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. (shrink)

This response focuses on Balibar’s method of thinking transindividuality through multiple figures, in their similarities as well as their productive differences. His essay ‘Philosophies of the Transindividual: Spinoza, Marx, Freud’ combines the three titular figures in order to better think the multifaceted idea of ‘classical’ transindividuality. Balibar’s method combines the three but nonetheless maintains their dissimilarities as real differences. This response attempts to test or apply that method in two ways. The first application links Balibar’s analysis of Freud’s hypnotic leader (...) with a theme Balibar does not here discuss: wonder’s connection to superstition in Spinoza. At the level of their effects, superstitious wonder and hypnosis are nearly identical transindividual processes which lead to affective mass formation. However, their causes are quite distinct. This response details the similar effects and different causes, then asks the question: does their difference render them irreconcilable or complementary? Given the prominent role Spinoza plays in Balibar’s work, and the strong overall equivalence of wonder and hypnosis, this first application of Balibar’s method of multiple combination likely presents a complementarity rather than a conflict. This response’s second application, attempting to integrate another figure into the transindividual multiple, presents greater difficulties: what role, if any, could Foucault play in Balibar’s transindividuality? With Foucault, the tensions or differences perhaps amount to fundamental and thoroughgoing incompatibilities. However, combining Foucault with ‘classical’ transindividuality potentially extends and deepens each. This response concludes with examples of these problematic tensions as well as possibly fruitful combinations. (shrink)

This article situates current debates about transdisciplinarity within the deeper history of academic disciplinarity, in its difference from the notions of inter- and multi-disciplinarity. It offers a brief typology and history of established conceptions of transdisciplinarity within science and technology studies. It then goes on to raise the question of the conceptual structure of transdisciplinary generality in the humanities, with respect to the incorporation of the 19th- and 20th-century German and French philosophical traditions into the anglophone humanities, under the name (...) of ‘theory’. It identifies two distinct – dialectical and anti-dialectical, or dialectical and transversal – transdisciplinary trajectories. It locates the various contributions to the special issue of which it is the introduction within this conceptual field, drawing attention to the distinct contribution of the French debates about structuralism and its aftermath – those by Serres, Foucault, Derrida, Guattari and Latour, in particular. It concludes with an appendix on Foucault’s place within current debates about disciplinarity and academic disciplines. (shrink)

This article analyses Guattari's and Latour's bodies of work as radical developers of a processual and ontological transdisciplinarity. These works impose a definitive break from the history that, in the 1960s, had drawn upon structuralism in order to oppose philosophy with an epistemological revolution from the perspective of a scientific problematization and first transdisciplinary reconfiguration of the sciences de l'homme. It is shown that the second anti-structuralist transdisciplinarity affirms as its raison dêtre "the necessity to return to Pragmatics", to enact (...) the new significance of the transversal constructions liberated by the rhizomatic monism of a hybrid social ontology. Between Guattari, Latour, and the ecologization they share, a total de-epistemologization and re-ontologization is engaged. It leads to the fall of the 'Ontological Iron Curtain' erected by the philosophical tradition between mind and matter, nature and society. The article concludes by critically addressing the final statements of both Guattari and Latour towards a new aesthetic paradigm and a new diplomacy of institutional forms respectively. (shrink)

This article considers Friedrich Kittler’s deterministic media theory as both an appropriation and mutation of Michel Foucault’s archaeological method. Focusing on these two thinkers’ similar but divergent conceptions of the “death of man,” it will be argued that Kittler’s approach attempts to expunge archaeology of its last traces of Kantian transcendentalism by locating the causal agents of epistemic change within the domain of empirical experience, but in doing so, actually amplifies the anthropological vestiges that Foucault hoped to eradicate. The result (...) is an alluring but dogmatically positivist theory of mediatic causality that, in spite of its best efforts, can only reify, rather than dispel, the image of “so-called man.”. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore some issues regarding the different modes of generality at stake in the formation of transdisciplinary concepts within the production of ‘theory’ in the humanities and social sciences. Focused around Jacques Derrida’s seminal account of ‘writing’ in his 1967 book Of Grammatology, the article outlines what it defines as a logic of generalization at stake in Derrida’s elaborations of a quasi-transcendental ‘inscription in general’. Starting out from the questions thereby raised about the relationship between such forms (...) of generality and those historically ascribed to philosophy, the article concludes by contrasting Derrida’s generalized writing with more recent returns to ‘metaphysics’ in the work of Bruno Latour and others. Against the immediately ‘ontological’ orientation of much recent ‘new materialist’ or ‘object-oriented’ thought, the article argues for the necessity of ‘different levels of writing in general’ through a continual folding back of absolute generalization into historically specific disciplinary crossings and exchanges; something suggested by but never really developed in Derrida’s own work. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 6, Page 904-933, July 2022. 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. (shrink)