Citizen-Subject and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar

Walker, Gavin

doi:10.1353/pmc.2012.0018

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 12 publications

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“…The relation between subject and citizen, Balibar claims, “cannot be conceived as a linear succession or teleological transformation” (Balibar 2017a, 4; also 1994c, 13; 2003, 19). This claim includes but certainly cannot be reduced to the notion that the modern revolutions arrive with a delay or lag, or that old forms of oppression (“feudal remains”) are stubborn and refuse to give way to these new ideals (Balibar 2014b, 7; also Lampert 2009; Walker 2012; Toscano 2014, 765). Balibar goes much further: he argues that subjection continually haunts modern citizenship.…”

Section: Citizen Subject: Who Comes After the Subject?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Étienne Balibar on the dialectic of universal citizenship

Boonen

2021

Philosophy & Social Criticism

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In this article, I reconstruct Étienne Balibar’s work against the background of the debate on modern universal citizenship. I argue that universal citizenship is neither fundamentally emancipatory nor fundamentally oppressive but is rather both. In order to defend this position, I build on Balibar’s concept of the “citizen subject.” First, I parse this concept, showing how it allows us to think about the contradictions of modern universal citizenship. In the second section, I elucidate its temporal logic and show how it undermines the telos of modern universal citizenship. In sections three to five, I show how citizenship’s universalism clarifies both its oppressive and its emancipatory thrust. The dialectic of universal citizenship, I argue, unfolds as a conflict between and within political universals. In the conclusion, I will tie up these different strands and end with some reflections on the conditions of possibility of this dialectic.

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Section: Citizen Subject: Who Comes After the Subject?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Étienne Balibar on the dialectic of universal citizenship

Boonen

2021

Philosophy & Social Criticism

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Thinking Through Balibar’s Dialectics of Emancipation

Bromberg

2018

Hist. Mater.

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In this review, I discuss Balibar’s ‘proposition of equaliberty’ with regard to its theoretical status and contribution, its relationship to other contemporary theories of radical democracy as well as to the problematic of bourgeois versus communist emancipation in Marx. The primary interest of this essay is to develop a detailed understanding of Balibar’s analytical schema, which draws a complex picture of our contemporary ‘human condition’, and to place it within his own theoretical development since his contribution toReading Capitalin the 60s. On that basis, it will be possible to assess his contribution to thinking politics with and after Marx and place it more concretely within the generalised radical-democratic turn in post-Marxist theory.

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Tanigawa Gan and the Poetics of the Origin

Walker¹

2017

Positions: Asia Critique

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The work of the poet, theoretician, and political activist Tanigawa Gan (1923–95) played a decisive role in postwar Japanese intellectual and political life, deeply influencing the politics of 1968. By interrupting the prevailing discourses of democratic reconstruction, high economic growth, and the cosmopolitan Marxism of urban life, Tanigawa (along with the other members of his commune) practiced a rigorous subtraction from the dominant ideological and aesthetic discourse of postwar Japanese life. Remapping their politics by imbricating activism with the line of writing, they moved into the rural and isolated villages, the utterly deprived and depleted “forgotten” zones of the countryside, where Tanigawa attempted to discover an “origin,” not in a romantic or nativist sense, but as a source of human energy for the active aesthetic creation of life practices in exodus from the dominant society. Tanigawa's writing itself—his practice of holding politics and poetics immanent to the flux or energy of the historicity of the struggle of the oppressed, to the historical event of their dispossession—remains a powerful site of analysis for us today. In contemporary Japan, where the struggles of the unemployed, the homeless, and the semipermanently underemployed have emerged sharply against the backdrop of the turn to neoliberalism and dismantling of social policy, Tanigawa's work has seen a sudden resurgence. But his work is frequently being presented as “utopian,” “nativist,” “romantic,” and so forth. In examining a sequence of Tanigawa's poetry and certain of his critical essays, the author tries to disrupt such readings by arguing that his attempt to conceive of a practice of writing, not focused on the substantialization of “the people” or the region but, rather, on the dynamic flux of energy produced by this tension of exile itself, inaugurates a series of potential moments through which the possibilities of resistant mappings can be understood. For Tanigawa, the political potential of this mapping rather lies in mobilizing the histories of the affective memory of struggle that are sedimented in the communities of the dispossessed, what he called “operating” (kosaku) on the situation.

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Citizen-Subject and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar

Cited by 4 publications

References 12 publications

Étienne Balibar on the dialectic of universal citizenship

Étienne Balibar on the dialectic of universal citizenship

Thinking Through Balibar’s Dialectics of Emancipation

Tanigawa Gan and the Poetics of the Origin

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