This paper offers a genealogy of anti-polygamy sentiment in North America, elucidating certain racist and nationalist formations that are implicit in the historical valorization and enforcement of heterosexual monogamy. It tracks the white supremacist and heteronormative logic that conditions the widespread disdain toward polygamy, and that renders it fundamentally different from familial configurations that are associated with national identity. Relating political and philosophical doctrines to the archival documentation and insights of contemporary legal and cultural historians of anti-polygamy sentiment, it elucidates (...) the racial Anglo-Saxonism of Hegel's ruminations on marriage and on the state, and highlights its reverberation within the political philosophy that justified the criminalization of polygamy and its supporting institutions in the nineteenth century and in contemporary immigration policy and same-sex marriage advocacy in Canada and the United States. (shrink)

In this review, I discuss Balibar’s ‘proposition of equaliberty’ with regard to its theoretical status and contribution, its relationship to other contemporary theories of radical democracy as well as to the problematic of bourgeois versus communist emancipation in Marx. The primary interest of this essay is to develop a detailed understanding of Balibar’s analytical schema, which draws a complex picture of our contemporary ‘human condition’, and to place it within his own theoretical development since his contribution toReading Capitalin the 60s. (...) On that basis, it will be possible to assess his contribution to thinking politics with and after Marx and place it more concretely within the generalised radical-democratic turn in post-Marxist theory. (shrink)

Oriented, descriptively, by recent liberal definitions of populism, this essay pursues a historical-materialist definition that grounds populist antagonisms in class struggles as ‘crystallised’ in the capitalist state. A critical assessment of Laclau’s early equation of populism and socialism inaugurates the reading of Poulantzas’s relational account of class and state as a nascent framework for a theory of populism, centred on the state and its ideological crystallisation of individualisation, the mental/manual-labour division and the ‘people-nation’. This framework is then expanded to articulate (...) the political-economic core of populist antagonisms, the specific character of ‘neoliberal populism’ today, and the potential, in relation to theories of ‘popular politics’ and a ‘communist people’, that left-wing populism might hold as a process of new political productions of class. This reading provides for a more expansive account of such movements’ potentials, beyond a threat to or correction of pre-determined democratic or Marxist schemas. (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)

This paper considers the trajectory of Althusser's Spinozism pre- and post-May ‘68. Where Althusser's application of Spinoza would often lead him into unknown or non-Marxist territory, one alternative way to think this relation is through the figure of Mao, whose concept of non-antagonistic contradiction I propose to read in terms of Spinoza's “determinate negation.” Although not going so far as to suggest that a certain combination of Mao and Spinoza would have enabled Althusser to “complete” Marx, this paper speculates on (...) this omission from his work and what positive insights we can draw from it retrospectively for developing Althusser's political philosophy. (shrink)

Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly debunked the ostensible neutrality of the ‘world’ of world literature by pointing out that and how the contemporary world – whether conceived in terms of cosmopolitan conviviality or neoliberal globalization – cannot be understood without recourse to the worldly event of Europe’s colonial expansion. While we deem this critical perspective indispensable, we simultaneously maintain that to reduce ‘the world’ to the world-making impact of capital, colonialism, and patriarchy paints an overly deterministic picture that runs the risk (...) of unwittingly reproducing precisely that dominant ‘oneworldness’ that it aims to critique. Moreover, the mere potentiality of alternative modes of world-making tends to disappear in such a perspective so that the only remaining option to think beyond oneworldness resides in the singularity claim. This insistence on singularity, however, leaves the relatedness of the single units massively underdetermined or denies it altogether. By contrast, we locate world literature in the conflicted space between the imperial imposition of a hierarchically stratified world (to which, as hegemonic forces tell us, ‘there is no alternative’) and the unrealized ‘undivided world’ that multiple minor cosmopolitan projects yet have to win. It is precisely the tension between these ‘two worlds’ that brings into view the crucial centrality not of the nodes in their alleged singularity but their specific relatedness to each other, that both impedes and energizes world literature today and renders it ineluctably postcolonial. (shrink)

