LETTING BE VOLUME II

We Ourselves

The Politics of Us

Tristan Garcia

Translated by Christopher RayAlexander, Abigail RayAlexander and Jon Cogburn

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Series Editor’s Preface viii

We Ourselves

Book I: Transparencies The fi rst person plural 5 Everyone-we-I 30 Three objections 36 Every we is a system of divisions 50 Confl icts of division 56 The intersection model 59 The transparency model 64 The contour 66 The overlap 70 Transparency and opacity 74 Re-covering 78 The bottom 81

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Book II: Constraints 1. The Ground of We 105 2. Dynamic 162 3. Domination 186 4. The End of We 216

Bibliography 230 Index 248

66646_Garcia.indd646_Garcia.indd vivi 110/11/200/11/20 5:095:09 PMPM The fi rst person plural Let us begin by acknowledging that the subject of politics is we.1 In contrast with the fi rst person singular, something about the fi rst person plural grants it a permanent variation of range, since it can just as readily designate only you and me, or the totality of living things, or even what lies beyond. Let us imagine a circle, what we might call the ‘circle of we’. We can picture how its limits encircle those around us, our family, our clan, our tribe, and our community. Or, on the contrary, we can imagine the diffusion of that circle within the social realm. This diffusion increases when the circle is extended to sensate beings, animals, and even certain vegetables. As the circle expands or shrinks, its diameter corre- sponds to a given state of us. Consequently, there are as many political subjects as there are states of us, which we can understand as possible extensions of this imaginary circle. ‘We’ is an ectoplasmic form found in the majority of human languages. It is capable of embracing everything that lies between myself and the rest of the world. Through ‘we’, many subjects situ- ate themselves, limit themselves, negotiate their similarities and differences, and engage in politics. We can’t keep ourselves from saying ‘we’, no matter our degree of engagement, our line, or our camp. We all say ‘we’, regardless of the group: professional activists, mere sympathisers, sceptical citizens with fl uctuating convictions, socialists, social democrats, LGBTQI activists, takfi ri Wahhabists, Trotskyites from the Com- intern, separatists, Pabloites, Third Worldists, neoconservatives, autonomists, indigenists, anti-colonialists, untouchables from the Bahujan Samaj Party, Republicans, Ba’athists, patriotic nationalists, fascists, apolitical people, Christian Democrats, Mormons, pro- moters of the Third Way, defenders of animal rights, Zionist Jews, pan-Africanists, deep ecologists in the tradition of Ecosophy T, suffragettes, Bolivarians, anarchists, neo-Nazis, homonationalists or femonationalists, Labour supporters, degrowthists, liberal libertar- ians, constitutional monarchists, Black Nationalists, Mensheviks,

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Soka Gakkai Buddhists, abolitionists, civil rights activists, Sunni jihadists, reformists, pro-life activists, and so on. The essence of political discourse lies in defi ning how we understand this ‘we’, what our rights and legitimate claims are, and our conception of society as a whole. However, political discourse also requires us to negatively identify those who oppose us, the ene- mies whom we designate as ‘you’ or ‘them’. Try for a moment to make no distinction between all of the possible groups and asso- ciations to which you feel you belong and those that appear dis- tant, even exotic. Stop separating the collective identities that you consider to be grounded, universal, and serious from those you consider irrational, ridiculous, or dangerous. Suspend your moral judgement. Then, through thought, try to establish a sort of imagi- nary plane upon which you might consider, at once equally and distinctly, everything that speaks in the name of we. Try this now, and you will see that everyone who says ‘we’ speaks as the same person, which is to say that they take on the being of people who speak that way, even when those people have an identity or principles that irritate or repulse them. We say ‘we’ along with them. So let us examine this vertiginous diversity alongside the cacophony of our attempts to portray ourselves. Let us do this even though it might seem to the more sceptical among us as a sign of fanaticism or a proof of the airy nature of all proclamations of identity. However, let us also suppose that the proliferation of divergent and contra- dictory we’s is not irrational, but rather manifests a noble trait of subjectivity: its propensity to organise itself politically. What happens when we say ‘we’? By the grace of language, which allows us to inhabit that pronoun, we can at different times claim to be on all sides, including that of even our fi ercest adversaries. Nothing enunciated in the name of a we is a com- plete stranger to us. However, ‘we’ also signifi es our we, as distinct from your we. We know that you say ‘we’, but you don’t say it like us. We can tell this because our practices, customs, and ideas are different. We is at once the possibility of being everyone, the vague promise within language of universal belonging, as well as the concrete assignation to a particular identity.2 We is some- thing that we are and that you are not, even if you also say ‘we’ in your own way.

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This we is a fl exible entity.3 It is malleable enough to take in beings of all kinds, but still suffi ciently limiting to allow for distinc- tions between camps, depending on who is using the word and how they are using it. We should not naively think that all who cry ‘we’ understand the word in the same way. But we also shouldn’t think that ‘we’ is a meaningless word that we can defi ne however we want. Nor is it a simple indexical term, a mirror word that just refers back to its conditions of enunciation, to who said it and when and where they did so. The truth is that, even if there is only one word to say it, there is not only one we.4 Nevertheless, there are not as many different we’s as there are uses of the term. In order to avoid falling into either opening of this double trap, it is use- ful to consider the we as a structure that is at once both free and determined. We should not think of we as a pure phenomenon of language. We structures the spirit of those who make use of it, and orients that usage without entirely forcing it. One may speak of we with respect to a very small number of people, or in reference to everyone. Nevertheless, there is something within that we – a sort of resistance within its ectoplasmic form – that follows a certain logic. This logic only becomes apparent through the repeti- tion of its variations. Therefore, in order to comprehend what we is, we must go against all the recommendations of the sociological method and treat the masses and the state without distinction. The more we’s that we recognise, the more we abstract from the particularities of the use of the fi rst person plural. Our com- mon traits stand out more clearly. A general understanding of what we is requires nothing more than a moral quality, a certain empa- thetic disposition that allows us to weaken the closed-mindedness of our own convictions and principles in order to strengthen our ability to mentally participate in any community whatsoever. Lis- tening to everything that the people around us say and naively including ourselves whenever we hear ‘our brother’, ‘our family’, or ‘our comrades’ is enough for us to imagine being one of them, sharing their ideas and identity, and counting ourselves as part of their number. But where to begin? First, let us draw an initial cir- cle of we. Then, let us adjust its perimeter, cut it into subsets, and shift its boundaries to try to discover as many manifestations of identity as possible in recent history.

