WENDY BROWNbreakdown of this logic of liberal universalism. Tolerance arises as a way of negotiating
‘‘cultural,’’ ‘‘ethnic,’’ and ‘‘religious’’ differences that clash with the hegemonic ‘‘societal
culture’’ within which they exist. The conflict that emerges when those differences erupt
into public life poses more than a policy problem, for example, whether Muslim girls in
France can wearhijabto public schools, or whether female circumcision or bigamy can
be practiced in North America. Rather, the conflict itself exposes the nonuniversal charac-
ter of liberal legalism and public life; it exposes its cultural dimensions.
Thisexpose ́is managed through the supplement of tolerance discourse in one of two
ways. The difference is designated either as dangerous in its nonliberalism (hence as not
tolerable) or as merely religious, ethnic, or cultural (hence as not a candidate for a politi-
cal claim). If it is a nonliberal political difference, it is intolerable; and if it is tolerated, it
must be privatized, converted into an individually chosen belief or practice with no politi-
cal bearing. Tolerance thus functions as the supplement to a liberal secularism that cannot
sustain itself at this moment. Still, the very fact of the eruption that challenges liberalism’s
putative aculturalism, and the mobilization of tolerance to respond to it, suggest other
political possibilities, ones that might affirm and productively exploit rather than disavow
liberalism’s culturalism.
In a passing remark about the contemporary language of ‘‘cultural or ethnic minor-
ity,’’ Talal Asad identifies another site of contemporary leakage in the aspirations of liberal
legalism to purity. Within liberalism, Asad notes,majorityandminorityare political terms
with political relevance. As such, these terms ‘‘presuppose a constitutional device forre-
solvingdifferences,’’ which is not, of course, how the language of tolerance approaches
difference. ‘‘To speak of cultural majorities and minorities is therefore to posit ideological
hybrids,’’ Asad continues. ‘‘It is also to make the implicit claim that members of some
cultures truly belong to a particular politically defined place, but those of others (minority
cultures) do not.’’^54 Without acknowledging or thematizing this slippage between the
cultural and the political within liberalism, tolerance is adduced to handle it, indeed, to
re-depoliticize what erupts into the political as a cultural, religious, or ethnic claim. Again,
tolerance appears as a supplement for liberalism at the point of a potential crisis in its
universalist self-representation. And again, the alternative is not abandoning or rejecting
liberalism but, rather, using the occasion to open liberal regimes to self-reflection on the
false conceits of their cultural and religious secularism, and to the possibility of being
transformed by their encounter with what liberalism has conventionally taken to be its
constitutive outside and its hostile other. Such openings would involve deconstructing
the opposition between moral autonomy and organicism, and between secularism and
fundamentalism, both for the polyglot West and for the polyglot Islamic world.^55
These deconstructive moves bear the possibility of conceiving and nourishing a liber-
alism more self-conscious of and receptive to its own always already present hybridity, its
potentially rich failure to hive off organicism from individuality, culture from political
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