this, and he explains that the large-scale exhibitions that the RA produces do not make the institution the place for ‘super cutting-edge art making […] We have a certain status and a certain position. We might want to be a bit more experimental, but that is more for places like the Serpentine’.   During the first ten months of the pandemic, the country’s primary focus was on science, the development of vaccines, and economic survival. However, as we pass the first anniversary since the pandemic began, society is craving a return of culture and a revival of the arts. The RA reopens on 18 May 2021, with an array of exciting new exhibitions featuring David Hockney, Michael Armitage, Tracey Emin, and Edvard Munch. Louisa Stuart-Smith, the interviewer, is a third-year undergraduate in History of Art at Trinity College, Cambridge, interested in Italian medieval and early Renaissance art and architecture. In 2021 she will begin an MPhil in Italian medieval afterlife images.

Professor Judith Butler is a world-renowned philosopher and theorist whose writing has made them a household name. Their work has shaped and continues to shape how we conceive of gender, post-structuralism, embodiment, sexuality, and language. This interview is centred around Butler’s recent work Who’s Afraid of Gender?  (2024), which addresses the cultural and political anxieties surrounding gender and gender nonconformity. The following discussion dissects the rise of anti-gender ideology and explores the possibilities provided by psychoanalysis, feminist coalitions, the law, language, and art in counteracting this ideology in order to achieve liveability.   This interview was conducted on 15 July 2024 . The views and opinions expressed by Judith Butler in this interview are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the interviewer or CJLPA . The interviewer assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the interviewee’s statements.   CJLPA : Who’s Afraid of Gender,  as the title suggests, is centred around various fears surrounding gender. The ‘anti-gender’ movement encapsulates multiple fears, whether of a destabilisation of norms, of invasion, inversion, regression, or also progression. Why is it that gender has become the site on which these fears have been projected? And what is it about gender that makes it so potent?   Judith Butler : It’s an excellent question. First, let me say that the anti-gender ideology movement does identify gender as a particularly dangerous and fearsome enemy. This anti-gender movement is largely part of broader right-wing movements, which target critical race theory, sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and migration studies as well. The teaching of race, gender, and sexuality tend also to be anti-migrant and/or subscribe to the Great Replacement theory. So, there are racial, sexual, gendered dimensions of this right-wing, psychosocial constellation, and gender can’t be easily or fully extricated from these other matters.   Secondly, I think it’s fair to say that potentially everyone is afraid of gender—that is, gender understood as gender identity or as a set of norms that convey both expectations and possible punishments. Gender and gender identity are, of course, distinct. Gender can be for some a way to establish a place in the world, who experience their body in a certain way, many of whom take gender for granted at the same time that they value its social operation. For some, gender anchors their experience and as such, when certain questions about gender get raised, they feel that anchor loosening, and fear a destabilisation or going adrift in directions that are unknown and possibly frightening.   That’s an abstract way of saying that many people don’t want to hear questions about how others can and do change their sex assignments or how the complexity of gender identity is lived. This fear also attends to the new vocabularies, including new pronouns, that have been developed to recognise that complexity of gender experience, not just among young people, but across generations, and which generally exist alongside political claims for equality and freedom, for protection against violence, and for protection against discrimination and pathologisation.   So, I ultimately think it is destabilising for those who hold the worldview, sometimes a religious view, that male and female are to be taken not only as naturally given or God given (divinely given through natural law) but also given for all time. That is, sex, or binary sex is considered to be an immutable thing we should not be debating—something that should not be subject to change or reinterpretation, something that is what it is for the time of life without alteration.   CJLPA : I wish to expand on the links you mentioned between race, gender, and sexuality a little later. However, prior to this, I wanted to focus more explicitly on some of the book’s terminology. The book ubiquitously refers to gender being construed as a ‘phantasm’ with purported destructive powers and draws on Jean Laplanche’s formulation of the ‘phantasmatic scene’. For the benefit of our readers, could you explain what it means for gender to be a ‘phantasm’ in the context of anti-gender ideology?   JB : One of the regrets I have about this book is that I didn’t spend enough time distinguishing the phantasmatic scene articulated by Laplanche from the adaptation I make of his theory for critical and political purposes—an appropriation that Laplanche himself or his followers would not have appreciated. The phantasmatic is invariably a structured scene where various elements come into a dynamic interplay. It has its own syntax governing the ways that elements can be related to one another. There are fantasies that we have that are more or less conscious. According to Susan Isaacs, ‘Phantasy’ with the ‘ph’ should designate unconscious processes. The phantasmatic is the syntactically organised scene in which phantasy plays out.   I was drawn to thinking about Laplanche’s phantasmatic scene because it gives us a way of understanding the psychosocial elements involved in what Umberto Eco identified as the ‘jumbled character of fascism’. Eco pointed out that those who are drawn to fascist movements are very often enticed by the fact that they don’t have to reconcile certain fears they’re living with. They are not governed by any standard of consistency or non-contradiction.   In other words, the enemy—in this case ‘gender ideology’—can stand for the acceleration of capitalism and hyper-individualism at the same time that it is taken to be a sign of an oncoming totalitarianism or state communism. Alternately, gender could represent the incarnation of the devil in our time, one which will destroy Biblical law and its mandates regarding men, women, and the family: its heteronormativity, heterosexuality, and the specific meanings of feminine and masculine. Is it an excess of freedom, of individualism, or is gender state control, a dogma, a campaign of indoctrination? It is said that gender is a doctrine of radical determinism. It is said that gender supports a totalitarian regime that will take people’s sex assignment away with the consequence that no one will any longer be able to be a man or woman. Supposedly, you will no longer be able to be a mother or a father as well! Gender is going to strip people of established sex identities. Those who fear the phantasm of gender can easily hold all these views at the same time, and land upon a ‘cause’ for their anxiety about what is happening to the world they once knew. And then we also have a different version of problems: gender permits for trans women to enter prisons and take over the place or invade it or do harm.   So, there are many different kinds of phantasmatic elements that are held together in one place or by one people, and that means they’re under no obligation to reconcile them. There’s no consistency mandate. There’s no coherency mandate because this ‘ideology’ collects them all and promises a relief from every point of anxiety or fear. There is something nearly religious in that promise which most fascists make. They’re going to restore order. They’re going to restore society to the way it used to be—in the case of anti-gender fascists, it is often patriarchal order or heteronormativity that needs to be restored. In this way, a promise of the restoration of order tends to also be part of the promise of fascism.   There’s one more point I would like to add. Freud’s interpretation of dreams was important to Laplanche, but also to me in thinking through the appropriation of Laplanche’s theory here. This is because in a dream sequence, as opposed to a logical one or most conscious ones that take a straightforward narrative form, there are elements that hold together different psychic issues—they could include an anxiety, a desire, or a fear. When one looks at how a dream is organised in terms of the characters, the landscape, the transitions, and the ambient feeling, it seems as if the psyche of the dreamer is, in fact, distributed in a certain way across the scene. It is, as we know, sometimes difficult to understand that the dream scene is the scene of one’s own psyche. It may well be informed by a profound residue from everyday life or infantile histories, or impressions from others. It’s never freed of the environment or social interaction—it carries those traces as well.   The phantasmatic scene is a particular way of rearranging those elements that doesn’t necessarily correspond in any mimetic way to reality; rather, it gives us a refraction of reality of a certain kind. I think that this way of thinking about phantasmatic scene helps us with Eco’s idea that here are these apparently disparate issues that are somehow brought together in a scene without having to be reconciled according to conscious, logical measures—criteria that we might usually seek to use.   CJLPA : That’s a very helpful framework. When you referenced Freud in the context of dreams, the first thing that came to me was his idea of Verschiebung  (displacement) which brings to mind how gender has been distorted in order to accommodate disparate, often conflicting, elements of anti-gender ideology.   JB : Yes, Freud’s ideas of both displacement and condensation are at play, but so too is externalisation. I continue to think that we can’t do an ideology critique of the critique of gender ‘ideology’ without Freud.   CJLPA : Building on the aforementioned fears surrounding gender, the book also identifies that one of the consequences has been a rise of trans exclusionary feminism. The politics of fear, here, is generally centred around a fear of replacement and/or of violation. How seriously should this fear be taken? Additionally, I wonder whether over-engaging with these concerns risks dominating the discourse, allowing this fear to have primacy over the right to existence for trans women?   JB : Well, first of all, the fear of violation when stated should always be taken seriously. I think we all have a fear of violation. I don’t know anyone who belongs to a vulnerable community—whether that’s gay, lesbian, bisexual people, travestis in Latin America, trans people, or Black and Brown people, especially migrants—who doesn’t fear violation. But how we define who or what is threatening to violate us is a different matter. If we decide that members of other vulnerable communities are the real threat, then we have forgotten to ask what makes any of us vulnerable. The answer to that involves knowing the broader map of power, including extractivism and exploitation, abjection and effacement.   If many of us live in fear of violation, harassment, harm, rape, and murder, then we need to think clearly about the conditions under which those fears are rightly registered, and those in which they are incited and magnified to serve a fully different political purpose. I find it especially hard these days when countries who had earlier signed the Istanbul Convention are now unsigning that convention that did seek, for instance, to protect women against marital rape and gay and lesbian people against discrimination and harm. It mandated various kinds of social policies to help people understand the harm of homophobia and misogyny, and these are mocked and distorted by the political right as totalitarian educational projects.   Indeed, we have leaders now who mock feminist aims or misuse them for their own purposes. Both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, in their debate preceding the general election, debunked trans claims in ways that I found profoundly disrespectful and politically regressive. And Giorgia Meloni, who now fashions herself as a centrist despite her prior affiliations with fascism, promotes the restriction of reproductive rights, including access to reproductive technology. She also has begun the process of nullifying trans rights and challenging the legitimacy of gay and lesbian parenting rights. There are many people on the loose in positions of power who make us all feel the fear of violation, because it’s not just that we are losing legal protection, but violation is being renamed as something normal, and this discourse gives permission for a certain kind of violation.   There seems to be no recourse when the laws that are supposed to protect us actually harm us. Protection is itself a problematic notion, since it assumes a ‘protector’ who has power over us, and without whom our safety is put in question. Equally, when the laws that protect us are withdrawn or mocked or rendered inoperative, we are left even more vulnerable, having to find resources and support in extra-legal networks and communities. So, I understand the fear of violation, and I don’t blame any of the trans exclusionary women from voicing the fear of violation, but I do hold them accountable for making trans people, who suffer that same fear, into the paradigmatic abusers. This move is painful, unknowing, and unjust, amplifying prejudice rather than destroying it.   I have suggested several reasons for the fear of violation. These fears are multiplied for Black and Brown women, trans people, non-gender conforming people, and migrants. One question I have is how did it come to be that trans women, who have historically broken with certain notions of manhood to embrace an identity necessary for their lives—an identity that puts them at greater risk of discrimination, harm, and even murder—are now the targets of feminists who understand what it is to be vulnerable and courageous? Why wouldn’t we object to rape, violation, harm, and discrimination against all vulnerable communities? Identifying another vulnerable community as the true enemy, the one with all the power to hurt us, not only breaks solidarity but also misreads the map of power in our times. That is a perilous error and plays into the Right’s plan of action.   Unfortunately, many trans-exclusionary feminists use rhetoric similar to that of the new fascists and neo-authoritarians. I’m not saying they are, therefore, fascists or neo-authoritarians, but it remains remarkable how rarely they have stepped forward to distinguish their criticism of trans people from a right-wing eliminationist discourse. I wish they would, because if they don’t like being called fascists, they should show that they aren’t.   Feminists need to consider what alliances we want to be part of. In Latin American feminism, trans people are at the centre of the battle against fascism and state violence. Even the emerging left in France, although fragmented, shows how quickly people can overcome deep divisions when they see the necessity of opposing right-wing, white supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic forces. Our alliances need to be as deep or deeper than their hatreds. We make a grave mistake when we become hyper-sectarian or separatist, identifying other vulnerable communities as the true danger to our lives.   CJLPA : This brings up several important points. You pointed out that many people understandably fear violence, and you also mentioned the lack of recourse when protective laws are rescinded. Additionally, you touched on how shifting political landscapes influence this situation. Given this context, how do you view the law’s potential: is it still effective, or is it too closely tied to shifting politics, making its protections inherently unstable and prone to change?   JB : I think the law is really important. I appreciate left legal scholars and organisations—especially those who take on lost cases to make a point. I don’t share the deep suspicion of the law that some people on the left have. However, I believe it would be terrible if legal frameworks became the ultimate political frameworks. We need a larger framework for politics that includes the law and allows it to serve broader political and social aims. The law cannot effectively support goals like freedom, equality, or justice without a political movement and a firmly built vision of politics that provides the aspirations, ideals, and principles guiding our legal activism.   CJLPA : Practically speaking, how can we leverage the law to achieve these desired changes?   JB : Some years ago, I was on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, and now I am excited to see how they use legal strategies to advance progressive politics. They have an extraordinary way of thinking about the law. There’s also the National Lawyers Guild in the US, and I’m sure there are UK equivalents that I’m not familiar with, which are committed to political aims that drive their decisions about cases to take, how to argue them, and which precedents to establish in order to support our political struggles. This dynamic is happening, and as academics we might need to engage more deeply with these legal organisations to understand how they work and perceive the relationship between law and politics, allowing that to inform our own efforts to distinguish and ally the two.   CJLPA : I now want to turn to the audience of the book. In the work, you describe experiences encountering individuals who are unwilling to engage in debate, some of whom even view your work and ideology as demonic. Moving beyond this group of people, I wonder how you navigate discussing the issues raised in this work with those who are willing to engage but who are outside of academic contexts? I noticed that this book, unlike your previous works, was published by a non-academic publishing house. Is there a deliberate shift in the audience you aim to reach with this book?   JB : There is often a difference between the audience you wish to reach and the one you actually reach. According to Amazon, my work reaches people in gay and lesbian studies, women’s studies, and those interested in the critique of fascism, which isn’t surprising. There has been some mainstream crossover, which I’m glad about. Even though I conceived this book as a non-academic one and deliberately published it with trade presses, it may still be a bit dense and lengthy for a broader public. Non-academics can get certain things from it, based on my conversations with many readers.   I wasn’t trying to defend my former positions in this book; I didn’t revisit my previous works like Gender Trouble  or Bodies That Matter  to clarify or defend past ideas. It wasn’t an academic self-defence or clarification. The concept of performativity is mentioned only a few times and in passing, which was deliberate because the book is not about me or my work.   Additionally, I dispute the idea that I have an ideology or that gender is an ideology. For me, self-criticism is important as I embark upon a new project. Often in my scholarship, I end up questioning presumptions from my earlier work. I appreciate the living character of theoretical work, where you can write a book with full conviction and then revise it based on people’s responses that you found persuasive. Academic humility is important. We shouldn’t hold positions over time and defend them against all opposition. Instead, we should listen to those who have good criticisms, or feel excluded or misunderstood by our positions, and be willing to change if we want to be responsive and overcome our own blind spots and unwitting prejudices.   Regarding the performativity of gender, I’m no longer sure how I feel about it. Other issues seem more important to me now. I became interested in talking to people who are unsure about what’s going on with the contemporary discourse on gender. For example, are women in prisons truly threatened by trans women? Or is the real threat from guards, or the prison system itself? The same people who threaten women in prisons often threaten trans people as well. What do we make of that? The violence of the prison system should be a focus, not just individual violent acts, but the harm inflicted by largely unsupervised guards, psychiatric personnel, and sentencing protocols.   Similarly, are women (AFAB) truly threatened by trans women using the same bathroom? Understanding the challenges trans people face when deciding which bathroom to use is crucial. Trans women and trans men face significant vulnerabilities and violence in these situations. For example, I have a friend, a trans man, who was thrown against a wall by police for choosing to use the women’s bathroom because he didn’t feel comfortable or safe in the men’s room. He was trying to avoid a potential scene of harassment by using the women’s bathroom. He figured he could be taken to be a very masculine lesbian butch. Why should such a person be in an imperilled situation no matter which bathroom they used? We should be identifying these vulnerabilities and sharing strategies and forms of resistance in a collective fashion rather than viewing each other as primary enemies, and letting the larger structures of oppressive power fade from view. This also applies to trans people who see feminism as their enemy. What a terrible and unnecessary division! The issue isn’t feminism as a whole but the broader transphobic world, with some feminists engaging in transphobia in horrific ways. Let us keep those larger structures in mind. We are more easily gathered together as a right-wing phantasm than by ourselves, in the interests of solidarity.   CJLPA : I would like to hone in on the importance of listening to those who feel excluded and allowing our own perspectives to be shaped by the lived experiences of others. I also appreciate you sharing your friend’s experience. With this in mind, I’m wondering whether you see a clear distinction between scholarship and activism, and if so, how would you define that distinction?   JB : I think there is a distinction. I think this book tries to show a not fully scholarly audience what scholarship actually does—that the false things that are said about gender can be defeated or debunked in a patient and informed way. For instance, I discuss biology at some length because people often wrongly say that gender denies the materiality of the body. That’s simply not the case. Look at the incredible work in feminist biology and feminist science studies—it is an extraordinarily rich field.   There are different ways to debunk or to oppose the false things that are said about gender. That’s important to do, but I’m also trying to deflate the fears that have become prevalent in the public discourse. People believe that their traditional households will be disrupted or destroyed by some gender ideology that’s let loose into the world. That’s not the case. A trans or queer couple living next to you won’t disrupt your traditional heteronormative marriage with your children and a dog. They won’t come rushing into your home to take your sexed identity away.   Many feel that their sense of being natural, necessary, and universal is profoundly challenged by the existence of queer kinship and trans folks trying to find reproductive technology that works for them. They feel deeply threatened. But are they truly threatened? What is it they’re actually at risk of losing? The only thing a traditionalist who’s afraid of gender ideology is losing is the sense of being superior, exclusive, and universal. My advice to them is to mourn that loss. You still get to have your life. It’s the same thing you’d say to a white supremacist: yes, you’re losing that sense of supremacy. That’s good. You’re going to live in a better world governed by equality, and that loss is necessary to live in that better world.   