The Politics of Unity

– Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa (2003), 14 life-size fiberglass mannequins, 14 chairs, table, Dutch wax printed cotton. The Pinnell Collection, Dallas –

Calls for unity are being heard from across the political spectrum following the murder of Charlie Kirk. What is unity?

The production of unity requires creating a shared or “good language,” words permitted to be spoken. Unity is playing out in at least three different ways in relation to Kirk’s murder:

1. Kirk is a saint.
2. Kirk is a devil.
3. Kirk is a human animal, deserving of compassion.  

However, the production of unity is not initially affirmative. Unity is predicated on censorship (see Judith Butler, e.g., Excitable Speech).

The politics of unity is founded on the creation of the zone(s) of its own dissolution, on the “bad speech” that must be silenced for unity to take its affirmative shape. Thus, at least three different speech acts are prohibited, depending on which one of the three unities you find appealing:

1. Kirk is a devil.
2. Kirk is a saint.
3. Kirk is inhuman, undeserving of compassion.

Similar scenes of unity usually unfold for me on an ecclesial stage. Consider the following examples:

Scene 1: I am prohibited from preaching/speaking of LGBTQ+ themes from the pulpit, to avoid being labeled as “controversial,” and to have the opportunity to preach about unity.

Scene 2: A lesbian pastor is prevented from asking for accountability when a guest delivers an anti-LGBTQ+ sermon from her pulpit, to maintain the unity of the church.  

There is no escape from the scene(s) of unity. The subject is founded on its exclusive stage. Our readability as human animals entirely depends on an initial exclusion, on the prior “knowledge” of what constitutes the off-stage, the inhuman.

Another example from the ecclesial sphere may help us understand how the politics of unity shapes or fashions the subject. I wrote about it on a friend’s blog ages ago, in 2015.

I was asked to contribute to a blog series inquiring about the character of pastoral identity. Instead, I wondered about what was beyond pastoral identity. I illustrated my argument like this (I am amused by the person who decided to draw out his argument):

I explained:

The square[s constitute] the world. The circles (thin lines) represent various modes of life, the Hetero-social::State::Church and the homo-social::church::world, respectively. The thick black lines symbolize the circuitry of desire.

The image on the left represents our problem. The image on the right represents what is beyond pastoral identity. The dotted-line between the images indicates that the two images do not overlap; the church (right) is in a non—relationship-or to the side of—the Church (left). How are we to interpret the image on the left?

The fact that there are three circles is not important. The Church, the State, and the Hetero-social occupy the same sphere. As you can see, [those spheres keep] desire [. . .] in its place.

Desire is stuck to the Institution and is, therefore, necessarily immobilized within the system imaged on the left. The Church, let us say, is structured like a certain ego [subject, identity, etc].

The image on the right is my attempt to represent a step to the side of the system within which our problem makes any sense. Note the square(s) at the center of the circle(s) on the right. The church’s desire is in the world—where the church always-already re-finds itself—welcomed. The church corresponds with the world.

I did not know it then, but by sidestepping the invitation to define pastoral identity, I was, in fact, describing it. Pastoral unity or identity depends on what is outside or beyond it, namely, the world.

Thus,

we may not say:

1. The pastor is the world;

we may say:

1. The pastor is the Church/State/Heterosexual.

Given that we cannot escape the politics of unity, the question arises: What do we do with it? It is a possibility/question inherent in the politics of unity itself.

In 2015, referring back to my drawings, I wrote, “This [threatening] possibility is imaged on the left by the diagonal sphere [formed by a dotted black line meeting a solid black line that then spins outside of the Institution, into the world], that exceeds the system within which it is initially confined. We might understand this movement as desire’s resistant drift.”

We may not be able to escape the pull of unity, but unity’s regulatory power is not fully within its direction. Spinning off-stage, we may occupy the space of unity’s first creation: the sphere of its dissolution, disruption, or redefinition.

If we remain strictly within the scene(s) of unity, we are obliged to lie and deceive. Specifically, we are compelled to confuse the world with our projections or phantasms, pretending that what we are not is strictly outside of us, in the world.

As I have written elsewhere, the author of Ephesians offers us an alternative to the normative politics of unity. We may speak the truth in irony (Ephesians 4[:15]).

One way to understand speaking the truth in irony is as a practice of not . . . taking ourselves too seriously. Unity is not worth the price of someone’s or some other group’s degradation.

In the resistant ecclesial space, we may say that the pastor is the church (lowercase c) in the world (illustrated by the image on the right). In the resistant murder scene, we may say that Kirk is a human animal undeserving of compassion.

Speaking the truth in irony, we may, or at least this is what the author of Ephesians hopes will happen, grow up in unity.