SECOND CRITICAL STUDIES CONFERENCE
Etienne Balibar
Famously known for his contribution to Lire le Capital (Reading Capital), a result of Louis Althusser’s seminar on Karl Marx’s Capital, and coauthored by Althusser and his students, Etienne Balibar has been one of Europe’s most important philosophical and political thinkers since the 1960s. His work has been vastly influential on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the humanities and the social sciences.
In We, the People of Europe?, the last available work translated in English, he expands on themes raised in his previous writings to offer a trenchant analysis of “transnational citizenship” from the perspective of contemporary democratic movements in Europe. Combining deftly various critiques of state theories, national sovereignty, and debates on multiculturalism and European racism, Balibar leads the readers toward imagining a more democratic and less state-centered European citizenship. This imagination links citizenship with sensitivities about labour, gender, ecology, and cross-border immigrants. In this way Balibar makes Europe’s colonial past as a core issue of the present.
In Masses, Classes and Ideas, Balibar argues that in Das Kapital, the theory of historical materialism (or rather, the radical political economy that Marx developed in his early writings that would latter be referred to as “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 “labour” – labour as the revolutionary class subject (i.e., the “proletariat“) and labour as an objective condition for the reproduction of capitalism (the “working class”). For Balibar, what this problem implies is 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 Race, Nation, Class – Ambiguous Identities (co-authored with Immanuel Wallerstein) Balibar shows the linkages between claims to universality and the links of these claims to specifics, and shows the modern nature of racism linked to the nation form and acquiring populist sanctions. In all his other writings too he has forced us to reflect on the crucial political questions of our time in new ways that take into account the developments of the last half century – his own reflections leading us and shining in the long tradition of critical philosophical thought.
He is currently Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at Paris X Nanterre and Distinguished professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.
Select Bibliography
- 1965: Lire le Capital (en collaboration avec L. Althusser, P. Macherey, J. Rancière, R. Establet), Editions François Maspéro, Paris (2ème édition augmentée, 1968) (3ème édition, P.U.F. Collection “Quadrige”, 1996). (English translation: Reading Capital, New Left Books, 1970)
- 1974: Cinq Etudes du Matérialisme Historique, F. Maspéro, Paris.
- 1976: Sur la dictature du prolétariat, F. Maspéro, Paris. (traduit en Angleterre, Allemagne, Italie, Espagne, Portugal, Japon, Grèce, Iran) (Engl. transl. On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, New Left Books, 1977)
- 1985: Spinoza et la politique, P.U.F., Paris (Engl. transl. Spinoza and Politics, Verso,1998)
- 1988 : Race, Nation, Classe (en collaboration avec I. Wal¬lerstein), Editions La Découverte, Paris (2e édition 1997). (Engl. transl. Race, Nation, Class, Verso 1991)
- 1993 : La philosophie de Marx, collection “Repères”, Editions La Découverte, Paris (traduit en japonais, italien, anglais, brésilien, grec) (Engl. transl. The Philosophy of Marx, Verso 1995) (2e édition corrigée, 2001)
- 1994 : Masses, classes, ideas. Studies in politics and philosophy, Routledge, New York.
1998 : Droit de cité. Culture et politique en démocratie, Editions de l’Aube (réédition augmentée 2002 Presses Universitaires de France, Collection Quadrige) - 1998 : Identité et différence. Le chapitre II, xxvii de l’Essay concerning Human Understanding de Locke. L’invention de la conscience, Editions du Seuil (traduction, introduction et commentaire)
- 2002: Politics and the Other Scene , Verso, London and New York
2003: We, The People of Europe ? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton University Press (Adaptation de Nous, Citoyens d’Europe?)