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WORK TITLE: Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics
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PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 4/23/1942
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born April 23, 1942, in Avallon, Burgundy France; married; wife’s name Françoise (a physicist); children: Jeanne.
EDUCATION:Attended École Normale Supérieure, Paris, beginning 1960; University of Nijmegen, Ph.D., 1987; University of Paris I, postdoctoral habilitation, 1993.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Paris X, Nanterre, professor of moral and political philosophy, 1994-2002, professor emeritus, 2002–. University of California, Irvine, professor of humanities, beginning 2000, now professor emeritus; Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London, professorial fellow, 2010; Columbia University, visiting professor; Kingston University, London, Anniversary Chair Professor at Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy; University of Buenos Aires, lecturer at French-Argentine Center of Higher Studies. French Communist Party, member, beginning 1961, expelled, 1981; Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, member; Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, cofounder.
MEMBER:Association Jan Hus (acting chair).
WRITINGS
Contributor to numerous works published in French, Italian, German, English, and other languages, including the postscript to Political Theology and Early Modernity, edited by Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2012; and foreword to Althusser, the Infinite Farewell, by Emilio de Ípola, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2018.
SIDELIGHTS
Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher who attracted scholarly attention in his twenties, when his essay “On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism” was included in Lire “le Capital” in 1968. The volume emerged from a seminar on Karl Marx presented by the preeminent philosopher Louis Althusser, and was later published as Reading “Capital.” Balibar pursued his studies for several years, earning his doctorate in 1987 and his French teaching certification in 1993. He was a professor at the University of Paris X from 1994 to 2002, when he was granted the status of professor emeritus.
Balibar continued his academic career at the University of California in Irvine, Columbia University, Kingston University in London, and elsewhere. He is highly regarded for his interpretations of moral and political philosophy in general and Marxist philosophy in particular. For twenty years Balibar was a member of the French Communist Party, until his criticism of party policy resulted in his expulsion in 1981. It was not the last time that his observations would challenge the conventional wisdom.
Balibar has published many books over the years, primarily in French or Italian. Several titles have been translated into English, especially in recent years, but none of them are intended for the casual reader. Though the content may lean toward topics of popular interest, such as nationhood and citizenship, violence and civility, equality in politics, and the relationship between politics and religion, the exposition is decidedly academic. The greatest understanding would accrue to readers already well versed in the work of Karl Marx, Balibar’s venerated mentor Louis Althusser, or other proponents of dialectical materialism.
Race, Nation, Class and Equaliberty
In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Balibar and American historian-sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein explore the notion of racism. Rejecting the facile attribution of racism to the ignorance of the past, they connect recent versions of xenophobia to current social infrastructures: the constituents of contemporary nation-states and the disparities between the margins and the core of the groups that comprise them. First published in 1988, the authors foresee the threat of creeping nationalism and ethnocentricity.
Increasingly in the 1980s, Balibar concerned himself with popular concepts that, by their very definition, struck him as oxymorons, or contradictions in terms. Equaliberty: Political Essays is a collection devoted to the philosophical conflict between equality and liberty. If equality applies to rights and representation, and liberty addresses the freedom of the citizen to challenge someone’s right to equality, then he concludes that only one side of the equation can be true. Balibar would continue to explore the tensions that inform modern political theory: conflicts between concepts of nation and state, man and humanity, man and citizen, and inevitably citizenship and democracy.
Citizenship and Violence and Civility
In the volume Citizenship, Balibar contrasts the concept of democracy as a political system of freedom for all with the notion of citizenship, which grants exclusive favor to certain members of the nation-state. The definition of the term “citizen” has remained ambiguous throughout history, but in politically fragile times the dynamics between inclusion and exclusion take on added weight. Citizenship can be redefined by geographical or political borders, ay assimilation into a group identity, or by any other factor, and it can be coerced by any number of physically or psychologically violent conditions. The author’s thesis is that the ideals of citizenship and democracy, while always connected, also exist in contradiction, that true democracy “is something that can never be fully achieved,” as Chris Moreh wrote in a blog at the London School of Economics and Political Science website. R.W. Glover explained in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries that Balibar “brings clarity to ways that popular action and initiate and enact political change … in an effort to ‘democratize’ democracy.”
Balibar expands his analysis in Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Philosophy, a collection of lectures originally delivered at Columbia University in 1996. “Balibar has consistently rejected shoehorning politics into a pre-given theoretical grid,” Todd May posted at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. In this case, the author considers the role of violence in the shaping of political relationships. He mentions several levels of violence, including “exploitation … , domination, marginalization, and degradation,” May observed, but Balibar focuses on the extreme cruelty of treating the masses of humanity as inanimate objects, on the one hand, or as living “incarnations of evil” on the other. Balibar calls for an injection of “civility” into the political dialogue, by which he seems to mean the humanization of “the other.” At the same time, May wrote, he offers little optimism that political violence can ever be completely eradicated. The critic emphasized that “Balibar’s reflections … are subtle and at times profound.”
Secularism and Cosmopolitanism
In Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics, Balibar writes that the dialogue between secular and religious ideals must expand beyond the narrow confines of traditional assumptions. Religious debate can no longer be isolated from the political and social factors that contribute to the issues. In order to remain true for all times and all cultures–past, present, and future–Balibar calls for consideration of “the cultural hybridization, migration and mobility, and transformation of borders that have reshaped the postcolonial age,” according to the book description posted at the Columbia University Press website.
In the transcript of a lecture posted at Monthly Review Online, Balibar said: “There is no such thing as a purely religious conflict, but in today’s world a conflict that pits religious representations and allegiances against one another, or against their secular antithesis, is always already entirely political.” In Secularism and Cosmopolitanism Balibar addresses specific recent examples of the tensions that challenge the relationship between religion and politics, from terrorist attacks to the debate between “free speech and blasphemy,” according to a Publishers Weekly contributor. The critic concluded that Secularism and Cosmopolitanism “contains remarkable insights for scholars working on secular ethics and contemporary religious quarrels.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Bojadzijev, Manuela and Katrin Klingan, editors, Balibar / Wallerstein’s Race, Nation, Class : Rereading a Dialogue for Our Times, Argument Verlag (Hamburg, Germany), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Capital & Class, June, 2011, Tony N. Buell, review of The Philosophy of Marx, p. 326.
Choice, November, 2015, P.N. Malcolmson, review of Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, p. 498; March, 2016, R.W. Glover, review of Citizenship, p. 1084.
