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Sovereign Violence and the Remainder

The story of the shibboleth test has had paradigmatic power. In the wake of this narrative, the word shibboleth, in all its manifold spellings and pronunciations at different times and in different languages, has become the concept of the test that the narrative describes. In becoming a common noun that means the use to which it is put in the story, shibboleth extends itself immeasurably past its immediate context; but it is helpful to begin with a consideration of the paradigm—a pronunciation test that presupposes both a telling linguistic difference and a great deal of linguistic and cultural similarity between two warring groups, one of which, having prevailed, holds the power of life and death over the other. Western history records a few cases of mass-murderous shibboleth-testing in this precise sense—the most famous ones all, as it happens, involving French-speaking victims: the “Sicilian Vespers” of March 30, 1282, when Sicilians rebelled against the forces of Charles I, identifying victims—such, at least, is the legend—by having them pronounce the word ciciru (chickpea); the “Matins of Bruges” of May 18, 1302, when Flemish fighters slaughtered a garrison installed by Philip IV, using as shibboleth the phrase schild en vriend (shield and friend); closer to our time, and more terrible in scale, the “Parsley Massacre” that claimed the lives of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, ordered by Rafael Trujillo and carried out on the northwest border of the Dominican Republic in the first week of October 1937 by squadrons that employed as one of their identity tests the Spanish word for parsley, perejil.¹

Such close historical analogues to the biblical story are infrequent, however, and are not our main object of interest here. At issue is the exemplary yet also unruly force of a narrative. Behind the story of the shibboleth test looms the story of Babel, which tells how the Lord “confounded the language of all the earth” and “scattered” humanity “upon the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9). We shall eventually want to look again at that extraordinary moment in Genesis; but for now it suffices to note that among the uncountable consequences of Yahweh’s confounding and scattering of language is the confounding of confounding itself, such that the differences among languages and peoples can always turn uncertain and contestable, as is the case with the Gileadites and the Ephraimites. “Ye Gileadites are fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites”—the shibboleth test is necessary because the difference between self and other, friend and enemy, family member and stranger, has threatened to become illegible. When the Ephraimite requests, “Let me go over,” and then, trying to save his life, answers “No” to the question of whether he is an Ephraimite, he has not yet betrayed himself. The shibboleth test provides a supplement to ordinary discourse in order to establish a difference between a self and an other—a potential infiltrator or, in the biblical story, a potential escapee—who is in some sense a neighbor, looks and sounds like a native, speaks almost as “we” do, knows and can perform with native competence almost all the codes circulating in the community that is being protected and purged. The other is almost the self—and vice versa: the self needs to know its other well in order to select a sign that the other will find hard to feign. Judgments that appear natural and impulsive in contexts in which the other can be imagined as distinct from the self (e.g., the perceived racially, sexually, or culturally marked other; the barbarian whose speech is babble) require the help of a supplemental testing device when a situation turns uncertain. The paradigmatic shibboleth-test, therefore, has an affinity with civil war.

This fraught proximity between self and other renders palpable the performative force of the shibboleth test. It is not just that the test is composed of performatives as speech act theory understands them—a command that includes a modeling of the successful passing of the test that is being demanded (“Say now ‘Shibboleth’ ”), followed by an enforced repetition of the required word that either passes the test or fails it. Speech act theory can only partly account for the force of a test that is also producing the difference for which it asks. The other who might be the self is produced as other or self in and through the test that is failed or passed. The pronunciation of the word shibboleth is the only guarantee—to the extent that there is a guarantee—that the other is other. Only through the shibboleth test is a nongeographic “internal border” of linguistic difference, as Fichte famously calls it, laid over the “natural” border of the formidable but fordable River Jordan; and only thus, in the punctual unfolding of his enunciation, is the speaker produced as Ephraimite or Gileadite.² Two consequences deserve immediate note. In the first place, as Fichte’s expression suggests, the linguistic test renders the border mobile, irreducible to fixed sociopolitical articulations of the earth. The biblical story culminates at the Jordan (a logical corralling point, since the Ephraimites are trying to flee to home territory), but in principle the Gileadites could put Ephraimites to the test anywhere they managed to establish a zone of power. The border is now also the checkpoint.³ Second, and even more significantly, in producing an identity within a field construed as a binary opposition (and it must be stressed here that these identities are produced: if we imagine someone who was neither Gileadite nor Ephraimite getting caught up by accident in the dragnet, we would have to add that that person, if judged worthy of being subjected to the shibboleth test, would in principle be processed as either Ephraimite or Gileadite)—in producing these identities, the shibboleth test opens the concept of the political in Carl Schmitt’s sense, as the opposition between enemy and friend.⁴ Enemy and friend are known only in and through this decisive performance. The greater the uncertainty between these categories, the greater the need for a formalized test in order to produce the border that produces other and self as enemy and friend. On the one hand, the test presupposes for its full formal elaboration a moment of physical domination in which one side holds the power of life or death over the other and can force the other to submit to a test that will decide whether the other lives or dies. The judging instance functions as a finite echo of the divine sovereign claim (“See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me; I kill and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand” [Deuteronomy 32:39]). It compels a speech act into existence and judges it (and in such a context, silence or delaying tactics can always be assimilated to the test and judged accordingly—the test-taker who fails to speak, fails); in this sense the test constitutes an exemplary instance of sovereign power. Yet on the other hand, that sovereign moment depends on the test in order to come into being as such. The shibboleth test provides the only way in which power can obtain a target and realize itself as sovereign, in and through the act of deciding whether to kill or let live.