I don’t expect the most avid proponents of anti-gender ideology to be convinced by me. I suppose I am trying to talk to people who are confused in the political centre or who don’t know how to adjudicate some of the claims that are circulated without support on social media and news outlets. I looked at the Sex Matters internet site, for instance. They take established scientific journals and reject their claims without offering evidence to the contrary. This is bad scholarship and bad journalism. We need to listen carefully and distinguish between informed and ill-informed views.   I had someone come to a talk in San Francisco recently; she was a member of a trans-exclusionary feminist group. She and her cohorts leafleted the event in advance, and some of them came inside and then lined up to speak after the presentation concluded. One of them asked a question, and I thought that was good opportunity to see whether dialogue is possible. That person spoke about her fear of violation, identifying trans women as the threat to her personal safety. My approach was to have provisional empathy with that fear and then to open it up, and to ask if what you say you’re fearing is indeed the source, the reason for your fear. Are there other sources of this feeling that many of us share that something is, in fact, threatening our lives? I said, ‘like you, I fear violation. But unlike you, I understand its sources and instruments differently’. If we had been able to pursue a conversation, that would have been a starting point. It’s important to understand the kind of fear trans exclusionary feminists feel, and to offer them another way of understanding how widely shared that fear is, what might be accounting for it, and to let them know that trans and queer people share that fear. That can lead to a potential solidarity. Maybe we could overcome what I take to be a lamentable division among some feminists—a very minority view within feminists—that is trans exclusionary, creating a division between them and trans and queer allies.   CJLPA : In the book, you propose a form of coalition wherein all those targeted unite effectively, despite their differing viewpoints, leveraging their power in numbers. You note that a coalition, at its best, is not comfortable. However, beyond discomfort what do you think are the primary obstacles standing in the way of achieving this coalition? And how do we go about minimising these?   JB : I think it’s perfectly possible to ally without overcoming obstacles. To accept that there are, at least for now, irresolvable differences, and at the same time, to realise that an alliance is necessary in order to fight off a form of power—whether it’s fascist, neo-fascist, or authoritarian—that is going to strip people of their rights.   Here I am talking about women of all kinds, trans people, gay and lesbian people, queer people, migrants, vulnerable people, especially Black and Brown people, and indigenous people. We really identify and document who is involved in the attacks on such people and what powers are undermining the economic futures of those who are most precarious, including workers whose unions have been weakened or disbanded. We would be very foolish not to see the larger picture.   People ask me, ‘How would we get along? There’s so much vitriolic antagonism. How could we ever make an alliance?’ Ultimately, there are times when that vitriol and antagonism are not resolved but are understood to be secondary when threats are more appropriately identified as coming from fascist or right-wing sources of profit and power, both state and non-state powers. Ecologically speaking, we don’t have time for these internecine conflicts or, if they are necessary, we can accept the unresolved character of those conflicts as we join in the fight against fascism. When the question becomes, ‘How are trans and feminist people going to get along?’, we need to ask: What is the framework in which you’re asking that question? It’s very small and has narrowed into this little fight. What’s the background for that fight? What happens if we open up the frame to understand the background of that fight?   To what extent are we having that fight in order not to see ecological catastrophe, the true damage of hyper-capitalism, whose trace is in fascist discourse, or the true damage of amplified state power, whose trace is also in fascist discourse? What would a left, feminist, queer, trans, and anti-racist alliance look like that could identify these issues given all the resources we have from socialist history and theory and from ecological criticism? What could we do if we understood those internal differences as persistent but secondary?   CJLPA : Looking at the bigger picture is clearly essential in the context of this coalition. However, some might be concerned that within a diverse and pluralistic feminist coalition, marginalised voices could risk being overshadowed by more dominant perspectives. What is your view on this potential issue?   JB : The form of coalition that I advance is one that Black feminists have articulated. I think that Black feminism is the future of feminism, and that it should indeed lead the way. Feminism from the Global South that has been building coalitions knows how to do it. These are the most important points of reference for thinking about coalition. It’s from that hard-won understanding that the rest of us need to learn. In that sense, those who emerge fighting from a history of subordination are leading the way.   CJLPA : I fully agree that intersectional feminism is the way forward. This also ties in with a discussion of language, as the book mentions how Eurocentric fictions have organised language into fixed and normative binaries. Therefore, while there is power in putting oneself into discourse (through the use of pronouns, for example), not everyone is given this power. What, then, does a decolonial approach to understanding gender look like, and how do we go about widening the ambits of discourse?   JB : This is one of those moments that Naomi Klein refers to as a ‘doppelgänger issue’. The Vatican claims that gender is an ideology seeking to colonise  the Global South, asserting that gender is another imperialist export and will undermine local cultures, especially the culture of the poor. Of course, if you’re on the left, you recognise the left version of this argument: ‘Oh no, we don’t want a feminism that’s imperialistic. We want an anti-colonial feminism. We want a decolonial feminism. We want a feminism that thinks seriously about white supremacy and colonial power and how feminism has been deployed to support those forms of objectionable power’. Of course, we want to deploy feminism against those colonial powers. There’s just no question about that. So, we could be taken aback or even taken in by the Vatican’s claim. But here is where we need to make a distinction.   What the Vatican would like to impose on the Global South is a Christian missionary view of the natural family: white, heteronormative, and anti-feminist. This view re-subjugates women and challenges the notion of gay and lesbian marriage or gay and lesbian forms of intimate association or kinship that are not necessarily marital or conjugal. So, we see a different kind of colonial imposition, the one that the Church has always been imposing, acting as if it is the protection against colonial domination. Now that needs to be exposed and analysed in detail. It’s not easy because we do know that there are colonial forms of feminism, and that feminism has been deployed in a pernicious and horrible way to wage wars against Muslim and Arab peoples, for instance. Such ‘feminist’ war tactics fail to recognise both Muslim feminist networks and anti-colonial feminist movements. The US has used feminism to advance war and colonial occupation, as we see in the mainstream coverage of the war against Palestine. But Palestinian women and children have been the ones to suffer most in that war.   So, we do need very strong criticisms of colonial feminism, but we also need to understand how versions of colonialism can be furthered by the right-wing appropriation of left arguments and the creation of a kind of confusion among people who cannot see the difference. It cannot be the case that we conclude, ‘Oh, the anti-colonial thing to do is to accept the Church’s teachings!’ No, that’s to accept a different version of colonialism, or sometimes the same version that the Church says is imposed by the Global North as they themselves impose it (from the Vatican, part of the Global North). I do think the Global North imposes ideas of gay rights, lesbian rights, and feminism that are very often smug, arrogant, and destructive, assuming what forms resistance and liberation should take for all people, imposing local norms as if they are, or should be, universal. That is actually a critique I have made alongside many others, and I continue to make it. Unfortunately, it rhymes with the Vatican view. Here again drawing distinctions is crucial, marking off the critique of colonial feminism and the one that’s being advanced by the Church as a subterfuge for the amplification of its own colonial power. I do try to address that a bit in the book. It’s not a large section, but I point to the scholarship that is doing that and should surely be read.   CJLPA : Who’s Afraid of Gender?  also explores ‘monolingual obstinacy’ and the productive potential of translation. Could you explain these concepts briefly, so that those readers who may not have read the book yet have a sense of how this ties in with our discussion.   JB : Well, one way of entering that question is autobiographical. I wrote Gender Trouble  in 1987 and 1988. It came out in late 1989. Suddenly that book took off in the US and the UK, Australia as well, and was translated into twenty-something languages in the following years. I was invited to various places, met those translators who were working with my language in Latin America but also in Eastern Europe. Those translators were also scholars. They were, and remain, scholars of the topic and they knew things about gender, sexuality, law, social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis that I didn’t know. I ended up learning from them not only about theory and the problem of translation, but the asymmetry of translation, how English floods non-English markets, how scholarship from an array of languages rarely finds its way into English unless the scholars master academic English. I also had to confront the limits of English, the arrogance of anglophone theory, and the importance of attending to the non-translatable.   Indeed, exposed to other languages through the translations of Gender Trouble  actually allowed me to learn different ways in which gender—as a term, a concept—is and is not translatable. Gender produced a disturbance in the so-called ‘target language’—I hate that military word, but that’s how translation theory works. I learned all kinds of things about why it doesn’t work. For instance, many people in South Africa explained to me why the term gender doesn’t work because there are all sorts of local ways in different African languages for designating what we call gender positions in kinship and community. Many people in East Asia explained why it was so hard to translate and the various political debates about translation. Even in Germany, where it seemed like ‘Geschlecht’ was the only thing you could use, it was too biological, related more to ‘species’ than to difference or identity. Maybe we should just say ‘gender’, or in French, could you really say ‘genre’ given the literary traditions that distinguish among them with such enthusiasm? So, I learned a huge amount as a consequence of being translated and actually came to be able to read in Spanish, which I never could do before, even though I live in California—and should have, much earlier. My own first-worldism was appropriately challenged, if not shattered. I became very interested in all the examples of why gender does not work. And I made friends with my translators, many of whom are among my most important interlocutors. My views on the importance of multilingualism to any theory of gender were established only after being translated.   Perhaps one insight I have now is the result of translation: gender sometimes works in ways we don’t anticipate and is sometimes feared in ways that are completely different from what it means in the scholarship or even in law and social policy. But sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s not the term; sometimes it needs to be forfeited for another vocabulary altogether. Those of us who’ve been working in that framework of gender, or gender studies, need to listen and learn and revise what we think according to what folks who are grappling with the issue of translation tell us.   Even though I haven’t been strictly monolingual as an adult, I still think every English language speaker and writer has to deconstruct their monolingual obstinacy, take apart the assumption that English is the language in which theory takes place or English is the language in which things become most clear. It’s not the case. Theory is not produced in the Global North, or in English, and then applied to the South. For those who work with that unexamined assumption, they operate with an arrogance that has to be undone. Embracing the practice of translation is a knowledge-seeking activity. It is, in fact, one of the main ways to learn about the world, that is, how the world is organised differently. It is also one of the main ways to learn how to speak across languages with greater care and openness, letting another language enter and transform one’s thought. I am a strong supporter of a transnational and multilingual forms of coalition. Those are both enormously important for any global movement that addresses the conditions of destruction, exploitation, extractivism, and domination.   CJLPA : It is crucial to go beyond one’s own perspective, rooted in one’s language, to understand how gender is currently understood by others and how it possibly could be understood looking forward. With this in mind, it is interesting that some feminists or gender theorists advocate for a post-gender world. Yet, your approach emphasises making diverse social embodiments more liveable.   Within the transgender community you acknowledge that while the binary framework works for some to articulate their gender identity, it is unworkable for others. Specifically, for those for whom the binary is unworkable, there is a form of hermeneutical injustice when it comes to the intelligibility of non-normative expressions of gender identity. There seems to be a tension between the flexibility to self-describe and this social intelligibility—I wonder what you make of this tension.   JB : Well, look, there are those who say to me, don’t we want to simply abolish the gender system? And I generally respond, from what position would we, or could we, do that? I accept that we’re historically formed and that we act from a distinct situation. I would not say that we are historically determined in a deterministic sense by all kinds of norms. We can, and do, break with them. But the conditions of that break? How do we understand that historically, as evidence of the open-ended and nondetermined character of history and historical formation? I don’t think we can leap out of history or our own historical formations to simply get rid of gender. We can do that in a play or a film, or maybe a dream, and dreams are important for politics, to be sure. But what precisely is the practice of abolishing gender?   We could start by saying, ‘Okay, hospitals shouldn’t assign sex’—which is a very interesting idea, one that Monique Wittig proposed, and I liked it when I first heard it, but I took it as a thought experiment. If we seized power in hospitals and banned sex assignment, then we would be accused of being those totalitarians who are going to strip people of their sexed identities. Is that what we want? Or are we on the side of freedom, wanting to expand the domain of gender freedom? Of course, that threatens the Right from another side, but so be it. If we want to abolish gender through law, then through what state power would we act? And would we then be aligned with the State, or would we be State powers? Is that what we want?   I think of sex assignment as iterable, meaning it happens not just once, but throughout life. It happens again and again. I suggest that that’s true for people who stay with their original sex assignments, who effectively say ‘I was assigned female. I like being female. Female is great. I’m assigning myself female all the time. I am in my life living out that assignment and repeating it and reproducing it’. No one simply has a sex assignment. It is being renewed all the time, or broken with, recommenced with another category. So we might say there’s an iterable or performative dimension to sex assignment (which does not mean it is fake or an artifice). No, it’s part of the temporality of a life. Sex assignment happens when we rely on observations about what sex someone is. There are chains of such acts, and those chains can be broken by those who actually need to break the chain to live, and to start another sequence as a way of living, if not flourishing.   I think that takes us away from the idea of a punctual and definitive sex assignment, which I don’t think does justice to the way that assignment works in a lifetime over the course of a life—and how it can change.   CJLPA : I find this approach highly compelling. I am also curious to hear what role you think art—especially visual art which transcends language—has in this venture of ‘curating’ one’s self-expression and broadening the remits of how gender is perceived.   JB : I think art is crucial. I think we need a new imaginary or, rather, counter-imaginary. The right wing is filling the world with these phantasms. They appeal to passions like fear and anxiety, longing for a different world, mainly an ideal of a former way of life. And what do we on the Left offer? What passions are ours? And how do we appeal to them imagining a future in a different way—not the imagined future in which patriarchy and racism is restored, but an imagined picture of greater liveability, equality, justice, and freedom?   I do think that liveability has to be included as a goal. It sounds like a very modest goal, but it’s not. It actually includes survival and flourishing. And it assumes equality and universality, since I cannot achieve a liveable life if the conditions for that life are not accessible to everyone else. At the same time, it is not easy to stipulate for everyone what constitutes the ‘liveable’. I published a short book with Frédéric Worms on this.[1] For instance, I’m not going to say from the outset that anybody who stays in the binary gender system is not living a liveable life—who would I be to say that? That’s just wrong. However, if they live in that binary system and say that no one can live outside of it, then I’m going to oppose them. So, I think we need to accept from the outset that people find liveable very different ways of naming and practicing embodiment. Affirming that complexity is important with the caveat that certain ways of practicing sexuality can be coercive and violent and must be categorically opposed.   I understand that Gender Trouble  was taken by some readers to license self-expression as a value. Although that is certainly important, I’m less interested in self-expression than in establishing modes of liveability that includes the affirmation of complexity. Once we go back to self-expression as the core of our aesthetic practice—focusing on issues such as self-crafting, we’re also implicitly or explicitly subscribing to individualism. And then we’re forgetting that what we need to do is fight for a world in which liveability is achieved by affirming complexity and difference. So, I want a common, if not collective, vision, and not simply an individualistic one.   CJLPA : Finally, I’m aware that you have put off writing a book on Kafka to write Who’s Afraid of Gender?  I’m curious about whether you believe Kafka’s writings offer any insights into countering anti-gender ideology.   JB : I always have—there might even be a brief reference to Kafka in Gender Trouble . I had read Derrida, I’d seen Derrida give a talk on Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’   as I was writing Gender Trouble , and I’ve been teaching Kafka for many years. I love his humour, and I appreciate his ways of seeking to flee a world that is fundamentally unliveable. There are fundamental questions in Kafka about the ways that legal life confounds human existence, extending key legal concepts like judgment and prison to everyday life. He lets us to see that the promises of law to deliver justice, for instance, are very often broken, or that some legal systems built on property relations and racism, break their promise of justice at the moment of making it. As a result, we have to reconceive our way of understanding law as bound up with that broken promise and the way that promise works in our lives, inspiring the very hope that it tends to destroy.   It is easier to think about the false promises of authoritarian and fascist leaders than the ones we live within democracies governed by the rule of law. Of course, there are false promises that are made by fascist leaders right now, but we would be wrong to think that the fascism at issue is not produced in the midst of democracies that are supposed to be their opposite. The false promise is exciting and blinding, and some people would rather have the promise, regardless of its falsity, than not have it at all. Very often in these cases, the promises of a restoration to a former time are fuelled by a restoration fantasy.   Kafka exposes how that works. In his short fiction, mainly parables, but also the novels, the narrative expectation is established that law will deliver justice, that liberation is at hand, that a way out can be found. And then, in The Trial  for instance, it turns out that sentencing and punishment precede the trial that never arrives. This destruction of a narrative expectation relates, for instance, to the work of Ruth First’s 117 Days . That work speaks, of course, to questions of indefinite detention under South African Apartheid, but it also speaks to the scrambled sequences that now govern our lives. So, I would argue that there are temporal and fictive dimensions to fascist passion and fascist promise that would benefit from a reading of Kafka.   CJLPA : What strikes me most about Kafka’s writing is the quintessential narrative manipulation of time and space. To me, it seems that this disfiguration and disorientation from conventional coordinates also prompts readers to reimagine the status quo and to consider different realities which easily extends to gender.   JB : For sure, if you think about developmental narratives—‘oh, you’re born a girl, you’re supposed to become a woman’, many ways of blocking freedom and complexity are taking place. The detour, the error, the ‘failure’ are all constitutive of the scene of gender, as are new beginnings and persistent modes of ambivalence. This temporal elaboration within which we seem to live, almost unconsciously, is generally accompanied by great disturbance, and that is significant. This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in forward motion of any kind; I am in favour of forms of hope that can be shared and grounded in workable solidarities. Kafka disturbs the temporal developments that are often assumed or expected in literature, law, and life, so one question is how such expectations inform promises of a political or legal kind, or even religious expectations of fulfilment. That disturbance does open up a different kind of imaginary, one perhaps that we don’t know how to expect, but which will change the course of our political expectations of justice. Or so I hope—see, I do hope. This interview was conducted by Helena de Guise. Helena graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2022. She remains academically interested and personally engaged in feminism, law, German literature, and postcolonial theory. [1] Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms, The Liveable and the Unliveable  (Fordham University Press 2023).