Publishers Weekly, April 9, 2018, review of Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics, p. 73.
Reference & Research Book News, February, 2009, review of Spinoza and Politics.
Review of Metaphysics, December, 1999, Jeffrey A. Bernstein, review of Spinoza and Politics, p. 426.
ONLINE
Columbia University Press website, https://cup.columbia.edu/ (August 26, 2018), book description.
Columbia University website, https://french.columbia.edu/ (August 21, 2018), author profile.
London School of Economics and Political Science website, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ (July 7, 2016), Chris Moreh, review of Citizenship.
Monthly Review Online, https://mronline.org/ (May 11, 2010), Étienne Balibar, “Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Working Hypotheses” (partial transcript of lecture at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London).
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online, https://ndpr.nd.edu/ (July 10, 2015), Todd May, review of Violence and Civility.
Étienne Balibar
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Étienne Balibar
Étienne Balibar.jpg
Born 23 April 1942 (age 76)
Avallon, Burgundy, France
Alma mater École Normale Supérieure
Era 20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Post-Marxism
Main interests
Politics
Notable ideas
Equaliberty
Influences[show]
Influenced[show]
Étienne Balibar (French: [balibaʁ]; born 23 April 1942) is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University and a Visiting Professor at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.
Contents
1 Life
2 Work
3 Bibliography
3.1 Works in French
3.2 Selected translations
3.3 Online texts
4 References
5 Further reading
6 External links
6.1 Archival collections
6.2 Other
Life
Balibar was born in Avallon, Yonne, Burgundy, France in 1942, and first rose to prominence as one of Althusser's pupils at the École Normale Supérieure. He entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1960.[1]
In 1961, Balibar joined the Parti communiste français. He was expelled in 1981 for critiquing the party's policy on immigration in an article.[2]
Balibar participated in Louis Althusser's seminar on Karl Marx's Das Kapital in 1965.[3] This seminar resulted in the book Reading Capital, co-authored by Althusser and his students. Balibar's chapter, "On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism," was republished along with those of Althusser in the book's abridged version (trans. 1970),[4] until a complete translation was published in 2016.[5]
In 1987, he received his doctorate degree in philosophy from the Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen in the Netherlands.[1] He received his habilitation from the Université Paris I in 1993. Balibar joined the University of Paris X-Nanterre as a professor in 1994, and the University of California, Irvine in 2000. He became Professor Emeritus of Paris X in 2002.[1]
His daughter with the physicist Françoise Balibar is the actress Jeanne Balibar.[6]
Work
In Masses, Classes and Ideas, Balibar argues that in Das Kapital (or Capital), the theory of historical materialism comes into conflict with the critical theory that Marx begins to develop, particularly in his analysis of the category of labor, which in capitalism becomes a form of property. This conflict involves two distinct uses of the term "labor": labor as the revolutionary class subject (i.e., the "proletariat") and labor as an objective condition for the reproduction of capitalism (the "working class"). In The German Ideology, Marx conflates these two meanings, and treats labor as, in Balibar’s words, the "veritable site of truth as well as the place from which the world is changed..."
In Capital, however, the disparity between the two senses of labor becomes apparent. One manifestation of this is the virtual disappearance in the text of the term "proletariat." As Balibar points out, the term appears only twice in the first edition of Capital, published in 1867: in the dedication to Wilhelm Wolff and in the two final sections on the "General Law of Capitalist Accumulation". For Balibar, this implies that "the emergence of a revolutionary form of subjectivity (or identity)... is never a specific property of nature, and therefore brings with it no guarantees, but obliges us to search for the conditions in a conjuncture that can precipitate class struggles into mass movements...". Moreover, "[t]here is no proof… that these forms are always and eternally the same (for example, the party-form, or the trade union)."
In "The Nation Form: History and Ideology,"[7] Balibar critiques modern conceptions of the nation-state. He states that he is undertaking a study of the contradiction of the nation-state because "Thinking about racism led us back to nationalism, and nationalism to uncertainty about the historical realities and categorization of the nation" (329).
Balibar contends that it is impossible to pinpoint the beginning of a nation or to argue that the modern people who inhabit a nation-state are the descendants of the nation that preceded it. Balibar argues that, because no nation-state has an ethnic base, every nation-state must create fictional ethnicities in order to project stability on the populace:
Etienne Balibar with Judith Butler in Berkeley, 2014
"the idea of nations without a state, or nations 'before' the state, is thus a contradiction in terms, because a state always is implied in the historic framework of a national formation (even if not necessarily within the limits of its territory). But this contradiction is masked by the fact that national states, whose integrity suffers from internal conflicts that threaten its survival (regional conflicts, and especially class conflicts), project beneath their political existence to a preexisting 'ethnic' or 'popular' unity" (331)
In order to minimize these regional, class, and race conflicts, nation-states fabricate myths of origin that produce the illusion of shared ethnicity among all their inhabitants. In order to create these myths of origins, nation-states scour the historical period during which they were "formed" to find justification for their existence. They also create the illusion of shared ethnicity through linguistic communities: when everyone has access to the same language, they feel as if they share an ethnicity. Balibar argues that "schooling is the principal institution which produces ethnicity as linguistic community" (351). In addition, this ethnicity is created through the "nationalization of the family," meaning that the state comes to perform certain functions that might traditionally be performed by the family, such as the regulation of marriages and administration of social security.
Bibliography
Works in French
1965: Lire le Capital. With Louis Althusser et al.
1974: Cinq Etudes du Matérialisme Historique.
1976: Sur La Dictature du Prolétariat.
1985: Spinoza et la politique.
1988: Race, Nation, Classe. With Immanuel Wallerstein.
1991: Écrits pour Althusser.
1993: La philosophie de Marx.
1997: La crainte des masses.
1998: Droit de cité. Culture et politique en démocratie.
1999: Sans-papiers: l’archaïsme fatal.
2001: Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’État, le peuple.
2003: L'Europe, l'Amérique, la Guerre. Réflexions sur la médiation européenne.
2005: Europe, Constitution, Frontière.
2010: La proposition de l'égaliberté.
2010: Violence et Civilité
2011: Citoyen sujet et autres essais d'anthropologie philosophique
2012: Saeculum : Culture, religion, idéologie
Selected translations
1970: Reading Capital (London: NLB). With Louis Althusser. Trans. Ben Brewster.
1977: On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (London: NLB). Trans. Grahame Lock.
1991: Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London & New York: Verso). With Immanuel Wallerstein. Trans. Chris Turner.