The performative force of the shibboleth test entails the evacuation of the semantic dimension of the test-word and remains indifferent to cognitive capture from any perspective, including those offered by disciplines such as phonology or phonetics as fields of knowledge. The problem is not just the pragmatic difficulty of cognitively mapping what Ferdinand de Saussure called actes de parole (“the pronunciation of even the smallest word represents an infinite number of muscular movements extremely difficult to know and figure”).⁵ Such knowledge, even if achieved, counts for nothing in the absence of a performance, judged felicitous, of the particular speech act. If it were simply a matter of knowing the meaning or the scientifically formalized elements of a test-word, the test would dissolve into the universality, the open access, of a concept. The Ephraimites presumably knew how they ought to be pronouncing a word that had just been pronounced for them (or not: it is possible that they were being tested with a phonic difference they could not hear); be that as it may, they could not pronounce it. “It is in the body,” Derrida comments, “by reason of a certain impotence coming over their vocal organs, but an impotence of the body proper, of the already cultivated body, limited by a barrier neither organic nor natural, that the Ephraimites experienced their inaptitude to pronounce what they nonetheless knew ought to be pronounced shibboleth—and not sibboleth.”⁶ The shibboleth opens the friend/enemy difference as a biopolitical inscription. Like other strong allegories of the articulation of a subject within a field of power—Lacan’s name-of-the-father, or the “hey, you” of Althusser’s policeman—the story in Judges presents the inscription of the embodied subject in language as an exposure of that subject to political violence in and through noncognitive, performative aspects of language. Such models break with the fiction of a social contract that at some mythical or hypothetical moment in time offered subjectification as a knowable choice. The cut of the shibboleth obtains its material, biopolitical force by bypassing semantics, communication, and cognition; it offers contemporary criticism a further reminder of the necessity yet also the complexity of thinking “the subject” and “the body” as discursively articulated.⁷ As the sign of what Derrida calls the “already cultivated body” and thus of a limit that is “neither organic nor natural,” the shibboleth opens biopolitics as the phantasmatics of the “native speaker” of a “mother tongue”: a tongue that inhabits, shapes, forks, and splits the tongue.

