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Finkielkraut is not the first to note that a shift is under way from the rootedness of persons in given places and times to their ever-changing connectivity across times and spaces. In The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx already foresaw such a shift and praised it as an achievement of capitalism. Much more recently, in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), Anthony Giddens, for instance, analyzed this severing of human beings from the particularities of time and place under the category of the "disembedding tendencies of late modernity." But Finkielkraut is not content merely to analyze this shift, and even less is he inclined to praise it. Instead, he feels obliged to raise his voice against it. The consequences of these disembedding tendencies and of their cultural mirroring are pernicious, he believes.
It would take some detective work to reconstruct out of his "dispatches from the Balkan War" both Finkielkraut's critique of contemporary Western societies and his alternative vision. His own thought seems to have undergone development. Whereas in the eighties (The Defeat of Mind [1987; tr. 1995]) he opposed the ethnic concept of the nation as well as its echoes in the contemporary politics of identity ("la pensee ethnologique") in the name of the voluntarist concept of the nation as a free association of individuals on the basis of universal values, in the nineties he began to oppose economic globalization in the name of language, tradition, place, and nation ("We are all Quebecois"). Hence in the Dispatches he addresses a cluster of important themes at whose heart lies the problem of identity. His targets are not only the prophets of globalization but also the post-structuralists who, like Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx, think of community, the nation state, sovereignty, borders, and native soil as "primitive conceptual phantasms" and instead yearn for a "postgeographical meta-country" (William Gibson).
"Anachronistic Croatians! … They have effectively decided to live with borders, while … all that is good in our day [does] not or should not have any borders," writes Finkielkraut sarcastically. To espouse the erasure of boundaries is in effect to claim that "inscription into time and place is no longer a modality of our finitude." It is to replace a situated human being with an interchangeable "other"—a creature constructed by overlaying an ever-changing hybrid identity upon a biologically defined abstract humanity. Without boundaries, however, all the culturally rich textures of human lives (including particular languages) would eventually be lost, and the result would be not an increase in humanity but its diminishment. For Finkielkraut, particular identity is an intrinsic category of the human condition, not a pathology.
Not only anthropological and culturological reasons drive Finkielkraut, a Jew, to reject the deconstruction of cultural, ethnic, and political identities. Political reasons do so as well. "Vigilant people who meditate on the Jewish experience of history only to make a crime out of identity: could the fascism of our day hope for anything better?"
What is so bad about the erasure of boundaries, one might wonder? Consider just a few of its consequences.
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