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We can begin by tracing an imaginary line around all human beings. This yields a more or less circular fi gure, the interior of which consists of endlessly multiplying sections of the circle. The most notable of these, or at least the one that superfi cially seems most important and most present in political discourses, is the section pertaining to individuals described in Woyzeck as ‘poor people like us’, the landless and the disinherited, the proletariat, the workers, the exploited, the small.5 The name changes, and, as it transforms, the circle is no longer exactly the same. At its big- gest, its default defi nition is the we of the Occupy movement: ‘We are the 99%.’6 It is the nameless we, we the many standing in opposition to the minuscule minority that possesses the planet’s economic wealth. Blurring the lines between all who are neither ‘masters’ nor ‘bosses’, the we of the many is the main character of Marxist history. This we is celebrated by the well-known couplet of ‘The Internationale’: ‘We are the law, we are the many. We who were nothing, let us be all.’7 But this we of the many, which has the right to aspire to eve- rything, this immense we of all who feel dispossessed of economic means, robbed of their inheritance, excluded by the telling of his- tory and the curating of cultural knowledge, and cut off from the law and the state apparatus, such a we is weakly determined. This we is purported to be the democratic subject of history. However, as soon as we try to give it a name and stake out its limits, this we divides itself into a multitude of slightly more particular we’s. They alternate between intersection and opposition, but such we’s most commonly end up being superimposed or overlapping one another. Then the circle’s diameter is diminished, or, more accu- rately, its contours change and become more diffi cult for us to picture. In a well-known speech from 1913, the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst declared as much:

If there is a great industrial strike, you know exactly where the violence is, and every man knows exactly how the warfare is going to be waged; but in our war against the government you can’t locate it [. . .] If any gentleman who is the father of daughters in this meeting went into his

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home and looked around at his wife and daughters, if he lived in England and was an Englishman, he couldn’t tell whether some of his daughters were militants or non-mil- itants [. . .] We wear no mark; we belong to every class; we permeate every class of the community from the highest to the lowest; and so you see in the woman’s civil war the dear men of my country are discovering it is absolutely impossible to deal with it: you cannot locate it, and you cannot stop it.8

And yet, by this we Pankhurst does not mean the dispossessed in general, but rather a we divided into sexes: ‘we, the women’. This we cuts transversally through all of the social classes: among the 99% just as well as the small group of the 1%. Within the prole- tariat and the bourgeoisie, and in both colonised and colonising countries, there are women. They are not equally distributed in all classes and jobs, nor is their identity limited to their class. A woman is not a part of the lower classes of society. So, then, what is a woman? Pankhurst wrests a we from the various social sub- groups. This we, which transcends all those subgroups, is a uni- versal feminine identity. Pankhurst uses ‘we’ to point towards a principle that escapes localisation within class. Women are found in all social, cultural, and ethnic circles. Gathering them together by saying ‘we’ produces another cut, a reorganisation of the group, the tracing of another circle that overfl ows the customary boundaries of caste, tribe, or lineage. This is in order to unite, not the proletar- ians of the world, but the women of all countries and classes. The history of feminism is the story of the constitution of this we.9 It is the long story of the formation of a new circle of humanity. This new circle is not divided according to class but rather by sex. The circle is cut in two, and we insist that its two sec- tions should be equal. This we is the subject of Carrie Chapman Catt’s famous declaration: ‘We women demand an equal voice. We shall accept nothing less.’10 We ask for the ability to be us, neither more nor less than you. This we is also seen throughout Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Manifesto of the 343 Sluts’. She opens this declaration with a factual statement given in the third person: ‘A million women in France have abortions every year [. . .] One

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keeps quiet about these million women.’11 Beauvoir goes on to say ‘I’ (‘I declare that I am one of them’) so that all of the signatories may inhabit that I. She then concludes, ‘We demand the right to unrestricted abortion.’ In short, what we have here is a miniature model for the constitution of a political subject: fi rst the imper- sonal fact, then the isolated subjective experience, and fi nally the demand for rights in the name of us all. And yet, this we which was charted by feminism has also been cut into sections. There can be no doubt that it was divided and traversed by contradictions from the very begin- ning. As it integrated the differences between class, race, and sexuality, this we was also pulled in different directions by those very differences. The more attention we pay to the effects of that two-way process of integration, the more the boundaries shift. As awareness of sexual minorities emerged, other we’s also came forth. For example, in the process of establishing the homosexual we that includes its masculine gay part, the femi- nine we was split between lesbians and heterosexuals. This dis- placement can be seen in the radical texts of Monique Wittig, such as ‘The Straight Mind’: ‘If we, as lesbians and gay men, continue to speak of ourselves and to conceive of ourselves as women and as men, we are instrumental in maintaining hetero- sexuality.’12 Saying ‘we women’ supports the division of gender. It does so by grounding itself in discourse that normalises and naturalises heterosexuality (which is to say, discourse that is qualifi ed as straight). Because of this, homosexual women have an interest in fi rst presenting themselves as homosexuals, and not as women. Claire Michard astutely analyses Wittig’s strate- gic discourse along these lines:

The author thus develops a privileged solidarity with les- bians without breaking solidarity with feminists, homo- sexual men, or the generally oppressed writ large. But while the author’s solidarity is marked by ‘we’, there is no such connection to those who speak from within straight discourse. Those people are exclusively presented in the third person, which is to say, as non-subjects vis-à-vis the interlocutor. The author never joins up with them.13

