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'There is hardly a field in contemporary critical thought that does not bear the traces of the powerful interventions of Étienne Balibar. This collection of essays is not merely a due homage to his work. It opens up new and challenging pathways in the wake of Balibar's philosophical and political reflection.'
Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna
Explores the core of Balibar's work since 1980
This collection explores Balibar's rethinking of the connections between subjection and subjectivity by tracing the genealogies of these concepts in their discursive history.
The book provides an overview of Balibar's work after his collaboration with Althusser, explaining and broadening his framework, in particular by restoring Arabic and Islamic thought to the conversation on the citizen subject. Also included are two previously untranslated essays by Balibar himself on Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes.
The essays represent the breadth of Balibar's work and the range of its influence, both by the diversity of their geographical and cultural foci, and the historical span of the texts and themes they examine.
Warren Montag is Professor of English at Occidental College and Hanan Elsayed is Assistant Professor of French and Arabic, also at Occidental College.
Cover image: Mihrab of Mezquita Cathedral in Cordoba, Spain © Artur Bogacki/Shutterstock.com
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edinburghuniversitypress.com
ISBN [PPC] 978-1-4744-0421-1
ISBN [cover] 978-1-4744-0423-5
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List of contents
Introduction: Balibar and the Citizen Subject, Warren Montag and Hanan Elsayed; Part I: Balibar Reading Schmitt Reading Hobbes: Equality or Sameness?; 1. Schmitt's Hobbes, Hobbes's Schmitt, Etienne Balibar; 2. The Mortal God and his Faithful Subjects: Hobbes, Schmitt and the Antinomies of Secularism, Etienne Balibar; Part II: Transindividual / Universal; 1. The 'Other Scene' of Political Anthropology: Between Transindividuality and Equaliberty, Jason Read; 2. Intersubjectivity or Transindividuality: The Leibniz-Spinoza Alternative, Vittorio Morfino; 3. A Parallelism of Consciousness and Property: Balibar's Reading of Locke, Warren Montag; 4. Figures of Universalism: Notes on Philosophy and Politics in Etienne Balibar, Mohamed Moulfi; 5. Balibar and the Philosophy of Science, Giorgos Fourtounis; Part III: Inequality, Violence and the Possibility of Citizenship; 6. La Haine: Falling in Slow Motion, Hanan Elsayed; 7. Morbid Perseverance: The Internal Border and White Supremacy, James Ford; 8. Just like a woman: Balibar on the politics of reproduction, Nancy Armstrong; 9. Another "Neo-Racism": Balibar and the Everywhere War, Mike Hill; Notes on contributors; Index.
About the author
Warren Montag is Brown Family Professor in Literature, English at Occidental College. His publications include
The Other Adam Smith with Mike Hill (Stanford UP, 2014) and
Althusser and his Contemporaries: Philosophy's Perpetual War (Duke UP, 2013).Hanan Elsayed is Associate Professor, Spanish and French Studies at Occidental College, where she teaches French and Arabic languages and literatures. She is the author of
L'Histoire sacrée de l'Islam dans la fiction maghrébine (Karthala, 2016).
Summary
The 12 essays provide an overview of Balibar's work after his collaboration with Althusser. They explain and expand his framework; in particular, by restoring Arabic and Islamic thought to the conversation on the citizen subject. The collection includes two previously untranslated essays by Balibar himself on Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes.