Review of: Citizenship, by Etienne Balibar. 2015, Polity, 180 pp. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Citizenship as Equaliberty Practice in the Philosophy of Étienne Balibar
Springer International Publishing eBooks, 2022
This chapter focuses on citizenship as a critically envisaged and inherently conflictual term discussed in the work of Étienne Balibar, a contemporary French philosopher with a background in Althusserian Marxism. It interprets and explains citizenship as a term 'pervaded with antinomies', yet one very actual and crucial for critical philosophy. The problem of citizenship has central importance in Balibar's work, questioned in terms of its possibility in the current world and whether it can exist in contemporary globalized realities, under what conditions and how. To answer these questions, Balibar identifies the conditions of possibility of citizenship in history, finding them embedded in material socio-political settings, and discussing and developing his ideas in extensive works including Equaliberty: political essays (2014), Citizenship (2015) and The Citizen Subject (2017). Their interpretation provides contrast when evaluating the conditions of contemporary citizenship. Hence, his philosophy contains a critique, grounded in historical interpretation and critical reflection on
Etienne Balibar on the dialectic of universal citizenship
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2021
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.
Philosophy and Social Criticism (forthcoming), 2019
Arendt famously pointed out that only citizenship actually confers rights in the modern world. To be a citizen is to be one who has the “right to have rights.” Arendt’s analysis emerges out of her recognition that there is a contradiction between this way of conferring rights as tied to the nation-state system and the more philosophical and ethical conceptions of the “rights of man” and notions of “human rights” like those championed by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant who understands rights belonging universally to all humans as a result of facts having to do with what it means to be human. Étienne Balibar, in his recent work adds to this by pointing out that there is a contradictory movement between this universalizing tendency in philosophical thought and the production of the citizen-subject out of the exclusionary acts of law and force. In this article I put Balibar’s work in dialogue with the contemporary moment where we are witnessing the re-emergence of a nativist right populism. I use Balibar to help distinguish between three modes of political existence that we find today. Two of these three are more of less well understood. They are the non-citizen, who has no—or almost no—rights in a given nation state and the citizen who enjoys the full benefit of the rights a given nation-state has to give. The third category is what I term the “nominal citizen.” This last category is somewhere in between full citizenship and non-citizenship. Individuals in this last category have rights in name but are largely unable to exercise them. Understanding this last category can, among other things, help us at least partially make sense of the return of right populism and also help us see the ways in which the modern category of citizenship, with its contradictions as elaborated by Balibar, can provide a means for resistance.
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Rethinking the concept of citizenship: ideology, agency and resistance from the margins
Civitas Hominibus. Rocznik Filozoficzno-Społeczny
This essay aims to rethink concepts such as ideology, agency and resistance in order to problematise how these are being instrumentalised by nation states to create hierarchical differentiating categories under the umbrella of citizenship. In order to address the idea of otherness that sustains the discourses that have been generated around citizenship as an element that not only legitimises the existing system, but also the identities and subjectivities that may or may not form part of the enunciated norm. Through this journey, other ways of approaching these concepts from and for the identities of the margins will be presented, with the intention not to enunciate new truths or definitions of the concepts addressed, but to try to make visible the existing gaps in the system and how we can build on and thanks to these „borders”. Keywords: ideology, agency, resistance, citizenship, margins
This paper discusses the trajectory of the concept of citizenship in its manifold dimensions and ramifications in modernity, bringing out its main worldwide concrete incarnations. Marshall’s and Marx’s definitions are discussed, but an effort is made to cover the most relevant global literature on the subject. It is argued that although modernity has become a catchphrase lately, it is increasingly threatened by recent developments in terms of what may be called social liberalism, which seats comfortably with the present pattern of global capitalist accumulation and neoliberalism. Finally, against these recent developments, the emancipatory potential of citizenship is briefly accessed.