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In refusing to ever say ‘we’ in a way that betrays a minority iden- tity, Wittig defends a new political division of we that overfl ows the traditional boundaries of both Marxist and feminist schools of thought. We are familiar with the role that this skewed divi- sion plays in affi rmations of gay pride and slogans like ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.’14 This type of division has made its mark on activist movements for minority rights, so much so that we might think that the essential aim is to learn how to say ‘we’ and how to make that word resonate in the public sphere. This proud we embodies the vow of those who campaign against the discrimination suffered by disabled people: ‘Nothing about us without us.’15 In other words, we don’t just want you to defend us; we want to be able to defend ourselves. Many margin- alised groups of people became conscious and protective of their ability to speak for themselves during the twentieth century. And, at the very same time, politics became confused with having one’s voice heard. This brought about a period of enthusiasm. The we looked like a kind of miraculous solution or the magic formula for a spontaneous politics. To be able to express a we was already a form of emancipation. To say ‘we’ was to become it. It was to trace a circle that made the invisible visible: ‘we, women’, ‘we, single mothers’, ‘we, Jewish people’, ‘we, the colonised’, ‘we persons with reduced mobility’, ‘we, the elderly’. But now it’s clear that the we of the minorities or subalterns who have access to speech and a visible identity is neither a simple nor a magical we. Just like all the others, it is riddled with contradic- tions, or, rather, fractured by the lines of its own divisions. We fi nd the circles are set within one another. For black American women activists, and most notably homosexuals within that group, racial dif- ferences have inserted a wedge between those who rally behind ‘we, the women’ and those who associate themselves more with ‘we, the homosexuals’. Recognising this has given rise to innumerable moral dilemmas. For example, in 1970 Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton, and Patricia Robinson confessed to uncertainty about the meaning that they could attribute to we, granted the privileged identities that they had assumed, willingly or otherwise. Along with their feminist comrades, they defi ned themselves as ‘we, the women’, but with a clarifi cation: ‘Yet we black women in our deepest humanity love

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and need black men, so we hesitate to revolt against them and go for ourselves’16 – meaning that they sometimes present themselves as ‘we, black people’ at the price of being ignored as women. This problem becomes even more complicated for black lesbian activ- ists, who experience not only the incompatibility of their gender and racial solidarities but also the disparity between their sexual community and these two other groups. Being primarily associ- ated with white homosexuals brought up in the middle and upper classes, they feel a certain disconnect with their sexual minority. This brings about fractures that weaken the unifi ed we for which they had wished and called out. It is possible to imperceptibly slide from the circle of sexes to the circle of races. This latter division isn’t exactly the same, but it still displays some analogous features. Like Emmeline Pankhurst’s ‘we, the women’, ‘we, black people’ was an expression within language itself of a striking discovery associated with the struggle for civil rights in the US. This was the discovery of an identity that is irreducible to other identity- based divisions. There were black men and black women, a black working class and a black bourgeoisie, black Americans and black Africans. And yet, there was an obvious link between black iden- tity and the most underprivileged classes of American society. The black we was distinct from the proletarian we and the we of the marginalised, but it was never completely separate from them. These are sections from many different but correlated circles. The exact measure of their correlation continues to be the subject of countless sociological studies. However, rather than remain a sociological subject, the black we had to become independent in order to become a political subject. Beginning in the 1950s, Ralph Ellison spearheaded the critique against Marxist universalism. He did so in accordance with a set of convictions that came to resemble those of New Liberalism: ‘That’s how they lost the Negroes. The Communists recognised no plu- rality of interests.’17 Class division trumps all of the other divisions of the social world. In Invisible Man, ‘the fraternity’ of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA) shows itself to be discouragingly rigid in its conception of identity. This forces the protagonist to view himself as ‘colorless’. Without his colour, he becomes invisible. In

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the early stages, it was certainly possible to say ‘we, black people’ and to understand that to mean all black people, regardless of their class. This immediately brought the intersection between we poor people and we black people to light. As in the lyrics of Curtis May- fi eld, it was necessary to defi ne one’s colour: ‘We the people who are darker than blue.’18 This was the theme of many of the greatest hits of the 1960s, from artists such as James Brown (‘Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud’),19 Nina Simone (‘Four Women’),20 and Sly Johnson (‘Is It Because I’m Black?’),21 who all presented a subject who identifi ed proudly with their own colour. By doing so, they rejected the notion that such identifi cation is shameful. And so it was no longer a question of feeling invisible in society, like the nar- rator of Invisible Man:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood- movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of fl esh and bone, fi ber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mir- rors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or fi gments of their imagination – indeed, everything and anything except me.22

Throughout the entirety of the work, the narrator, whose colour paradoxically turns him invisible, is trying to escape from the hell of a me that prevents one from existing in society. Ellison’s narrator is endeavouring to fi nally say ‘we’. In the twentieth century, all ethnic minorities learned to declare their we in accordance with a model that built a social circle out of pride and visibility. One might even venture to say that the lion’s share of modern politics has been dedicated to the elaboration and enunciation of this we. Such is the case with ‘Native Americans’. Beginning in the 1980s, the book series with the slogan ‘We Were Here First: The Native Americans’ served to recall a forgotten truth. In spite of the wars and linguistic and cultural differences that had always kept them apart, this strategy

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allowed indigenous tribes to express their belonging to a unique we that was present on the American continent long before the Europeans arrived. Sometimes the we of colour, the ethnic we, the territorial we, and the national we blend together harmoniously – or at least appear to do so – but sometimes they infringe upon one another. Most colonial situations are readily comprehensible when consid- ered through the lens of this overlapping of circles. Comprehended within a larger national circle, those who fi ght for independence or emancipation draw other circles that are inscribed within or straddle these national boundaries. In so doing, the peripheral we affi rms the existence of a we that is distinct from the metropolitan one. This former we is included within a distant assemblage. This forcible inclusion is illegitimate in the eyes of the periphery. For this reason, the correct designation of ‘our name’ has often been fi rst on the agenda for debate in anti-colonialist politics. Should we fi ght for the rights of a particular we within a coun- try that is populated by both colonists and indigenous people? Or should we speak in the name of a new national we, one that excludes colonisers for good? Many activists studied in Europe and felt a sense of belonging to a growing bourgeoisie with con- nections to the colonial middle classes. But how were they to reconcile their class consciousness with their feeling of national belonging? On this issue we may note that, at the outset, mem- bers of NAMSA (the North African Muslim Student Association) defi ned themselves as ‘students’, which is to say, as representa- tives of an educated elite. The declaration of their 1935 congress then marked a decisive turning point in their political infl ection. When they substituted this we with a ‘we, the colonised’, they showed that their primary solidarity was with those who had no access to education in their countries of origin. ‘We, the colo- nised’ grew stronger and stronger, and was placed ahead of ‘we, the students and the learned’: ‘We, the colonized, the learned, ought to devote our time and resources to defending the interests of our homelands.’23 The way we reconcile and prioritise these we’s almost entirely explains politics. Which kind of division should I fi rst refer to when I say ‘we’? Do I fi rst belong to ‘we, humans’? Or, more generally,

