CIUDADANÍA

by Étienne Balibar

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. With extraordinarily acute discernment, the leading philosopher Etienne Balibar examines one by one the various faces of this object, more numerous - and far more fissured - than one would imagine. The question of what it means to be a citizen has, from the dawn of Western politics, been anything but clear and straightforward; and modernity has shown it to be even more enigmatic and contested.

Inseparable from democracy, and the demands for equality and liberty from which democracy draws its origins, citizenship is constantly being redefined within the unresolved contradiction between universal principles and the discriminatory mechanisms that regulate membership of a political community.

Not everyone is a citizen, even within one nation-state. It has been said that ?certain persons are in society without being of society?. The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion continue to generate dramatic asymmetries and create openings and closures, especially today in a time of particular fragility and when national sovereignty is in flux. So are there too many antinomies within citizenship? Balibar does not shy away from these antimonies, but he knows that to renounce citizenship would be to abandon the chance to create new modes of collective autonomy, in short, to democratize democracy.

Genres: Philosophy

235 pages, Paperback

First published July 13, 2015

About the author

Étienne Balibar is emeritus professor of philosophy at Paris X Nanterre and emeritus professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is also professor of modern European philosophy at Kingston University, London, and professor of French and comparative literature at Columbia University. His books include Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (Columbia, 2015).

Reviews

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book: it takes Agamben's and Foucault's perspectives on the political/police agonism and governmentality to a higher level.

The 'Citizen' is a person who both rules and is ruled, a constituent power within a stabilizing constitution. Most importantly, the Citizen is insurrectionary. (The type of insurrection that might inform notions from The Invisible Committee).

The Citizen is the destabilizing force of reifying power structures; it is the foundation of democracy: "It is not that we must throw out constitutions in favor of insurrections, but rather that we must place the insurrectional power to emancipate at the core of political constitutions" (p.18).

I think there is a clear enough definition of the Citizen for it to represent a class-that-values-democracy (or what Balibar calls equaliberty). I don't think the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is much different (as Hal Draper might define the concept).

What I particularly liked about this book were the thoughts on neoliberalism, which Balibar suggests might render obsolete the democratic balance of citizen and state institutions. Neoliberalism has expropriated the direct capacity of Citizens within a democracy and buried the 'political' beneath extreme economic logic and the new culture of 'rationality' (of the market, presumably). He offers seven propositions to counter the affects of neoliberalism.

I think I enjoyed this book more having recently read Agamben's State of Exception.

[Monokl Kitap · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hem devlet, hem kamu hem de halk düzlemlerinde demokrasinin demokratikleştirilmesi ve demokrasiden kopuş süreçlerini ayrıntılandıran kitap, yurttaşlığı derinlemesine incelemek için mükemmel bir kaynak.

[Mills College Library]

323.6 B1862 2015