Professor Jan-Werner Müller is the Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He has published many books—including  Contesting Democracy  (Yale University Press 2011), What is Populism?  (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016), and Democracy Rules  (Penguin 2021)—and voluminously in academic journals and public fora including the Guardian , The New York Times , and Project Syndicate .   This interview was conducted on 3 January 2024—before the re-election of Donald Trump—and has been edited for length and clarity.   CJLPA : Good afternoon, Professor Müller. The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art  is singularly lucky to have you here with us today. To begin, can you tell us a little bit about your personal and intellectual biography and in particular what draws your theoretical focus to democracy?   Jan-Werner Müller : I’m glad we have about five hours so that I can pontificate at length about my autobiography! Many academics are rightly reluctant to go down a very autobiographical path because there’s the danger of seeming very narcissistic. But maybe less obviously, there is also the danger of appearing reductionist about one’s own interests, of simply reducing intellectual commitments to completely contingent contexts. So, with these caveats, I’ll be relatively brief: contrary to what is often said today, which is that the 1990s were an age of liberal triumphalism, complacency, supposedly ‘The End of History’, nobody quite believed that (and nor had everybody truly understood what Frank Fukuyama was really trying to say).   Contrary to that cliché, it’s important to point out that, at least in certain respects, the 90s were a moment of insecurity, of uncertainty, of liberals feeling that they may have lost their bearings. This is partly because the great struggle with communism, for shorthand, seemed to be conclusively over. And at the same time, issues were appearing that liberals felt they didn’t have much of an answer to. One of them was nationalism (which is not to say that nationalism had not been politically important during the Cold War).   For many years, if you lived in Europe, you were bound to be preoccupied with what was happening in the former Yugoslavia. Many of us became disturbed by questions about liberal democracies’ ability to respond to questions about belonging, where to draw borders, and what really holds people together in a democratic polity. As a result, there was much handwringing and agonizing by liberals at the time. Of course, I’m not saying that we had the answers soon after. I’m also not saying the story about complacency is completely wrong. But in certain ways, it was a very unsettling time. In the country that I originally come from, Germany, there were also questions about belonging, given that for many decades we had laws on the books that basically said you had to be ethnically German to be a citizen. Questions of belonging in a democracy, questions of social cohesion, questions of citizenship were very much alive in those years.   It was also in the 90s that a curious revival of the thought of the German political and legal thinker Carl Schmitt started. This was puzzling for many people at the time because, up until that point, there had been a general view that Schmitt’s reputation was simply too tainted by his involvement with National Socialism, and by plenty of evidence that even after the war he had no real regrets, and that he remained an anti-Semite. The assumption was that his theories could not come back into general circulation. But again, some of us who perhaps didn’t feel all that complacent at that time got the idea that Schmitt, whatever else one thinks about him, is a formidable critic of liberalism, and of democracy in certain regards. It’s important to take his critique seriously and to work out arguments that might respond to the kinds of anti-liberal and anti-democratic attacks that he had been advancing.   CJLPA :   One of the things that personally stuck with me when I first read Alexis de Tocqueville was a somewhat piercing comment he made about the future of democracy. He suggested that there was a wonderful chain that aristocracy had provided for the West, and what democracy did was break the chain. ‘Each man would be thrown upon himself alone…there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart’—a very foreboding comment about the future of communities and belonging in general.   JWM :   It’s interesting you bring this up. Let me react with two observations. Of course, the 90s were also a heyday of the so-called liberalism and communitarianism debate, and there was plenty of pressure on self-declared liberals to prove that somehow liberalism was able to generate resources for community building. Some of them reacted, rightly I think, by saying that the idea of community being held up by some communitarians was either undesirable or profoundly unrealistic. Plenty of people pointed this out, also among those who might not really see themselves as liberals at all—think of Iris Marion Young, for instance. Communitarian and liberal nationalist claims were also a reason for me to think about the concept of constitutional patriotism, often criticized as being, to invoke the particularly inappropriate metaphor that often comes up in this context, ‘bloodless’. A concept that supposedly only exists on paper, or supposedly a concept that only works for particular countries. For better or for worse, I tried to vindicate this idea and defend it against what I see as often very clichéd and superficial critiques.   The other thing I would say is that of course Tocqueville’s observation about what he would have called individualisme —a really bad thing for him, meaning atomization and isolation, not autonomy—has experienced a revival in our era. It very often serves as shorthand for a quasi-sociological explanation of why we may have seen the rise of right-wing populism, or, some would say, outright authoritarianism or even fascism. Of course, there are many important thinkers one can invoke in this context, not just Tocqueville. Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the emergence of mass society and atomization. All I would want to say in this context is that while certainly it is a diagnosis worth taking seriously, I worry that sometime these claims are made a bit too quickly, and that they, first of all, add up to a certain kind of psychologizing. Secondly, they sometimes underestimate that people who are tempted by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, fascism—whatever you want to call it in the context of our conversation here—are not always particularly isolated. In fact, sometimes they are extremely well organized.   Again, it’s worth remembering that, already in the 90s, our colleague Sheri Berman wrote an important article about civil society in the Weimar Republic, because civil society was a 90s buzzword. Many immediately framed civil society as normatively desirable and essential for democracy and so on. I don’t want to dismiss these arguments, they are important of course. But the thought didn’t occur to too many people that in the Weimar Republic you had an absolutely flourishing scene of associations and clubs—a wonderful, if you like, Tocquevillian civil society life—except that it was full of people who hated democracy, who were all-out racists, and who quite often celebrated violence for its own sake. So, all I’m saying is that we should be very careful with casual Tocquevillian readings.   CJLPA : You talk in Democracy Rules  about three bedrock principles of democracy :  equality, freedom, and uncertainty. I spent some time last year reading Montesquieu, who contends that for a republic to successfully operate there needs to be the passion of love or reverence, either for the principles undergirding the republic or for the particular republic itself, in order for it to be maintained. What role do history, culture, and indeed patriotism play in the strength or atrophy of a democratic state today?   JWM :   Like Hannah Arendt (again!), and many others, I would shy away from the language of love. I don’t think love has a place in the public realm. Again, the thought can too easily lead to a certain type of kitschy communitarianism; after all, we live in—here I am invoking Iris Marion Young once more—a polity of strangers. In certain respects, that’s a good thing. It’s also a good thing that we are not constantly pressured to make confessions, reveal emotions, or relate to people beyond what of course cultural pessimists would see as a certain kind of superficiality. The flipside of being strangers is that, especially in the anonymity of the modern metropolis—I am simply repeating what we have known at least since Georg Simmel’s writings—we can engage in forms of self-invention, of liberation, trying out different lifestyles, finding out who we really want to be. Of course, that’s never a totally isolated process, but I think that if in doubt we should go easy on the on the kitschy emotion talk.   On a more theoretical level, you might say, those who want us to have more emotions in politics often have a very hard time explaining how much exactly is needed, where exactly you find that magic balance of reason and emotion. I would hope that in this regard we’ve also moved beyond the 90s with its very stark oppositions of reason and emotion (or all-out universalism versus particularity all the way down). For one thing, emotions are based on what Jon Elster calls cognitive antecedents—anger, for instance, is not some incomprehensible, irrational outburst, but based on a sense of unfairness, for instance (that sense may or may not be justified).   CJLPA :   Fantastic. I asked this question in part because we’ve seen in America a recent revival in certain, you might say, right-wing domains of this idea of a sort of civic religion. That might be in the legal academy, through what is sometimes called Common Good Constitutionalism, or from political theorists themselves who look at America’s founding and they consider it as a sort of a step in the greater path that ended with some form of certainty in the realm of community. It’s an incredibly parochial view of history, but one that’s unsettling, at least in my eyes.   On the point of pluralism: we have in the modern day shifted towards a language of significant absolutism about certain what you might even call very necessary courses of political action. What would you say to someone who would deny the standing of a political adversary that resists or questions, for example, climate change or climate change related policies?   JWM :   If I may, can I follow up just very briefly on what you said earlier about civic religion? It’s important to bear in mind—work by colleagues like Philip Gorski at Yale is very helpful in this regard—that what is today sometimes propounded by way of Common Good Constitutionalism, or also Integralism, or for that matter Christian nationalism (very important phenomenon), that this is really categorically different from what people were talking about in the 20th century as American civil religion.   It doesn’t mean you have to like that old version of American civil religion—there are plenty of things one can find very problematic about it. Plenty of people would say, ‘let’s get religion out of political discourse altogether’. But it’s worth recalling that theorists who perhaps aren’t read that widely any more—like Robert Bellah, who initially came up with a whole theory of American civil religion—thought of these issues very differently than some of our contemporaries who really mean ‘religion’ when they say ‘religion’. The latter really mean that a good regime would basically use public coercive power to impose certain understandings of religion, certain forms of morality. This is a phenomenon that didn’t quite exist as recently as ten years ago. Now it’s possible to be quite open with the idea that certain aspects of what some of us understand to be crucial to democracy as such—including uncertainty of outcomes; repeat play in the democratic game; accepting that you lost an election even if you think that your moral conceptions are the correct ones or that you somehow possess the truth—might be of secondary importance or dispensable entirely. One more gesture to Hannah Arendt: let’s not forget that political judgment is about the ability to draw distinctions. And what is sometimes now sold as a new version of the old civil religion might really be quite different. Especially, of course, Christian nationalism, as it has become much more prominent in recent years.   Anyway, forgive the interludes and digressions. To your question and point about pluralism: what matters is that democracy, as plenty of other theorists have said, is not ultimately about necessarily finding consensus. It’s not about maximizing cohesion under all circumstances. Again, that’s the kind of communitarian kitsch which we hear far too often, where people say, ‘oh, we’re so divided, that’s so horrible, why can’t we all come together?’. But conflict is normal and legitimate in a democracy; the real question is: which ways of conducting conflict become dangerous for democracy? So, one has to think about what the boundaries of conflict are, such that conflict remains containable or ideally becomes productive for a democracy.   One of the boundaries, I would say, is that you do not delegitimate your political adversaries. You don’t treat them like enemies, you don’t deny their standing. This is what in my view, right-wing populists always do when they essentially say that the others don’t really belong to the polity to begin with. ‘She should be disposed of in Anatolia’. That’s more or less a paraphrase of what a leader of the German far right not too long ago said about a German politician whose family just happens to have Turkish origins. Or when, in the US it was said that certain politicians should go back to, forgive the word, their ‘shithole countries’. That makes it impossible to conduct a conflict because you’re communicating to people that the other person shouldn’t really be in the conflict to begin with, that they have no standing, that they don’t belong here, that they are not even a legitimate person to engage with.   The other boundary has something to do with facts. Of course, the line between facts and opinions is not always exactly clear, to put it mildly. And yet, drawing one more time on Hannah Arendt, if I may: it remains important in our conceptions of democracy to hold on to some kind of distinction between facts and opinion; to say that, of course, people can have their own opinions, but that opinions have to be constrained by something that is recognizable as fact. And ‘the truth’ we should probably leave out of democratic politics altogether. Because we do not say to losers in elections that somehow it was shown that they failed to grasp the truth. No, all that was shown was that maybe their opinions, their judgements, their programs and promises weren’t as popular, weren’t as attractive as those of the other side.   Now, there can be plenty of opinions about climate, but it’s hard to see how conflict with someone who claims that global heating is an invention of the Chinese government to destroy our manufacturing industry could turn out to be productive. Of course, some people would say that such views should somehow be sanctioned or should even become subject to what in some countries is known as militant democracy—the idea that you should restrict people’s basic political rights because of the dangers they pose to democracy. I don’t think that in this case that is remotely appropriate. What you have to do is, first of all, argue on the substance as best as you can. But then also occasionally bear in mind that democratic conflicts have audiences; it’s not just about you and your adversary. You also have to bear in mind what effects there might be on the audience. Occasionally, at least, it’s also important (even though it can sound very academic) to go somewhat meta and say, ‘look, we might have all kinds of disagreements, and I’m not going to vilify my adversary. I’m also not going to say that they’re stupid or anything. But here’s the evidence. And let me also explain beyond pointing to the evidence how this kind of stance just makes it extremely difficult to have a productive conflict in a democracy’. Because even if my adversary in this case were to accept some of the facts, that doesn’t commit them to particular view about what we should do. There’s plenty of room left for saying ‘Oh, we shouldn’t do anything. Let’s just all enjoy ourselves now’, or ‘I trust that in five years, some fantastic technological innovation is going to come along that will help us to deal with all these climate-related challenges successfully’.   As always, the facts are not going to somehow determine their political choices. Choices will always be informed by value commitments, by what Rawls famously called the burdens of judgment. So, you might be very risk taking; I might be very risk-adverse. Or you and I read history and the lessons it might offer very differently. There might be many other factors that come into the picture such that one could not simply say ‘being risk averse is illegitimate; hence you have no space in this conflict, et cetera’. Facts do not eliminate profound disagreements.   Long story short: it’s important not to fall into the trap that, alas, sometimes liberals have fallen into (especially since 2016) where they’ve very complacently settled on the view that whoever disagrees with an ‘us’ that is somehow taken for granted hasn’t understood the truth or necessarily is dealing in falsehoods, and we can simply dismiss what they say. To be sure, populists do lie. To be sure, they often propound conspiracy theories. But you can’t always know that in advance. And sometimes it’s important to say ‘let’s actually deal with the harder questions about differences in values, differences maybe in how we read history, etc’—as opposed to adopting a de facto technocratic stance which assumes that anyone who disagrees must be irrational.   CJLPA :   You recently wrote an op ed for the Guardian about Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is getting a lot of attention these days, and the potential disqualification of Donald Trump from the presidential ballot. This, one might say, is an example of militant democracy, effectively removing someone from a political process. In the piece, you take issue with commentators who argue that he should be properly defeated at the polls. Could you speak to your thought process in observing this legal dynamic play out and the political ramifications in light of what we just spoke about?   JWM :   That’s a very good but very difficult question, one with many layers. We could have a longer discussion about constitutional interpretation, but regarding the specific militant democracy angle that you also alluded to, I would say that removing somebody from the political process is of course an extremely serious, fraught decision that should never be taken lightly. It is not something that democracies should get into the habit of doing. There are countries like Turkey, for instance, which have a long record of constantly banning parties, and that’s one reason—never mind what has happened under Erdoğan more recently—to say that this was always a very flawed democracy at best because political associations were far too casually taken out of the process, of course in many cases because they were advocating for Kurdish citizens.   One has to take seriously the worry that has always shadowed militant democracy, which is that, as you are busy trying to save democracy, it’s actually you who is destroying it by restricting people’s basic rights, outlawing parties, substituting the Judiciary for part of the political process, and so on. One should never imagine that militant democracy is some quasi-technocratic fix, where you remove one or two bad actors and everything will be well.   