Étienne Balibar
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823273607
- eISBN:
- 9780823273652
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823273607.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience “the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship”? This title considers the necessary and ...
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What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience “the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship”? This title considers the necessary and necessarily antagonistic relation between the categories of citizen and subject. In this book, 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 Foucault, Freud, Kelsen, and Blanchot). After the “humanist controversy” that preoccupied twentieth-century philosophy, the book 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 the text 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, the text 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.Less
What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience “the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship”? This title considers the necessary and necessarily antagonistic relation between the categories of citizen and subject. In this book, 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 Foucault, Freud, Kelsen, and Blanchot). After the “humanist controversy” that preoccupied twentieth-century philosophy, the book 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 the text 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, the text 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.
Étienne Balibar
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780823273607
- eISBN:
- 9780823273652
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823273607.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This introductory chapter traces the evolution of the various hypotheses concerning the upheavals that modernity has produced in the field of philosophical anthropology, as collected in this volume. ...
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This introductory chapter traces the evolution of the various hypotheses concerning the upheavals that modernity has produced in the field of philosophical anthropology, as collected in this volume. It credits the formation of this book to its initial conception as a response to a question raised by Jean-Luc Nancy—“Who comes after the subject?” The chapter also summarizes the contents of the book in brief—breaking it down into three paths which help to interrogate the utterances of the subject of philosophy (autoreference, community, judgment)—and provides an overview into the theoretical approaches that inform the studies conducted in the following chapters.Less
This introductory chapter traces the evolution of the various hypotheses concerning the upheavals that modernity has produced in the field of philosophical anthropology, as collected in this volume. It credits the formation of this book to its initial conception as a response to a question raised by Jean-Luc Nancy—“Who comes after the subject?” The chapter also summarizes the contents of the book in brief—breaking it down into three paths which help to interrogate the utterances of the subject of philosophy (autoreference, community, judgment)—and provides an overview into the theoretical approaches that inform the studies conducted in the following chapters.
Irving Goh
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780823262687
- eISBN:
- 9780823266371
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823262687.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter underscores the fact that the contemporary world has recently witnessed the militant or even violent rise of rejects as a political phenomenon: the 2011 Arab Spring revolution; and the ...
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This chapter underscores the fact that the contemporary world has recently witnessed the militant or even violent rise of rejects as a political phenomenon: the 2011 Arab Spring revolution; and the 99% who protested against unequal wealth distribution. These events suggest a political potentiality of rejects, which Derrida recognizes by turning to the “rogue” or voyou. It is from the voyou, who idly roams the streets and is despised by civil society – hence some form of reject, that one begins thinking how democratic hospitality can accommodate this figure, or to critique the State’s monopoly over violent force that it deploys to neutralize the supposed threat the voyou poses to the State’s sovereignty. To bring democratic thinking further, especially to push it beyond anthropologic and anthropocentric limits, which tend to evacuate all considerations of animals, this chapter also elucidates the political potentiality of Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal.” With the latter, a more just response to injustice can be in place, where democratic institutions do not exclude animality or animal voices and silences, or require that these animal conditions be translated into rational, human speech before institutions are willing to intervene or address an injustice done to a being.Less
This chapter underscores the fact that the contemporary world has recently witnessed the militant or even violent rise of rejects as a political phenomenon: the 2011 Arab Spring revolution; and the 99% who protested against unequal wealth distribution. These events suggest a political potentiality of rejects, which Derrida recognizes by turning to the “rogue” or voyou. It is from the voyou, who idly roams the streets and is despised by civil society – hence some form of reject, that one begins thinking how democratic hospitality can accommodate this figure, or to critique the State’s monopoly over violent force that it deploys to neutralize the supposed threat the voyou poses to the State’s sovereignty. To bring democratic thinking further, especially to push it beyond anthropologic and anthropocentric limits, which tend to evacuate all considerations of animals, this chapter also elucidates the political potentiality of Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal.” With the latter, a more just response to injustice can be in place, where democratic institutions do not exclude animality or animal voices and silences, or require that these animal conditions be translated into rational, human speech before institutions are willing to intervene or address an injustice done to a being.
