Citizen subject : foundations for philosophical anthropology / Étienne Balibar ; translated by Steven Miller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Balibar, Étienne, 1942- author.

Series:

Commonalities

Standardized Title:

Essays. Selections. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Philosophical anthropology.

Subject (Philosophy).

Physical Description:

xvi, 391 pages ; 26 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, 2017.

Summary:

What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience "the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship"? Citizen Subject is the summation of Étienne Balibar's career-long project to think the necessary and necessarily antagonistic relation between the categories of citizen and subject. In this magnum opus, the question of modernity is framed anew with special attention to the self-enunciation of the subject, the constitution of the community as "we" and the aporia of the judgment of self and others. After the "humanist controversy" that preoccupied twentieth-century philosophy, Citizen Subject proposes foundations for philosophical anthropology today in terms of the becoming-citizen of the subject and the becoming-subject of the citizen. The citizen-subject who is constituted in Arendt's claim to a "right to have rights" cannot exist without an underside that contests and defies it. He-or she, because Balibar is concerned throughout with questions of sexual difference-figures the social relation but also the uneasiness at the heart of this relation. The human is established by betraying itself in "anthropological differences" that impose normality and identity as conditions of belonging to the community. Because the violence of "civil" bourgeois universality is greater (but less legitimate and less stable) than that of theological or cosmological universality, right is founded on insubordination, and emancipation derives its force from otherness. Ultimately, Citizen Subject offers a revolutionary rewriting of the dialectic of universality and differences in the bourgeois epoch, revealing in the relationship between the common and the universal a political gap at the heart of the universal itself. Book jacket.

Contents:

I "Our True Self is Not Entirely Within Us"

1 "Ego sum, ego existo": Descartes on the Verge of Heresy 55

2 "My Self," "My Own": Variations on Locke 74

3 Aimances in Rousseau: Julie or The New Heloise as Treatise on the Passions 92

4 From Sense Certainty to the Law of Genre: Hegel, Benveniste, Derrida 106

II Being(s) In Common

5 Ich, das Wir, and Wir, das Ich ist: Spirit's Dictum 123

6 The Messianic Moment in Marx 143

7 Zur Sache Selbst; The Common and the Universal in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit 155

8 Men, Armies, Peoples: Tolstoy and the Subject of War 173

9 The Social Contract Among Commodities: Marx and the Subject of Exchange 185

III The Right to Transgression

10 Judging Self and Others: On the Political Theory of Reflexive Individualism 205

11 Private Crime, Public Madness 213

12 The Invention of the Superego: Freud and Kelsen, 1922 227

13 Blanchot's Insubordination: On the Writing of the Manifesto of the 121 256

IV The III-Being of the Subject

14 Bourgeois Universality and Anthropological Differences 275.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780823273607

0823273601

9780823273614

082327361X

OCLC:

956530257