Having said that, it also matters that militancy is usually something that plays out over time. Well-meaning actors, people who are aware of the dangers of militant democracy, would say, ‘yes, we should never be too quick in these judgments. We should leave some room for things to sort themselves out politically, ideally, before judges get involved’. That’s always much, much better than to imagine that, in quasi-technocratic fashion, somebody could rush in and somehow ‘fix it’. The flip side of that emphasis is that if, over time, you see certain patterns of behaviour and you don’t see any process of self-correction, perhaps you see even processes of radicalization, that also matters. So, with all due respect to some of my very learned and esteemed colleagues who say the political process should take care of all of this, they somehow seem to assume that the political process itself will not be endangered, will be clean somehow. And then, they assume, once Trump is defeated at the polls he will concede, and his followers will politely accept what happened. Then it’s over, finita la commedia . But we already know that this is very unlikely because we’ve already seen how this has played out once. We’ve already seen how in the campaign Trump is not signalling that he understood that inciting people to violence or denying the standing of adversaries is wrong. He’s not saying this time, ‘I’m going to win in a clean way that is in line with our basic liberal democratic commitments in the United States’.   One last thought, to signal that I’m not some gung-ho crusader for militant democracy. One of the most serious points that we can make about this whole approach is that there is a fundamental paradox about its application. When you can apply militant democracy, and when you can apply it in such a way that the outcome is accepted, you probably didn’t need it in the first place. A classic example would be West Germany in the 1950s. We can debate whether it was right or wrong to ban when the Communist Party at that point. Nonetheless, the Communist Party was banned and so was a de facto neo-Nazi Party, and that was accepted as an outcome. People did not say this did lasting damage to the political culture, but in retrospect, they also said, ‘look, probably West German democracy would have been fine, even without these bans’. Conversely, in countries where, broadly speaking, anti-democratic actors do enjoy large amounts of public support, and where maybe the public support is even increasing, or let’s say in a two-party system where one party seems to have turned away from democracy, it’s very unlikely that a ban would simply be accepted. But it’s in those situations precisely where it would be more urgent to actually have militant democracy because the threat is much more real than, say, some still relatively marginal neo-Nazi party. I don’t want to minimize the dangers; even small parties can terrorize people. It’s not like there’s no danger. But in terms of them getting hold of the national levers of power? No, very unlikely.   In other situations, anti-democratic actors might actually succeed. But precisely because it could happen, that also means that the outcomes of militant measures are probably not going to be accepted. So, the paradox is: when you can have militant democracy in a constitutional system, you probably don’t need it, and when you would really need it, you might not be able to have it, given the empirical circumstances. Some of our colleagues in the US today seem to suggest that the circumstances are such that militancy is too dangerous—which is another way of saying: we are being blackmailed by the MAGA movement. The threat is, ‘if you ban our candidate, we’re going to be on the streets and going to be violent’.   CJLPA :   What, perhaps besides what we’ve already talked about, do you identify as being some of the most immediate crises or problems with modern democracy right now?   JWM :   Again, let me say two things, preceded by a rather pedantic observation. We should take on board the lesson that recently was put forward by our esteemed colleague Adam Przeworski in his book about crises of democracy. There, he at least initially says, ‘look, folks tone it down a bit’. Not every policy challenge, even a very serious one, is quite the same as a crisis of democracy. In line with his in certain ways very minimalist understanding of democracy, he then argues that you really have a crisis if something like a peaceful transfer of power is no longer accepted; if people do not understand that, in a very specific sense, democracy is about uncertainty—which is to say we can never be certain about the outcomes, we can only be certain about the process. In autocracies, it’s the other way around. We all know who’s going to win in Russia this year, but the process could change all the time, up to the last minute, as it did last time, because the powerful are fiddling with various regulations up until the last minute to make sure that the one and only right person wins.   Under such circumstances it is justified to speak about a crisis of democracy, or also the possible end of democracy. This is also helpful in terms of assessing the real meaning of January 6th. One can debate how likely it was that the peaceful transfer of power was ultimately going to be impeded, but there was an attempt, and an attempt that, as we now know, was maybe more systematic than we had understood immediately at the beginning of 2021. In that sense, yes, that is a crisis. It’s also a crisis if—again, I refer to the idea of right-wing populism—you have actors who basically say only one outcome is legitimate because there is only one representative of what right-wing populists often call ‘the real people’ (such that actually not all citizens are the people). Only those who fit that understanding of the supposedly ‘real people’ are the people. That poses a permanent danger. It doesn’t mean that every single election outcome will be met with violence, but probably every single election outcome where a populist loses is going to be declared somehow illegitimate, problematic, not quite right, that there must have been a conspiracy, probably by liberal elites behind the scenes, such that the real people or—another famous or infamous expression— ‘the silent majority’ couldn’t really express itself. Even in situations where losing right-wing populists do not mobilize people to impede the peaceful transfer of power, very often they insinuate to their supporters that the outcome is illegitimate and must have been brought about by nefarious actors behind the scenes manipulating the system. In that sense they always cast doubt on the system and erode trust.   Now, allow me to add—because I’m not saying that we should all just simply trust the system—that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with criticizing, let’s say, the American election system. In fact, there’s plenty to criticize and to criticize in other countries as well, especially the extraordinary role of money which is one of the most structural problems for democracy today. But there’s a fundamental difference between a loser who says, ‘well, our system is rotten, because I didn’t win’ and somebody else who says, ‘well, I would like to point out that the power of the wealthy is far too large’. Or who says: ‘We have sections of the population who have basically quit the political process altogether, who simply don’t vote any more at all because they think there’s nothing in it for them’. I mean, these are very serious structural challenges, which one should talk about, but one doesn’t have to talk about them in the vein of right-wing populism.   CJLPA :   You wrote recently about how there is a popularly perceived decline happening in democracy in general, amongst the public. I wonder to what extent the perceived decline of democracy is a corollary of another popularly perceived decline, namely universities—whether indicated by rows over public school curricula in the US, or by commentary now surrounding the resignations of prominent Ivy League leaders.   JWM :   By now you know I’m going to say that I’ll say two things. The first takes issue with the more general diagnosis and the second is more specifically about higher education. Firstly, I think we should be very cautious with colleagues and pundits who tell us that the people themselves are sort of disenchanted with democracy. I don’t see a lot of evidence for that. Most people want to hold on to democratic ideals. And even in countries where things are not going well for democracy, such as India, it remains supremely important for Prime Minister Modi always to point out that ‘we’re the world’s largest democracy. We have a very important tradition of having democracy and diversity at the same time’, and so on. You may recall that when Biden had his first democracy summit in 2021, even Beijing came out with an official paper saying, ‘actually what we’re doing is democracy, it is much better than the chaotic, messy US where nothing is working any more’. That’s one indication that people still want to claim the D word. And they wouldn’t do that if they didn’t feel that the people themselves actually like democracy.   If I may add one other thought to that: it’s very clear by now that in many countries where democracy is in danger or has already been replaced by more-or-less soft versions of autocracy, it is usually not the people who collectively endorsed that shift. It was usually a set of elites who said, ‘actually, we can do without democracy’, or ‘we get certain benefits from a different system’. As always, one should be very careful with the sort of macro comparisons with previous eras, but it’s not totally unjustified to say that, at least in some instances, we already saw this pattern in the twentieth century. So, in 2022, we commemorated 100 years of the March on Rome. And there was, of course, a March on Rome. But we sometimes forget that Mussolini arrived very comfortably by sleeper car from Milan because what in those days actually would have been known as liberal elites basically invited him in to take over the government. That was not a singular, isolated incident. That’s something that marks a certain pattern. I dare say we are sometimes seeing the same pattern today.   To your question about universities: here it’s very important to keep two things apart. We can have a very serious, learned, important discussion about academic freedom, which is not the same as free speech, even though the two are very often conflated. We can have a discussion about student clubs and what kind of speakers they invite and how under those circumstances which are not primarily, sometimes not at all, about academic freedom, you might or might not have certain limits on speech. All these are important discussions. But this is only one aspect. The other aspect is that a huge right-wing culture war machine is now engaged in systematic attacks on higher education. And we’ve seen this in countries that have already left the fold of democracies. You may recall that it was pretty important for Viktor Orbán to get Central European University out of the country. We’ve seen in the US what has been happening in Florida. On the one hand, the strategy contains glorifications of free speech, on the other it involves restrictions on what teachers can actually do, what professors may say—in many cases completely clear violations of academic freedom.   Why is this happening? Well, two hypotheses. For one, it’s always an easy way to prove you’re ‘populist’ by attacking universities. To be sure, this is not my understanding of the term ‘populism’. But one can see why there is an incentive for what in effect are elite actors to say: ‘we are going after the elites, we are with the common people against experts, against snooty professors, who tell us what’s what and tell us how to live’, and so on. It is basically a cost-free way of sending signals like this. Secondly, it’s about undermining centres of authority. I mean, most of us in universities don’t feel that we have all that much authority. But in some circumstances, it does matter that somebody can contradict a government official or tell a foreign journalist who’s just come to the country, ‘look, actually, we study this stuff, and we think this is a bit different than what the power-holders are telling you at the moment’. For some actors, it’s extremely important to remove these centres of rival authority.   Even if they don’t succeed—this is the third sort of quasi-hypothesis—it’s enough to cause confusion and obfuscation. This is the maybe less obvious point about what has been happening in the US more recently. As right-wing culture warriors themselves explain, their thing doesn’t work if they do not reach people beyond the already converted. Members of the MAGA movement know already that liberal professors are evil; the point, then, is to capture a wider audience, and to persuade people who do not think of themselves as remotely MAGA. This is the fateful pattern among many actors—sometimes politicians, sometimes pundits, sometimes academics—who see themselves as the reasonable centre. They’re basically saying, ‘oh, I prove to myself that I am the reasonable centre by being very carefully balanced and by being very moderate in my judgments’. Since you mentioned both Tocqueville and Montesquieu, of course this is something where one can very easily find very important backup in terms of saying, ‘it is a liberal virtue to look for a certain juste milieu ’. I’m not saying that this is necessarily always nefarious But, to use a word that has played a huge role in debates here more recently, context  does matter. And sometimes very self-conscious moderation and centrism become a colossal failure of political judgment.   I worry about the self-declared liberal who basically says, ‘yes, I’m really worried about Trump coming back, but I’m also extremely worried about’—and I think if you use this word in a pejorative sense you’ve already given away the game of where you really stand—‘I’m also really worried about the woke on campus’. You end up with a false equivalence. But if you present it this way, it’s very convenient. It’s very easy to say, ‘look, I’m the reasonable person who sees all the problems on all sides’. It’s actually a failure of political judgment. Those strategists in the right-wing cultural war industry, they’ve understood something that actually is not new. Steve Bannon already explained that it didn’t matter if you had Breitbart say that Hillary Clinton was corrupt; what you had to do was to get the New York Times  to run an article about a story of possible corruption.   Now, this does not mean, I hasten to add, that there are taboo subjects or, God forbid, that serious investigative journalists should hold off on stories that might hurt liberals politically. Of course not. But a lot of the stuff of what is sometimes now rightly called ‘reactionary centrism’ is mere opinion. Nobody went anywhere to investigate something. It’s usually somebody who banged out the op-ed piece in half an hour by recycling the same ten anecdotes about some crazy stuff that happened on some campus, supposedly, plus a quote from someone in some university who says, ‘I don’t feel like I can still say what I want to say’. And bang, there is your op-ed piece that sounds so reasonable and well informed. Zero reportorial labour has gone into this. Very often, with all due respect, zero intellectual labour gone has gone into this. But—to repeat—I’m not denying that we should be having a more serious discussions about the normative basis of academic freedom. We should think more systematically about how academic freedom and democracy hang together, for instance. It’s not like we have all the answers ready.   CJLPA :   My last question, since our hour is about up, concerns your current projects. We understand that you’re working on a new book?   JWM :   Yes, I’m trying to finish a volume on architecture and democracy. Among other things, I’m asking the question: what kinds of spaces might either represent democracy or sometimes concretely facilitate democratic conduct? This is something that I’m of course not the first to think about. We talked earlier about Rousseau. Think about his arguments against the theatre: why did he think that theatre was giving us passive citizens, why should we have festivals instead, where everybody can see everybody else and be affirmed in their belief that we’re all committed to a shared political project together? Quite a few political figures, eminent ones, have given thought to this, but there aren’t very many systematic accounts of the issues at stake.   A further point I would make in this context is that it is also important to rethink some of the basic, if you like, communicative democratic rights which are essential for the working of democracy; some of them require physical space. I’m thinking in particular about freedom of assembly. Of course in the US context it goes very, very far back. In other countries it’s much more recent as a codified right. It’s generally not a very robust right. If you think about what’s been happening in the UK, in terms of new legislation to supposedly prevent public disorder, some of that is very draconian. Even where demonstrations are allowed, they’re often unreasonably constrained. Often, people can’t demonstrate where they want to demonstrate. They might be shunted aside, they’re told to go to places which symbolically aren’t important or where they’re very unlikely to be in the face of other people.   If you make a criterion for permits that ‘assemblies must never disturb anybody’, then you’ve taken away the edge of freedom of assembly, of demonstrations, because that’s one moment where—going back to our earlier discussion about community in big cities—people want to be in each other’s face in a certain way, where they want to bother each other, where they want to start conflicts—and sometimes that can be unpleasant. It would obviously be a mistake to think that only nice progressive people do demonstrations. But that’s something that, as long as it remains peaceful, we have to put up with and should try to engage with. We should even, I think, be more tolerant of civil disobedience than has been the case—even if it can be annoying and causing all kinds of inconveniences. It’s part of the cost of democracy, so to speak. Even if now you don’t see any big reason to demonstrate out there, if we move to a system where it’s much more about technocratically managing dissent—as opposed to having somewhat more unpredictable, dare I say uncertain, forms of protest—you might regret that shift; you might want to be able to protest in a noisier and more disturbing way one day.   CJLPA :   The concept of a debate chamber being the absolute heart of a democratic republic is something which both Joseph Schumpeter and Carl Schmitt have spoken about. For them, these are not genuine debate chambers any more, but simply shells. They reflect a normative bedrock that no longer exists, which is the commitment to a particular discursive legislative process.   JWM :   Then again, Schmitt was making a bad faith argument in this context. He was arguing that in the nineteenth century, supposedly, parliaments were real sites of deliberative democracy, if you like. But then it became very easy to say, ‘let’s hold up this ideal, which proves that in the twentieth century and beyond—in an age of mass democracy, mass parties, and committee meetings where things are actually decided—this is no longer the case’. You can have a much more realistic view of parliaments; it’s not really the case that somebody makes an argument and then somebody across the aisle says ‘yeah, now that I think about it, that’s a really good point’. That is pretty rare, in fact. In many countries, things only really come to the debate chamber when they’ve already been decided. But even the speeches are important, as they dramatize conflict; it is a way to tell citizens what the different sides are thinking—all this goes back to the point that there is nothing wrong with conflict, even if conflict doesn’t result in consensus agreement or anything. As you’re hinting, that’s being endangered if now our representatives are mainly there to produce short social media clips and then, as Ted Cruz famously did, immediately check themselves on Twitter to see ‘is it playing well? Is it working?’ and so on. That’s not very helpful in terms of citizens getting a wider view of what’s actually at stake in a certain conflict, what are the different contending positions, and so on. I don’t have any sort of obvious solution to this, but at least realizing it’s a problem, even if you don’t have a terribly idealistic view of parliamentarism to begin with, might be helpful in terms of finding our bearings and putting our present situation into a bit more of a historical perspective.   CJLPA :   Professor, it has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today. On behalf of The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art , thank you.   JWM :   Well, thank you for having me. Thank you also for the thoughtful questions—and I don’t always say that! Benjamin Keener, the interviewer, is a law student at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where he is an articles editor for the Journal of Constitutional Law . Ben received his MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge and writes and publishes on topics of legal history and theory.