1994: Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx (New York & London: Routledge). Trans. James Swenson.
1995: The Philosophy of Marx (London & New York: Verso). Trans. Chris Turner.
1998: Spinoza and Politics (London & New York: Verso). Trans. Peter Snowdon.
2002: Politics and the Other Scene (London & New York: Verso). Trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson & Chris Turner.
2004: We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press). Trans. James Swenson.
2014: Equaliberty: Political Essays (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Trans. James Ingram.
2015: Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press). Trans. G.M. Goshgarian.
2018: Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press). Trans. G. M. Goshgarian.
Online texts
Occasional Notes on Communism. In: Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy
Theses for an Alter-Globalising Europe .
Reading Capital (1968).
Self-Criticism: Answers to Questions from Theoretical Practice (1973).
On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1977).
At The Borders Of Europe (1999).
Etienne Balibar
Etienne Balibar is a French Marxist philosopher and the most celebrated student of Louis Althusser. He is also one of the leading exponents of French Marxist philosophy and the author of Spinoza and Politics, The Philosophy of Marx and co-author of Race, Nation and Class and Reading Capital.
Etienne R. Balibar
Research Interests
Moral and political philosophy
Etienne Balibar teaches at Columbia every Fall semester. He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He also holds a part-time Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He has published widely in the areas of epistemology, Marxist philosophy, and moral and political philosophy in general. His works include Lire le Capital (with Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, Roger Establet) (1965); The Philosophy of Marx (1995); Spinoza and politics (1998); Politics and the Other Scene (2002); We, the People of Europe? (2003) ; Equaliberty (2014) ; Violence and Civility. On the Limits of Political Philosophy (2015) ; Citizen Subject. Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (2017) ; Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (2018).
Etienne R. Balibar
Professor of French and Comparative Literature
MY CONTACT INFO
515-521 Philosophy Hall
OFFICE HOURS
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212.854.2500
eb2333@columbia.edu
Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Working Hypotheses
Posted May 11, 2010 by Étienne Balibar
Topics: Agriculture , DemocracyPlaces: Colombia , France , Israel
Listen to Étienne Balibar:
Étienne Balibar: . . . I will be trying to reverse the implicit rule of this kind of event. Far from coming with positions for which I would argue, I mean already established positions for which I would argue, trying to convince others that they can be shared, I’m coming with doubtful hypotheses in the hope that they will become challenged and possibly dismantled. I come from an intellectual and political tradition whose central principle — not always put into practice, I have to admit — was that only error leads to knowledge. I also share the idea, central in the work and method of Edward Said and other so-called post-colonial theorists, that difference of cultural traditions and backgrounds is not an obstacle to discussion and understanding, provided it is consciously recognized as a site of repressed prejudices that need to be systematically unraveled and submitted to self-criticism.
Allow me to be more specific and come to the subject itself. What the conjunction “and” in my title “Secularism and Cosmopolitanism” might suggest is that there is a complementarity of the two notions, or that we should try to build or rebuild a discourse combining the definition of secularism, even secularist perspective, with cosmopolitan perspective. I will readily admit that, in my view, these are positive notions and values, which form part of civic and democratic understanding of the political. Simultaneously, I have become aware that their combination is profoundly contradictory. Each of them in the contemporary situation — this situation is a result of a long history — essentially undermines, destructs, or deconstructs the meaning and stability of the other, putting its validity into question. This situation makes it probably more difficult, not less, to refer to them as complementary aspects of the same democratic project. So, in a sense, what I want to do is to make it more complicated to associate cosmopolitanism and secularism within a single problematic, as many of us might perhaps be tempted to do with different intentions in mind, either affirmative or negative. In particular, I am trying to work against a tendency to which I myself owe a great deal of my civic commitment, a tendency to see cosmopolitanism and secularism as natural components of modernity, which, as we know, can also become a reason for some of our contemporaries to challenge their validity and criticize their belonging to hegemonic discourse, essentially that of Eurocentric and European modernization of the world, in other terms, an imposition on the rest of the world of Europe’s anthropological and constitutional assumptions during and after the formal colonial era.
This kind of preoccupation leads me to formulate rather convoluted questions, I must admit. For example, supposed that, in the conditions of contemporary politics, no cosmopolitan project can acquire meaning without involving a secular dimension, so that no such thing as, for example, religious cosmopolitanism is thinkable. Why is it, then, that, initially at least, a secular, not to say secularist, understanding of the construction of the cosmopolis adds difficulties and contradictions to those already contained in the classical idea of instituting citizenship at a transnational level or granting it with a transnational dimension? Why is it that the explicit characterization of the public sphere as a non-religious or secular one, which seemed quite clear, if not universally accepted, at the level of the single city or the nation, becomes confusing and possibly self-destructive when we tentatively raise our definition of the political to the apparently unlimited, non-exclusive space of the human world? How could the obstacles contained in such a representation, adding utopia to utopia as it were, nevertheless figure a path to discussing political tasks and the kind of political process involved in the cosmopolitical horizon for our societies? And conversely, suppose that, at least in some regions of the world, or perhaps in all of them, each time in a singular way, there no longer exists any possibility to ground and implement a secular agenda in politics, to vindicate secularism in the regulation of social conflicts or development of such public services as education, healthcare, urbanism, etc., without referring to a cosmopolitan way of defining the political. Suppose, in other terms, there is no viable, no consistent, no progressive or democratic secularism that can be less than cosmopolitan, so that, in particular, secularism defined in purely national terms, or subjected to the mere imperatives of national unity and national security, would instantly become contradictory and in fact self-destructive. Again, why is it that such a formula does not so much remove obstacles as in fact creates them, or, to be more cautious, reveals them in a manner that precludes immediate and visible solutions?