Although the nonsemantic and performative character of the shibboleth as test-word demands analysis along such lines—lines that will need to be extended further—a paradox has also begun to impose itself: the nonsemantic shibboleth test is a site of semantic, conceptual, and theoretical energy. Shibboleth becomes “the” shibboleth, the concept of itself. Having lost its semantic and referential dimensions in becoming a test-word (though as soon as we say that it “loses” these dimensions we start losing our way, because as soon as the common-noun-turned-test-word shibboleth becomes the concept of itself, it reveals that a nonsense word or a nonsemantic phatic sound or filler or name or expletive would have done just as well for a “shibboleth,” so long as the phonemic constraints were being fulfilled)—having become, as test-word, something like a referentless proper name (and indeed, as we shall see, the unspeakable name of God haunts the edges of this story), shibboleth folds back onto itself to mean, through a kind of improper antonomasia, an anantonomasia, its own role in the biblical narrative. Indeed, since this role is that of (dis)enabling a perilous crossing, this movement of sublation can be said to translate the movement of translation (trans-latio, über-setzen), and to allegorize the sublation of metaphor (meta-pherein: a crossing- or bearing-over) into concept that Derrida tracks in his great early essay “White Mythology.”⁸ “Shibboleth” inflates to signify any linguistic identity test or mark of identity. One can thus claim that as soon as speech begins, the shibboleth leaves its mark, as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opening sentence in his Essay on the Origin of Languages: “Speech distinguishes man among the animals; language distinguishes the nations among themselves: one does not know where a man comes from until he has spoken.”⁹ For indeed, any word and any part of a word, spoken aloud, will have greater or lesser shibboleth-test force in the right context (including, to be sure, the word shibboleth—in an English-speaking context, for instance, the final “th” offers a trap to speakers of numerous other languages). Shibboleth is now no longer a formalized test; it will involve the shading of an accent or turn of phrase, or by extension, nonverbal cues that carry semiotic freight; it gathers to itself all sensory registers of all signs, whenever those signs are signs of identity and difference and the difference between identity and difference. The shibboleth test can now be understood as operative in, and indeed, constitutive of, any drama of covert signaling, on the one hand, or of policing and “passing,” on the other, as narrative parsings of the “eggshell shibboleth of caste and color” have so often dramatized.¹⁰ Shibboleth testing in this expanded sense processes dress, gesture, expression and attitude, the manifold, sometimes exquisitely subtle, signifiers of belonging or not-belonging—belonging or not-belonging to a class, a sex, a gender, a sexual orientation, a race or ethnic group, a profession, and on and on, from the most weighty to the most trivial and evanescent of the myriad and layered differentiations of social existence. In Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, Derrida offers powerful generalizations that reiterate, perforce and knowingly, this movement of inflation and idealization: e.g., “A shibboleth, the word shibboleth, if it is one, names, in the broadest extension of its generality or use, every insignificant, arbitrary mark, for example the phonemic difference between shi and si when that difference becomes discriminative, decisive, and divisive” (26). The political-theoretical claims that we offered in previous paragraphs follow a similar pattern: “the shibboleth,” as the concept of itself, allegorizes the biopolitical capture of the body in language while opening political space as the friend/enemy distinction (though also, as will very shortly become clear, in ways irreducible to the Schmittean binary opposition)—all the while allegorizing its conceptual profligacy as a version of “metaphor in the text of philosophy.” The semantic exfoliation of the word shibboleth in modern and contemporary English that we examined at the beginning of this book rehearses a similar tension. This word’s constellation of meanings (test-word, password, slogan, cliché) suggests, we suggested (echoing a great Benjaminian phrase turned slogan or cliché), the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility. The loss of meaning that the word shibboleth means is a hermeneutically generative matrix. One does not need to propose large politico-theoretical allegories in order to tap these energies; any reading of the story in Judges runs into hermeneutic questions that cluster around the shibboleth test. Presumably a different test-word with the shin phoneme might have been chosen; why this one? Who would not want to linger over the word shibboleth’s double meaning of grain and stream, bread and water, the fundamentals of life, despite the evacuation of these meanings (along with any others that philology might someday disinter) at the moment of crisis and crossing? And how—to reprise the question that closed this essay’s previous section—might the story of the shibboleth test be read in conjunction with the murderous and self-destructive turns of Jephthah’s acquisition and exercise of sovereignty?

