Abstract

Interculturalism and multiculturalism seem to be finished. ‘Transculturalism’ is now the order of the day, an idea which, apart from referring to a break with the classical conception of culture, also indicates in which direction a solution should be sought: in the mutual intersection, penetration, interweaving and overlapping between the cultural forms and lifestyles cutting through the various national or ethnic cultures which are now seen to be less monolithic and less hermetic than they had appeared through multicultural spectacles. In short, métissage is in, and we all find ourselves in a big melting pot where the political problem no longer consists in combining the different ingredients but in giving shape to the combination which has already come about de facto — and by ‘shape’, transculturalism is not simply referring to the syncretism of bringing old, already existing elements together, but rather means to establish something new.Multiculturalism, according to the champions of transculturalism, has never succeeded in doing this. Instead of leading to cultural contact, it produced a flourishing of cultural separatism, a kind of totalitarian particularism which carried ‘retribalization’ even into education: instead of grouping plants according to Linnaeus’ classification scheme, Mexican- American children now follow their ‘own’ rediscovered ethnobotanical principles.Multiculturalism, then, seems on the one hand to be outdated by facts which it cannot very well place within its own concept of culture . And, on the other hand, multiculturalism seems to have led to a fiasco when it has been able to impose itself politically: “Instead of plurality we find particularism; instead of citizenship, a dictatorship of minorities.” Authors such as Welsch in Germany, Finkielkraut in France, or Procee in the Netherlands are thus in search of a new concept of culture which would be able to curb multicultural violence.Since the plausibility of their ‘transcultural’ alternative seems to depend on the extent to which one is convinced by their critique of multiculturalism, I will begin by examining this critique , then go on to formulate another critique which concerns multiculturalism as well as transculturalism , and which is mainly centred on what I take to be a mistaken concept of alterity and difference which one finds in both conceptions and which links them together