In other terms, what I have in mind in the first place is the fact that secularism and cosmopolitanism — now again hotly, hotly debated issues — remain indeed less and less separable. More than ever there is a necessity of discussing each of them in terms of its intersection with the other. However, their conjunction produces a terrible vacillation in almost each and every one of the apparent certainties that we associate with the names of secularism and cosmopolitanism, the vacillation that is indeed so violent that it can be doubted whether they will survive this trial in a recognizable form. I’m tempted here also — because in a minute I will refer to some of her analysis in this sphere — to simply borrow the marvelous title of Joan Scott’s seminal book on the constitution of republican citizenship in French constitutional history: Only Paradoxes to Offer. I do so because I believe that such a formula aptly indicates what in other places I have suggested is the intrinsic property of the development of citizenship as a historical institution, namely its antinomic or contradictory character or its capacity to generate internal contradictions and become in some circumstances self-destructive. I try to associate this with the idea that citizenship, at the same time, is a necessary relation to processes of democratization and nevertheless remains irreducible to pure democracy. I admit that this represents an extremely quick shortcut, but let me suggest that along those lines, those of discussion of antinomies of citizenship, cosmopolitanism and secularism are indeed parts of a project of democratizing the accepted forms of democracy or democratic citizenship themselves that cannot be brushed aside, but at the same time they indicate limits, contemporary limits, of the possibility of expanding citizenship in a democratic manner, limits which could prove insurmountable for a long time perhaps. And this is even more the case when their conflictual interdependency is perceived. . . .
<
Étienne Balibar is Professorial Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Paris 10 Nanterre, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Balibar also teaches seminars at the Centro Franco-Argentino de Altos Estudios de la Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. His numerous books include Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser, 1965), On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1976), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (with Immanuel Wallerstein, 1991), Masses, Classes, Ideas (1994), The Philosophy of Marx (1995), Spinoza and Politics (1998), Politics and the Other Scene (2002), We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2004). Balibar is a member of Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (Paris), with a particular interest in the rights of migrants and asylum seekers. He is also co-founder of Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace and acting chair of l’Association Jan Hus. This lecture was delivered at the Birkbeck Institute on 6 May 2010. The text above is an edited partial transcript of the lecture.
Secularism and Cosmopolitanism
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 <
Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics
Publishers Weekly. 265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p73.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics
Etienne Balibar, trans. from the French by 6. M. Goshgarian. Columbia Univ., $28 (288p) ISBN 978-0-231-16860-1
Philosopher Balibar (Violence and Civility) undercuts the liberal faith in secularism as a solution to political problems in this dense, precise work. He opens with a complex and subtle essay about the inherent paradox of secularism and cosmopolitanism. Although robust democracy and intellectual debate require exposure to differences, Balibar argues, proponents of secularism attempt to flatten out human variety. Religion, in his mind, will continue to survive and morph into new forms, and requires a new secularism that can turn its own critique of subjugating ideologies on itself. In the pieces that follow, Balibar further develops his argument that Western thought obscures the "hegemonic overtones of terms" to perpetuate the power of the ruling classes. "Monotheism" is a surprisingly recent creation deployed to defend political structures, he writes, and "secularism" purports to be universal despite arising from a very specific time and place. Balibar's less detailed (though no less demanding) essays critique responses to the Charlie Hebdo and Nice terrorist attacks, including an incisive breakdown of the issue of <
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 73. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535100016/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d658a128. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535100016
Balibar, Etienne. Citizenship
R.W. Glover
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.7 (Mar. 2016): p1084.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Balibar, Etienne. Citizenship, tr. by Thomas Scott-Railton. Polity, 2015. 145p bibl index afp ISBN 9780745682402 cloth, $59.95; ISBN 9780745682419 pbk, $16.95
53-3261
JF801
2014-45196 CIP
Balibar's latest work explores the conceptual complexity packed within modern notions of citizenship and the related concept of democracy. Balibar lays bare the contradictions and tensions packed within contemporary conceptions of the political: that universalist modes of citizenship, rooted in equality and liberty, necessitate and engender new forms of exclusion; or that institutionalizing rights can create obstacles for movements seeking to further expand the register of recognition and belonging. Particularly useful is the nuance and subtlety Balibar brings to the analysis of exclusionary effects of citizenship, not limited simply to borders, categorizations, or status. Balibar recognizes that even political inclusion can be "just as violent" when it constitutes a loss of group autonomy as one is pressed into "conversion" or "assimilation." Far from another mere lament of the "hollowing out" of citizenship, Balibar's articulation<< brings clarity to ways that popular action can initiate and enact political change>>. These tensions inherent to citizenship create spaces of possibility, in which Balibar articulates a notion of democratic citizenship as an insurrectionist political form. Citizenship exists as the field through which contentious struggles can unfold<< in an effort to "democratize democracy.">> Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.--R. W. Glover, University of Maine
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Glover, R.W. "Balibar, Etienne. Citizenship." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Mar. 2016, p. 1084. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A445735681/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d6a569eb. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A445735681
Balibar, Etienne. Violence and civility: on the limits of political philosophy
P.N. Malcolmson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.3 (Nov. 2015): p498.
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Full Text:
Balibar, Etienne. Violence and civility: on the limits of political philosophy, tr. by G. M. Goshgarian. Columbia, 2015. 212p index afp ISBN 9780231153980 cloth, $30.00; ISBN 9780231527187 ebook, $29.99
53-1516
JC328
2014-29659 CIP
In 1996, Balibar (emer., philosophy, Paris X, Nanterre) delivered the prestigious annual Wellek Library Lectures, which are normally published shortly afterward. Balibar's were not because he did not feel his thinking on the subject was sufficient. This book, a translation of the original French version (2010), is introduced by a lecture he gave in 1992 and concludes with a lecture delivered in 2003. It thus contextualizes and extends his Wellek Lectures. Critically drawing upon the philosophical traditions of Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, and others, Balibar takes issue with the idea that all "historical violence is in the last instance convertible." He is thus pessimistic that political violence can ever be completely controlled. Even revolutionary violence, with justice on its side, thus requires a "politics of civility" if it is to be truly transformative. Extreme violence (cruelty) is the limit of politics. Strategies of civility can help people understand those limits, but Balibar seems less than optimistic that they can be transcended. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Graduate and research collections.--P. N. Malcolmson, St. Thomas University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Malcolmson, P.N. "Balibar, Etienne. Violence and civility: on the limits of political philosophy." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Nov. 2015, p. 498. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A434319851/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8ecda2d0. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A434319851
Etienne Balibar: The Philosophy of Marx
Tony N. Buell
Capital & Class. 35.2 (June 2011): p326+.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309816811402312
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Conference of Socialist Economists
http://www.cseweb.org.uk
Full Text:
Etienne Balibar
The Philosophy of Marx, Verso, 2007, 139 pp: 9781844671878 9.99 [pounds sterling] (ppk)
This concise, illuminating and thought-provoking book deserves a place in the library of anyone with an interest in Marxian politico-philosophical analyses. Etienne Balibar explores an assortment of concepts including 'alienation', 'fetishism' and the materialist/ idealist dichotomy. A few arguments deserve a much more extensive critique than is actually provided, including the contention that Marx can be read as a crescendo of German idealism. Ultimately however, The Philosophy of Marx is a successful defence of the seemingly contradictory thesis: 'Whatever may have been thought in the past, there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be; on the other hand, Marx is more important for philosophy than ever before' (p. 1, original emphasis).
