**Post-Scriptum—Laurent Dubreuil**

#### **Department of Comparative Literature; Department of Romance Studies; Program in Cognitive Science; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14851-3201, USA**

*There is no democracy without free speech*, for the rule of the people is only ensured if anyone is able—not summoned—to speak publicly without constraints. The short qualification I just gave is immediately at odds with what has been the dominant practice of so-called "Western" democracies, especially in Europe, where entire sets of laws ban the publication of certain opinions, touching on the distortion of historical facts (such as denying crimes against humanity), political opinions that are considered inacceptable (usually far-right, but also far-left), or accusations that are perceived as libelous against specific persons (defamation laws). Such limitations are usually accepted as "lesser evils" and legal safe-guarding against fundamentally anti-democratic activism. Such accommodations undoubtedly *alter* the quality of the "democracies" that implement them, though they do not *change* their democratic postulation *as such*. While I am a firm believer in *maximal* freedom of speech, I recognize I know of no social context or human culture where absolutely any opinion could be voiced. A maximum, in this regard, is to be evaluated in terms of situation and is neither the infinite nor the absolute.

What is now known as "academic freedom" (i.e., despite ancient roots, a modern practice, largely influenced by the American system, and the AAUP statements) is a specific form of "free speech." (In this Special Issue, see, in particular, the article by Fenton and Smith.) It is usual to disconnect the two concepts, on both historical and legal grounds, but it is obvious that academic freedom enacts, in a University setting, the same democratic *principle*, with "the people" here equaling "the faculty," along with their "students" (in the best-case scenario). The underlying idea is that knowledge and research necessarily rely on the *possibility* to question whatever is otherwise admitted (by tradition, by religious authorities, by "expert consensus," by the ancestral culture, by the dominant class, etc.). In this sense, "academic freedom" was implied by Socrates (outside of any established school) when he began asking people on the streets about the definition of their very concepts. As is well known, Athens was a democracy for her (male, free) citizens, *although* this was not the point of accepting such an intense level of inquiry. Socrates' intellectual descendants understood this lesson and opted to build up external structures and self-governing bodies (Plato's Lyceum, Aristotle's Academia, whose name we still use in English as a generic designation) by way of protecting scholarly inquiries. Overall, the actual disconnect between the two orders of freedom can be felt when universities offer more leeway for debates than the surrounding society, or when more limitations are found within Academia than outside of it. It remains that higher education, if it seeks to bring more than (technical) instruction, only finds meaning in the creation of a critical space allowing for the potential counter-examination of *any* consensus. Going against any well-received idea does *not* guarantee novelty or accuracy *by itself*, but without the extension of the possibility of free questioning, we must be sure that no new knowledge or theory will ever be imparted.

All I just said might look like platitudes, and I confess I am almost ashamed to rehash such basic theses. However, if we do believe that intellectual freedom based on the potential explosion of any consensus is a sine qua non of research and thought, then we also have to readily admit that, for most of its history, post-Greek Academia has only been intermittently worthy of its own principles. Conformism and cowardice have always been widespread in lecture halls. Unfortunately, constraints on academic pursuits are, historically, the *norm* and not the exception, and they have come from within (deans, peers, students) as well as from the outside (the Church, the Prince, the Party, the "public opinion"). What, then, is specific to our current situation? In some respects, one could argue, the mounting attacks against intellectual controversies are part of an almost uninterrupted tradition of war *against* academic freedom, from Socrates to Galileo, from McCarthyism at Berkeley to the Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua. Moreover, only extreme optimists, or absolute hypocrites, would posit that hires and promotions are only one factor in evaluating scholarly quality, whereas many gatekeepers aptly close the doors when they perceive a line of argumentation they simply *disagree* with. Still, we are in a particular moment, for, in the name of equality (much less so of freedom), many societies are currently, and actively, opposing the very democratic principle they may still claim as theirs in formal declarations.