The semantic and thematic lure of the shibboleth may be understood in conjunction with its mechanical repeatability—its deadly force as border control technology—by way of Derrida’s quasi-concept of iterability. As the “concept of the possibility of ideality” yet also of “the limit of all idealization,” iterability signifies the co-implication of repeatability and alterity: “It entails the necessity of thinking at once both the rule and the event, concept and singularity.”¹¹ Iterability at once opens the possibility of idealization as the repetition of the same, and alters, displaces, and renders impure the effects of plenitude that are generated. This difficult, powerful line of thought accounts both for the production and circulation of meaning and for the mechanical repeatability of technique, both of which intertwine in the shibboleth. If the shibboleth were pure, self-identical event, it could not become a concept and would not function as a test; it would have neither significance nor effectivity as a technique of identification and border control. This doubling and infinite redoubling of “the” shibboleth is remarked in the very drama of the test: it is a demand to repeat, and repeat in the mode of the same. A felicitous performance consists in the repetition of the word shibboleth as the “same” word (within the range of a “native speaker”: the same, that is, across variations of voice, tone, timber, even across accepted accentual variation, accepted mistakes, accepted “bad grammar,” and so on: the same as recognized on the immaterial level of the phoneme and in concert with a myriad other signs, many of which can be non-linguistic, as “one of us”). Yet this effacement of difference in the production of identity (us, them, our language, their language) originates in repetition, and thus in a repeatability opening the possibility of the empirically “first” utterance of the test-word as sovereign demand. The shibboleth test owes its concept, its wider significance, and its political power to its iterability. This means in turn, however, that, despite its ferocious ability to target and kill, the shibboleth works only insofar as it is able to miss its mark. The repeatability that makes it a weapon also exposes it to failure and errancy. On the one hand, as Rousseau affirms, there is no accent-free speech; on the other hand, the subtleties of an accent, like all other linguistic phenomena, are constituted by and vulnerable to replication. To the extent that self and other—the subject and the object of the sovereign decision—require the shibboleth test for their realization, they are under the sway of a “law of iterability” that “exceeds the intentional structure that it renders possible” (Limited Inc, 130). It will always be possible for an Ephraimite to pass the test or for a Gileadite to fail it. And of course the Gileadite giving the command and the example—“Say now, ‘Shibboleth’ ”—can always choke on his word, demand a mangled sound, derail the test before it begins—not an implausible scenario after a few thousand repetitions have taken their toll (though of course the power asymmetry between test-giver and test-taker would lead to a different outcome if the former rather than the latter is mispronouncing the word). Such exceptions to the rule will then be ascribed to empirical contingencies (the Ephraimite is an exceptional mimic or had a Gileadic nanny; the Gileadite has a speech impediment, or his attention wanders, or the unconscious speaks); but exposure to such contingency forms a nonaccidental part of the rule. No mark, signature, or speech act can function except insofar as it can go wrong, misfire, be repeated, forged, or cited, otherwise and elsewhere. If the shibboleth test provides the only guarantee that the other is other, this guarantee is unguaranteed. The friend/enemy distinction can never be truly secured. (It is for this reason—to open a brief parenthesis, looking forward to a history that left its impact on Celan—that nineteenth-century Western European anti-Semitic writing tends to adopt an even more strident tone than usual when affirming, with, say, Gobineau, the “particular accent” of the Jew. Racist ideologies grow anxious in the proximity of linguistic identity tests and need to be ready to discount them, for although language, according to these ideologies, ought to be an expression of race, language is frustratingly permeable, reproducible, unreliable.)¹² The sovereign moment of decision and the Schmittean political space produced by the shibboleth test are both derivative of a deeper condition of insecurity, such that self and other cannot be constituted in a specular relationship without residue.

Hence the explosive aggressivity that characterizes the shibboleth story, as summed up by the Ephraimites’ taunt and the Gileadites’ reaction, and as given narrative expression by Jephthah’s history and fate. Like a reaction formation, the story of the shibboleth test supervenes on the story of a quasi-illegitimate leader who, expelled from the community, owes his reintegration and his precarious sovereignty to a speech act: the promise sworn by the elders of Gilead before the Lord. Jephthah then supplements that speech act with another: a conditional promise made directly to God. The form of Jephthah’s vow follows a conventional do ut des formula (reversal being equally conventional: if the Lord grants this, I shall do that), except in one regard: the vow registers, in the dangerous open-endedness of its offer of sacrifice, the infinite distance that a contract with God needs to span.¹³ Mythic violence fills that space with the oathmaker’s only child. The cost of (a brief spell of) rule as judge of the people is the barrenness and scattering—the castration and accelerated extinction—of a leader who will never be a patriarch. (In all these ways Jephthah is the pointed opposite of the ur-patriarch Abraham: Abraham, who has a son rather than a daughter, who obeys a dictate from God rather than proposing a contract, who evades child sacrifice, and whose seed, God promises, will multiply as the stars of heaven.) Commenting on the logic of sacrifice, Jacques Lacan suggests that sacrifice seeks to capture the Other in the circuit of desire, as though the gods desired as we do: “the sacrifice signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other that I call here the dark God” (Dieu obscur).”¹⁴ The dark God exacts the highest possible price, as he must; for the cruelty of his demand at once indexes and conceals the impossibility of knowing what or whether the Other wants. (“To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats” [Isaiah 1:11].) Translating into the idiom being examined here, we could say that, at this point in the text, the name of God is the unpronounceable shibboleth that both underwrites and hollows out sovereign authority. The subsequent story of the shibboleth test repeats and displaces that pattern. The test produces a border that promises to be harder to cross than those crossed by a bastard son turned judge of the Gileadites; it transforms the ambiguous kinship of Gileadite and Ephraimite into a binary opposition maintained by a microscopic but knife-sharp difference; it makes space for a sovereign decision; it unleashes lethal, targeted violence. And it also undermines sovereignty and identity in ways we have only begun to examine.