Balibar situates the 'non-philosophy' of Marx within a substantial intellectual universe of both Marxist and non-Marxist thought, including philosophers and social theorists as diverse as Aristotle, Adam Smith, Levi-Strauss and Nietzsche. Such breadth is by far the book's greatest strength. You will not find any proclamation even resembling dogmatic party lines. The book pivots not just around Western Marxism, but Western philosophical discourse more generally. For example, the author demonstrates how Marx's transindividual ontology of social relations is really a dual rejection and supersession of the Hobbesian 'monad' as well as Comte's 'grand etre'. Balibar takes a cursory venture into both Soviet and Chinese communism by way of Lenin, Pashukanis and Mao. Curiously however, no mention is ever made of Trotsky even in the 'Bibliographical guide' that is provided as an appendix. One cannot bur consider this omission as purposeful, albeit lacking an evident motive.
The most interesting and technical of Balibar's arguments are outlined in the penultimate chapter entitled, 'Time and Progress'. Here, the author dances around positioning orthodox historical materialism within a teleological evolutionist paradigm, which regards societal progress as proceeding through ever-higher universal stages, culminating in the case of Marxism with a positively free human community. There are actually two separate but overlapping charges entailed in such a classification. The first is that, 'it is practically impossible not to be an evolutionist in the nineteenth century', and that Marxism has never fully shed itself of this antiquated point of view (p. 91). Secondly, so many readings of Marx generalise his models of Western European capitalism vis-a-vis Das Kapital and revolutionary praxis vis-a-vis The Communist Manifesto as the models of socioeconomic development and liberation. Balibar advocates the total abandonment of such deterministic accounts. There is neither 'capitalism "in general"' nor any 'universal history', but rather 'capitalisms' and 'singular historicities' (p. 110). Historical materialists ought to analyse the agency of class struggle as well as the subject as practice.
For all its deserved praise, there are a couple of shortcomings in the book that should be accounted for. First, Balibar's persistent allusions to his former mentor and co-author of Reading Capital, Louis Althusser, strike the reviewer as reminiscent of a Wacquantian style of self-referentiality. For example, an entire inset is devoted to Althusser, complete with reference to Balibar himself. Furthermore, the extensive attention given to theories of 'ideology' and the concept of 'misrecognition' require discussion of structural Marxism by way of Althusser. The second weakness of the text is the inconsistent analytical standards. At certain points, Balibar encourages readers to view philosophical questions through the mind of Marx by interpreting his intentions as well as following the 'letter of the text' (p. 33). At other points, we are encouraged to gaze retrospectively toward Marx through the lens of more contemporary theoretical schemas and concepts, such as 'performativity', 'interpellation' and 'symbolic structures'. At still other certain points, Balibar requests the liberty to read 'between the lines' (p. 20). While such positional interchanges are fascinating, ultimately this strategy detracts from the soundness of his analysis.
Balibar's twelve textual insets provide invaluable context to a novice explorer of Marxian thought. Every eleventh page, on average, contains a bracketed region of text devoted either to an intellectual biography of a prominent Marxist ora recontextualisation of a dogmatic principle or schema. Topics of these insets include, inter alia, 'dialectical materialism', Walter Benjamin, and 'determination in the last instance'.
Readers ought to use this text in two primary ways. The first and most highly recommended is to use The Philosophy of Marx as a tool with which to revisit and rethink some core philosophical, political and anthropological inquiries. For example, Balibar explores how Marx addresses the timeless question of human essence. Furthermore, Balibar breathes new life into the theories of 'fetishism', 'class struggle' and 'dialectics'. Second, this book will make an excellent addition to any course curriculum on political philosophy or social theory. Assigning this book toward the conclusion of such a course will allow students to appreciate the continued relevance of studying Marx, particularly the young Marx, by way of The German Ideology and the 1844 Manuscripts. I do not, however, want to leave the reader of this review with the idea that Balibar confines his discussion to the younger and more theoretically humanistic Marx. On the contrary, the French professor encourages us to read the entirety of Marx's oeuvre qua philosophy, albeit an incomplete 'anti-philosophical' 'plurality of doctrines' (p. 4).
DOI: 10.1177/0309816811402312
Reviewed by Tony N. Buell, Northeastern University, Boston MA, USA
Tony N. Buell is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. His academic interests include social theory; crime, deviance and social control; and social psychology. He is currently conducting research on class-based differences in the desistance process.
Buell, Tony N.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Buell, Tony N. "Etienne Balibar: The Philosophy of Marx." Capital & Class, vol. 35, no. 2, 2011, p. 326+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A261080686/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=17ba6932. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A261080686
Spinoza and politics
Reference & Research Book News. 24.1 (Feb. 2009):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Ringgold, Inc.
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Full Text:
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Spinoza and politics.
Balibar, Etienne. Trans. by Peter Snowdon.
Verso
2008
136 pages
$12.95
Paperback
Radical thinkers; 27
B3999
Everything Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) said seems to preclude finding anything meaningful about politics in his work, admits Balibar (philosophy, U. of Paris-X). Still, or perhaps therefore, he takes on the challenge of introducing the Dutch philosopher's thought through his politics. Among the approaches he finds are the crisis of the Dutch Republic, the legacy of theocracy, the body politic, sociability, and power and freedom. Spinoza et la politique was published in 1985 by Presses Universitaries de France; Snow's translation first appeared in 1998.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Spinoza and politics." Reference & Research Book News, Feb. 2009. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A196721077/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7522ab52. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A196721077
Spinoza and Politics
Jeffrey A. Bernstein
The Review of Metaphysics. 53.2 (Dec. 1999): p426.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
http://www.reviewofmetaphysics.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=16
Full Text:
BALIBAR, Etienne. Spinoza and Politics. Translated by Pete Snowdon. New York: Verso Books, 1998. xvii + 124 pp. Paper, $18.00--Balibar's text gives an interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy which has received relatively scarce attention in the English speaking world. This interpretation can be termed "dialectical" insofar as it views Spinoza's texts in a dynamic relationship with one another, and with the historical and theologico-political environment of seventeenth century Holland. Thus, when he states that "I propose to initiate the reader into Spinoza's thinking through his politics," (p. xxii) Balibar means for the political context to be understood not as a static ground for Spinoza's philosophy, but rather as in continuous dialogue and exchange with his thought.
