Bøker av Etienne Balibar

Many on the Left have looked upon "universal" as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. Balibar builds on these critiques, yet works to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common.

Etienne Balibar, one of the foremost living French philosophers, builds on his landmark work 'Spinoza and Politics' with this exploration of Spinoza's ontology. Balibar situates Spinoza in relation to the major figures of Marx and Freud as a precursor to the more recent French thinker Gilbert Simondon's concept of the transindividual.

Etienne Balibar explores the tensions between cosmopolitanism and secularism in order to advance a truly democratic and emancipatory cosmopolitanism, which requires a secularization of secularism. Going beyond circumscribed notions of religion and the public sphere, Secularism and Cosmopolitanism is a profound rethinking of identity and difference.

The preeminent political theorist Etienne Balibar examines what he calls "equaliberty," the fundamental tension in modern democracies between equality and liberty, humanity and citizenship.

A collection of Essays over the last 20 years, exploring different dimensions (historical, political, philosophical, literary) of the philosophical debate on "subjecthood" and "subjectivity" in Modernity, as it was framed by the "Controversy on the subject" from the 1960's, and showing how it is now continued in a "controversy on the Universal".

Acclaimed French philosopher on metaphysics and politics

French philosopher, Etienne Balibar, explores the intrinsic relationship between abstract philosophy and concrete politics. He discusses the influence of political philosophy on collective movements, touching on issues of religious and class struggle, nationalism and racism and the Rights of Man.

If fundamental political categories were represented as geometric shapes, citizenship would be one of those rotating polyhedrons with reflective surfaces that together create effects of light and shade.

Providing a lucid and accessible introduction to Marx, complete with pedagogical boxes, a chronology and guides to further reading, Etienne Balibar makes the most difficult areas of his philosophy easy to understand. One of the most influential French philosophers to have emerged from the 1960s, Balibar brings a lifetime of study and expertise to create a brilliantly concise portrait of Marx that will initiate the student and intrigue the scholar.He examines all the key areas of Marx's writings, including his early works, The Communist Manifesto, The German Ideology and Capital, explaining their wider historical and theoretical context. Making clear such concepts as class struggle, ideology, humanism, progress, determinism, commodity fetishism and the state, Balibar includes brief yet incisive biographical studies of key Marxists such as Althusser, Gramsci, Engels and Lenin.The Philosophy of Marx will become the standard guide to Marx's thought.

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?, he expands on themes raised in his previous works to offer a trenchant and eloquently written analysis of "e;transnational citizenship"e; from the perspective of contemporary Europe. Balibar moves deftly from state theory, national sovereignty, and debates on multiculturalism and European racism, toward imagining a more democratic and less state-centered European citizenship. Although European unification has progressively divorced the concepts of citizenship and nationhood, this process has met with formidable obstacles. While Balibar seeks a deep understanding of this critical conjuncture, he goes beyond theoretical issues. For example, he examines the emergence, alongside the formal aspects of European citizenship, of a "e;European apartheid,"e; or the reduplication of external borders in the form of "e;internal borders"e; nurtured by dubious notions of national and racial identity. He argues for the democratization of how immigrants and minorities in general are treated by the modern democratic state, and the need to reinvent what it means to be a citizen in an increasingly multicultural, diversified world. A major new work by a renowned theorist, We, the People of Europe? offers a far-reaching alternative to the usual framing of multicultural debates in the United States while also engaging with these debates.

In Violence and Civility, Etienne Balibar boldly confronts the insidious causes of violence, racism, nationalism, and ethnic cleansing worldwide, as well as mass poverty and dispossession. Through a novel synthesis of theory and empirical studies of contemporary violence, the acclaimed thinker pushes past the limits of political philosophy to reconceive war, revolution, sovereignty, and class.Through the pathbreaking thought of Derrida, Balibar builds a topography of cruelty converted into extremism by ideology, juxtaposing its subjective forms (identity delusions, the desire for extermination, and the pursuit of vengeance) and its objective manifestations (capitalist exploitation and an institutional disregard for life). Engaging with Marx, Hegel, Hobbes, Clausewitz, Schmitt, and Luxemburg, Balibar introduces a new, productive understanding of politics as antiviolence and a fresh approach to achieving and sustaining civility. Rooted in the principles of transformation and empowerment, this theory brings hope to a world increasingly divided even as it draws closer together.

No-one and nothing, not even the Congress of a Communist Party, can abolish the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is the most important conclusion of this book by Étienne Balibar. Balibar spells out his reasoning against the background of the 22nd Congress of the French Communist Party, which decided to ‘drop’ the aim of the dictatorship of the proletariat and to substitute the objective of a ‘democratic’ road to socialism. His concrete references are therefore usually to arguments put forward within the French Party. But it is quite obvious that the significance of this book is much wider, not least because, in spite of the important political and economic differences separating the nations of western Europe, many of their Communist Parties are evolving in an apparently similar ideological direction, and indeed appear to be borrowing arguments from one another in support of their new positions.

A key dialogue on identity and nationalism by major critics of capitalism.