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to ‘we, sensate beings’? ‘We, natural beings’? Or does the situation require more precision? ‘We, women’? ‘We, black people’? ‘We, white people’? ‘We, Arab Muslims’? ‘We, the progeny of the great Indian civilization’? (This recalls Nehru’s declaration during his trip to the United States: ‘You Americans are so adolescent. We Indians are an ancient people with a culture thousands of years old.’)24 Or would it be better to fi rst identify ourselves economically: ‘we, the proletarians’, ‘we, the exploited?’ Are we slaves, peons, or salaried employees? What name should we use for ourselves after realising that we belong to a dominated class? The precariat? The oppressed? The suppressed? The subalterns? ‘We, the colonised and humiliated’, in the style of Nkrumah or Lumumba’s speeches?25 This is not a question of linguistic subtlety, but rather an extremely precise, delicate, and diffi cult choice. Everyone who takes a political position is faced with this question, and even those who refuse to take a stance still have to decide what or who falls within the circle. Jacques Chevallier is one of the great forgotten fi gures of ‘medi- ation’ during the Algerian war. He promoted the plan to form a federal Algeria, knew Messali Hadj well, and tried until the end to maintain contact with both the National Liberation Front and the Secret Army Organisation. Chevallier was born in El Bidar, and he published a book entitled We, Algerians with Calmann-Lévy in 1958. When Chevallier said ‘We, the Algerians’26 he included him- self as a French colonist in a we that extended to the indigenous we because he too had been born in that land. This we was denounced as unacceptable by the pieds-noirs, who refused to back the inclu- sion of Arabs. The activists fi ghting for freedom also rejected this we because they considered the pieds-noirs’ fantasy of belonging, as seen in Chevallier’s Algerian we, to be wholly illegitimate. They thought the we of Algeria should refer exclusively to the indig- enous populations. In a manner of speaking, this co-inclusive we existed in a vac- uum, a sort of political non-place that none of the existing parties wanted or were able to recognise. It disappeared with the arrival of Algerian independence. The history of colonialism, as well as that of anti-colonialism, is the theatre of war for a number of we’s that are situated inside one

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another. This is because, as Edward Said wrote, the we of the colo- nisers constructs the colonised as Other27 (Simone de Beauvoir used the same expression with respect to women in The Second Sex).28 But at the same time, the colonisers’ we claims to integrate the colonised into the progress of civilisation. This makes we into a sort of linguistic trap for the colonised. Aligning themselves with a universal we in order to demand equal rights requires a reference to the very same universalism of which they have been deprived. It requires calling upon the same universalism that had previously been used to justify labelling them as inferior beings who were left behind by historical and cultural progress. Joining with this we also risks neutralising the particular identity of the colonised by presenting all people as a single block devoid of false differ- ences. But saying ‘we, the indigenous’ or ‘we, the colonised’ against a white universal we reduces a group to a particular community and risks excluding and racialising ourselves. In other words, we do the colonisers’ work for them. It is very clear that no we is univocal. Some people have fought colonisation in the name of our humanity, and others have defended the coloniser under the same aegis. This same word is a bone of contention for many different groups. The ‘we, Republicans’ from Jules Ferry’s speeches to the French National Assembly in favour of colonisation’s civilis- ing mission was contested at the time by certain pacifi sts.29 For example, in an article from 1896 on ‘The United States of Europe and Peace’, Madame Destriché declared, ‘The Abyssinians and the Cubans conduct themselves with bravery. What do they want? To defend themselves or win their independence from the mon- archies that deny them this liberty. We, the French Republic, must wish for their success.’30 She then compares the French nationalist struggle to wrest Alsace and Lorraine back from Germany to the struggles of the colonised peoples of Africa and Asia. But independence for those countries did not bring the colo- nial dilemma to an end. Indeed, it was quite the opposite. All putatively post-colonial political declarations are an exercise in redefi ning the we within a framework where every word counts. For example, the ‘Call to the Indigenous People of the Republic’ proclaims ‘WE, the descendants of slaves and deported Africans,

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daughters and sons of colonized people and immigrants, WE, the French and the non-French living in France, male and female activists struggling against the oppression and discrimination pro- duced by the post-colonial Republic. . .’31 This organisation aims to give rise to a twenty-fi rst-century we in opposition to that of the French Republic, a we capable of traversing the divisions within the social sphere. It aims to unite immigrants of all generations with the descendants of popula- tions that were colonised by the French in sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, and the Antilles. The affi rmation of the existence of such a we depends on the belief that what the members of this we have in common –even if it is sometimes just the feeling of being discriminated against – will always be stronger than what divides them (gender, profession, and religion, for example). But this is always the promise of politics: to put a name on what we have in common that is stronger than what separates us. The French Republic has long claimed to stand for this we, one that rises above all of the dividing lines of race, gender, and class. However, it is interesting that the French Republic has never said ‘we’ in its constitutions. The Republic speaks in the third person as the ‘French People’, ‘the French’ and ‘their representatives’.32 We can almost conceive of an entire history of French politics exclu- sively concerned with tracking moments when different groups, parties, and associations have taken Republican principles origi- nally stated in the third person and translated them into the fi rst person. Perhaps the Republican idea has always been impersonal, encased within a bloodless constitution, unable to articulate itself through one or more concrete subjectivities. Multiple declarations from the Paris Commune utilise the we, but it was undoubtedly Sylvain Maréchal’s manifesto for the ‘Conspiracy of the Equals’ that inaugurated this tradition of French declarations in the fi rst per- son by taking up the impersonal principles of the Republic and demanding their immediate application. When the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ declares that ‘all men’ are born and remain equal, Maréchal responds thus: ‘Are we not all equal? [. . .] Well then! We aspire to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want real equality or death; this is what we need.’33 The Equals were not contesting the contents of the Declaration.