An example of dialectical thinking, with respect to the theological ideology of Spinoza's context, occurs in Chapter One when Balibar discusses the conflict between the orthodox Calvinist pastors (who advanced the doctrine of predestination) and the Arminians (who advocated free will) (p. 11). Spinoza's response to both sides was to challenge the shared assumption of a personal deity: "Spinoza does not identify the `eternal will of God' with grace, in opposition to human nature; ... he identifies it with nature itself, in its totality and its necessity" (p. 12).
Next, Balibar extends his analysis of Spinoza's response to the theologico-political register where the aristocratic Orangists and the bourgeois Regentists--who compete d for monarchical control of Holland--opposed the Gomarists and the "Christians without a Church" (that is, the Socinians and Collegiants, among others) who competed in their advocacy of the democratic "aspirations of the common people" (p. 20). Balibar shows (in Chapter Two) that Spinoza's response, while clearly antimonarchical, again questions the presupposition of both sides--namely, the opposition between the sovereign state and the free individual: "the sovereignty of the State and individual freedom do not need to be separated, nor indeed conciliated, because they are not in contradiction. The contradiction lies precisely in the attempt to set them up in opposition to one another" (p. 27).
Indeed, contradiction, far from being a hindrance which disallows political or philosophical thought (the two for Balibar's Spinoza imply each other [p. 4]) is rather a feature of the concrete, historical world, thus calling for new approaches which fit the given circumstances. Contradiction is "in the first place ... a reality (... itself ... historical) whose analysis would require the invention of new methods and new tools"(p. 44). For this reason, a concept such as "democracy" does not, in Spinoza's thought, amount to a static oppositional hindrance when compared with other types of regimes such as "monarchy." Instead, Spinoza taps into the dynamic possibilities contained in the idea of democracy, thus allowing its fluid interaction depending on the context. In the final essay (not included in the French text)--entitled, "Politics and Communication"--Balibar shows how this dialectical concept of democracy functions for Spinoza in a dynamic (rather than static) manner: "When the mass is fully active ... , then the State has achieved what for Spinoza is the absolute of power--internal stability.... But this concept clearly corresponds to a `striving' (a tendency) rather than to a static state ... [I]nstead of a theory of democracy what we have is a theory of democratisation, which is valid for every regime" (p. 121). As with the previous examples, Spinoza's approach is to resist the opposition which bounds the two sides together in order to suggest a new way to conceive of those sides.
There is one way in which Balibar's text resists its own dialectical movement in favor of stasis. Tiffs resistance occurs around the idea of history. In his emphasis on the political, Balibar seems to treat the notion of history as if it were a universal notion: "One might think that for such a radical naturalism the notion of history would have no meaning.... Rather, the `nature' with ,which we are dealing here is nothing other than a new way of thinking about history, according to a method of rational exegesis that seeks to explain events by their causes" (p. 36). Therefore, "nature is effectively identical with history" (p. 69). Nature is, however, comprised of irreducibly singular finite modes, each with radically fluid temporalities;. For Balibar the tension between finite modes and political communities "is nothing other than the struggle of individuals who have no preestablished goal to transform their own collective `temperament'"(p. 96). Calling this "collective temperament" history, however, suggests that a certain configuration of finite modes has priority over any given finite mode. The question then arises: how is it possible to think the fluidity of finite modes in a manner which does not privilege one configuration over the indefinitely many others? How can one think the "politics" in Balibar's title in an even more rigorously dialectical manner?--Jeffrey A. Bernstein, Miami University.
(*) Books received are acknowledged in this section by a brief resume, report, or criticism. Such acknowledgement does not preclude a more detailed examination in a subsequent Critical Study. From time to time, technical books dealing with such fields as mathematics, physics, anthropology, and the social sciences will be reviewed in this section, if it is thought that they night be of special interest to philosophers.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bernstein, Jeffrey A. "Spinoza and Politics." The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 53, no. 2, 1999, p. 426. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A64426390/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=89e90bac. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A64426390
Book Review: Citizenship by Étienne Balibar
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Citizenship presents a collection of seven lectures by Étienne Balibar, extending his longstanding engagement with citizenship as a concept that is both inextricably linked to, and in contradiction with, democracy. While the text may occasionally lose sight of its central topic of citizenship, Chris Moreh highlights its ‘affirmative’ agenda in the face of contemporary challenges to democratic politics.
Citizenship. Étienne Balibar. Polity. 2015.
CitizenshipÉtienne Balibar needs no introduction to readers in the field of citizenship studies, yet precisely for this reason it is useful to place his latest book, Citizenship, in the context of its author’s body of work and broader intellectual background. Balibar came to prominence as one of Louis Althusser’s preeminent students at the École Normale Supérieure, with whom he co-authored his first book on Reading Capital, originally published as Lire le Capital in 1965. Including additional contributions from other participants in Althusser’s reading seminar, the abridged English edition five years later became one of the most influential texts of Marxist philosophy internationally. After two decades dedicated to elucidating core Marxist concepts – amongst which historical materialism, ideology and the dictatorship of the proletariat were the most central to his interests – it was in the second half of the 1980s that Balibar became increasingly engaged with questions of race, nationalism and citizenship. His early work on these topics was collected in the volumes Race, Nation, Classe: Les identités ambiguës (1988, co-authored with Immanuel Wallerstein) and Les Frontières de la democratie (1992); these contained the origins of the central ideas in the present volume.
Approaching the topic through his sophisticated dialectical lens, Balibar described ‘citizenship’ in one of his earliest interventions on the subject to be translated into English as bound to both a principle of public sovereignty and to an individual capacity towards political participation. ‘This is why the dimension of equality’ – he noted – ‘is always present in the constitution of a concept of citizenship’ (1988: 723). It is this idea of a constituent antinomy at the heart of citizenship that has been most dominantly retained in Balibar’s decades-long engagement with the political concept.
Citizenship, for him, ultimately rests on a ‘dialectic’ between rights and duties; between the principle of liberty and that of equality; tautologically, between democracy and citizenship itself. In discussing these characteristics, he famously adopts the notion of equaliberty – first introduced in a talk given in the fateful year 1989 and now the English title of another of Balibar’s influential recent books – which traces back to the political tradition of Roman republicanism and Cicero’s conviction that liberty, that most desirable of blessings, ‘if it be not equally established for every one, it is not even liberty at all’ (30). This is the foundational social democratic principle underlying Balibar’s thinking on the subject.