The current form of this suicidal tendency could be called "identity politics 2.0." This identity creed relies on the following articles of faith: (1) Identities are all that matters in politics; there is no denying this; (2) Either temporarily, by way of remediation against the harms of the past, or for the foreseeable future, some identities should receive more control and power than others; (3) Identities predetermine what people are and what they think, feel, or love; (4) Under certain conditions, I may adopt a new political identity (e.g., from *straight* to *gay*), but identities, by themselves, are not dynamic; in the same way, "intersectionality" only points at set intersections; (5) All subaltern identities are the product of open wounds and recurring traumas; (6) Because of the suffering shaping my identity, I have a right to avoid being hurt again and, in practice, a right to avoid (the opinions, the writings, the oeuvre of) any individual bearing a different identity than mine; (7) As a corollary to the right to opt out, I also have a right, in the name of my hurt identity (as -i*sm*), to silence, "cancel," "call out," "deplatform", bearers of other identities who either say or *might be expected* to utter something that could contradict what I believe I am; (8) The political community first consists of associating myself with people who *truly* share my identity, which gives way to my demands for safe spaces, specific products, reserved rights, special artworks or clothes, and so on, all attributes that are *truly mine* and that dissimilar citizens could not adopt (or this would be a *cultural appropriation* on their part); (9) The truth or authenticity of each political identity, with its paraphernalia, has to be constantly watched and reassessed by the relevant identity-bearers (be they a militia, an online mob, "self-appointed identity cops,"[1] an NGO, or a governmental office); (10) Further political identities are to be "discovered," or, more realistically, manufactured, and their generation is unlimited a priori.

It is easy to see that the first four articles of faith are anything but new (only the emphasis on a quasi-mystical concept of "identity," instead of *blood* or a given religion, is relatively recent). In fact, they are perfectly soluble in any ethnic or racist definition of the in-group, such as the Nazi notion of *Volk*. The definition of political identities through a wound or social harm is a more novel development that unfolded over the last few decades. Incidentally, it represents a negation of the original "identity politics" (from the 1970s, as used by the Combahee River Collective, among others), for its anchoring in trauma later makes it practically impossible to seek any end to one's own social suffering, unless one abandons (*betrays*) one's identity, which is politically forbidden or impossible, by virtue of the first part of the creed. Therefore, emancipation is either constantly postponed to a later dated or, more simply, short-circuited. I need to underline the fact that, in the current game, *any* identity could claim to be oppressed, and, ironically, resistance against the dominant minorities is a now banal part of the rhetoric of white supremacists in the USA [2]. The coupled rights to opt-out and to suppress come with a dual need to police other members of the common identity and to push forward new official political subcategories. To avoid any significant mutability in a given identity at a certain point of time, it might be more expedient to output an additional reified being (which is the promise of the final + in LGBTQIA+).

It is equally easy to see that such principles are eminently apt to be supported by the Internet as we know it. To be more precise, as I wrote in my 2019 book *La dictature des identit´es* and elsewhere [3–5], the very functioning of social media and all digital communicational tools enhances, arms, and sustains the propagation of standardized political identities. Identities have become a law of the market, because of the low-grade algorithms that are used to shoehorn individuals into predetermined boxes for marketing reasons, and because of the intentional mobilization, by the tech industry, of neural patterns supporting addictive behaviors. The globalized economy of digital communication allows for the speedy circulation of positions, behaviors, and ideas that no longer specifically belongs to "American society." In fact, we all constantly upload and download ourselves to, and from, the planetary Network, whose main rule is the mechanical reproducibility of identicals. Finally, we could swiftly deduce that none of the ten articles of faith that are de rigueur in identity politics 2.0 are compatible with the democratic principles of academic freedom. Screaming outrage or indulging in electronic soliloquies about one's harmed identity have simply nothing to do with the creation of a contradictory, dialogic space. The "clash," then, is inevitable, and it does not depend on different civilizations, as Samuel Huntington once infamously claimed. On the contrary, one new civilization, based on transnational identity claims, is emerging and it clashes with any commitment to heterogeneity. The new order functions as an upper layer that *percolates* into local contexts, sometimes becoming a mere prompt for writing new laws or policies. The freedom of thought and creation that is basically required in the arts, sciences, and humanities simply cannot remain in this prosthetic world-order, and it makes sense, politically, to attack all the institutions whose paradigm contradicts the promotion of identities with particular vehemence. Among these are universities.

