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Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology

Étienne Balibar

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 ... More

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

The Disavowed Community

Jean-Luc Nancy

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community (1983)—a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “the inoperative community”—Nancy ... More

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community (1983)—a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “the inoperative community”—Nancy responds in turn with The Disavowed Community (2014). Unfolding as a close reading of Blanchot’s text, Nancy’s essay addresses a range of themes and motifs that mark both his proximity to and distance from Blanchot’s thinking. These themes and motifs include: their respective readings of Georges Bataille, notably his political writings as well as his appeal to the “community of lovers”; pre- and post-war responses in France to fascism and communism; the relation between community, communitarianism, and being-in-common; the relation between the disenchantment with democracy and “aristocratic anarchism”; readings of Marguerite Duras’s récit, The Malady of Death; references to the Eucharist and Christianity; and a rethinking of politics and the political. In short, the exchange between Blanchot and Nancy opens up a rethinking of community that raises at once questions of affirmation and critique, of avowal and disavowal.Less

Europe and Empire

Massimo Cacciari

Alessandro Carrera (ed.)

The European Union and the single currency have given Europe more stability than it has ever known in the last thousand years, yet Europe seems to be in perpetual crisis and “unshakably undecided,” ... More

The European Union and the single currency have given Europe more stability than it has ever known in the last thousand years, yet Europe seems to be in perpetual crisis and “unshakably undecided,” so to speak, when it comes to defining its stand in the world arena. To the Asians, Europe was once the Land of Sunset, the place where exiles took refuge. Many empires had their day in Europe. In the end, however, they all bowed down to the multiplicity of ethnicities, traditions, and civilizations that have shaped the continent. Europe will never be One, but to survive as a union, it will have to become a federation of “islands,” both distinct and connected. Written between 1994 and 2012, the essays included in Europe and Empire hark back to the dawn of Europe in the light of today’s sunset. Drawing freely from Ramon Llull, Nicolaus of Cusa, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Kojève, Hannah Arendt, and María Zambrano, Cacciari questions the juridical structure of the Roman Empire, the destiny of Christianity, and the inevitability of secularization. Cacciari’s assessment of Europe comes down to the advice: Do not resist the sunset, embrace it. Europe will have to “let go” of itself and open up to the very possibility that in a few generations new exiles and an unpredictable cultural hybridism will change (again!) all we know about European legacy. This is hardly happening today, yet the political unity of Europe is still a necessity, no matter how impossible it seems to achieve.Less

The Mandate of Dignity

Drucilla Cornell and Nick Friedman

A major American legal thinker, the late Ronald Dworkin also helped shape new dispensations in the Global South. In South Africa, in particular, his work has been fiercely debated in the context of ... More

A major American legal thinker, the late Ronald Dworkin also helped shape new dispensations in the Global South. In South Africa, in particular, his work has been fiercely debated in the context of one of the world’s most progressive constitutions. Despite Dworkin’s discomfort with that document’s enshrinement of “socioeconomic rights,” his work enables an important defense of a jurisprudence premised on justice, rather than on legitimacy.Less

The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil?

Roberto Esposito

This book explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century's most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer's Iliad as the common origin and ... More

This book explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century's most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer's Iliad as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, the book examines the foundational relation between war and the political. Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt's and Weil's voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, the book traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of the notion and practice of “the impolitical.” Within the book, Arendt and Weil emerge “in the inverse of the other's thought, in the shadow of the other's light,” to “think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought.” Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, the book unravels the West's illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.Less

Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought

Roberto Esposito

This book is about the relationship between theology and politics. In the late stages of a debate that has spanned the entire twentieth century, the ultimate significance of the notion of “political ... More

This book is about the relationship between theology and politics. In the late stages of a debate that has spanned the entire twentieth century, the ultimate significance of the notion of “political theology” continues to elude us. Despite our efforts to move beyond it, we still remain confined within its horizons. The reason lies in the fact that political theology is neither a concept nor an event, but the hub around which the machinery of Western civilization has been turning for more than two thousand years. At its center is the articulation where universalism and exclusion, unity and separation, meet. All the philosophical and political categories that we employ, beginning with the dispositif of the person, Roman and Christian in origin, still mirror this exclusionary device. The text analyzes the conceptions of philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Hegel through this lens. The possibility of moving past political theology—which is the core task of contemporary philosophy—demands a radical conversion of our conceptual lexicon. Only once we have restored thought to its proper “place”—relative not to the single individual, but the human species—will we be able to escape the machine that has imprisoned our lives for far too long.Less