Citizenship, the book, is not a new stage in the intellectual development of its author, but rather a collection of seven lectures, many of which have previously seen print as individual essays and first came together in the original Italian edition of 2012. The text’s novelty, however, rests in the teleological structure of argumentation, culminating in the formulation of seven ‘theses’ or ‘theoretical propositions’ at the end of the volume (indeed, Theses on Citizenship could have been just as valid a title, if only for the final chapter). The last, recapitulative proposition, which somewhat abruptly concludes the book – avowedly a ‘provisional conclusion’ (6) – besides encapsulating the main argument, also echoes the determination of Karl Marx’s own famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, proclaiming in an equally powerful voice that ‘insurrection, in its different forms, is the active modality of citizenship: the modality that it brings into action’ (131).
Building up to this apotheotic conclusion, the chapters of the book undertake an archaeology of the dialectic of citizenship and democracy from Aristotle through to the emergence of ‘the Rights of Man and Citizen’ in modernity’s archetypal insurrectional moment, to the consolidation of the European welfare state – or the ‘social-national state’, as the author prefers – and its paradoxically inherent propensity to create new social exclusions and civil conflict, to the adversities of neoliberal ‘governance’.
Citizenship imageImage Credit: Panoramic image of Acropolis Hill and Parthenon at night (Ggia)
The working hypothesis of this book affirms the antinomy between citizenship and democracy; the two concepts are ‘inextricably linked’, argues the author, yet ‘at the heart of the institution of citizenship there is a contradiction with regard to democracy’ (2). According to Balibar, democracy or the ‘constitution of citizenship’<< is something that can never be fully achieved>>, for ‘a democracy whose role is to “preserve” a certain definition of citizenship is also’ – he argues – ‘incapable of resisting its own “de-democratization”’ (37). Following Wendy Brown, he contends that neo-liberalism is currently achieving such a ‘de-democratization’, and adopts Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s view that countering it requires a ‘democratization of democracy’: an active citizenship through means of insurrectional politics.
Despite the bluntness of its title, the book is not an introductory text to the concept and politics of citizenship, but rather a composite analysis reliant on ‘a specific conception of political philosophy’ (3). In fact, at times it feels like the text itself – consciously or unconsciously – reflects the contemporary emptiness of citizenship, its demise and overshadowing by the neoliberal discourse of democracy as a product readily packaged for export. It is indeed the case that ‘de-democratization’ employs a narrative abduction and exhaustion, and in refuting such an understanding of democracy, Balibar also lets citizenship slip into the background. While this doubtfully intended artistic effect may rouse the insurgent instincts of some, it leaves most readers interested in citizenship even less reassured.
On the other hand, one of the great theoretical achievements of the book is in distancing itself from the negativity of many leftist critiques of global capitalism to instead propose a positive, ‘affirmative’ agenda when identifying the foremost challenge facing democratic politics today: ‘finding forms of collective autonomy that would correspond to the environment of globalization’ (122). It is solely by virtue of the author’s ingenuity that such a characteristically ‘third way’ stance could still be coupled with an electrifying radicalism. At the same time, this may just become the Achilles heel of the book in the close reading of an equally resourceful reader. It is, therefore, a work that opens up to many possibilities of appropriation, and should attract the attention of many.
Chris Moreh is a Research Fellow at the ESRC Centre for Population Change at the University of Southampton. He received his PhD in Social Sciences from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, and holds an MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University, and an MA in Cultural Anthropology from Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. His recent research focuses on the political sociology of transnational citizenship, primarily in the context of migration from Central Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom, having previously studied migration to Spain and Hungary. He has also conducted research on topics as varied as gentrification and urban heritage, and the political discourse of Asianisation. He Tweets @CGMoreh, and his writings are available on academia.edu.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.
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ÉTIENNE BALIBAR
Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy
Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, G.M. Goshgarian (tr.), Columbia University Press, 2015, 212 pp., $30.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780231153980.
Reviewed by Todd May, Clemson University
Étienne Balibar is one of the most rigorous thinkers of contemporary politics, especially European politics, that his generation in France has produced. A student of Louis Althusser, <
The book is dedicated to Derrida's memory. It is not hard to see why. Balibar sees a necessary haunting by violence of all political movements that seek to eliminate it -- that is, all political movements. Thus there is an economy of violence and the attempt to suppress it with which political reflection must come to terms. Among the implications of this is that, contrary to many utopian political movements of the twentieth century, "we must renounce eschatological perspectives, even in their secularized forms, which, as we know, were always insistent in the revolutionary discourse about politics, especially in its communist variants." (xiv)
What is violence, then? Balibar does not say. He notes that there are many forms of violence, and his examples include not only physical violence but also<
He contrasts these two forms of violence in this way:
the first [ultraobjective] kind of cruelty calls for treating masses of human beings as things or useless remnants, while the second requires that individuals and groups be represented as <
Or again:
one of which [ultraobjective] proceeds by way of an inversion of the utility principle and the transformation of human beings into not useful commodities but disposable waste, while the other proceeds by installing in place of the subject's will the fetishized figure of an 'us' reduced to absolute homogeneity. (61)
Ultraobjective violence is usually more of a structural matter. As an example, we can consider Marx's unemployed "industrial reserve army," those who are ready to work but have no employment. However, if we are to do so, we must abstract from this example the role the industrial reserve army plays in keeping wages low. Ultraobjective violence reduces its objects to masses without any role whatsoever. In contemporary politics, undocumented immigrants (a common example in French leftist discourse from Alain Badiou to Jacques Rancière) might serve as a privileged case. By contrast, ultrasubjective violence, of which Nazism provides the most extreme example, is a more nearly psychological phenomenon. The other is an Other, a foreign object or a disease that threatens to infect or debilitate the group and for that reason must be eliminated. As contemporary cases we might think here not only of the racist view of undocumented immigrants but also of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, including those Palestinians that are Israeli citizens.
While distinct, these two forms of cruelty are in Balibar's view often engaged with each other. He borrows the image of the Möbius strip from the thought of Jacques Lacan to illustrate their relation. A Möbius strip is created by taking a strip of paper, twisting it once, and then attaching the two ends together. If one travels the length of such a strip, one will start on the outside and wind up on the inside before returning to the outside again and vice versa. The two sides of the strip are separate, but they lead to each other. Balibar views the relation of ultraobjective and ultrasubjective violence in this way. This is not difficult to see in our world. In the US, for example, public discourse about undocumented immigrants tends to include both themes of surplus -- they are stealing our jobs or bleeding our welfare system -- and of evil -- they are raping our women and creating violence in our cities.