Since the late 1960s there has been a resurgence of interest in Spinozism in France: Gilles Deleuze was among the first who gave life to a ‘new Spinoza’ with his seminal book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. While Deleuze was primarily interested in Spinoza’s ontology and ethics, the contemporary French philosopher Étienne Balibar focuses on the political writings. Despite their common fascination for Spinoza’s relational definition of the individual, both thinkers have drawn very different consequences from the Spinozist inspiration regarding the (...) relevance of his philosophy for a contemporary ethical and political thought. Deleuze draws from Spinoza an ethics of the encounter, an ‘ethology’ that is concerned with the composition of bodies on a plane of immanence. Balibar, on the contrary, deals with the modes of communication that we institute between one another and that are always effectuations on two levels at once: the real and the imaginary. Whereas Deleuze emphasizes the conception of a... (shrink)

At the beginning of his essay ‘Philosophies of the Transindividual: Spinoza, Marx, Freud’, Balibar [2018] hints at some reasons why he will not be dealing with Simondon, despite agreeing with the latter’s program of going beyond ‘the metaphysics of the subject and of substance’ and towards an ‘ontology of relations’. In what follows I would like to outline Simondon’s concept of transindividuality and spell out more clearly why Balibar cannot follow Simondon’s trajectory. At the same time, I suggest a number (...) of socio-political approaches that a specifically Simondonian concept of transindividuality opens up. (shrink)

This article deals with theories and political projects that can be defined as ‘left populism’. It begins with a reading and critique of the work of Ernesto Laclau on the theory of populism and then moves to recent debates about the possibility of left-populist movements. In contrast to these positions it attempts to present an alternative theoretical framework based on Gramscian notions, in order to rethink the notion of the people in ways that do not de-link it from class analysis (...) and social relations of production. (shrink)

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 or 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. (shrink)

This essay explores recent scholarship on Hannah Arendt's contribution to the field of global justice. I show that many of Arendt's ideas have been brought to bear fruitfully on some of the most pressing global issues of our day. I turn first to the area in which Arendt has, arguably, been most influential, namely human right. I then look at recent scholarship on Arendt and various issues in global justice, including immigration, statelessness, human security, global poverty, political reconciliation, and global (...) democracy. This essay offers a critical analysis of the ways that Arendt's work has been employed in discussions of global justice and highlights the contributions that she has made to this field of thought.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between revolution and corruption in Jean Genet’s accounts of the Palestinian movement in his final work, Prisoner of Love. For Genet, corruption does not simply expose the actions of a revolutionary subject as an empty impersonation, performed for the actual ends of acquiring personal power and fortune. Rather, it exposes the ‘pretension’ inherent in the revolution it undermines as well as in the accumulation of value. For Genet, the misappropriation of money by the Palestinian leadership (...) makes manifest the imaginary character of both devotion to a revolutionary cause and greed for the commodity-fetish. Corruption, in other words, betrays revolution as well as the ‘imaginary wealth and power’ which the ‘game of revolution’ attempts to destroy. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to reclaim Kristeva's concept of the semiotic chora by reinscribing it as an intervention in the context of two important postmodern debates. The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of "the beginning before the Beginning." The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between incommensurable entities: the "demonic" and the social, desire and the Law, material production and representation. I contend: (1) that the introduction of the chora in RPL is part of (...) Kristeva's effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato's Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows her controversial term; and (2) that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva's part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our transcendence to the "demonic" lies less "beyond us" than "in-between.". (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to reclaim Kristeva's concept of the semiotic chora by re-inscribing it as an intervention in the context of two important postmodern debates. The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of “the beginning before the Beginning.” The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between incommensurable entities: the “demonic” and the social, desire and the Law, material production and representation. I contend: that the introduction of the chora in RPL is part of Kristeva's (...) effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato's Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows her controversial term; and that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva's part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our transcendence to the “demonic” lies less “beyond us” than “in-between.”. (shrink)

This article seeks to re-examine two major assumptions in mainstream anti-racist thought of the post-war era. These are culturalism, on the one hand, and human rights on the other, both of which have been offered as potential solutions to the ongoing problem of racism. I argue that both fail to cope with racism as it has been institutionalized in the political and social structures of European societies because they inaccurately theorize ‘race’. Racism is treated as an individual attitude born of (...) prejudice and ignorance and not as a political project that emerged under specific conditions within the context of the European nation-state. A re-examination of this legacy of modernity and a questioning of the structuring principles of anti-racism is necessary in the current context of racism against migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. (shrink)

This article explores the possibility of a notion of left-wing populism that is conceptually opposed to the identitarian logic of embodiment that characterises right-populist interpellations of ‘th...

