Dying for a Signifier

Text presented at the international conference “Ethnic and Religious Conflicts in the World: The Contribution of Psychoanalysis,” October 17, 2014, Italian Chamber of Deputies, Rome.

I. Between 1954 and 1962, France was caught up in opposing Algeria's successful war of independence. What one of France's prime ministers (before the rise of de Gaulle), Guy Mollet, said in parliament to justify the fact that Algeria belonged to France and, therefore, to justify the ruthless repression against the insurrection particularly struck me. He said that Algeria was essentially a French invention. This was true. The French created Algeria as a political entity. This, however, did not prevent a strong national sentiment from taking shape among Algerians, one that culminated in a bloody war of liberation.

In 1994 we witnessed one of the most shocking genocides of the 20th century: between half a million to one million people died in Rwanda, victims of a civil war that killed mostly civilians in just three months. This holocaust resulted from the conflict between two ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. But who exactly were these Hutu and Tutsi, and what was the source of such a reciprocal and deadly hatred?

In fact, there is no clear meaning to being Hutu or Tutsi. Both groups speak the same native tongue, Rwanda-Rundi, which is part of the Bantu subbranch of languages. Nobody knows exactly what produced this lethal difference between Hutu and Tutsi, although a few theories have been elaborated, the most reliable of which affirm that the difference was created by German and Belgian colonists. It seems that the Belgian colonial power designated people as Tutsi or Hutu on the basis of cattle ownership and of differences in their physical stature! Yet this arbitrary designation caused millions of deaths, refugees, destruction, and ruin.

Another striking example is the patriotism fuelled by the Ba'ath party in Iraq for 35 years starting in 1968. Iraq was created by the British and Fren