The shibboleth test recodes the sublime distance between God and humanity as the arbitrary difference between a voiceless postalveolar fricative and a voiceless alveolar fricative (shin and sin). It transforms the unpronounceable name of YHWH, the Tetragrammaton, into a “secret without secret,” as Derrida puts it (Shibboleth, 26): a secret without semantic or theological depth, a prohibition without content and in that sense without epistemological, mythological, or psychological dignity. The secret as shibboleth, the secret that leverages and weaponizes the depthless unconscious of linguistic competence, is nothing more than the linguistically inscribed body’s ability to pronounce a word. No conscious knowledge or intent, no reserve of intelligence or virtue, no strength of character or will can access this fundamentally banal though, at the crucial moment, all-important secret-without-secret. It is accessed only when “the subject,” however defined, does not know what it is doing. If death is the penalty for failing the test in the biblical story, this accords with the exemplarity of that story. Whether destined to be killed or to be allowed to cross over and live, the subject as locus of intentionality is annihilated in the very moment that it is being “subjected” in the sense of being produced as a target of sovereign force. The subject occupying the position of sovereign power, though protected from the threat of immediate physical death, suffers an equivalent annihilation qua subject as it cites or repeats a test-word that it does not know how it knows how to enunciate, listens to a repetition that it does not know how it knows how to judge, and “judges” without the support of a center of will and identity. Nor is this subject properly “sovereign” even in its inaugural decision to open the sequence of repetitions through which the shibboleth test demonstrates its murderous power, as tester and test-taker play out their preprogrammed if never completely predictable roles. Language irrevocably contaminates sovereignty, as Derrida and others have stressed: “A pure sovereignty is indivisible or it is not at all, as all the theoreticians of sovereignty have rightly recognized, and that is what links it to the decisionist exceptionality spoken of by Schmitt. This indivisibility excludes it in principle from being shared, from time and from language.… Sovereignty withdraws from language, which always introduces a sharing that universalizes.”¹⁵ The sovereign decision composing the shibboleth test, enabled not just by the empirical circumstances that have created a power differential between two opposed yet hard to distinguish groups, but—also and therefore—by unchosen linguistic differences into which it has always already been thrown, and in and through which it comes into existence as speech act, is radically exposed to the linguistic contingency that it instrumentalizes. Only because it is thus contaminated and exposed can it perform itself as an instrumentalization of linguistic difference. If we call the deciding instance at the origin of the shibboleth-test-enabled bloodbath “Jephthah,” as many summaries of the story do—though he is not mentioned in the relevant verse—we are left with an antonomasia for a disorder internal to all claims to and expressions of sovereignty and identity in language. It is perhaps telling that Jephthah—previously so prone to give speeches and perform speech acts—disappears during, or into, the account of the shibboleth test per se. And if we do allow his name to linger on in this scene, we might wish to give a little extra spin to the two etymologies that (possibly) entwine in the name Jephthah (better transliterated as Yiphtaḥ), via a verb פתח (patah) that means not only to open (the womb, but also the mouth, eyes, ears, and so on, and thus: to speak, see, hear, and the like) but also to bore through, carve, or engrave. To open, to go through, to write: as the improperly proper name of the shibboleth test, this judge’s name opens as a mark that cuts itself apart.¹⁶

Subjectless and meaningless in the space of its event, the shibboleth has in itself no aim, no purpose or telos, despite the measureless stakes it puts into play. It is not even certain that, in this context, “shibboleth” remains a word. The test bears not on a full word, not even on an entire word stripped of its semantic value, but only on a piece of that skeleton, the shin phoneme with which it begins. The Ephraimite who fails the test fails it in the first instant of utterance, at the first hiss of the s; the ax falls there, before the rest of the word can arrive. The hiss is an orphaned bit of a word; a Joyce can trope it as verbal excrement (“Shitbroleeth,” murmurs Leopold Bloom, recalling “vaguely the past of Ephraim” but at least getting the opening fricative right, in the Circe episode).