This paper draws upon Hannah Arendt's idea of the 'right to have rights' to critique the current protection gap faced by refugees today. While refugees are protected from refoulement once they make it to the jurisdiction or territory of a state, they face an ever-increasing array of non-entrée policies designed to stymie access to state territory. Without being able to enter a state capable of securing their claims to safety and dignity, refugees cannot achieve the rights which ought to be (...) afforded to them under international law. Drawing upon both legal theory and political philosophy, this paper argues that refugees today, just as the stateless in Arendt’s time, must be afforded the ‘right to have rights’, understood as a right to enter state territory. (shrink)

Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, and following geographical and technological changes in the global economy, theorists in Europe as well as the United States have lamented the confusion and emotional disengagement of many groups formerly identified with the left. This paper addresses the Kantian origins of the idea that 'revolution', however defined (or deferred), is the only plausible image for effective historical engagement capable of motivating spectators to action. Drawing on Foucault's inquiries into conditions for the possibility (...) of 'heroizing' the present, I examine two frameworks for understanding the ontological impact of historical models for 'eventfulness', those offered by Heidegger and Bergson. I then explore their implication for debates between Foucauldian theorists over the technological and bodily bases required to recognize the optimistic moral significance Kant attributed to revolution in practices characterizing the 'new capitalism'. Key Words: Bergson • Foucault • Heidegger • historiography • Kant • revolution. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben presents us with one of the most powerful and controversial criticisms of human rights. He contests conventional understandings of human rights as normative setbacks on sovereign power, and shows instead how these rights reinforce sovereignty by producing bare lives that are irredeemably exposed to violence. This essay aims to understand the distinctive aspects of Agamben's critique and assess his concluding call for a politics beyond human rights. It suggests that this call is necessitated by a counternarrative of Western (...) politics that ties human rights inextricably to the logic Agamben ascribes to biopolitical sovereignty. Within this stringent logic, any politics organized around human rights cannot help but reproduce sovereign violence. The essay questions this counternarrative in two ways: First, it shows how this counternarrative, which aims to unveil all the myths that sustain sovereignty, ends up repeating what it identifies as the distinctive mythologizing gesture: rendering the contingent necessary. Second, it turns to Agamben's notion of ‘potentiality’ to break the binding spell of his narrative of fated necessity and reclaim the contingent, equivocal and unpredictable effects of modern rights declarations and struggles. The essay concludes with a discussion of contemporary rights struggles of sans-papiers to illustrate the strengths and limits of Agamben's critique of human rights. (shrink)

Whilst it has long been established that there are significant, if complex links between the New Left and Critical Legal Studies, the relationship of CLS to ‘the movement’ has not been properly understood. CLS inherited the New Left’s fraught relationship with race and gender and splintered in the face of Feminist and Critical Race Theory critiques just like the New Left before it. This essay argues that it is more accurate to see CLS/new Left thinking actually continuing into Feminism and (...) CRT. This is not to repeat a variation on the argument that ‘good’ left critique turns into ‘bad’ identity politics; rather, that CLS, CRT and Feminism wrestle with the same ongoing problematic of radical community. (shrink)

This study is an intervention in postcolonial theorising through a critique of technologies of representation. It examines the effects of technologically-mediated representation in a postcolonial condition that the Philippines has exemplified. New media technologies are mechanisms of representations that embody the logic of spectrality presented in Jacques Derrida’s later work. Spectrality, which brings doubts, ephemerality, and instability to dominant discourses and modes of representation, provides a chance for change.Spectres are effects of technologically-mediated representation that articulate the infinite demand for justice (...) under conditions of enduring inequality. As quasi-transcendental elements of deconstruction, spectres are not reducible to either human or technical intervention; they express the relation of humans to technologies, in which representation is central to the mediation of political authority. This technological representation is the condition of what Derrida calls “iteration,” or the transformation of hegemonic authority through the very repetition of its fundamental terms of identification. The examination of emancipatory new media technologies in a postcolonial condition is inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida, in his deconstructive reading of Marx’s spectres. However, the writings of Habermas and Adorno have offered an implicit appraisal of the ontology of spectres. Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and Adorno’s negative dialectics are discourses that unwittingly solicit spectres. The account of the postcolonial condition in the Philippines works through the questions of universality, subalternity, and the right to theory that are raised by the project of Western critical theory. (shrink)