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They were taking it at its word and reproaching it for its funda- mental inability to convey its message through a we. In other nations, such as the United States, this tension doesn’t exist, or at least not in the same way, because the Constitution itself opens with an affi rmation of ‘We, the People’.34 For this rea- son in particular, political debates are frequently carried out in the name of the Constitution (for example, in the name of the 1st Amendment), and not against it. Because the Constitution starts off with ‘we’, it is presumed to be a democratic weapon used to counter authoritarian abuses. In France, on the other hand, the very enunciation of constitutional principles is always subject to reproach precisely for never having said ‘we’. The French Consti- tution speaks in the name of no one, or rather, from the political point of view of no one in particular. The Republic is everyone and no one, but it is never us. ‘We, the People’ is the American we that is supposed to go beyond the differences between ‘we, men’ and ‘we, women’; between ‘we, the poor’ and ‘we, the rich’; between ‘we, black peo- ple’ and ‘we, white people’; between ‘we, Christians’, ‘we, Jews’, ‘we, Muslims’, and ‘we, Buddhists’. This very inclusive we is also what enables a population to mobilise in times of national unity against a common enemy. Proust provides a lucid description of the momentum that chauvinism and Germanophobia were gain- ing in the salons of Paris during the First World War through an analysis of this pronoun: ‘Mme Verdurin, in conversation, when she communicated news, used “we” in speaking of France [. . .].’35 In one of his major speeches from 1941, we can see how a sim- ilar semantic slippage allowed Stalin to shift from ‘we, the commu- nists’ to ‘we, the Russians’, preparing to defend the country against the Nazi invader. Owing to both custom and Stalin’s authority, the circle of the new ideal we became the circle of the old patriotic we, without which the Party did not think it would be able to stave off the German onslaught. Stalin’s speech begins with the following (the order of terms is important here):

COMRADES, men of the Red Army and Red Navy, commanders and political instructors, working men and working women, collective farmers – men and women,

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workers in the intellectual professions, brothers and sis- ters in the rear of our enemy who have temporarily fallen under the yoke of the German brigands, and our valiant men and women guerrillas who are destroying the rear of the German invaders!36

Stalin fi nishes off his oration with ‘Long live our glorious Motherland, her liberty and her independence!’ He thus raises the banner of Lenin. However, ‘our Motherland’ was a chau- vinistic Russian term that harkened back to the war between Tsar Ivan and the Boyars. For that reason, Lenin had banned it. Nevertheless, the term emerges here again as part of the circle of interests used by Stalin to defi ne what we are. A signifi cant portion of twentieth-century political history stems from enormous geopolitical or geostrategic we’s that fl at- ten all other identities. For example, Churchill’s words made clear the state of total war between the Allies and their Nazi enemies: ‘It’s either us or them.’37 Perhaps the Cold War was nothing more than the passage from disjunction (‘or’) to a stable conjunction (‘and’). This conjunction indicates a simultaneous coexistence and irreducible difference. ‘Us and them’ became the slogan during the confrontation between the Truman Doctrine and the commu- nists.38 When the Soviet regime collapsed, other big we’s and other big they’s appeared or reappeared; these were the we’s of empire. Just as in Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’,39 the future of these we’s of empire is sustained by the ‘common sense’ obser- vation that people are always wont to divide themselves into them and us, the in-group and the others, our civilisation and that of the barbarians. Since 1993 Huntington has forwarded the hypothesis that future battle lines will not coalesce around an ideological or economic difference between us and them, but rather a cultural one. He holds that civilisational we’s will henceforth sketch out the battlefi eld and draw the dividing lines. This implies that there is a ‘big we’ of the West and a ‘big we’ of the Arab Muslims. Within each of these ‘big we’s’ there are smaller we’s, for instance, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims. Those who oppose Huntington have only rarely accused him of being completely mistaken.40 Instead, they critique the way

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his interpretative framework erases differences and confl icts that he considers to be ‘secondary’. It’s all a question of prioritisation among the circles. While we must be cognisant of the confl icts between civilisational circles and the clashes between the circles drawn by social classes, the essential decision involves choosing which side of which battle line should take priority over the others. If one fi rst divides the world into civilisational circles, one ends up relegating to the background the ideological and economic circles that separate rich from poor. In order to clearly perceive certain lines that traverse and divide the world, it is necessary to blind ourselves to other lines that can hardly be traced and barely stand out at all. In the same way, tracing the real outline of the we of social class and the we of gender blurs or even erases the (also real) lines of fracture between civilisational or religious we’s, leading to their systematic undervaluation. The religious we’s also stake out circles that resurface in the social world. These circles try to encompass those left behind by modern society’s beliefs in laicisa- tion and secularisation and its slide into disenchantment. These circles of religious we’s both bring individuals together and divide them into different groups. For example, the common usage of the Shiite we and the Sunni we establishes a system of polarisation without which the confl icts, alliances, and counter-alliances of the Islamic world would be incomprehensible. When an Iraqi imam such as Rafi ’ Al-Rifa’i argues that fi ghting against Islamic State would reinforce Iran, he is operating on the supposition that there is greater distance between ‘we, the Sunni’ and ‘we, the Shi’a’ than there is between himself and the forces of Islamic State within ‘we, the Sunni’. This notion leads to the careful negotiation and prior- itisation of religious we’s: ‘Why should we fi ght ISIS? [. . .] We are not stupid enough to start internal [Sunni] fi ghting only so that the [Shiite] militias can come and slaughter us.’41 Religious we’s have always been systems of dividing circles that are themselves riddled with internal divisions. Those divisions can provoke a schism, a sort of mitosis of the religious circle. At other times, shattered circles of belonging regroup into a single, greater we. These revivals are often due to a sense of fraternity. ‘We, brothers’ is the strongest intensity bestowed upon a political person. Like ‘we,

