What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship ? Citizen Subject is the summation of Etienne Balibar's career-long project to think the necessary and necessarily antagonistic relation between the categories of citizen and subject. In this magnum opus, the question of modernity is framed anew with special attention to the self-enunciation of the subject (in Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, and Derrida), the constitution of the community as we (in Hegel, Marx, and Tolstoy), and the aporia of the judgment of self and others (in Foucualt, Freud, Kelsen, and Blanchot).
After the humanist controversy that preoccupied twentieth-century philosophy, Citizen Subject proposes foundations for philosophical anthropology today, in terms of two contrary movements: the becoming-citizen of the subject and the becoming-subject of the citizen. The citizen-subject who is constituted in the claim to a right to have rights (Arendt) cannot exist without an underside that contests and defies it. He-or she, because Balibar is concerned throughout this volume with questions of sexual difference-figures not only the social relation but also the discontent or the uneasiness at the heart of this relation. The human can be instituted only if it betrays itself by upholding anthropological differences that impose normality and identity as conditions of belonging to the community.
The violence of civil bourgeois universality, Balibar argues, is greater (and less legitimate, therefore less stable) than that of theological or cosmological universality. Right is thus founded on insubordination, and emancipation derives its force from otherness.
Ultimately, Citizen Subject offers a revolutionary rewriting of the dialectic of universality and differences in the bourgeois epoch, revealing in the relationship between the common and the universal a political gap at the heart of the universal itself.
Etienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Universite de Paris X Nanterre; Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine; and Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. His research in the fields of political, moral, and Marxist philosophy focuses on emancipation, citizenship, and on what he terms equaliberty. The breadth of his thought can be gauged from his published works, from Reading Capital, released in 1965 and coauthored with his mentor Louis Althusser, to the more recent We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2003), Equaliberty (2014), Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (2015), Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (2017), and Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (2018). Steven Miller is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Psychoanalysis and Culture at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is author of War After Death: On Violence and Its Limits and translator of books by Catherine Malabou, Etienne Balibar, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Emily Apter is Silver Professor of Comparative Literature and French at New York University. She has published extensively in translation theory and is the author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Verso, 2013) and co-editor with Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood of the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton University Press, 2014). Her most recent book is Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018).
Title: Citizen Subject (Commonalities)
Author: Judith Butler, Steven Miller, Etienne Balibar
ISBN: 9780823273614
Binding:
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Publication Date: 2016-11-01
Number of Pages: 416
Weight: 0.8848 kg
The appearance of this book in France was something of a historic event. Under the heading of 'universality,' a concept that Balibar has almost single-handedly salvaged, Citizen Subject tries to rethink political belonging in our time, so as to redeem a humanism capable of contesting itself from the inside and available to serve the struggles of our day. Balibar rewrites a central tradition of Western philosophy from Descartes through Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, and from Wolstonecraft through Fanon, showing in case after brilliant case that the very writers most invoked as origins (or critics) of the subject had in fact been engaged in a common enterprise of thinking a social, nontranscendent self, the democratic citizen under the contradictory conditions of modernity. The result is one of the strongest, most ambitious, and most pertinent rewritings of the history of philosophy that readers are likely to encounter in their lifetimes. -- -Bruce Robbins Columbia University