First published in French in 2010, _Equaliberty_ brings together essays by Étienne Balibar, one of the preeminent political theorists of our time. The book is organized around _equaliberty_, a term coined by Balibar to connote the tension between the two ideals of modern democracy: equality and liberty. He finds the tension between these different kinds of rights to be ingrained in the constitution of the modern nation-state and the contemporary welfare state. At the same time, he seeks to (...) keep rights discourse open, eschewing natural entitlements in favor of a deterritorialized citizenship that could be expanded and invented anew in the age of globalization. Deeply engaged with other thinkers, including Arendt, Rancière, and Laclau, he posits a theory of the polity based on social relations. In _Equaliberty_ Balibar brings both the continental and analytic philosophical traditions to bear on the conflicted relations between humanity and citizenship. (shrink)

A collection of Essays over the last 20 years, exploring different dimensions of the philosophical debate on "subjecthood" and "subjectivity" in Modernity, as it was framed by the "Controversy on the subject" from the 1960's, and showing how it is now continued in a "controversy on the Universal.".

Etienne Balibar, one of the foremost living French philosophers, builds on his landmark work 'Spinoza and Politics' with this exploration of Spinoza's ontology. Balibar situates Spinoza in relation to the major figures of Marx and Freud as a precursor to the more recent French thinker Gilbert Simondon's concept of the transindividual. Presenting a crucial development in his thought, Balibar takes the concept of transindividuality beyond Spinoza to show it at work at both the individual and the (...) collective level. (shrink)

Qu'appelons-nous " modernité "? Cette question est travaillée selon une triple orientation philologique, épistémologique et historique, en prenant pour fils conducteurs l'auto-énonciation du sujet, la constitution du " nous " communautaire, l'aporie de l'institution judiciaire. L'interprétation défendue pose que les processus opposés du devenir-citoyen du sujet et du devenir-sujet du citoyen en viennent à se recouvrir. C'est aussi le moment où le rapport du commun à l'universel devient un écart politique au sein de l'universel lui-même. Le " jugement des autres (...) " doit être rapporté à un " jugement de soi-même " attestant pour chacun sa propre normalité. Dès lors, l'humain ne peut coïncider avec l'institution du politique qu'à la condition de se retrancher de soi-même, dans la forme des " différences anthropologiques ". Le citoyen-sujet ne peut se comprendre indépendamment de son envers, qui le conteste et le défie. (shrink)

étienne Balibar has been one of Europe's most important philosophical and political thinkers since the 1960s. His work has been vastly influential on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the humanities and the social sciences. In We, the People of Europe?, he expands on themes raised in his previous works to offer a trenchant and eloquently written analysis of "transnational citizenship" from the perspective of contemporary Europe. Balibar moves deftly from state theory, national sovereignty, and debates on multiculturalism (...) and European racism, toward imagining a more democratic and less state-centered European citizenship. Although European unification has progressively divorced the concepts of citizenship and nationhood, this process has met with formidable obstacles. While Balibar seeks a deep understanding of this critical conjuncture, he goes beyond theoretical issues. For example, he examines the emergence, alongside the formal aspects of European citizenship, of a "European apartheid," or the reduplication of external borders in the form of "internal borders" nurtured by dubious notions of national and racial identity. He argues for the democratization of how immigrants and minorities in general are treated by the modern democratic state, and the need to reinvent what it means to be a citizen in an increasingly multicultural, diversified world. A major new work by a renowned theorist, We, the People of Europe? offers a far-reaching alternative to the usual framing of multicultural debates in the United States while also engaging with these debates. (shrink)

In this contribution, Balibar follows his seminal 1993 work applying the notion of the transindividual to Spinoza’s work, to produce a broader history of thinking the transindividual that brings both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud into relation with Spinoza, devoting a section to each of these thinkers. Balibar positions the notion of the transindividual, here, as a solution to the opposing ontological errors of philosophical individualism that fails to attend to the social constitution of the individual, and the (...) social organicism that reduces the individual to the effect of larger forces. For Balibar, following Gilbert Simondon, the individual is to be understood as always already extending beyond themselves. (shrink)