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comrades’ or ‘we, friends’, ‘we, brothers’ plays the role of a shepherd. In retracing the circle of a we gathered by faith, ideas, and values, the aim is to establish a group that brings individual identities and particular sects back into the fold. Published in 1936, Hassan al-Banna’s 50-Point Manifesto for the Muslim Brotherhood ( Jamāʻat al-Ikhwān al-Muslimīn) addresses a we that gathers to unite Muslims under a single Ummah with uniform Shari’ah law.42 In this way, al-Banna re-grounds a strong Muslim-speaking subject, one that had been dispersed with the decline of the Caliphate, the collapse of the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire, and the end of European political and commer- cial domination. In a text entitled ‘Our Mission’, al-Banna speaks to his ‘brothers’ and asks what this we wants. When he analyses the character of this European culture that has become purely materialistic,43 it becomes clear to him that, as science and modern industry have spread wealth to different populations, they have also led to the removal of religion from certain spaces reserved for the state, such as schools and legal institutions. No longer united by spiritual values, these peoples are instead unifi ed by material goods. When the organisation fi rst came into being, al-Banna empha- sised the importance of solidarity and altruism in the teaching of Islam (for example, collecting and distributing zakat, constructing and renovating mosques, founding madrasas, engaging in social work for the most marginalised groups, and so on). In this way, al- Banna sought to restore Egyptian workers’ sense of belonging to a fraternity that had been forgotten. In response to accusations that they were just playing the political game, he frequently advised his brothers to respond by saying, ‘This is Islam, and we do not rec- ognize such divisions.’44 Al-Banna’s explicit goal was to eliminate the divisions of class and race (he rarely mentions sex or gender) that modern civilisation placed within the idea of a Muslim we: ‘Islam is equal for all people and prefers nobody to others on the grounds of differences in blood or race, forefathers or descent, poverty or wealth. According to Islam everyone is equal [. . .]’45 Al-Banna then clarifi es his point: ‘However, in deeds and natural gifts, then the answer is yes. The learned is above the ignorant . . . Thus, we see that Islam does not approve of the class system.’46 By

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positing education as the only grounds for difference in author- ity, the Muslim we subsumes the we of class and the we of race, thereby establishing both equality and hierarchy within this we. Little by little, this political Muslim we was reconstructed in the twentieth century. Some time before the reconstruction of this Muslim we, a Jew- ish we was reformulated and, in certain milieux, transformed into a political Zionist we. This occurred after Theodor Herzl’s speech at the 1899 Third Zionist Conference in Basel. Herzl carefully clarifi es the point: ‘We are not here to occupy ourselves with the internal affairs of the individual countries of which we happen to be citizens.’47 This declaration sets the national we aside. Herzl speaks of ‘our people’, but in successive conferences he often ended his addresses with a vision of our contributions to the pro- gress of the whole of humanity: ‘If it portends injustice toward our people we shall reply to it in the future. In our future, in our coun- try! And our answer shall consist in the advancement of human civilization.’48 Militant radicals such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky would soon thereafter have a different interpretation of the relationships between the interests of the human species in general, class inter- ests, Jewish interests, and Zionist ideals. Although he was a social- ist, Jabotinsky started out by presenting himself as a nationalist politician (a kol-yisroel politician) rather than a class politician.49 He argued that one could see throughout the world that general national interests were eclipsing particular class interests. Jonathan Frankel observes that: ‘Standing beyond or above class, his move- ment had the right and duty to take the lead in the politics of national unity.’ Frankel here cites Jabotinsky: ‘“We, Zionists”, he concluded, “consider ourselves not a party but the spokesmen of the entire Jewish people.”’50 We can see how this new political we emerged from an attempt to remove class and party differences. This new division of the political space forces an overlapping of the different polarisations of questions both social (revolutionaries versus conservatives) and religious (Jews versus antisemites). At the crossroads of these polarities, one fi nds Jewish revolutionaries and revolutionary Jews, as well as Jewish conservatives and conserva- tive Jews. And one can also see parallel lines of division among antisemites. It’s all a question of priorities.

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Since the late nineteenth century in France, the antisemitic we has become a political subject. This began with the writings of Édouard Drumont.51 This we would subsequently be taken back up, revised, and clarifi ed by Albert Regnard and Édouard Marchand.52 This antisemitic we then resonated with different political identities, so that the Antisemitic and Nationalistic Youth League of France could later write ‘we, revolutionary antisemites. . .’ In Ukraine, after the Russian Revolution, some activists conversely referred to themselves as ‘antisemitic revolutionaries’. This order of priorities (between the social question and the antisemitic question) is often a cause for debate within fascist move- ments. It was one of the breaking points in the relationship between the members of the SA (Sturmabteilung) in Munich and the move- ment led by Ernst Röhm, who maintained close ties to leftist work- ers in northern Germany. In order to avoid further fractures in the sense conveyed by ‘we, the fascists’, Mussolini often referred instead to an open we without any a priori commitment to a specifi c doc- trine: ‘We, the fascists, have no preconceived doctrine; our doctrine is deeds.’ He then adds, ‘We, the fascists, have never concealed our complete disinterest with regard to all theories [. . .] We are aris- tocrats and democrats, revolutionaries and reactionaries, proletar- ians and anti-proletarians, pacifi sts and anti-pacifi sts.’53 In Pasolini’s fi lm Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, the Duke even declares that ‘We, fascists, are the only true anarchists.’54 This fascist we has always oscillated between an authoritarian we and this other open we, a kind of vital we that represents the hope of escaping all of the old categorisations of self and corrupt institutions of power. The French writer and collaborationist Lucien Rebatet once asked the following:

Why did we declare ourselves as fascists? We did so because we were horrifi ed by democratic parliamentarianism, its hypoc- risy, its incompetence, and its cowardice [. . .] Fascism repre- sented movement, revolution, and the future [. . .] We wanted to abolish all political sects in favour of a singular party.55

The hope of the fascist we is to do away with false divisions and parliamentary carping that impede the country’s vital development.