This Special Issue of *Societies*, co-edited by Heather Piper and Else-Marie Buch Leander provides a typical, and international, overview of some of the current limitations which academics are facing in a globalized identitarian regime. If the focus of the collected articles is on academia, Universities are not conceived as fortresses or autonomous bodies without ties to "external" realities. For instance, the essay by Buch Leander et al. on Danish childcare facilities, with their heavy policing of behaviors, illustrates the solidarity of some academic positions with concrete regulations in the workplace. Furthermore, some interdictions the authors mention (in the context of pre-school childcare facilities) are oddly consonant with some of the new puritanical policies American Universities have recently been eager to implement, as if *adult* citizens (undergraduate and graduate students) should be statutorily put on a par with 3-year old children. To return to Academia, the article by Jane Fenton and Mark Smith, and the article by Stuart Waiton function as obvious entry points to this dossier. Both texts summarize some of the major coordinates of the current identity debate. Gustavo Gonzalez-Calvo's "Narrative Reflections" and "Disaggregating the Asian 'Other'" by Rooshey ´ Hasnain et al. also indicate the intellectual perils of the identity machine, but from the inside. As is clear in "Disaggregating the Asian 'Other'," the moment identity categories are accepted as valid, one is prone to contributing to a proliferation that is internally legitimate (it is indeed absurd to consider that one "Asian-American" identity would cover the situation of people with ancestry from the Kerala, Tibet, or Sichuan) but externally misguided, such as the defective one-size-fits-all rubric that is criticized. Instead of favoring the transient creation of identifiying multiplicities, one simply multiplies reified categories, in a vain attempt to take into account (and *in advance*) any deviation from the sub-norm. This is a mere identity trap. "Narrative Reflections" centers on the mystifying notion of "the body" (as if "the mind" were anything out of its embodiment). This unavoidably leads the author to the repetition of pseudo-evidence about male, paternal, or heterosexual identities. I certainly believe in the heuristic power of narrative fiction, but fiction, precisely, is apt to deliver us from the realistic need to be *this* or *that*.

The two contributions by Erik Olsson and Jens Sorensen ("What Price Equality?" and "Shadow ¨ Management"), as well as "Scholarship Suppression" by Sean Stevens et al., provide a large array of very carefully detailed cases pertaining to the "new rules" of permissibility. The Swedish situation (also evoked, more broadly, by Johan Lundberg's "Return of the Clan") is particularly revealing. As appears in Sweden and beyond, very old structures of power, which are to be wholly distinguished from the now proverbial "power structures", are coopted, or resurrected, by the new identitarian regime. In fact, ancient notions such as "races," "ethnic groups," or "clans" are very fungible in our dictatorship 2.0. With the right settings, the central State (as in Sweden) could be remarkably prompt to echo and implement the political fragmentation that others (such as "minorities activists" in the US or in France) could naively believe to be, *in essence* and *by definition*, "grassroot," "anti-government," "subversive," or even "revolutionary." Quite the contrary, since as pointed out in "Shadow Management" among others, the complicity of identity politics and the neoliberal agenda is patent. The study by Eva Langsoght et al. on Brazil points to the active role of standardization norms (here, in testing or hiring procedures) in the gradual construction of a new political reality, where we are all more or less turned into children in a Danish Kindergarten; that is, we are free to be surveilled and policed by both our peers and bureaucratic bodies.