This paper presents the main directions of a new research project that centres on the paradox of the enunciation of the universal. Historical experience and the history of philosophy have made us highly sceptical towards the very possibility of enunciating the universal, yet the universal can be said to have become a fact of contemporary life, and the attempt at enunciating the universal remains an inescapable demand, in politics and notably in practice. Not to enunciate the universal is impossible, but (...) to enunciate it is untenable. Three directions of questioning emerge from this paradox. First, a rereading of Hegel helps us to study the conflict of universalities. Second, with Marx, we can revisit the problem of ideology, the relation between the enunciation of the universal and the idea of domination. And thirdly, by rereading texts by Freud on identification and ideality, we can revisit the relation of the universal to the idea of community, and the aporia of its deconstruction. (shrink)

Cet article propose une analyse philologique, épistémologique et critique du concept de survaleur, des Grundrisse de 1858 jusqu’au Capital où il reçoit son développement systématique. Il rappelle la centralité que lui confère son couplage avec la notion de surtravail pour opérer le renversement du « point de vue du capital » au « point de vue du travail », faire de l’exploitation du travail la source de l’accumulation du capital, et comprendre comment s’articulent la « contradiction » et le « (...) conflit » dans le mouvement historique du capitalisme et de son dépassement. Il identifie pour finir certains points de tension appelant, plutôt que l’invalidation de la théorie de la survaleur, sa relance critique dans des analyses de l’exploitation devant inclure, non seulement une grande contradiction entre capital et travail, mais aussi des contradictions spécifiques au sein du travail, qui ne peuvent rester sans conséquences pour l’analyse « marxiste » des articulations entre théorie critique du capitalisme, composition de classes, et mouvements ou formes de mobilisation politiques. (shrink)

What is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and secularism—the worldwide and the worldly? While cosmopolitan politics may seem inherently secular, existing forms of secularism risk undermining the universality of cosmopolitanism because they privilege the European tradition over all others and transform particular historical norms into enunciations of truth, valid for all cultures and all epochs. In this book, the noted philosopher Étienne Balibar explores the tensions lurking at this troubled nexus in order to advance a truly democratic and emancipatory cosmopolitanism, (...) which requires a secularization of secularism itself. Balibar argues for the idea of the universal against its particular dominant institutions. He questions the assumptions that underlie popular ideas of secularism and religion and outlines the importance of a new critique for the contemporary world. Balibar holds that conflicts between religious and secular discourses need to be reframed from a point of view that takes into account the cultural hybridization, migration and mobility, and transformation of borders that have reshaped the postcolonial age. Among the topics discussed are the uses and misuses of the category of religion and the religious, the paradoxical genealogy of monotheism, French laïcité’s identitarian turn, and the implications of the responses to the Charlie Hebdo attacks for an extended definition of free speech. Going beyond circumscribed notions of religion and the public sphere, Secularism and Cosmopolitanism is a profound rethinking of identity and difference that seeks to make room for a renewed political imagination. (shrink)

L'ouvrage se propose d'introduire à la philosophie de Spinoza - conçue comme une ontologie et une éthique de la communication - à partir du rapport intrinsèque qu'elle entretient avec la politique. Après une mise en situation de Spinoza dans les conflits de son temps et de son pays, qui claire les multiples dimensions de son projet intellectuel, les trois grandes oeuvres (Traité théologico-politique, Traité politique, Ethique) sont successivement discutées. Une attention particulière est apportée aux thèmes de la démocratie, de la (...) religion, de l'institution et du rapport entre la raison et l'imagination, qui font l'actualité du spinozisme. L'ouvrage s'adresse à la fois à un public d'étudiants, d'enseignants et d'intellectuels pluridisciplinaires. (shrink)

