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"BALIBAR, Étienne"
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Reinventing the Stranger: Walls all over the World, and How to Tear them Down
Balibar reflects on the changes and what remains pending in the global regime of borders and passports. What has certainly not evolved is the proliferation of walls, their installation on the site of borders, which they fortify and redouble, but also displace, or fragment, in nearly every part of the world, East and West, North and South. It has juridical, political, moral, economic, and in fact anthropological dimensions, since it commands the articulation of residence and mobility for entire populations. It is overdetermined by questions of security and the development of a new wave of xenophobia, but also remarkable efforts of solidarity, which create a new cosmopolitanism.
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A New Querelle of Universals
We are witnessing and participating in a new “Querelle of Universals” which has indissoluble political and philosophical characters. It ranges from the incorporation of anthropological differences (of gender-sex, race-culture, normality and abnormality, etc.) into the very definition of the “human” to the contemporary attempts at rethinking the diversity of histories within mankind as a multiverse of translations rather than a failed unity. The essay discusses a series of typical aporias that are relevant to this querelle and proposes a concept of subjectivity which elaborates their productivity.
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The expropriation of expropriators
This essay provides a genealogical, philological, and contextual analysis of the celebrated formula that concludes the section on the “historical tendency of capitalist accumulation” in volume one of Capital : “the expropriators are expropriated!” While it is supposed to encapsulate the revolutionary consequences that follow from the development of capital, in reality it expresses only one of several concepts of the “class struggles” that are contained in Marx’s essentially unfinished, equivocal, and open theory as proposed in his magnum opus. For us post-Marxist theorists and activists, the task remains to elucidate the various alternative possibilities of transformation inherent in contemporary post-socialist capitalism. This is a crucially important and urgent task, for which Marx’s elaborations, in their diversity, do not suffice, but prove indispensable for meditation.
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Politics of the Debt
This essay attends to the specifics of the debt economy within contemporary finance capital: its production of profit, credit, money, taxes, and derivatives; its control of institutions and its organizational techniques; its relation to the State, to banks, to industry, to labor, and to consumption; its management of risk and of cycles of boom and bust; and so forth. It offers a detailed account of debt as a generalized means of control and a powerful mechanism for generating, maintaining, and multiplying inequalities. Yet “debt” is not so much “sovereign” as characteristic of a quasi-sovereignty that remains susceptible to conflicts and contradictions. Thus, the essay asks questions about the limits of debt and debt accumulation. It also debates the possibility of debt cancellation, notably in the context of intensifying instabilities surrounding both the concept and practice of ownership or property.
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The Instance of the Letter and the Last Instance
In the 1960s and 70s, first Lacan and then Althusser invoked the category of instance, in a way which would mark what is today called the «structuralist moment» of French philosophy, profoundly influencing the discourse of those who were the disciples of both. The complex system of references to action, demand, insistence, effectivity, decision, hierarchy , which found themselves combined in the notion, proves difficult to translate into other languages, and in particular into English (which has today become the paramount language of critical theory ). In order to achieve a syncretism of three heritages (Marx, Freud, Saussure), the French theorists drew on the polysemic extension of the word « instance », which while it does exist in English, operates differently. Hence the interest in examining the divergent choices made by the English and American translators, reading them as symptoms of certain tensions and of a logical instability which affect, from within, the «structuralist» paradigm à la française .
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Racism Revisited: Sources, Relevance, and Aporias of a Modern Concept
Why do we call certain attitudes, both individual and collective, racist? Why do we list certain discourses—admittedly a very wide range of discourses, which single out, stigmatize, threaten, or discriminate against various human and social groups—as racist? Why do we consider that practices, both spontaneous and institutional, unofficial and officially organized, that in the past and present have resulted in lasting forms of oppression, persistent hostilities and misunderstanding, and sometimes tragic violence in all sorts of societies are racist? To my surprise, this basic and preliminary question is seldom addressed in the huge scholarly and popular literature concerning racism—the old and new forms of racism, the modernity or antiquity of racism, the quantitative and qualitative variations of racism, and so on. Or, better said, the question is addressed only partially and indirectly: the category itself is taken for granted, all the more because the study of racism has become an essential sociological and political object, and what are mainly discussed are different definitions and theories and the conditions of their application. It seems that the very fact that there exists (and has long existed) something called racism , which includes a variety of manifestations, is subject to transformations, and does not purely and simply coincide with violence, not even violence based on collective hatred, need not be questioned. But isn't it necessary to discuss the reasons that we consider this fact obvious?
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Violencia, política, civilidad
La violencia no es lo otro de la política. Al relacionar esta afirmación con la ambivalencia fundamental de la política, este artículo propone reexaminar las tensiones y las estrategias que se configuran entre política y violencia, discutiendo particularmente los grados y las modalidades de esta última. Se trata, así, de trazar las líneas de reparto, instables y móviles, y no metafísicas, de un lado, entre formas de crueldad y formas de civilidad, donde la civilidad hace referencia a las políticas de la antiviolencia y, del otro, entre violencia y violencia extrema. El artículo se enfrenta a la cuestión de la violencia extrema con respecto a la globalización capitalista, a las violencias comunitarias y al Estado, y examina finalmente las posibilidades y estrategias políticas de la civilidad, como una capacidad de actuar en el conflicto y sobre el conflicto.
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From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back: What to Do with Marx's Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach?
This essay is based on a reading of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach from 1845, especially Thesis 6 , which discusses its wording with reference to signifying chains tracing back to the constitution of Western Metaphysics. The claim that \"the human essence is not an abstract being inhabiting the singular individual\" not only rejects post-Aristotelian metaphysics, but also theologies of the interpellation of the subject. Saying that \"in its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations\" opens the possibility of a multifaceted ontology of relations. Further, it identifies a weakness in Marx's assessment of Feuerbach's philosophy of the \"generic being.\" It is on this basis that applications to contemporary debates on philosophical anthropology should be reformulated.
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