TRYING TO UNDERSTAND FRENCH SECULARISMsovereign and yet obedient to the laws of the secular Republic, flexible and tolerant yet
fiercely principled. The liberal idea is that it is only when this individual sovereignty is
invaded by something other than the representative democratic state, which represents
his individual will collectively, and by something other than the market, which is the
state’s dominant civil partner (as well as its indispensable electoral technique), that free
choice gives way to coerced behavior. But the fact that the notions of moral and political
sovereignty are not coherent as descriptions of contemporary individual and collective
life is less important than the facts that they are part of the apparatus of techniques for
forming secular subject-citizens and that the public school has such an extraordinary
ideological place in the Republic’s self-presentation. Central to that apparatus is the
proper deployment of signs, a topic with which I began this essay. So I end with a few
further remarks about it.
The internationally famous Egyptian activist Nawal al-Saadawi describes a protest
march of young women against the new law in February 2004:
The slogan raised by the girls and young women who demonstrated against the an-
nouncement made by the government of France was ‘‘the veil is a doctrine not a
symbol.’’ Another argument used as a part of the brain-washing process is to consider
the veil an integral part of the identity of Islamic women and a reflection of their
struggle against Western imperialism, against its values, and against the cultural inva-
sion of the Arab and Islamic countries. Yet in these demonstrations the young women
and girls who marched in them wearing the veil were often clothed in tight fitting
jeans, their faces covered with layers of make-up, their lips painted bright red, the
lashes around their eyes thickened black or blue with heavy mascara. They walked
along the streets swaying in high-heeled shoes, drinking out of bottles of Coca Cola
or Sprite. Their demonstration was a proof of the link between Western capitalist
consumerism and Islamic fundamentalism, how in both money and trade ride su-
preme, and bend to the rule of corporate globalization. It was an illustration of how
a ‘‘false consciousness’’ is shot through with contradiction.^78What upsets Saadawi, of course, is the apparent mystification of the young women
demonstrating against the French ban, which led them to express their self-negation, as
it were. The interesting assumption that she and many others make is that a concern with
adornment is incompatible with religious expressions, which, to be really ‘‘religious,’’
ought to be concerned only with the transcendental and the unworldly, and that what is
asserted to be mandatory Islamic behavior cannot be authentic if it is at the same time
combined with ‘‘capitalist signs.’’ (As always, particular definitions underlie the discourse
about ‘‘religion,’’ but it is curious that thenormativecharacter of this definition should
so often go unnoticed by the ‘‘nonreligious.’’)
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