¹⁷ Cut off as it is from lexical or morphological or semantic context at the moment of the test, this fragment is neither one coherent thing in itself (for it is exposed to judgment) nor part of a whole (for only here does the shibboleth-test obtain its grip). And this fragmentary fragment or fragment of a fragment is not even necessarily a phoneme; its difference from mere noise shades toward illegibility. It could be a gasp, the intake or expulsion of a (last) breath; flatulence; background noise. No longer securely speech, this hiss-fragment no longer insulates its “speaker” from animality or even from inanimateness. It is taken as language, but that inevitable taking-as-language simply records the exposure of the sovereign decision to the undecidable. The sovereign decision occurs in and as a fractured moment of madness. Yet if in a sense this phoneme-noise-fragment is not enough language, in another sense it is too much language: it could belong to any number of languages; the sh or s of the test-taker—or whatever phoneme, phone, or allophone one imagines as the secret of shin or samekh—could be headed toward some completely different, unheard-of language. These uncertainly linguistic particles perform their difference—the deadly difference between Gileaditic and Ephraimitic, languages so similar that, it seems, they cannot otherwise be distinguished; languages that are and are not “one”—but they perform this difference only because they can wander elsewhere. The shibboleth story therefore underscores another insight that Derrida elaborated out of a web of quasi-concepts such as the trace, dissemination, and iterability: “No such thing as a language exists.” Babel not only scatters languages and humanity, it fragments language internally, because the unity of a language, as understood by classical linguistics, is a “unity … open to the most radical grafting, open to deformations, transformations, expropriation, to a certain a-nomie and de-regulation.”¹⁸ Hence the tightly paradoxical double affirmation that Derrida offers in Monolingualism of the Other: “We only ever speak one language—or rather, one idiom, only”; “We never speak only one language—or rather, there is no pure idiom” (8). A word like shibboleth, for instance, can cross linguistic borders, perhaps not entirely unscathed but living on nonetheless, as a loanword or what in German is called a Fremdwort, a stranger in a strange language, the beneficiary of unforeseeable and uncontrollable acts of hospitality. And a word like shibboleth (“if it is one,” as Derrida remarks more than once [Shibboleth, 26]) can, as “shibboleth,” point to itself as the name of a nameless self-alterity, while enacting this alterity as it crumbles into pieces, into phonemes and letters that in turn can always have unpredictable itineraries and effects. In shibboleth there is babel, which is also to say deconstruction: “If I had to risk a single definition of deconstruction, one as brief, elliptical and economical as a password, I would say simply and without overstatement: plus d’une langue—both more than a language and no more of a language.”¹⁹ Which is also to say, in yet another Derridean idiom, in shibboleth there is haunting; for this sovereign technic raises ghosts that no checkpoint (“Stand and unfold yourself”) can control (“Barnardo: Tis here. Horatio: Tis here. Marcellus: Tis gone”).²⁰

The word (or “word”) shibboleth is a catachresis for a remainder or crypt: a fractured fragment cut off from its word and from the Word, from meaning, intention, or aim—from the very performativity it enables. Because it “marks the multiplicity within language, insignificant difference as the condition of meaning” (Shibboleth, 28–29), it is language in not being securely language. It is metaphor as the effacement of the blankness of an uncertain crossing. Only as such a blind fragment can it be weaponized. This stub is the condition of possibility of shibboleth as the word that unleashes sovereign power; shelters the ethnos; purifies the family line; affirms “nativity” in and as language; distinguishes friend from enemy and this language from that language; draws and polices a border; targets and kills; folds back on itself to become the concept of this technic. With each cut, it marks with difference and finitude the sovereign instance and identity it so efficiently serves. One could say that this shibboleth-death, this secret without secret, silent as the “c” in the trigraph sch with which French and German render in writing that perilous fricative, is a name for the unpronounceable name of God if one is going along with a remark that Derrida risks in “Des Tours de Babel”: “the proper name of God (given by God) is divided enough in the tongue, already, to signify also, confusedly, ‘confusion.’ ”²¹