Inclusion Through Exclusion: Explosion or Implosion?

This essay seeks to destabilise some of the nationalist and racial premises of conventional discourses and debates surrounding “inclusion” and “exclusion,” with particular reference to their currency for the politics of (im)migration (and race) in contemporary Europe. This interrogation of those presuppositions unfolds through a critique of the complacencies and complicities of Jürgen Habermas’s remarks on “multiculturalism,” not so much in order to contribute to any presumably exhaustive dissection of Habermas’s philosophical corpus, as such, but rather because his discourse around these preoccupations seems highly symptomatic and thus revelatory of the larger malaise with which this thematic issue is concerned.