Concept

Distinguishes between discussing the scientificity, the discursivity, the historicity, and the politicality of concepts. Focusing on the last of these, offers a way of moving to and past the limit of any epistemological discussion of concept production, and toward a way of understanding concepts not as instruments serving to isolate or separate from one another the faculties or elements of intellectual activity that could generate conflicts but, on the contrary, to bring them together into a single topos in order to problematize the uncertain effects of their encounter.

Anthropological

Surveys Balibar’s work and shows the value and genealogy of the notion of “Philosophical Anthropology” in his later writing.

Cosmopolitics

Revives, with Balibar, cosmopolitics as a term accountable to the fallout of economized existence and to the necessity for a language of rights to have rights capable of doubling down on the politics of the global south within Europe.

Materialism

Argues that materialism is a political concept precisely because it bears on what is political in metaphysics in general, metaphysics being understood here a as the exercise in constructing and exploring conceptual consistencies. Balibar’s work constantly maintains the two requirements that we cannot do away with metaphysics, while metaphysics cannot do away with politics.

Relation

Identifies and explores the concept of relation in Balibar’s work and offers a genealogical account of the “ontology of relation.”

Race

Explores the three nodal points of Balibar's analysis of race and racism: 1) The relation between race and racism, on the one hand, and nation and nationalism, on the other, both grounded in what Balibar calls “fictive identity.” 2) The relation between race and racism and the theory and practice of universalism, the definition of the human through the identification/production of anthropological differences, and the tendency of equality (a notion central to any universalism) to become confused with similitude and likeness. 3) The process by which the foreigner becomes the stranger, who will in turn become the enemy, and the essentialization of language and culture and its relation to the production of the inassimilable and incompatible that underlie many of the contemporary forms of racism.

The Political

Identifies and discusses two “binding” political principles in Balibar’s work: equaliberty, and an explicit and systematic negation of the universalist dimension of equality and liberty. This other principle binds “a politics of purity.” Juxtaposing these two antagonistic forms of politics and explicating their common ground helps articulate an outline for a concept of the political that does not exclude one type of politics in favor of the other but is rather realized equally in both. The two types (and their opposite binding principles) are symmetrical in certain respects that make them equally (and especially well) equipped to demonstrate basic aspects of the political event and of the political as an event.

Border-Concept (Of the Political)

Examines the concept “border” bearing in mind Etienne Balibar’s extensive work on the matter of geopolitical borders, animated by analysis of the problem of “Europe” which ranges from a historical demand to account for the trajectory of European thought and its political implications to a philosophical demand to account for the present as it unfolds, often unpredictably, in real time of thinking and acting. To the first belongs a huge corpus addressing almost the entirety of modern European thought, from Balibar’s early work on Marx and Spinoza onward, and to the latter the work that encounters key landmarks of European reality (from those texts on capital, class, nation, and race to their eventual implication with questions of universality, secularity, citizenship, anthropology, and subjectivity). In a more pointed sense, this meditation on the concept of border in this European trajectory spans the range from the early analysis of the “interior frontier” in Fichte to multiple interventions regarding the institutional project of the European Union in its various manifestations in the last 35 years.

Conversion

Identifies, defines, and examines the distinction between absolute objective violence and absolute subjective violence in Balibar’s works. Considers whether either form of violence converts into a political disposition or ground.

Solidarity

Identifies one thread running through Balibar’s career: the question of how, in the absence of the certainties provided by universal history, mechanical materialism, class essentialism, ethnic unity, natural nations, or territorial fixity, a political subject and social collectivity manages to emerge, hang together, and act in the world, whether during or after struggles for emancipation and collective self-determination. “Citizenship” is one name that Balibar assigns to this political problem and phenomenon. But one might also locate the question of citizenship within the more general problematic of ‘solidarity’ (and vice versa).