In this dissertation I explore the conceptual relationship between equality and resistance in political philosophy. Through examination of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and Jacques Rancière, I formulate a position called Fractured Social Holism. This is a problematic that attempts to articulate core issues at stake in the debates surrounding the purposes, meanings, and possibilities for politics. Through Fractured Social Holism I articulate a theory of equality that emphasizes the communities upon which societys institutions intend to (...) distribute equality, arguing that resistance on the part of a populationgroup opposition, formal or informal, to some element of the societal status quoconceptually grounds equality and its distribution by articulating its very possibilities. My central questionHow is equality constituted?focuses on the community itself in order to shift agency from institutions that distribute equality to those who demand it. It emphasizes the active role of the people in the constitution of a community of equals, as well as the fact that the very notion of the people is what is at stake in that constitution; popular resistance challenges the very meaning and content of any given people. I understand equality in the broadest possible sense, in terms of the opportunity of each and all within society to participate in dictating the terms of their public engagement with that society and with others within it. I argue for the possibility of resistance within egalitarian community in Rousseau, the limits of what that resistance in egalitarian society looks like in Marx, how egalitarian communities can organize themselves in Dewey, and how subjectivity relates to mechanisms of resistance and political action within society in Rancière. These historical interpretations and the conceptual framework they engender provide a novel means of thinking about issues of paramount importance in contemporary political philosophy, including pluralism, oppression and domination, and the purposes and meaning of politics, remaining true to a normative vision of equality while insisting on the necessity of the peoples resistance to the status quo in the name of a re-imagined vision of social harmony. (shrink)

While Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” has long been considered one of the fundamental texts of translation theory, Gramsci’s important remarks on the question of translatability were not noted in the canonical studies of the history of translation theory nor, for a long time, in Gramscian studies themselves. Nevertheless, the notion of translatability plays a crucial role in the general economy of the Prison Notebooks. This paper proposes a dialogical reading ‘against the grain’ of three constellations of (...) some of Gramsci and Benjamin’s key concepts regarding the nature of translation and its philosophical presuppositions and implications. These constellations revolve around the Gramscian notions of hegemony, of translation between ethico-political contexts, and of reciprocal translatability; they are here read through the Benjaminian notions of translation as generative of the ‘afterlife’ of a literary work, as participating in a ‘pure language’ that functions as translation’s ‘horizon’, and as constituting an ‘echo’ of the original text in a new linguistic and historical context. The encounter of Gramsci and Benjamin is not only on their points of clear convergence but also on those points where they might seem to diverge: this forms the basis for translation and transposition between their respective thought-worlds – a translation that at the same time represents an attempt to open their works up to their immanent transformation. (shrink)

During the 20th century there have been many attempts to reconstitute political knowledge as objective, value-neutral empirical science. One of such attempts was the “behavioral revolution” in political science. However, apart from this tendency a different one can be traced: scholars strived to openly acknowledged political goals and values as a factor in their own work. In this case one can speak of “engaged knowledge”. Pierre Bourdieu, a representative of this tradition, spoke of the need to give up an image (...) of the “scholar who locks himself up in his ivory tower” and stop the “flight into purity”. He urged scientists to bring their knowledge outside academia and join social movements. In the similar vein Michael Burawoy emphasized the necessity to make sociological knowledge available to the wider public. The article reveals the ways in which engaged knowledge distances itself from the image of political and social scholarship as “pure science” as well as from the approach of political philosophy with its emphasis on philosophic contemplation. This perspective opens up the way for the analysis of Max Weber’s ideas on the value neutrality of scientific knowledge, essential features of the “behavioral revolution” in political science, as well as Leo Strauss’ views on the nature of political philosophy. The article develops the ideas of feminist standpoint epistemology, which is contrasted with the scientist’s “gaze from nowhere” and philosopher’s “gaze from above”. Finally, the article gives account of the problematic relation between engaged knowledge and the Marxist tradition. (shrink)