A Policy of Suspicious Subjectivity: Essentialization and Existentialization of the Other in French Immigration and Integration Policies

The article aims to provide a better understanding of how the authorities in France narrate and transform into a roadmap for public action the coexistence of a welcoming and rejecting stance towards those whom their origins potentially designate as Others. It shows that the contradiction between two orientations that may seem incompatible is resolved by making one the condition of the other and by individualising the boundary that separates their respective targets. This is based on criteria that combine cultural and biological markers in reference to origins, but according to a combination that is only partially accounted for by the distinction between (cultural) heritage and (biological) heredity. The detour via policies in other areas of public action, which are also based on a political problematisation of the minority condition, sheds light on the complexity and driving forces behind the borderisation operated by immigration and integration policies. It provides a better understanding of the structural scope and social effects of the investigation into threatening subjectivities carried out by the French authorities, but also, more broadly, perhaps by all liberal democracies, in the face of a right to difference that they protect while protecting themselves from it when it is identified with the right to assert oneself as the subject of one's own existence.