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For the fascists, this singular we is what must sound the call to action and hold together by force what were crumbling groups, cliques, interests, and mediocre we’s. As in communist traditions, the we takes on a decisive importance in fascist movements because it becomes a principle of greater political unity that cloaks false divisions. The we becomes an ideal of life, camaraderie, and fra- ternity. The statement of purpose of an identity movement cur- rently popular among French youth says as much: ‘We declare war against all of those who would uproot us and make us forget who we are.’ Then they continue, ‘We are comrades, friends, brothers, a clan. More than just a youth movement, we are the youth on the move.’56 This identitary we is a we of origin, one founded on soil and bloodlines, a religious identity (Christian), and a colour (white). Furthermore, it is also a generational we, because it becomes an identity grounded in age as well as sex, gender, class, ethnicity, and religion. The circle of the national we is intertwined with the circle of different ages, as well as with the circle of youth in particular. A strange echo emerges; this patriotic-nationalist group’s ‘we are the youth on the move’ is reminiscent of the formula invoked in a twentieth-century socialist song. Pacifi st Paul Vaillant-Couturier wrote the following words, set to the music of Arthur Honegger: ‘We are the ardent youth who came to scale the sky.’57 This use of we to designate a class in terms of age serves to divide the twenti- eth century in half. During the fi rst half of the century, this we was associated with political, fascist, communist, and socialist move- ments that tried to mobilise young people and give them a politi- cal identity (Napoleon’s Young Guard comes to mind). Charles Péguy’s Our Youth was an early indicator of this change.58 Youth, with its doubts and outbursts, is an identity in itself. In the second half of the twentieth century, youth became an auton- omous political subject in the same way as sex, gender, ethnicity, and colour. We might even say that what we call ‘counterculture’ was largely the creation of a ‘we, the youth’ that splashed declara- tions across the walls of Paris in 1968: ‘We’re all enraged!’ This we was frequently challenged (as in Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that, from a sociological point of view, ‘youth is just a word’), but it brought about the emergence of a new political subject. The title of a song

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by Taxi Girl, ‘We Are Young, We Are Proud’, puts a new twist on James Brown’s ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud’. It exhibits the constitu- tion of a we that longs to move beyond traditional political divi- sions in order to affi rm the existence of a community parsed in terms of age.59 This is the we of the ‘kids’ from The Who’s ‘The Kids Are Alright’,60 the we that one fi nds in what has become a proverbial song of protest by The Doors: ‘We want the world, and we want it now.’61 The political subjects of rock and pop and the experimentation with systematic transgression that accompanies them make up the ‘we, the youths’ or ‘we, the youth’ that punk band Sham 69 sings about: ‘If the kids are united, then we’ll never be divided.’62 We can see the evolution of this we in the history of recorded popular music. During the 1980s, this we led to the hope for a we that would be universal but empty, like the one that resounds in the song ‘We Are the World, We Are the Children’, which Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, and members of the band Toto wrote in order to raise money for children suffering from famine in Ethiopia.63 Later on, we fi nd some contemporary formulations of the we that verge on the tautological. Take, for instance, the we vehemently and combatively affi rmed in Ke$ha’s ‘We R Who We R’.64 This we is a circle restricted to the person speaking, the only one who knows what they themselves are, but at the same time it is also a universal circle that designates all of those who are what they are. This we designates everyone and no one. Making this we authentic, however, means excluding those hypocritical we’s who are not really what they claim to be. In their rush to reconcile contrary positions, certain counter- cultural slogans risked exposing their inconsistency. Such was the case with the phrase ‘We are all German Jews’, declared in May ’68 in solidarity with Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Shortly thereafter, Dominique Grange wrote a song, a couplet of which affi rmed that ‘We are all Jews and Germans, we have all been dissolved.’65 Thirty years later, a still optimistic Daniel Cohn-Bendit declared,

This slogan has supported the refusal of exclusion in all of its forms: ‘We are all immigrants’, ‘We are all foreigners’, ‘We are all undocumented’. It communicates an identifi cation

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between some of the youth and people on the margins of society. This slogan has taken on a life of its own. It has sur- vived as a symbol of solidarity. It is a good slogan. It gets behind its own metamorphosis.66

However, through its metamorphosis, this slogan actually lost its meaning. It no longer brought contradictory identities together, and the youth themselves no longer used it. Its use instead moved to the rest of civil society and the media. For example, the phrase ‘We are all Americans’ emerged the day after 9/11, as did ‘We are all Charlie’ after the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Then this we was twisted and parodied on the internet, and it has now become everyone and no one. The internet abounds with examples of small, childish battles over different we’s in an attempt to escape ‘we, everyone’. Here we might think of the debate surrounding the contemporary inter- pretation of ‘swag’, which is a modern version of ‘cool’. We have seen some oppositional redefi nitions of the acronym. Some people affi rm that ‘swag’ means ‘secretly we are gay’, while others argue that it means ‘secretly we are African guys’ or even ‘American guys’. ‘Having swag’, and therefore also being desired by others who want to be like us, entails an attempt to appropriate the very terms of that desirability: we are what you want to be. In this case, this ‘secret we’ is a manifestation of the desire to reform a small circle of initi- ates within the empty circle of democracy. In opposition to the we of everyone and no one, the moder- nity of avant-garde aesthetics and politics has long depended on seizing an aristocratic we from within a democratic regime. But if we can be anybody at all, how can we be distinguished? The Nietzschean maxims ‘[W]e the noble, the good, the beautiful and the happy!’67 and ‘[W]e spirits that have become free . . .’, 68 both of which are variations of Stendhal’s ‘happy few’,69 already set the tone for the pamphlets and manifestos that later affi rm: ‘[W]e, DADA, don’t agree with them’ (Tristan Tzara),70 ‘We, Surrealists, undertake to celebrate here the fi ftieth anniversary of hysteria’ (André Breton and Louis Aragon),71 ‘We, Suprematists [sic], throw open the way to you. Hurry!’ (Kazimir Malevich),72 ‘We, situationists, protest. . .’ (Guy Debord, who said this many times).73 Sometimes, as in the

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case of Futurism, the aesthetic aristocracy that tried to uproot all old identities to reveal a new, irreducible we came to resemble a rite of purifi cation in opposition to the social norms of the we. But what exactly should we oppose? In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, the we of power, a totalitarian we, is predominant.74 The author imagines a world where people’s iden- tity has been reduced to identifi cation codes composed of letters and numbers. When the totalitarian we is triumphant, the resist- ance affi rms the singular I. However, in a liberal society where the I has won the day, dissidents have to fi nd a new ideal we. The Coming Insurrection contains the following passage: ‘The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained.’75 The I is the empty form of the liberal world. The I is an impasse that power uses to forbid us from being ourselves. ‘The self is not some thing within us that is in a state of crisis; it is the form they mean to stamp upon us.’76 In order to become us, the I must become ‘communal’. ‘Communes come into being when people fi nd each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path [. . .] It’s what makes us say “we”, and makes that an event.’77 Delivering a politi- cal elegy for friendship, the Invisible Committee, as in primitive Christianity and utopian socialism, substitutes a we rooted in ideas for all the we’s based in particular interests (gender, class, race, etc.). These interest-based we’s come to resemble something like identity police despatched by power. The we of political com- munes ‘would not defi ne themselves – as collectives tend do to –by what’s inside and what’s outside them, but by the density of the ties at their core’.78 In a manner similar to the union within Christ or a classless society, the commune is a we that is not set in opposition to you, them, others, or enemies. On the contrary, the communal we welcomes them. It is the utopian dream of an absolute and autonomous we that doesn’t structure itself through opposition to an outside. Of course, this utopian we was fi rst rhetorically claimed for us all by a very limited avant-garde. It was the part speaking for the whole. The opponents, the resistance, and the outcasts still say ‘we’ in small groups, but they do so in the name of a principle they