One of Adolf Hitler’s favourite musicians was Richard Wagner. His thunderous compositions were meant to instil a violent pride within the listener, with pieces like the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ roaring into one’s ears with bombastic brass and screeching violins. It is fitting, then, that an anti-war film like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now  (1979) chose it to accompany a horrific act of violence, in a scene that involves US military helicopters launching rockets and firing machine guns at a Vietnamese settlement. The scene is emblematic of much of the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s. It is bleak, uncompromising, and deeply cynical, but also indulgent and excessive, revelling in its own glorification of stomach-churning violence.   In Jarhead , his memoir, former US marine Anthony Swofford describes his experience watching the movie during the Gulf War. His platoon would ‘concentrate on the Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals’.[1] In Sam Mendes’ 2005 film adaptation of the book, Swofford and his platoon are depicted singing along to the fascist anthem, cheering as Robert Duvall shoots down Vietnamese people. It is important to note that, within Jarhead , the Apocalypse Now clip is played out of context, separated from the preceding or following scenes. It is through this lack of context that the military can turn an ostensibly anti-war scene into a pro-war experience. ‘Come get some, marines!’, the announcer says after the clip finishes playing. Just like Coppola’s characters, Swofford and his platoon cannot wait to smell napalm in the morning.   ‘There’s no such thing as an anti-war film’, French director François Truffaut once said.[2] According to the New Wave pioneer, the camera turns the world into a spectacle, the horrible into the voyeuristic, reality into construction. It is, in fact, why he refused to adapt 81.490 , a book comprising Alexandre Chambon’s recollections of a   concentration camp. ‘I couldn’t resolve to have characters weighing 30 kilos played by 60[-]kilo extras, for here, the physical, visual and bodily reality [was] too important to be sacrificed’.[3] Truffaut explains the sacrificial aspect of narrative cinema, where one is forced to create a representation of the ‘real’, sacrificing the actual ‘real’ in the process. The concept of construction (or reconstruction) was very much at the core French New Wave’s ethos. A movement focussed on the noticeable arrangement of shots and edits, and spearheaded by Truffaut himself, the French New Wave drew attention to cinema’s artifice with the intention of revealing its hidden truth. When Truffaut saw a film, he saw a beauty in its fakery, a reality within its unreality. Though no match for personal experience, film represented history and life in a manner that stood apart from other art forms.   This aspect of cinema collides with a tragedy as cosmic as war. How does one reconstruct what it feels like to partake in legalised mass murder when armed with nothing but a camera? The anti-war film is nothing new. An early example is Westfront 1918  (1930), GW Pabst’s study of PTSD. War, in its glory and horror, has long been a bedfellow of the cinematic form. Edmund Burke suggested in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful  that there   was a perverse thrill in extricating beauty from violence. Misery is more palatable when viewed through a well-composed camera lens and perfectly positioned lighting. To say that cinema can’t have a destructive aspect does a disservice to the medium. DW Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation  (1915) was more than just a movie. It was a javelin   aimed at the heart of Black America and must be remembered and condemned as such. But this hate crime on celluloid had its intended effect. What happens when the opposite is true? How can a director contend with the possibility of their message being received not indifferently, but with a rapturous wrongness?   Anthony Swofford contends with this inner turmoil with his journalistic integrity. Sam Mendes does so with his reflexive visual grammar. The opening of Jarhead , often accused of plagiarism, is an intentional copy of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket  (1987). Swofford himself noted that the monstrous drill sergeant (R Lee Ermey) inspired many real-life drill sergeants. This is another example of the dangers of reappropriating art. Devoid of context, an anti-war statement on dehumanisation and abuse produces a manner to aspire to, complete with gendered and racialised jokes. However, there is a contrast between Kubrick’s and Mendes’ shooting styles. Kubrick emphasises the homogeneity of the military boot camp with stable, static, centred framing. Mendes uses an unsteady handheld camera. His intention differs greatly from Kubrick’s. Instead of a portrait of a genericised collective, he makes a statement on the unsteadiness of the drill sergeant in Jarhead . By literally destabilising the camera, Mendes destabilises our perception of both the soldiers and the instructor. He thus calls attention to both the artifice of his visual grammar and the artifice of the sergeant.   We use stories to make sense of our world.[4] Therefore, the lack of narratives around Swofford’s Gulf War turns his and his fellow soldiers’ lives into nonsense. It denies the catharsis that comes with making sense out of something as abstractly horrifying as war. The Gulf War was not given the same preferential treatment by cinema as the Vietnam War. This fact is referenced in Jarhead  when a helicopter passes overhead playing ‘Break On Through (To the Other Side)’ (1962) by The Doors. ‘That’s Vietnam music. Can’t we get our own music?’, moans Swofford in the film. Music is prevalent not just in the Mendes film, but in the history of war itself. Take, for instance, ‘Rock the Casbah’ (1982) by The Clash. The song was written by Joe Strummer with an anti-war intention. However, ‘one thing the pacifist anarchist Joe Strummer certainly never intended was for “Rock the Casbah” to become the anthem of the Gulf War soldiers during Operation “Desert Storm”’.[5] This was a particularly horrifying act of artistic reappropriation. It was more than just an act of disrespect by American ‘imperialists’. It was a desperate attempt to narrativise the unnarratable, using the sentiment of anti-war music to create the opportunity for the dramatic that Vietnam presented. When the war ends and the soldiers celebrate, they dance to ‘Fight the Power’ (1989) by the leftist hip-hop group Public Enemy, oblivious to the irony that they represent that same power.   Art presents a catharsis by narrativising the absurdity of life. Is it possible, then, to create ‘uncathartic’ art? It seems that this is Mendes’s intention with Jarhead , a war film that presents very little warfare, if any. Swofford, and by extension the audience, feels ‘blue-balled’ by the Gulf War—promised adrenaline-fuelled action but presented with monotony. The frustration and lack of release are literalised in Swofford’s inability to masturbate to a picture of his girlfriend. By relating the catharsis of violence to the orgasm (or lack thereof), Mendes links death to pleasure. Boot camp trained Swofford to treat the taking of life as a pleasurable act, but his incomplete masturbation represents a refusal of pleasure. It is a moment in which Mendes shows his intention to create an ‘uncathartic’ war film. Perhaps this is how Jarhead avoids Truffaut’s trap. Can the war film avoid glamorisation by simply refusing to show warfare? Perhaps the considerable loss Jarhead  made at the box office, despite its action-packed trailer, provides an answer. Perhaps audiences were hit with the same frustrations Swofford and his platoon felt. Tricked into expecting the indulgences of cinematic violence, they were instead left with a version of Waiting for Godot  set in the blistering desert. It is through this very lack of release, this intentional frustration, that audiences were taught to reject cinematic depictions of violence. Nobody gets to take their shot. Keshav Srinivasan   Keshav Srinivasan is an MPhil student in Film and Screen Studies at Wolfson College, Cambridge. In the past, he has worked as a filmmaker and writer, writing and directing several short films. After his degree, he plans on returning to America to pursue a career in filmmaking. [1] Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles  (Scribner 2005) 6. [2] Tom Brook, ‘Is there any such thing as an “anti-war film”?’ ( BBC , 10 July 2014) < https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20140710-can-a-film-be-truly-anti-war > accessed 19 February 2021. [3] Antoine De Baecque and Serge Toubiana, Truffaut: A Biography  (University of California Press 2000) 162. [4] Frank Rose, ‘The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories?’ ( WIRED , 3 August 2011) < http://www.wired.com/2011/03/why-do-we-tell-stories/ > accessed 19 February 2021. [5] Amin Farzanefar, ’25 Years of “Rock the Casbah”: Anthem of US Marines’, ( Qantara.de , 2007) < https://en.qantara.de/content/25-years-of-rock-the-casbah-anthem-of-us-marines > accessed 19 February 2021.

Becky Shaw is a Senior Associate at Boodle Hatfield in the firm’s art law and commercial litigation teams. She has worked on cases including  The Creative Foundation v Dreamland Leisure Limited and Others  [2015], one of the first cases to look at ownership of street art and what it means for property laws. In this interview she talks about why she and Rebecca Foden set up the  Art Law & More blog, what working through the pandemic has been like for the art world, and what emerging from it could look like.   Rebecca Foden is a Senior Associate at Boodle Hatfield. Although her practice spans many aspects of commercial litigation, she has achieved professional recognition in her work in art law, including working on the Caravaggio case  Thwaytes v Sotheby’s [2015]. In this interview, she discusses setting up the blog  Art Law & More , the changes the pandemic has wrought on the art world, and why sharing this information not only with professionals but the public at large is important.   Becky Shaw and Rebecca Foden, senior associates at Boodle Hatfield, are highly experienced art lawyers. Shaw has worked on the return of the Banksy mural  Art Buff  to Folkestone. Foden specialises in art litigation, and was involved in the well-publicised Caravaggio case Thwaytes v Sotheby’s .   Boodle Hatfield was founded in 1722, but its respectable heritage has not stopped it innovating. Shaw and Foden founded the Art Law & More  blog, and during the pandemic it has let their firm stay   in contact with the wider art scene. Shaw and Foden have both written long-form legal pieces for their firm’s website, but when I spoke to them on Zoom, they emphasised how the shorter, less technical nature of blog posts lets them publish more often and on more topics. The blog, along with its Twitter and Instagram accounts, has let them connect not only with people looking for legal information, but also with artists, auctioneers, collectors, students, and casual browsers.   Shaw recalls that they were inspired by similar blogs, like the Art Law Report  blog run by American firm Sullivan & Worcester.[1] However,  Art Law & More  focusses on English cases and news, and features   specialist contributors from the art world. These include museum professional Rachel Feldman and art historian Jasmine Clark.[2] Contributors write up much of the news section, but also contribute wonderful extras. For example, the ‘Strawberry Hill Treasure Hunt’ series followed art historian and provenance researcher Silvia Davoli as she prepared the eccentric Strawberry Hill House, built by Horace Walpole, for the ‘once-in-a-lifetime exhibition’ ‘Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill’.[3] Walpole had a large furniture collection, but it had not been seen since it was disassembled and sold in 1842. The 2018–19 exhibition gathered its components and reunited them with Walpole’s house. Art Law & More  provides information for any readers who believe they own furniture from Walpole’s collection, and the posts from the series will interest both future researchers and casual browsers.   The blog’s Instagram page has been used to advertise Boodle Hatfield’s arts sponsorships. For example, the firm has funded a prize for the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair since 2019.[4] In 2020, the firm was able to present it in person, but in 2021 it had to do so online, and its established online platform became very useful. The Art Law & More  Instagram showcased the prints, including Maite Cascôn’s Tricksters Tree I , and the blog published interviews with printmakers shortlisted for the prize, including Virginia Bridge and Jake Garfield.   The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on the art world. Rosie Adcock, another member of Boodle Hatfield’s art law team, was seconded to the Royal Academy’s legal team and has continued to assist them remotely with pandemic-related issues. Shaw is a trustee to the De Morgan Foundation, an independent charity that displays and cares for the works of husband and wife William and Evelyn de Morgan. William De Morgan was a member of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts circle, while Evelyn is best known for her spiritual, feminist Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Like many other art organisations, the Foundation had money problems as a result of the pandemic: it struggled to secure loans, and it was forced to cancel exhibitions. However, it was helped by ticketed online talks, which gathered speakers and viewers from all over the world.   Similarly, Art Law & More  let Boodle Hatfield maintain its connections when in-person and informal meetings became impossible in March 2020. It did so through a series of interviews with notables of the commercial art world, called ‘A View from the Market’. The interviews have become a time capsule from ‘Lockdown One’, especially from April and May 2020, and Foden has enjoyed seeing whose predictions were the most accurate. For example, Sarah Hardy, curator-manager of the De Morgan Foundation, predicted that the digital art audience will remain powerful after the pandemic.[5] It is highly international, and its members have been able to appreciate culture more in the pandemic than they would have otherwise. Her prediction is probably accurate.   Online platforms have never been more important than during the pandemic. Jet-setters have found themselves grounded, and interior decorating and auction houses have provided a source of entertainment. One of Foden’s clients has had unprecedented success selling soft furnishings and antique rugs. Online auction technology has advanced rapidly, but smaller auction houses have struggled, and even Christie’s has cut archive staff.[6]   The decrease in travel has dramatically reduced footfall in Mayfair, a hub of small galleries. The area’s exorbitant rents had already forced out the twenty-first-century art gallery Blain Southern in February 2020.[7] How many more will go under when the furlough scheme ends and Mayfair rents return? The market has been innovative in response to these challenges. Many galleries have discovered the value of online sales during the lockdowns, and many are considering whether rent, once an assumed cost of a business, is necessary. Yet for many people, looking at artwork on a screen or attending an exhibition on Instagram will never match doing so in person. Foden visited Cromwell Place, a stretch of townhouses in South Kensington that offers short-term exhibition spaces to rent. Such spaces are a compromise between the isolation of the online experience and the high costs of a permanent physical base.   Despite these successes, we look forward to the return of in-person exhibitions and interactions. These are foundational to the world of art law. However, even once normality has in some form been restored, spaces like Art Law & More  will prove new necessities. Esmee Wright, the interviewer, is a final-year undergraduate in Modern and Medieval Languages at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, specialising in medieval French and Russian. She has written and edited for a number of student and professional publications, focusing on the arts. [1] See ‘Art Law Report’ < https://blog.sullivanlaw.com/artlawreport > accessed 1 March 2021. [2] See ‘Contributors’ ( Art Law & More ) < https://artlawandmore.com/home-2/contributors/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [3] ‘Strawberry Hill Treasure Hunt’ ( Art Law & More ) < https://artlawandmore.com/category/strawberry-hill-treasure-hunt/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [4] Woolwich Print Fair, ‘Prizes’ < https://www.woolwichprintfair.com/prizes > accessed 1 March 2021. [5] ‘A View From the Market—Q&A with Sara Hardy, Curator-Manager at the De Morgan Foundation’ ( Art Law & More , 23 April 2020) < https://artlawandmore.com/2020/04/23/a-view-from-the-market-qa-with-sarah-hardy-curator-manager-at-the-de-morgan-foundation/ > accessed 1 March 2021. [6] Anna Brady, ‘Christie's closes access to historic archive due to staff cuts’ ( The Art Newspaper , 11 February 2021) < https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/dealers-and-academics-mourn-suspension-of-access-to-christie-s-huge-archive > accessed 1 March 2021. [7] Anny Shaw, ‘Blain Southern goes into administration as artists reveal debts owed by gallery’ ( The Art Newspaper , 25 February 2020) < https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/blain-southern-artists-reveal-debts-owed-by-closed-gallery > accessed 1 March 2021.

