On 2 September 2004, at the start of the new school year in France, a law was enacted banning all religious symbols and garb in public schools. The media interpreted this law as focused on the khimar (headscarves) that Muslim girls wear as part of hijab (modesty). On 14 September 2010, a ban on covering one's face in public followed. Such legal action, limiting religious freedom, is gaining traction among European nation-states partly due to their inability to deal with religious diversity in a constructive way, partly fuelled by a fear of religious extremism. According to the developing study of complexity theory in philosophy, however, dealing with religious diversity in such a way will only lead to a larger rift between nation-states and religious extremists; decreasing the meaningfulness and limiting the resilience of societies. This paper, attempts to track ways around such limiting legal moves by revisiting Derrida’s 1996 speech at the International Parliament of Writers published as On Cosmopolitanism. Employing an idea from Derrida’s address and supplementing it with one from Žižek, I will show how cities might become spaces that challenge austere and protective legal measures, enacted against religions, by European nation-states.
State of Exception: The Birthplace of Kafka’s Narrative Authority