Today, however, we are dealing with another form of the denegation of the political, postmodern postpolitics, which no longer merely represses the political, trying to contain it and to pacify the returns of the repressed, but much more effectively forecloses it, so that the postmodern forms of ethnic violence, with their irrational, excessive character, are no longer simple returns of the repressed but, rather, present the case of the foreclosed (from the Symbolic), which, as we know from Lacan, returns in the Real. In postpolitics, the conflict of global ideological visions embodied in different parties who compete for power is replaced by the collaboration of enlightened technocrats (economists and public opinion specialists, for example) and liberal multiculturalists; via the process of negotiation of interests a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less universal consensus. The political (the space of litigation in which the excluded can protest the wrong or injustice done to them) foreclosed from the Symbolic then returns in the Real in the guise of new forms of racism. It is crucial to perceive how postmodern racism emerges as the ultimate consequence of the postpolitical suspension of the political, of the reduction of the state to a mere police agent servicing the (consensually established) needs of market forces and multiculturalist, tolerant humanitarianism. The foreigner whose status is never properly "regulated" is the indivisible remainder of the transformation of democratic political struggle into the postpolitical procedure of negotiation and multiculturalist policing. Instead of the political subject "working class" demanding its universal rights, we get, on the one hand, the multiplicity of particular social strata or groups, each with its problems (the dwindling need for manual workers, and so forth), and, on the other hand, the immigrant increasingly prevented from politicizing his predicament of exclusion.
Here one should oppose globalization to universalization: globalization (not only in the sense of global capitalism, the establishment of a global world market, but also in the sense of the assertion of "humanity" as the global point of reference of human rights, legitimizing the violation of state sovereignty and policing activities - from trade restrictions to direct military interventions - in parts of the world where global human rights are violated) is precisely the name for the emerging postpolitical logic that progressively precludes the dimension of universality at work in politicization proper. The paradox is that there is no universal proper without the process of political litigation of the part of no-part, of an out-of-joint entity presenting/manifesting itself as the stand-in for the universal. The otherness excluded from the consensual domain of tolerant/rational postpolitical negotiation and administration returns in the guise of the inexplicable pure evil whose emblematic image is that of holocaust. What defines postmodern postpolitics is thus the secret solidarity between its Janus faces: on the one hand, the replacement of politics proper by depoliticized, so-called humanitarian operations (the humanitarian protection of human and civil rights and aid to Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, North Korea, and so forth); on the other hand, the violent emergence of depoliticized pure evil in the guise of excessive ethnic or religious fundamentalist violence. In short, what Rancière proposes here is a new version of the old Hegelian motto "Evil resides in the gaze itself which perceives the object as Evil": the contemporary figure of evil too strong to be accessible to political analysis (holocaust) appears as such only to the gaze that constitutes it as such - that is, as depoliticized. Crucial is their speculative identity, that is, the infinite judgement: Humanitarian depoliticized compassion is the excess of evil over its political forms.