Fig 1. Sacred and Profane Love (Titian 1514, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. . The sacred’ and ‘the profane’ might sound, at first, like the sorts of technical terms intelligible only to theologians and religious scholars. On closer inspection, however, it appears that they mean vastly dissimilar things to people from many different walks of life. Not only do the words ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ appear in the titles of numerous paintings and orchestral and choral compositions, showing that the relationship between the two has been a topic of interest for artists and musicians alike, but the dichotomy has also been the subject of lengthy written treatments by anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers. The sacred-profane opposition is often considered to have its origins in the work of Scottish orientalist and Old Testament scholar William Robertson Smith, who lived during the second half of the nineteenth century.[1] Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, both students of Émile Durkheim, were among the earliest thinkers on the continent to build upon Robertson Smith’s research into the sacred and the profane, and indeed Durkheim’s ideas about how the two were interrelated, a subject covered in his groundbreaking 1912 study The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life , were profoundly influenced by the work his pupils had previously undertaken. Since then, British anthropologists Jack Goody and Edward Evans-Pritchard, and the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade have been some of the many academics to have investigated the sacred-profane opposition.[2] In more recent years, the phrase ‘sacred and profane’ has occurred in the names of everything from podcasts to documentaries on the Lakota Sioux.[3]   But although Robertson Smith may have been responsible for popularizing the dichotomy, in no way should we suppose, as Jan Bremmer does, that the opposition only originated around 1900. There is good evidence to suggest it had existed long before that. Lindsay Mann observes that the sacred-profane opposition underlies much of John Donne’s metaphysical poetry.[4] Moreover, Gregory Nagy has argued that, although the songs of Sappho and Alcaeus might seem worlds apart, what unites them is the logic of the sacred and profane.[5] Perhaps we should regard Nagy’s arguments with a degree of suspicion, however, since in neither Sappho’s nor Alcaeus’ poetry is the opposition between the two made explicit. It might be argued that such a distinction is implicit. But, even if this were the case, one could object to this mode of interpretation on the grounds that, rather than examining these poems in a manner sympathetic to the contexts in which they were composed, we are instead looking at them through the distorted lens of our modern scholarly preoccupations. We have no idea as to how residents of Archaic Lesbos conceived of sacredness or profaneness. Furthermore, it seems inevitable that, whenever one undertakes to reduce the content of a poem or other work of literature to a straightforward binary opposition, one ends up overlooking much of its richness of language, complexity, and profundity.   Literature aside, several paintings and musical compositions have also made use of the sacred-profane dichotomy as a structuring device. Amongst those artists and musicians to have taken inspiration from the relationship between the sacred and profane are: Claude Debussy, composer of the 1904 Danse sacrée et danse profane ; Benjamin Britten, whose last major choral composition, from 1974-75, was the Sacred and Profane  song cycle; and the Baroque painter Giovanni Baglione,   best known nowadays for his rivalry with Caravaggio and for his painting Sacred Love and Profane Love , which exists in two versions, exhibited in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie and Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica respectively.   Britten   The question remains, what makes one piece of music more ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’ than the next? In the case of Britten’s song cycle, a lot of it has to do with the lyrics. Britten selected and set to music eight short medieval poems, dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. It is believed he discovered the texts in Reginald Thorne Davies’ 1963 book Medieval Lyrics: A Critical Anthology ,[6] which was published a few years before Britten began work on Sacred and Profane . Scholars have chosen to divide up the ‘lyrics’ (another word for song) into two groups, the secular and the religious. This is because collections of medieval lyrics, such as those housed in the Harleian Library, are known to have included both secular and religious songs. Secular lyrics frequently had an instrumental accompaniment and formed the basis of many popular songs, including drinking tunes like the ‘Song of Lewes’. Religious lyrics, on the other hand, did not always have an accompaniment and were generally written for liturgical use. The ‘profane’ songs in the collection (nb here, ‘profane’ is being treated as roughly synonymous with ‘secular’) discuss topics such as love between man and woman, the joyousness of springtime, and the arrival of winter, while the ‘religious’ songs (which we might, in turn, call ‘sacred’ lyrics) concentrate on Christ’s Passion and, in particular, his crucifixion; in fact, the seventh lyric, Ye that pasen by , is written from the perspective of Christ as he gazes down from the cross, and urges onlookers to contemplate his suffering and sacrifice.   Debussy   If, then, the poems that Britten uses provide the key to explaining his collection’s title, what are we to make of Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane ? The two dances are joined together to form a single movement, lasting approximately ten minutes in total. Writing to Manuel de Falla in 1907, Debussy referred to the distinctive ‘colour’ of each of the dances, comparing the ‘gravity’ of the one with the ‘grace’ of the other. With the opening bars of the danse sacrée , Debussy is said to be creating an atmosphere of ancient   religiosity, an effect he achieves through a combination of almost medieval harmonies and chant-like phrases in the strings. It has been suggested that he is endeavouring to reproduce the sounds and character of Roman or Classical Greek music, and that he writes the harp part in such a way as to deliberately evoke that instrument from antique times, the lyre. The danse profane , on the other hand, is of a decidedly exotic character. In French, the adjective ‘profane’ often comes with connotations of earthiness and sensuality, and we cannot fail to be struck by the more ‘impressionistic’ and lush style of the second dance. The harp line, here, is especially redolent of Spanish music. It is also interesting to note in this context that the cross-strung harp is believed to have originated in Renaissance Spain. Along with the sea, Spain was one of Debussy’s great loves; its bright colours and rich, expressive music intrigued him. Many of the composer’s other works, as well, show signs of having been influenced by Spanish music, such as the piano piece La puerta del vino  and the three movements of Ibéria  (the second of Debussy’s three Images pour orchestre ).   But where did Debussy get the idea to write one dance which was ‘sacred’ and another that was ‘profane’? Does his familiarity with the sacred-profane dichotomy suggest that the opposition was more widely known about than we might initially expect? Or did the inspiration to write a piece about the ‘sacred and profane’ come from somewhere else, somewhere other than the intensely academical works of Durkheim and Robertson Smith? Perhaps Debussy was struck by a painting he had come across, maybe one that was even in Rome at the same time as he was living at the Villa Medici, where he stayed for a period of two years during the 1880s. Ultimately, this is pure speculation—to my knowledge, there is no evidence linking Debussy’s two dances with either Baglione’s Sacred Love and Profane Love or Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love . What this   article aims to highlight is the possibility of a connection between Debussy’s composition and one or both of these paintings. The Galleria Borghese, where Titian’s work is displayed, did not open until 1903, and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, where one version of Baglione’s painting is exhibited, did not start welcoming visitors until 1893, so in both cases the establishment of the gallery postdates Debussy’s residency at the French Academy in Rome.   But perhaps—yet more conjecture—he found out about them some other way. This is not impossible, nor is it inconceivable that seeing the painting(s) inspired Debussy to write a composition to do with the sacred and profane. In fact, we know for certain that one piece of music Debussy wrote, the symphonic suite Printemps , was inspired by his experience of seeing a painting by the Italian Renaissance master, Sandro Botticelli. The painting in question, Botticelli’s Primavera , graced the walls of the Villa Medici during the years when Debussy lived there, and it made such an impact upon the composer that he undertook to capture, using music, the exuberance and vitality of the characters represented on Botticelli’s canvas. Given Debussy had already used this painting as a source of inspiration for one of his compositions, what was there to stop him from using other paintings as further sources of inspiration? Of course, what this thesis of mine fails to establish is that it was a painting  that provided the inspiration for the title of Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane .   Baglione Fig 2. Sacred and Profane Love (Baglione 1602–03, oil on canvas). Wikimedia Commons. . It remains for me in the concluding part of this article to sketch some of the major interpretative theories about Titian’s and Baglione’s ‘sacred and profane’ paintings. Baglione was, in addition to being an accomplished draughtsman and painter, an art historian. His 1642 book on the lives and times of artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Le Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori et Architetti , which contains biographies of Caravaggio, Carracci, and Orazio Gentileschi, among others, also has an entry about Baglione himself. There he explains how he made for Cardinal Giustiniani ‘two paintings of two Divine Loves, holding under their feet the profane Love, the World, the Devil, and the Flesh’.[7] This might be taken as concrete proof that the titles which the two paintings go by nowadays were the ones the artist always intended his artworks to have. It is commonly believed that Baglione meant Sacred Love and Profane Love  to be a response to Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit . Orazio Gentileschi’s deposition from the libel suit that Baglione later brought against Caravaggio certainly seems to suggest Baglione set out to rival Caravaggio so as to curry favour with the Giustiniani. Although we are hardly able to take Gentileschi’s testimony at face value,[8] not least because the information he gives is often imprecise or categorically wrong, we cannot doubt that Baglione was consciously imitating aspects of Caravaggio’s style, such as his dramatic use of chiaroscuro and the abruptness of presentation. Baglione’s painting has also been read as a visual accusation of sodomy against Caravaggio. The devil in the bottom left-hand corner of the Rome picture has frequently been identified as a caricatured portrayal of Caravaggio (nb we might observe how, by contrast, the face of the devil in the Berlin version is turned away). It could be, therefore, that Baglione is drawing attention to Caravaggio in more than one way, and in neither instance is he being particularly subtle.   Titian   If we turn from Baglione’s to Titian’s painting, the difference could not be more striking. While Baglione’s Sacred Love and Profane Love  is an agonistic painting, conceived as a retaliatory response by one artist to the work of another artist, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love  was commissioned to mark the occasion of a grand, aristocratic marriage, that of Niccolò Aurelio, chancellor in the city government of Venice, and Laura Bagarotto of Padua. An overview of some of the different interpretations of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love  will suffice to show the multiplicity of scholarly approaches to this most enigmatic of paintings. Walter Friedlaender drew attention to the connection between Titian’s work and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili ,[9] a romance by the fifteenth-century writer Francesco   Colonna. He hypothesized that the seated figure on the left of the painting was Venus, and the standing one on the right was Polia, a figure from Colonna’s narrative, who has recently joined the service of the goddess of love. Erwin Panofsky argued that the two women represent the Twin Venuses of Neoplatonic philosophy,[10] who personify transient and eternal love respectively. Eugene B Cantelupe, in turn, asserted that Titian’s painting is an exploration of the dual nature of love in Platonic philosophy and Christian doctrine. He believed Sacred and Profane Love  to be ‘an allegory of pagan-Biblical love’[11] and highlighted the complex symbolism of much of the painting’s iconography. For instance, Cantelupe regarded Adonis, whose sarcophagus we see in the painting, as a pagan prefiguration of Christ, in that just as Christ returned to life, so Adonis was resurrected, after having been killed whilst out hunting. Both Christ and Adonis, therefore, can be viewed as symbols of rebirth and eternal life.   The task of deciphering the meaning of Titian’s painting is made infinitely harder, however, in view of the fact that Sacred and Profane   Love  was not even the work’s original title, in all probability. The first mention of the painting occurs in a poem of 1613, where it is listed as ‘Beauty Adorned and Beauty Unadorned’. We cannot even be certain whether this was the name Titian used to refer to his work. What, then, is contained in the title of a painting? It is more than just a label. It is a description of that painting’s subject matter. Nor is it just that, for, as Paul Barolsky notes, ‘description is never mere description’, it is also implicitly interpretation.[12] So much of our understanding of Titian’s painting hinges on the particular title we use to describe the work. Not much is ultimately knowable or definite about Sacred and Profane Love , apart from the circumstances surrounding its creation. But in many respects this is what makes it such a captivating artwork. We must try our best to make sense of the painting’s complex imagery but, without the parameters of interpretation suggested by the work’s original title, the title given it by the artist, we can afford to be much freer in our ‘reading’ of the picture than might otherwise be the case. Who the two women in Titian’s painting are meant to be, no one knows. But what arguably matters just as much is who people think  they are. And the fact that we are still asking these questions, and still discussing this painting centuries after it was made, goes to show what a timeless and fascinating work of art Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love really is. Matthew Sargent   Matthew Sargent is a third-year undergraduate in Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. Among his diverse interests are Greek historiography, literature, and political thought. He was the joint recipient of the 2020 Porson Prize, for Greek verse composition. He hopes to do an MPhil at Trinity, focussing on leadership theory and paraenetic discourse. [1] Jan N Bremmer, ‘“Religion”, “Ritual” and the Opposition “Sacred vs. Profane”’ in Fritz Graf (ed), Ansichten griechischer Rituale: Geburtstags-Symposium für Walter Burkert  (BG Teubner 1998) 25. [2] ibid 28. [3] Jack Goody, ‘Ritual and Religion: The Definitional Problem’ (1961) 12(2) The British Journal of Sociology 142; Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion  (Oxford University Press 1965); Mircea   Eliade, The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion  (Willard R Trask tr, Harcourt 1959). [4] Lindsay A Mann, ‘Sacred and Profane Love in Donne’ (1986) 65(4) Dalhousie Review 534. [5] Gregory Nagy, ‘Lyric and Greek Myth’ in R. Woodard (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology  (Cambridge University Press 2007). [6] Christian Damon Stirling, ‘A Study of Britten’s Unaccompanied Choral Cycles’ (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2015) 106ff. [7] Maryvelma Smith O’Neil, ‘Giovanni Baglione - Seventeenth-Century Painter, Draughtsman and Biographer of Artists’ (DPhil thesis, Oxford 1992) 42ff. [8] ibid 44. [9] Walter Friedlaender, ‘ La Tintura Delle Rose (the Sacred and Profane Love) by Titian’ (1938) 20(3) The Art Bulletin, 320-1, 323-4. [10] Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks  (University of California Press 2000) 78. [11] Eugene B Cantelupe, ‘Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love Re-examined’ (1964) 46(2) The Art Bulletin, 224. [12] Paul Barolsky, ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ (1998) 17(3) Notes in the History of Art 25.