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have remained faithful to, a principle that the others have betrayed. After all, what is this group? We cannot escape it, though we might sometimes forget it in our less humane moments. It is the we of we’s, namely, humanity. The elderly deportee Robert Antelme makes a fi tting observation in The Human Race: ‘The SS cannot alter our species. They are themselves enclosed within the same humankind and the same history.’79 This we is shared by those who defend it as well as those who negate it; it is the human we. We say ‘we’ to our own, but in doing so we include ourselves with everyone else. And there you have it; we arrive right back at the place where we started. One can sometimes glimpse this great we of humanity in the writings of Erasmus.80 It is the human we of Étienne de La Boétie.81 It doesn’t explicitly appear in Montaigne’s Essays. How- ever, when in ‘An Apologie of Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne puts forward a series of examples to show the moral superiority of beasts over people, he still makes us distinct, albeit negatively: ‘we, the humans’ are those who, in our madness, ‘prefer ourselves before other creatures, and sequester our selves from their condi- tion and societie’.82 ‘We, the humans’ is a we of principle grounded in nothing but itself. Humanity is that which calls itself we and which leaves no room for a remainder. This full, integral we is the only one without an interlocutor. While ‘we, women’ responds to ‘we, men’, in the same way that ‘we, white people’ responds to ‘we, black people’ or ‘we, Indian people’, ‘we, humans’ is a message without a recipient. The opening and closing of the totality of the forms of we move along in accordance with this human we.83 This is what Francis Wolff defends in Notre humanité (Our Humanity): the human we is ultimately grounded in the ability to predicate things through language. Because this ability is only developed by our species, the sphere of being delimited by the word has no out- side. We are thus confi ned to our selves. This confi nement, which we see in Sartre’s humanism, for example, is the ground of political responsibility because only humans can judge other humans. However, as Francis Wolff recognises, modern politics has seen the appearance and reappearance of discourses that engage an even bigger we, one that surpasses our humanity. This is Steven

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Wise’s ‘we, animals with practical autonomy’ (the great apes, dol- phins, and possibly elephants).84 It is the ‘we, the great apes’ evoked by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer. In her plea for a ‘humanity beyond humanity’, Cavalieri says:

The notion of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘the other’, which, like a more and more abstract silhouette, assumed in the course of centuries the contours of the boundaries of the tribe, of the nation, of the race, of the human species, and which for a time the species barrier had congealed and stiffened, has again become something alive, ready for further change.85

What we have here is a progressive view, that some will call naive, of the linear history of we. This view sees a we that fi rst emerged in the dark corners of groups of humans who kept to themselves. It then became more pliable, diffusing and moulding itself to the limits of family and clan fi rst, and then to those of ethnicity and nation. This we fi nally came to correspond to an entire species. Enthusiastically pursuing this development, Cavalieri postulates that this we will continue to expand. Because of this expansion, and as we become increasingly intolerant of unnecessary animal suffering, we will identify not just with our species, but with all feeling things. We might say that history is the story of the concentric expan- sion of we. Any truly progressive person ought not to limit their we to humanity. They ought to be conscious of we’s that start off small in number, we’s that are fi rst confi ned to small groups of humans and are then centred around larger and more abstract categories, such as those of faith or nation, before they go on to encompass the whole of the species. History doesn’t halt at humanism’s ‘impassable barrier’86 of we, because stopping there would perpetuate our community’s insensitivity towards other feeling beings, not just the ones that are rational and capable of speech. People are neither the terminus a quo nor the terminus ad quem of the political we. Some say ‘we, animals and humans’ when defend- ing the rights of non-human species, in the same way that some speak in the name of ‘we, the cyborgs’, at once man and machine,

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in the hope of ‘building a political form’.87 For a long time now, all of the we’s have been kept in a sort of box, one that we thought was tightly sealed but that has shown its permeability. A certain period in the history of we has gone by many names. This period began in the Renaissance and seems to be close to its end, if it didn’t already end a few generations ago. During this period, all we’s were parsed in terms of humankind. Having crossed over the boundaries of the human, which are no longer very clear, we have to go even further and make room among us for all of the great apes, then the large mammals, then all mammals, and, fi nally, all animals. We must also say ‘we’ in the name of those who do not say ‘we’ but who live and feel just like we do. Everything that lives is in the ‘biotic community’ evoked by environmentalist Aldo Leopold, the author of a moral maxim often cited by ecolo- gists: ‘A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stabil- ity, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’88 Following Leopold’s lead, J. Baird Callicott conceives of a ‘land ethic’, an ethics centred around ‘citizenship in the biotic community’.89 In this way, we embraces the entire ecosystem and stretches across the whole surface of the Earth.90 But where does all of this end? No form of life should be excluded from a generous movement like this. But is there any- thing that we is not? What aren’t we? Here we are overcome by a vertiginous feeling, as it seems that there is nothing capable of stopping the expansion of the circle after it passes beyond the boundaries of humanity.

Everyone–we–I Let us imagine a we structured as a series of concentric circles. Those circles encompass the biosphere, planet Earth, the whole community of sentient beings, then those endowed with a cen- tral nervous system, then mammals, then those once referred to as ‘superior’ mammals, followed by the great apes, and fi nally humanity. Now, within the circle of humanity, let us imagine con- nections and disjunctions between a number of circles. Like a ring with interlocking bands, these overlapping circles criss-cross and intersect with one another according to gender (male and female,

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