Questioning Europe’s Others reveals Europe itself as a problem.

Evidence

Gil Anidjar seeks to interrogate not the “Jewish” and “Muslim Question” per se, but rather the subject who keeps posing these questions: Europe and the process whereby this entity called Europe has pursued to construct its integrity and unity “through the institutionalization of Others as ‘problems’” (Anidjar, 2012, p. 40). In this context, Anidjar, moreover, deconstructs the tenuous and fragile distinction between a question and a problem by arguing that these questions reveal not only how questioning turns subjects into problems to be solved, but also how all of these questions hint toward approaching Europe itself as a Question and as a problem. — Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, “They Love Death as We Love Life”, 679

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the frame entirely: the interrogated subject is Europe, not Muslims, and the act of questioning is constitutive of Europe’s unity.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the analytic move from ‘question’ to ‘problem’ as an operation that converts people into solvable problems.
• XREF: Resonates with Said’s Orientalism (the Orient as Europe’s constituting Other) and Ulrich Beck’s ‘European Question’ framing.