Rebecca Salter is a painter. She is President of the Royal Academy of Arts, the first woman in the role. She has a strong interest in Japanese woodblock prints.   Past and present leaders of the Royal Academy of Arts come together here to discuss the role and power of art in today’s world, and the difficulties and responsibilities of running an institution seen as the country’s cultural trendsetter. These conversations raise questions of ethics, artistic merit, and political compromise. CJLPA : What do you think about the current state of the world, and art’s part in it?   Rebecca Salter : I think for quite some years the art world has been becoming increasingly global and increasingly aware of its carbon footprint. It is predicated on massive growth and prices going up and up and up. I think what will happen now may change that—it will be more difficult for art sellers, probably for a while. So I think the money circus will slow down slightly. I hope it’s a good time to reassess.   CJLPA : Do you think that the pandemic will increase people’s interest in seeing art in person?   RS : I think so, partly because it will increase people’s interest in actually making, housing the made, and the whole process. Because people have had a huge amount of time on their hands, many have found themselves doing things which they never thought they would—making things. So I think there will be more of an interest in the physical object, and also that we will be so fed up with online by the end of the pandemic that we will just want to see the real thing.   I think we have realised there is a difference in seeing an object online. It’s a substitute for now, but nothing can beat the actual experiences of the object. In the object, you can feel the traces of the artist’s hand and as a result of that you can, to some extent, enter their head. I think we lose a lot of that when we look at things online.   There’s a Japanese term which translates to ‘your eyes sit’. It describes the difference between actively looking, on the one hand, and seeing, on the other. Your eyes relax so much that you almost disappear into the artwork because you’re no longer actively scanning it, you’re just ‘being’ with it.   CJLPA : Arts funding: a public or a private affair?   RS : As President of the Royal Academy—which of course gets no government funding—I think it’s a combination. We’re quite lucky in this country as we have a mixed model, wherein some places get government funding and are topped up with private funding. What’s going to happen after this I don’t know, because the government will be looking to reduce its support in all sorts of areas of life. One worries about the arts, because people always make the argument that they are not important and we don’t need them in the way we need roads and hospitals. I would argue that a country without any kind of cultural sector would be so impoverished it wouldn’t be worth living in.   CJLPA : The arts make life worth living in lots of ways.   RS : Exactly. But when you’ve got very difficult decisions to make, it’s not easy to make the case for arts funding when you’ve got schools, and hospitals, and paying back all this money we’ve borrowed over the pandemic. That’s going to be the crunch. Being more optimistic about it, I think that—again, during lockdown—people have recognised the value of the arts sector. So many arts organisations, including the Royal Academy, put stuff online very, very quickly. You could argue that by doing that—and by doing that for free—all the arts organisations contributed to the mental wellbeing of the country.   Nobody has figured out how to monetise the online offerings, because we’ve been effectively just giving them away for free. Just asking people to donate? But if more of what you do goes online at some point—and this is a question that comes up the whole time— how do you monetise art? I’m not sure anybody’s got the answer yet, but I also think that people who are fairly wealthy and are able to support the arts have, again, realised the importance of the arts during lockdown. One can start to have confident conversations with philanthropists, or potential philanthropists, about how they could support the arts. Because people during lockdown look to values in life and in organisation more closely than they might have done before, they want to support organisations that have values they agree with and they think are important.   CJLPA : In a revolution, statues tumble. Are we witnessing a revolution?   RS : I’m not sure whether I’d call it a revolution, but I think it’s always helpful to look at things again and reassess things. There are some truly egregious examples where statues should be tumbled, but in many cases I think it is much more important to have really good conversation about objects and their interpretation. I think if you’re not careful, the tumbling doesn’t actually achieve very much, except for taking something away. What you really want to do is add to the quality of the debate.   Look at how history has been interpreted. The Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition that has just opened at the National Gallery is incredibly interesting. For a long time, Gentileschi was sidelined almost completely in art history. There were some concerns that she was being exhibited at the National Gallery as a sort of token woman. But there is no way you could go around that exhibition and think she is a token woman. Her painting is unbelievably powerful, and by rights should have been in the canon right from the beginning. The exhibition wasn’t just run because she was a woman. She’s at last taken her rightful place.   CJLPA : How do you feel, being a woman in the art world? I know it’s a lot better recently, but I saw in Tate the posters of the Guerrilla Girls, and I thought about how they were making art not so long ago. I was always into art and drama. They are always labelled as very feminine subjects, whereas men are put towards maths and sciences. Some things have changed, but the art world is still quite male-dominated, for example in terms of salaries.   RS : There still are some very uncomfortable statistics about the art world. All the highest-paid contemporary artists are male. When I was at art school the gender split may have been close to 50–50, but I was never taught by a woman. All the teachers were men, and this applied to my cohort too. Courses with predominantly women are emerging, but there are still fewer women teaching, fewer women as career artists, and the statistics are very odd.   I fear it’s going to get worse. You need to spend some part of your week working for money, and then you need to find time to work on your art. The real pinch point is when you introduce children into that mix. Then, it becomes almost impossible, unless you’ve got an other half who is doing half the work. Quite a few of us older women Academicians don’t have children. Some of the younger ones do but it’s quite a struggle.   CJLPA : Planning your time is quite difficult as an artist, because you have to be immersed in what you’re doing.   RS : Yes, it’s tricky and time consuming. You can’t shortcut it and say, ‘I’ve only got an hour’. But there are more women, and we’ve elected more women at the Royal Academy in the last ten or so years, so the balance is changing.   CJLPA : You were the first female President. Congratulations!   RS: Thank you! It only took 252 years, but we got there in the end. Shockingly, the Royal Academy had two female members when it was founded in 1768, but then the next woman was elected in 1936. That tells you what the nature is of the organisation. Of course, the irony is that—as so often happens— it’s a woman in post when all the sweeping up has to happen, which of course is what’s happening with the pandemic. I get to do all the hard work.   CJLPA : Institutions such as the Royal Academy are the shapers of taste. How did you view this responsibility during your time as President?   RS : I think the Royal Academy might be flattered to think it is a shaper of taste, really! The wonderful thing about the Royal Academy is that it is independent and can do what it wants, money permitting. So even though it has ‘Royal’ over the door, and is in a rather grand place on Piccadilly, there is room to be radical. But I think taste is probably shaped virtually now. I suspect the real world just piggybacks on.   CJLPA : Surely the Royal Academy has a big influence?   RS : Well, it depends on which bit of the Royal Academy. Is it the exhibition we just had on Picasso, or is it the Summer Exhibition? They are very different: one is a scholarly, curated exhibition and the other is really a celebration of creativity. I don’t think the Summer Exhibition shapes taste in any meaningful way now. I think it used to. There’s a hilarious film on YouTube of the Summer Exhibition in 1976—everybody is chain smoking, the women are wearing hats and pearls, and the men are all dressed up in tweeds. But a few hundred yards away you’ve got the Sex Pistols. The Royal Academy really lost touch around this time. But I would argue we’ve moved a long way since then. You can look at the most recent artists we’ve elected, people like Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, and David Adjaye. It’s a very different place.   CJLPA : So do you think it has become more ‘with the times’?   RS : Yes. One of the tricky bits was that when you’re elected as an academician, you’re elected in a category: painting, sculpture, printmaking, or architecture. For an awfully long time, people were saying, ‘Well, what do we do with photographers?’, or, ‘We can’t have photographers because we don’t know where to put them.’ But now Isaac Julien can get elected as a Painter. It’s just a label.   CJLPA : In 1863, the Paris Salon rejected the works of Courbet, Manet, Pissarro, Jongkind, and Whistler. Today’s great art contests, such as the RA Summer Show, are sometimes viewed not as competitions but as lotteries. Do you think there is a risk of great works falling through the cracks? And might there be scope, as there was in 1863, for a Salon des Refusés?   RS : I think the nature of the Summer Exhibition has changed slightly. Back in the old days, there was a consensus about what should be hanging in the Royal Academy, but now for the last six years, maybe more, there’s been a curator coordinator. We’ve had Michael Craig-Martin and Grayson Perry, and this year it was Jane and Louise Wilson. Every year now the Exhibition has a slightly different vision, because the coordinator and committee are different each year. It’s just a reflection of the particular angle of that year’s committee, so it’s not quite as black and white as ‘in’ or ‘out’ and those ‘out’ are cast into darkness. It just means, ‘Not this year but maybe next year.’ Before I was elected, I submitted to the Royal Academy and never got in once.   CJLPA : Was it the same when you applied—that they were still changing curators?   RS : When I was putting in work, I think it was possibly still with a fixed academy view, but it just goes to show that not getting into the Royal Academy doesn’t mean very much if you end up as the president! So it is very different, it’s not really a shaper of any great   taste as it was in the past. Being refused I think is really just ‘try again   next year’ when it’s a different committee.   In the year that Grayson Perry did it, which was our anniversary year, the fact that he was the coordinator shaped the kind of work that was submitted. A huge number of people painted portraits of him, which of course the next year wouldn’t get in at all. Whereas Grayson took them all in because it was quite entertaining to have a wall full of portraits of Grayson. So it’s a much more complex relationship than it was before, because everybody looks at the committee and thinks, ‘OK, I might get in this year because they like the kind of work I do.’ It’s shaped by the committee that we put together, really. It’s not monolithic as it was before.   CJLPA : How do you view your place in the discourse of contemporary art?   RS : I’m in a slightly odd position. When I left art school, I went and did my postgraduate in Japan. This was considered very eccentric in 1979 because everybody wanted to go to New York. I’ve never regretted going to Japan. It was extraordinarily valuable to look back at your own culture, and European culture, through the eyes of a very different culture. It taught me many lessons about one’s narrow assumptions and interpretation of the world. Western perspective, for example, is just the way we choose in the West to represent the world on a flat surface. In Japan and China, they do it in a completely different way. These different visions of the world have been hugely enriching for me.   I was always fascinated by Japan and just wanted to go, though I’m not quite sure why. I got a scholarship and went. Japanese art was what I was drawn to, but I didn’t know much else about Japan, because in those days you didn’t really. Partly it was that things were economically really bad here in the early eighties, whereas Japan was booming. Also, by then I’d learned the language, and once you’ve done that it seems like a waste not to go back! I spent six years there in the end, two in university, and I go back as often as I can.   CJLPA : Has Japan inspired your art?   RS : Yes. When I was there I thought about my work in Japanese, because I lived with Japanese people and had mostly Japanese friends. This was really powerful, and I still do it sometimes. For much of my stay I hardly spoke English at all. When I came back to England, I couldn’t really talk or think about my work in English because it had been ‘created’ in Japanese. It’s like I’ve got two circuits in my head: every now and again when I’m working, I think about the work in Japanese because it can unlock things. My experience in Japan was very valuable indeed. Lily-Rose Morris-Zumin, the interviewer, is a Fashion and Arts & Culture writer, editor, and stylist interested in exploring the intersection of fashion, performance, and identity. Currently, she serves as the editor for The COLD Magazine  where she works across the art and fashion departments, attending key industry events like London Fashion Week, editing and writing features. She is also the External Arts Relations Officer at CJLPA , focused on cultivating partnerships with arts institutions and supporting editorial projects in both visual and performing arts.

Bury [music] so deep under the earth that no sound or echo of it may rise again. —Attributed to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb[1]   Over 10,000 farmers in India committed suicide in 2019, with indebtedness cited as the predominant factor leading to the deaths. In certain states, a farmer is over 80% more likely to take their own life compared with other members of the population.[2] And now, this agrarian crisis has been acutely pressured by the hurried enacting of three new farm laws in September 2020, opening up agricultural trade to private corporations and destroying what little price protection the country’s small and marginal farmers—who constitute 85% of the farmer populace—rely heavily upon to survive market vagaries.[3]   The government’s decisions have been deemed’ ‘undemocratic’ by those in India’s opposition party. Yet in the face of a seemingly bleak prognosis, the response, especially from the Sikh-majority state of Punjab, has been a remarkable exhibition of solidarity in civil resistance. The six months from August 2020 to February 2021 have seen an estimated 300,000 farmers march from Punjab to Delhi and erect settlements at its borders, besieging the city in demonstration against the laws.[4] What is striking about the images from the borders of Singhu, Tikri, and others, is that the protest sites are more resemblant of makeshift towns than rallies. Overhead shots display a tessellation of tractor trollies scattered with marquees offering 24-hour free hot meals, exercise facilities, and even a school for underprivileged children led by volunteer protesters. It is abundantly clear that the farmers are sat in for the long haul. And amongst the array of media, one theme consistently pervades: music.   From the sound of Sikh devotional hymns, or keertan , ringing through the tents, to the iconic figures of the Punjabi pop universe singing to gatherings of thousands, music has served to not only amplify the voice of the masses but also to let their spirits endure during the harsh winter months spent sleeping out in the cold. And it is no coincidence that musical expression has been a prominent medium for harnessing this sentiment, as it is fundamentally inseparable from both Sikh tradition and Punjabi culture.   The centrality of music to Sikh praxis   It is difficult to overstate the centrality of music to Sikh devotional practice. The vast majority of its canonical scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, has been arranged in  rāg.  A melodic framework designed for musical improvisation,  rāg  is akin, but not equivalent, to the melodic modes found in Western music theory. Each composition within the Granth Sahib is written in poetic measure and assigned a  rāg  to which it should be sung. The founder of the faith, Guru Nanak, goes so far as to identify himself as a minstrel, whose message is to be sung, not simply preached.[5] In a sense, Sikhi embodies a sonic theology.   Importantly however, the place of music within the tradition extends beyond mellifluous melody. One of the distinguishing features of Sikh religious observation is a confluence of the meditative and the heroic, with music acting as a thread to bind them together. Its significance is as much temporal as it is spiritual, and nowhere is this epitomised greater than in the flourishing of the  dhādi  tradition during the early seventeenth century. The  dhādi s, literally ‘bards’, were originally thought of as local amateur musicians who weren’t skilled enough to warrant a place in the Mughal courts. Under the sixth Guru of the Sikhs, Hargobind, a deliberate use of the same term was employed as a resignification of the vocabulary. The  dhādi  was not only celebrated in the Sikh tradition, but brought into courts and patronized by the Guru, being referred to as his ‘beloved’.[6] Although a little crude in its periodisation, this time period is also argued to have been an iconoclastic moment in Sikh history, transforming the psyche of the population from one of sainthood to one of warriorhood, and alongside it a more formal establishment of Sikh political authority.   The  vār s (ballads) the  dhādi s sing consist of tales of valour and heroism, intended to evoke a martial spirit and, as Joyce Pettigrew succinctly puts it, ‘overwhelm the conditions of injustice and oppression’.[7] Sikh hagiography places the arising of the  dhādi  along with a materialisation of militancy in the community. The theme of sacrifice for greater good is all but ubiquitous in their renditions:   It is not given to everyone to be a martyr. This position is the highest anyone can attain. The names of those will never remain Who fear death. Great are those fighters who give their life for the nation, Who give their life for the nation.[8]   The strength of the narrative was that it tugged at strings of sovereignty. Martyrdom in the name of justice was to be valorised, not feared, and by being expressed within melody was to increase its efficacy.   *   Fast forward a hundred years, and the place of music is reified again during the milieu of Mughal India under the reign of the emperor Aurangzeb. Italian writer Niccolao Manucci, who spent almost his entire adulthood detailing the lives of the Mughal rulers first-hand, recounts in his famous Storia do Mogor :   Not resting content with the above orders [prohibiting alcohol, drugs, long bears, etc], Aurangzeb … ordered the same official to stop music. If in any house or elsewhere he heard the sound of singing and instruments, he should forthwith hasten there and arrest as many as he could, breaking the instruments.[9]   Whilst the extent of Aurangzeb’s prohibition is debated by musicologists and historians alike, the continuation of the various musical traditions was now most certainly a vehicle of defiance of an oppressive and at times tyrannical kingship. With this antecedent, the use of music to amplify Sikh and Punjabi voices of resistance during the largest mass mobilisation in India’s postcolonial history should by no means come as a surprise.   The Punjabi music industry   A genre that in recent times has been largely typified by a glorification of violence, the Punjabi music industry now resonates with an entirely new flavour of rebellion. Since the start of the protests, dozens of songs have been released by both native Punjabi and diaspora artists in support of the demonstrations, characterised not only by their messages of solidarity but their damning critiques of the Indian polity. The same vibrations of the  dhādi  epics echo through the lyrics that have been fuelled by, and given renewed determination to, the movement.   Kanwar Grewal, a Sufi singer whose work has gained large popularity within the commercial space, is a regular feature on stages throughout the protest site. Crowds have gathered in their tens of thousands to listen to his acapella performances, and he has become something of a talisman for the effort. But his artistry has not been without rebuttal.   Grewal, who hails from a farming family in rural Punjab, has recently had one of his songs removed by YouTube in India. ‘Ailaan’ (‘Proclamation’) was confirmed to have been taken down by YouTube’s headquarters in California after the Indian government filed a complaint. None of the lyrics appear to breach the site’s content guidelines themselves. Instead they violate ‘certain rules and policies laid down by the Indian government’, noted the song’s producer, Harjinder Laddi.[10]   Oh Delhi, you are going to be troubled by this gathering, But only a farmer will have the final word about his crops.[11] —Kanwar Grewal, ‘Ailaan’   This is not the only instance of government retaliation. Singer and lyricist Pawandeep Singh Mohali, more commonly known by his alias Shree Brar, was arrested on 6 January 2021 under the Police Incitement to Disaffection Act for his lyrics encouraging gun culture and exalting lawlessness. The Senior Superintendent of Police, Vikram Jeet Duggal, claimed that ‘[t]he lyrics of the song very much encourage the youth to commit crimes and antisocial acts’.[12] The song in question, ‘Jaan’, was released just a week before the equally provocative ‘Kisaan Anthem’ (‘Farmer Anthem’) which features Brar and nine other Punjabi artists.   ‘Kisaan Anthem’ utilises an evocation of the Sikh Gurus to facilitate an emotion of virtue and righteousness. Brar sings of Guru Nanak blessing the Sikhs with a farming heritage, and implying that their rights have been divinely bestowed. Music, religion, and political resistance are deeply intertwined in these works. It is apparent in Brar’s lyrics, as it is in those of numerous others, that these songs are not designed to generate album sales or bolster fame. Instead, they are saturated by a tangible essence of challenging the hegemony, the source of which is is a long lineage of musical defiance.   O master of the hawk [the tenth Sikh Guru] place your hand on our head and protect us, As we walk alone and our enemy is the government.[13]   —Shree Brar, ‘Kisaan Anthem’   For the thousands of farmers who remain steadfast in their struggle, these musicians and their artistic expression serve as much more than entertainment. There is a deep-rooted sense of heritage and dynasty that vibrates with every note. The lyrics, melody, and rhythm that rang 500 years ago, whose resonance permeates the protests today, are not simply just a chorus of sacred sound. Nor are they merely demonstrations of political recalcitrance. These songs, hymns, and ballads are articulations of a sovereignty, and have become the anthems of a movement. And the orchestra that played to defy injustice over half a millennium ago appears to be just as loud today. Jeevan Singh Riyait   Jeevan Singh Riyait is currently studying for an MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies at Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has degrees in Mathematics from the University of Leicester, and Theology and Religion from the University of Oxford. Outside of his career in investment banking, his interests include the research and reading of precolonial Sikh history, as well as being an avid cricketer. [1] Katherine Butler Brown, ‘Did Aurangzeb Ban Music? Questions for the Historiography of his Reign’ (2007) 41(1) Modern Asian Studies 77. [2] Dominic Merriott, ‘Factors associated with the farmer suicide crisis in India’ (2016) 6(4) Journal of Epidemiology and Global Health 218. [3] Department of Agriculture, Cooperation & Farmers Welfare, All India Report on Agriculture Census 2015-16  (New Delhi: Ministry of Agriculture   & Farmers Welfare, 2021) 28 < http://agcensus.nic.in/document/agcen1516/ac_1516_report_final-220221.pdf > accessed 20 March 2021. [4] Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘Indian farmers march on Delhi in protest against agriculture laws’ Guardian  (London, 30 November 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/30/indian-farmers-march-on-delhi-in-protest-against-agriculture-laws > accessed 24 March 2021. [5] Guru Nanak, Guru Granth Sahib  (first published 1604; Sant Singh Khalsa tr) 151 < http://srigranth.org/servlet/gurbani.gurbani?Action=Page&Param=468&g=1&h=0&r=0&t=1&p=1&k=0 > accessed 27 March 2021. [6] Michael Nijhawan, ‘From Divine Bliss to Ardent Passion: Exploring Sikh Religious Aesthetics through the Ḍhāḍī Genre’ (2003) 42(4) History of Religions 375. [7] Joyce Pettigrew, ‘Songs of the Sikh Resistance Movement’ (1991) 23(1) Asian Music 86. [8] ibid 101. [9] Niccolao Manucci, Storia del Mogol di Nicolò Manuzzi veneziano  (first published 1708, Franco Maria Ricci 1986) 8. [10] Pawanjot Kaur, ‘YouTube Removes 2 Songs on Farmers’ Protest, Producer Says HQ Cited “Govt Intervention”’ ( The Wire , 8 February 2021) < https://thewire.in/agriculture/youtube-removes-farmers-protest-song-himmat-sandhu > accessed 24 March 2021. [11] Vari Rai, ‘Ailaan’ ( Rubai Music , 2020, song recorded by Kawar Grewal) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1t91auJVnM > accessed 27 March 2021. [12] Express News Service, ‘Patiala police arrests singer, lyricist Shree Brar for “glorifying” lawlessness’ ( The Indian Express , 6 January 2021) < https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/chandigarh/shree-brar-arrested-punjab-7134659/ > accessed 24 March 2021. [13] Shree Brar, ‘Kisaan Anthem’ ( PB Studios , 2020, song recorded by Shree Brar et al) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNJiVuPmh9A > accessed 27 March 2021.