The paper, which retains a hypothetical character, argues that Spinoza's propositions referring to God (or involving the use of the name ‘God’, essentially in the Ethics), can be read in a fruitful manner apart from any pre-established hypothesis concerning his own ‘theological preferences’, as definite descriptions of three ‘ideas of God’ which have the same logical status: one (akin to Jewish Monotheism) which identifies the idea of God with the idea of the Law, one (akin to a heretic ‘Socinian’ version (...) of Christianity) which identifies it with the idea of Human Love, and one (akin to a form of Cosmotheism, rather than ‘Pantheism’) which identifies it with Nature. Evidence of this analytic tripartition can be found in the letter of the texts themselves. If accepted (at least as a thought experiment), it would carry three interesting consequences: 1) to renew our understanding of the theory of the ‘three kinds of knowledge’, which have obvious affinities with the three possible ways of understanding the idea of God; 2) to emphasize the critical move associated by Spinoza with each of the three ideas of God (passing from an anthropomorphic legislator to an impersonal command, passing from an imaginary community of similarities to a practical community of singularities, and passing from a teleological and harmonious idea of nature to a causal, even conflictual, idea of its infinite power); 3) to locate the essential ethical and political questions associated with religion on the ‘vectors’ which lead from one idea to another, and represent themselves practical conatus: obedience, utility, order. It is also assumed that such a reading enhances the relevance of Spinoza's philosophy with respect to contemporary debates about religion and secularism. (shrink)

"As one of Louis Althusser's most brilliant students in the 1960s, Etienne Balibar contributed to the theoretical collective masterpiece of Reading Capital. Since then he has established himself amongst the most subtle philosophical and political thinkers in France. In Politics and the Other Scene Balibar deepens and extends the work he first developed with Immanuel Wallerstein in Race, Nation, Class. Exploring the theme of universalism and difference, he addresses questions such as "European racism, " the notion of (...) the border, whether a European citizenship is possible or desirable, violence and politics, identity and emancipation"--provided by publisher. (shrink)

Discussions around the meaning and validity of Freud’s notion of Todestrieb, as it was introduced in the essay from 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, later...

The article reflects on the present confusion between the category of enemy and that of stranger as result of a process of multiplication and reinforcement of territorial borders along ethnic and racial criteria. In particular, the text considers the external and internal borders of Europe as complex dispositivs of territorial control, which produce specific forms of foreigners as strangers and as cultural enemies. In order to analyze and stop this process, a cosmopolitan rethinking of the idea of citizenship is at (...) stake here. Transnational citizenship will be discussed in the frame of a philological model of translation between cultures and opposed to the model of an absolute untranslatability that characterizes the global civil wars. Cosmopolitics is thus conceived as a practical universalism, a progressive overcoming of the idea of the stranger in view of an idea of co-citizenship. Transnational co-citizenship does not suppress national identities but puts them in relation to all other sorts of particular identities and interests in order to create a contingent, maybe precarious but always concrete world of commons and communality. (shrink)

This article, originally a preface to the French edition of Carl Schmitt’s book The Leviathan in the State theory of Thomas Hobbes, displays a critical analysis that not only puts the above work in context, but also raises a question about Schmitt’s appropriation of Hobbes, an author who was considered a beacon of light by the former during his whole lifetime. Thus, the article undertakes a reconstitution of Schmitt´s relevance for Political Theory and Philosophy in recent years, and then develops (...) the way Hobbes was analysed in Schmitt´s essay. The interpretation of the Jurist is not innocent at all, and the propinquity to the English author in some issues could have allowed the former to reinforce his own arguments by using the latter as a mere strategic tool. The key question the article tries to elucidate is whether this re-appropriation was successful or not. (shrink)

Die spekulative Anthropologie von Sigmund Freuds »Totem und Tabu« ist in »Massenpsychologie und Ich-­Analyse« in Form einer Selbstwiderlegung präsent, die von eminent politischer Natur ist. Denn das theoretische Aufkommen einer spezifisch trans­individuellen Struktur, aus der sowohl das Individuum als auch das Soziale hervorgehen, maximiert die Spannung mit dem Evolutions­mythos. Indem sie das Individuum zu einem Effekt der Masse macht, eröffnet Freuds neue Ontologie der Beziehung, die sich auf das Schema der Identifizierung stützt, zwei entgegengesetzte Interpretationswege. Der eine, regressive, identifiziert die (...) Entstehung der Masse mit der Wiederholung des ursprünglichen Vatermordes: Er denkt die Regression zur Ununterscheidbarkeit nach dem Modell der Hypnose. Die andere, repressive, setzt das Über-Ich als Ursprung der Schuld voraus, um die Individualisierung als Autonomisierung gegenüber der Masse zu denken. (shrink)