The urgent question for Balibar is one of how to deal with such violence? He does not believe it can be eliminated -- or, more precisely, he believes that the threat of such violence cannot be eliminated. This, he thinks, is one of the great political lessons of previous centuries, particularly the past one. Thus he rejects, in a long discussion, Hegel's view that negative violence can be "converted" into positive violence: a violence that will eliminate cruelty. He notes that Hegel is
constantly engaging in two quite dubious, and what is more, inseparable operations on which the very possibility of internalizing violence depends. One consists in restricting the 'historically' significant instances of violence to certain specific forms that are in fact always already 'political'; a second consists in idealizing the effects of political violence less by downplaying the ravages and suffering they cause than by imposing meaning on them. (49)
What goes for Hegel also goes for Marx, although Balibar is careful to note that Marx's own view is a nuanced one. There is, on the one hand, a recognition of irrecuperable violence in Marx's thought, and yet, on the other, Marx often tilts toward a teleological view that posits the absorption of violence in the communist society.
If violence, or at least its threat, cannot be eliminated, what can be done to address it? Balibar briefly considers and rejects two options before embracing a third. The two he rejects are nonviolence and counterviolence. Nonviolence is to Balibar an "abstraction" (22) from violence. It fails to recognize that violence is always a threat, opting instead to occupy a position that seeks to be beyond the threat of violence. Counterviolence, by contrast, seeks to invoke violence against violence, hoping to end violence by violent means. This strategy, however, is simply an "inversion" (22) of violence, one whose consequence is often to repeat the cruelties that it set out to oppose. Instead of these two strategies, which share a false commitment to the idea that the threat of violence and in particular of the extreme violence of cruelty can be terminated, Balibar believes we must embrace a strategy of anti-violence or civility. He insists that "unless a politics of civility is introduced into the heart of the politics of transformation, indications are that the latter will not by itself create the conditions for emancipation (but only those of another form of servitude)." (104)
What, then, is civility? Although Balibar discusses several arenas for a politics of civility, he does not have much to say directly about its character. His discussion is more focused on the violence it seeks to prevent or at least keep at bay. However, from that discussion we can draw out his meaning. Civility, at a first go, is the attempt to ward off cruelty, to be cognizant of the twin but distinct threats of ultraobjective and ultrasubjective violence, and to counter them within whatever politics of transformation is being embraced. This, in turn, would require recognizing what might be called broadly the humanity of others: their distinct lives with their distinct dreams and hopes and projects and loves. (We will leave aside a discussion of the recognition of the "animality" of non-human animals, although it would be relevant at this juncture.) This recognition resists the reduction of others to an anonymous surplus or a diabolical Other. As Balibar would undoubtedly be the first to note, such a recognition is difficult on the terrain of political struggle. Such struggle often brings out the worst in both oneself and others and therefore poses an eliminable threat of a descent into violence and even cruelty. That is why, for Balibar, anti-violence or civility is never finished as a project and politics is always "precarious." "The idea of the precariousness of politics can be associated, it seems to me, with a modality of contingency that in some sort inscribes risk and discontinuity in everyday life (or, better, in the everyday reality of conflict)." (97)
Regarding strategies of civility, Balibar has isolated three: what he calls the hegemonic, the majoritarian, and the minoritarian (the latter involving a reference to Deleuze and Guattari's "becoming-minor"). The hegemonic is a state strategy, one that seeks to impose civility through the institution of Sittlichkeit, a normalizing morality. This, Balibar notes, is a Hegelian strategy, and its drawback is precisely in the imposition of a potentially overweening normality. Majoritarian and minoritarian movements, in contrast to hegemonic ones, operate from below rather than above in the state. They, however, have their own dangers.
We might say that the majoritarian viewpoint constantly detects a danger of ultraobjective violence in the "micropolitics of desire," whereas the minoritarian viewpoint constantly sees a danger of ultrasubjective violence (a recurrent fantasy of sovereignty) in the "macropolitics of emancipation," producing what could be called the antinomy of antistate civility. (124)
The latter danger is straightforward. Where revolutionary movements seize the state in the name of liberation, there is often a temptation to root out minority opposition as a diabolical or, in a medical image, cancerous growth within the population. The danger of ultraobjective violence, I take it, is one of ignoring structural concerns that are outside the realm of minoritarian desire, and so running the risk of reproducing or leaving intact the cruelty associated with such violence.
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The first question concerns the character of violence. Balibar uses the term to cover a broad swath of territory and concedes at the outset that there are many types of violence. One wonders, however, what all these different kinds of violence have in common that draw them into a single category. I am not asking here for a definition of violence itself. In composing a recent book on nonviolence, I sought to come up with a definition of violence that would cover all of its instances and failed miserably. Along the way I studied many other definitions, all of which I found wanting. However, Balibar seeks to confront, not all violence, but a number of specifically political forms of violence. One wonders what, for instance, structural violence has in common with the ascription of diabolical character to another that makes them both instances of violence, indeed for him instances of extreme violence or cruelty. My suspicion is that an answer to that question would lead back to concepts like dignity, humanity, and integrity, which would place his view in productive conversation with more traditional political views. I say this not as a criticism of Balibar's approach but rather as a way to place it in a context in which it can engage with other political views that at first glance it might seem distant from.
The second question concerns Balibar's view of nonviolence. For him, nonviolence is a utopian notion, one that has a teleological character and therefore resists recognizing the inherent political tendency toward violence. This, however, is not a view that would sit easily with those who have theorized about nonviolence. For them, and here I include Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as more recent theorists like Gene Sharp, the naïveté associated with such a view would be distant from their own approach. In fact, they are clear that violence is often a temptation, and they see the necessity for strict discipline among those who struggle in order to avoid it. In fact, one might say, they are committed to the view that "unless a politics of civility is introduced into the heart of the politics of transformation, indications are that the latter will not by itself create the conditions for emancipation (but only those of another form of servitude)." In other words, what Balibar offers under the name of civility is, perhaps, continuous with one of the central commitments that characterize nonviolent political action: a respect for the other and indeed for all others. If this is right, then one way to read Violence and Civility is as a contribution to a politics of nonviolence, a politics that, in our world, would be welcome indeed.