The family is often presented as an opponent to the state as the location of power, or as an alternative to state institutions. The 2004 law which banned French public school pupils from wearing religious symbols, implicitly focusing on the veil, exposed a ‘tension between abstract universalism and embodied particularism’.[1] That is to say, it centred the debate on laïcité (secularism, roughly) onto the issue of an imagined conflict between a universal French republican identity and a specific religious identity which was embodied by the veil, taken as a synecdoche of Islam. Family is significant to this, as the French doctrine of laïcité essentially dictates that religious freedom is welcomed but only so long as it remains in the private arena. Balibar (2007) perfectly exemplifies the laïque  (secularist) view by arguing that it is religion which organises the private sphere, specifically family and sexuality.[2] While a private–public binary is clearly artificial and religion does in fact shape both, he demonstrates the French assumption of the republican ideal of religion, as something that stays in the family. Therefore, when we talk about the ‘religion versus the state’ debate in a French context, we are exploring the ideas of private versus public spheres, even when family is not explicitly mentioned. Bowen argues that the foundation of laïcité  is the existence of a public space where there is freedom of expression. La croyance  (belief) must stay out of it, as a threat to free expression, while le culte , organised religion, must be regulated within it.[3]   I propose that an anthropological exploration of French experiences of family and religion would enable us to identify what is really at stake in the French headscarf debate. I first explore Foucault’s theory of biopolitics and discipline and how this interacts with ideas of the private sphere and family. I then examine Iteanu’s theory of hierarchy and values as inherently linked, suggesting that the veil debate centres on a perceived hierarchisation of familial/religious values over state/ republican values. Finally, I critically discuss Abrams’ approach to the state as an idea, which suggests that a reification of the state leads to essentialised categories of religious family and state, further obscuring the fault lines in this debate. I prove that an ethnographic focus on families sheds light on the insecurity of the French state, and its reliance on the public/private dichotomy.   Firstly, Foucault suggests that as the modern state emerges with its distinctive habits of biopolitics and discipline, the family as the main unit of governance is forced to retreat. He argues that the modern state makes the family into an instrument of governance, rather than a model of the state, as information required to control the population is gained through the family.[4] Before the modern state emerged, Foucault theorises, the state had had the power to make die and let live—that is, to execute or not. In practice, this is a weak form of power because the state ended up having little control over the living.[5] Killing someone may have been a power, but it was one that was abruptly ended when that person actually died. Therefore, a biopolitical shift to making live  and letting die  empowered the state by creating the arena of power as one where the state could actually act— the realm of the living.[6] However, Foucault’s perspective on the state is limited in its usefulness in a discussion of religion because it attributes atheism to the citizens. It relies on them being focussed on life over death, assuming they ultimately desire to stay alive as long as possible and surrender up freedoms to the state so as to be made to live.   Talal Asad, an anthropologist of religion and secularism, highlights that religion causes subjects to look to ‘other-worldly’ concerns, meaning that the state needs to assert its place as a ‘worldly’ power.[7] This may explain why the French republican state is so concerned with keeping acts of religious belief out of its public sphere. An assertion of worldly power is evidenced in the discourses around the alleged oppression of Muslim girls by their families, who boundary their sexuality by ‘forcing’ them to veil. For example, the 2003 Stasi commission argued that Islamism threatened secularism and women’s rights in the banlieues (suburbs).[8] The family and its transcendent religious values infringe on state power in state institutions such as schools, and in areas like the banlieues . They limit state sovereignty within their territory. The French state is essentially insecure about its grip on power, and transcendent religious values highlight that its power of making live is only relevant so long as people desire material life above all other things.   It is commonly argued that the French state’s choice of headscarves as the religious symbol to target is born of racism and imperial mores. Returning to Foucault, he argues that racism is a natural result of the biopower of making live and letting die so far discussed.[9] The state racialises groups within the human ‘species’ which allows it to leave some ‘inferior’ subspecies to die or be dominated, with the ultimate aim of strengthening the overall population. I argue that this is not the case in the veiling debate. Rather than dehumanising Muslim girls so as to abandon them to oppression and subordination, the French government is instead trying to force them up from the family  level of identity to a universal  French republican level of identity. It is trying to strengthen the republic as a whole by integrating  everyone rather than excluding  some.   The anthropologist André Iteanu demonstrates that banlieue  Muslim girls, who are at the heart of the veiling discourse, actually do better than the boys at school, losing their accent more easily and integrating more into the urban world of work.[10] He suggests that their Islamic revival and return to veiling has arisen not because they feel excluded from wider French society, but in fact because they feel comfortable in this context and able to express themselves and their religious identity. Another anthropologist of secularism, Mayanthi Fernando, described Muslim French youth, second- or third-generation immigrants committed to citizenship and gaining academic qualifications beyond the Baccalauréat (taken at the same age as A levels), in such a way as to support this picture.[11] Iteanu suggests that the predominantly North African immigrant communities of the banlieues , low-status as they may be in mainstream French society, are relatively free from state influence, as police are less present or effective with them than with other groups. However, this freedom is reliant on the banlieusards ( banlieue -dwellers) accepting a subordinate position.[12] The French state banning headscarves in school may be an expression of discomfort and insecurity at the fact that socially devalued girls are managing to achieve by its own measure of success—the Baccalauréat—even as they also embrace religious values in wearing the veil.   The anthropologist Didier Fassin (2006) suggests that this is a kind of racism without race. It culturalises biological difference so that it can be presented in a form more palatable to a nation that thinks of itself as egalitarian—a clash of Muslim family values versus laïque French society, rather than brown versus white.[13] While biopolitics’ racist method of biologically constructing an Other is irreversible, ‘culture’ is allegedly something one can be integrated into or out of. This explains a French state policy which seems to be at best hypocritical and at worst foolhardy. The state simultaneously legislates to keep individual Muslim signs out of its institutions and  to integrate Islam into its institutions, for example by giving it a Sunday morning slot on the French Two television station. The French state is trying not to force out  the banlieue  Muslim population, but to force it into  the ‘family’ of   the nation state. Muslim identity is acceptable when it is subordinate to French identity, and so an institutionalised religion which one picks up as a hobby, or listens to on the radio on Sundays, is no threat. What is a threat is a hierarchy of values where one’s duty to (Muslim) family comes first. The French state has read this prioritisation of values into Muslim girls choosing to wear the headscarf to school.   Iteanu demonstrates this link between values and hierarchy by proposing that values necessarily imply hierarchy, as one thing is valorised over another.[14] He argues that this idea of hierarchy is unpopular in Euro-America and so the link between the two is concealed in an ‘ideological twist’.[15] In fact, there is an ideological twist at the heart of laïcité , and this mystification explains why the French mainstream appears incapable of seeing the ludicrousness of the claim that children’s clothing threatens the nature of the French state. Underlying the debate, I argue, is an assumption that state values of secularism come into conflict with family values of religious duty, along with state insecurity about the hierarchy of values being established with state below family. Such insecurity leads the state to assert itself by, for example, banning the veil in public schools. All the while, it has to reject the idea that there is a hierarchy or even an alternative source of identity for citizens to itself, as this would threaten the claim of the unity of French society.   It is perhaps hard for a non-French person to understand how deeply this desire for unity runs. As an example, the historian Camille Robcis argues that both sides in the French debates over legalising same-sex marriage drew on this ideological notion to support their argument. The ‘anti’ side argued that writing into law the legality of gay relationships reified difference, thus hurting unity. The ‘pro’ side argued that not allowing gay marriage singled out a group and reified difference thus hurting unity.[16] The French republican ideological project cannot openly acknowledge that there is a threat to its internal one-ness.   Iteanu draws parallels between the debate over giving the women the vote and the headscarf debate. Formerly, the state argued that women couldn’t have the vote, not because of a lesser humanity, but because they were not as educated as men, which meant their choice of their vote might be swayed by their husband or priest.[17] The anxiety at the core of this position is that the private sphere would invade the public sphere which people enter when they vote, causing them to become ‘occasional politicians’, in Weber’s words.[18] In the case of the veil, the state’s argument is that Muslim women are not rationally fit to be French citizens because they subscribe to dogma and are spiritually and materially (in terms of their clothes) controlled by their families. The state’s designation of the headscarf as a religious symbol is about psychological as well as visible differences. It assumes that Muslim women desire to wear the headscarf and so to belong to a particular system of values. The state conceals the fact that it is attempting to place its own values higher in this perceived hierarchy by labelling the debate as one about égalité  (equality) and rescuing oppressed women. Herein lies the ideological twist.   Why the veil particularly? As one anthropologist joked to me: when in doubt, use Foucault. Foucault’s expansive theorising on state power includes a version of power premised on discipline, which works on the individual body and can coexist with a biopolitics focussed on controlling the population.[19] I argue this disciplinary kind of control better explains the veil situation, a conflict in which the French state has essentially taken against an embodied sign (the veil) and required individuals to change how they use their body as a result.   Fernando highlights the small scale of the issue at Jean Nouvel school, where there were around 20 veiled girls in a school of a thousand people. With only 20 bodies to remember and control, a girl called Nawel was repeatedly targeted, with or without her veil, because her name was remembered.[20] Iteanu argues that as conversion is treated by the state as an individual choice, the punishment can be individual. Indeed, the state had to view the banning of the veil in public schools as bodily discipline rather than spiritual control, as the latter would breach the principles of laïcité .[21] Asad builds on this by suggesting that the debate essentially boiled down to a misunderstanding of religious signs.[22] The state saw wearing the veil as merely a choice to demonstrate belonging to a community, while Muslims saw it as a duty  to God and to their families. The state took a material sign and tried to assume a transcendent, familial meaning behind it, a choice to belong to one community more than the French national community.   Furthermore, Foucault argues that discipline and biopower as two forms of power overlap in the case of sexuality, something highly relevant in the case of the veil. Foucault suggests that sexuality is the meeting of biopolitics and discipline because it combines both population-wide focuses on fertility and reproduction, and individual focuses on the body and its experience of pleasure.[23] While the biological focus is not there in the case of the veil, there is a combination of two different scales of approach. Sometimes the state’s discourse zooms in on individual Muslim women’s bodies, allegedly constrained in their sexuality by being forced to veil by family. Sometimes it zooms out to the privatisation of sexuality through the covering of hair and body, considering this a threat to the concept of a sexually free, rational French citizenry. On the one hand, Nawel was told by a teacher not to cover her ‘beautiful hair’, in a comment on her individual beauty and attractiveness perhaps intended to boost her confidence and empower her to free her sexuality from her male family’s control (a caricature of Nawel’s actual motivations for wearing the veil).[24] On the other hand, we can connect the conversation around sexuality, as does Iteanu, to a broader pattern of French politicians being almost expected to have affairs, and to chastity being distinctly un-French. Iteanu uses the example of Rachida Dati, a highly significant French politician of North African heritage. Dati garnered a frenzy of popular interest when she announced her pregnancy but would not say who the father was.[25] Iteanu proposes that the French tabloids were ecstatic to see Dati, a woman who grew up in a conservative Muslim home, choosing a supposedly French ‘free’ sexuality over family rules. The veiling debate reveals an interest in sexuality both at the level of the individual body and in broader conceptions of French identity.   A final remark is necessary on the risks of reifying the concept of the ‘state’. I suggest that a more productive route is to follow the sociologist Philip Abrams’ logic of the state being an incredibly powerful idea, rather than a concrete object. Much discussion of family in relation to the state assumes the existence of a state that its values can clash with. In fact, the state is a ‘unified symbol of actual disunity’, something very evident in the headscarf debate.[26] For example, the argument that conflict over the veil emerges from complex colonial relationships implies that, before colonialism, the French Republic was unified in its identity. In fact, ‘France’ as an imagined community is very new. In 1794, only 11% of people living in its territory spoke French as a first language, which implies provincial identity was a much more powerful source of belonging than the nation.[27] One was, say, Basque, rather than French. Even the idea of laïcité , treated by the French as a cornerstone of their history, was not legally enshrined as a term until the 1946 constitution.[28] The state considers itself ancient and unified, despite all the historical evidence to the contrary. Bowen suggests that the French state idea emphasises ‘continuity over rupture’, assuming universal, historical French values such as laïcité  so that so-called private—familial, religious—values can be treated as new impositions on a unified whole. The debate is therefore constructed as ‘Muslim communities versus[29] the State’—’State’, that is, with a capital ‘S’, reified in its institutions, in this case the education sector. In fact, if the state exists, it is as a series of interwoven ministries and people and ideas, all of which cannot be expected to be ideologically cohesive. In the case of the headscarf, for example, the Education League, the largest teachers’ body, with two million members, opposed  the 2004 law.[30] Conversely, we cannot homogenise ‘Muslim community’ as holding one driving ideology.   It may be too obvious a point that the three and a half million Muslims living in France are not unified in their position on the headscarf. First-generation immigrants encourage their children and grandchildren to pursue integration and financial success, while those in the younger generation criticise their parents for being ‘bad’ Muslims.[31] Bringing the family into an exploration of the construction of a state idea lets us examine essentialised categories and expose the lie of unity in the state. In this way, an ethnographic focus on families allows a deeper examination of the public– private sphere binary, and of the insecurities and falsities that such distinctions attempt to cover up. Mary Osborne   Mary Osborne is a second-year undergraduate in Human, Social, and Political Sciences at Christ's College, Cambridge, specialising in Sociology and Social Anthropology. She is particularly interested in the anthropology of ethics, sexuality, and intellectual disability, and hopes to pursue postgraduate research in the anthropology of disability after she graduates in 2022. [1] Mayanthi Fernando, The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradicitions of Secularism  (Duke University Press 2014) 7. [2] ibid 16. [3] John R Bowen, Why The French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space  (first published 2006, Princeton University Press 2010) 21. [4] Michel Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality  (University of Chicago Press 1991) 100. [5] Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976  (Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana eds, David Macey tr,   Penguin 2004) 241. [6] ibid. [7] Talal Asad, ‘French Secularism and the “Islamic Veil Affair”’ (2006) Spring/Summer 2006 The Hedgehog Review 94. [8] Bowen (n 3) 11. [9] Foucault (n 5) 254. [10] André Iteanu, ‘The Two Conceptions of Value’ (2013) 3(1) HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory 165. [11] Fernando (n 1) 13. [12] Iteanu (n 10) 166. [13] As cited in Fernando (n 1) 17. [14] Iteanu (n 10) 156. [15] ibid. [16] Camille Robcis, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France  (Cornell University Press 2013). [17] ibid 167. [18] Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures  (David Owen and Tracy B Strong eds, Rodney Livingstone tr, Hackett Publishing Company Inc 2004) 39. [19] Foucault (n 5) 242. [20] Fernando (n 1) 3. [21] Iteanu (n 10) 166. [22] Asad (n 7) 98. [23] Foucault (n 5) 252. [24] Iteanu (n 10) 167. [25] ibid 167. [26] Philip Abrams, ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State’ in Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (eds), The Anthropology of the State: A Reader  (Blackwell Publishing 2006) 124. [27] Fernando (n 1) 9. [28] Bowen (n 3) 31. [29] ibid 14. [30] Fernando (n 1) 8. [31] Iteanu (n 10) 165.