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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822355649 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2014 |
| Series: | a John Hope Franklin Center Book Series |
| Pages: | 376 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Étienne Balibar was a student of Louis Althusser, with whom he cowrote Reading Capital. The author of many books on moral and political philosophy, he is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Paris-X Nanterrre and Anniversary Chair in the Humanities at Kingston University in London. He has served as Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, and, more recently, as Visiting Professor at Columbia University.
Read an Excerpt
EQUALIBERTY
POLITICAL ESSAYS
By ÉTIENNE BALIBAR, JAMES INGRAM
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5550-2
CHAPTER 1
THE PROPOSITION OF EQUALIBERTY
I would like to propose some formulations that will help orient us among the presuppositions of a characteristic discussion of the 1980s. At once a subject for specialists and a matter of public debate, this discussion is marked by a tendency to substitute the theme of the relations between ethics and politics for that of the relations between the Political and the social, and perhaps more profoundly to reinscribe the latter within the former. It sees—on the right, but also on the left—the question of revolution give way to that of citizenship, at least insofar as what is at stake at a deeper level is not a reformulation of the question of revolution in terms of citizenship, and thus also civic-mindedness and civility, whether one invokes a renewal of citizenship (going beyond the simple recognition of individual rights) or advances the idea of a "new citizenship."
This is why it is not surprising that a central theme of ongoing debates—quite apart from any coincidental anniversaries—concerns the unfolding and historical impact of the French Revolution, and more specifically its "founding" text, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, the meaning and nature of whose universality are again being questioned. In focusing on this text myself, I am conscious of the double risk of antiquarianism in relation to the interpellations of present history and of Eurocentrism or even Francocentrism that comes with such an approach to the problem of the Political. But even if the question of "the rights of man" were only a mask or a lure, which I do not think it is, it would still be worth the trouble to try to assess the reasons for the gap between their statement in the past and a current democratic problematic. And even if this statement corresponds only to the fictive universalization of a particular society or culture, which I also do not think it does, it would be equally necessary to inquire anew into its reasons, unlike the intellectual movements and currents of social struggle that shaped the idea of "revolution" for us in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I will address, in a more or less elaborated way, four aspects of this question.
First, if it is true that for us the statement or rather the series of statements of 1789 has long since lost the self-evidence it claimed, if it is true that a gap has emerged in many ways between the prerequisites of freedom and those of equality, which were previously inseparably associated, how should we interpret the reasons for this?
Second, how should we interpret the relation between the statement of the Declaration and the specificity of the revolutionary event? Should the collective practice that finds its expression and weapon in this institutional text be thought under the heading of a subject (humanity, civil society, the people, social class), or rather that of a conjuncture and a conjunction of forces? Without there being any question of proposing here an analysis of the character of the revolution of 1789–95, the choice of the second option will lead me to say a few words on the originality of the Declaration's statements in relation to what is commonly considered its ideological "source," the classic theories of natural right.
Third, coming to what is probably the essential point, I will examine the status of the statement and the enunciation of the proposition that, it seems to me, is at the heart of the Declaration and allows us to understand its logic: the proposition that identifies—in extension and then in comprehension—freedom and equality. What interests me above all here is the truth of this proposition, which I will call the proposition of equaliberty, and on this basis the rupture it produces in the Political field. But these are equally the reasons for its instability, the forms in which an incessant division has developed out of what had been produced as a unity of opposites. What follows from this is a system of reference, a topos for classifying and interpreting the different strategies, theoretical as well as Political, that have confronted this dilemma over at least two centuries, and from which in reality we have not escaped.
Fourth and finally, though in an inevitably very allusive way, I would like to at least pose the following question. If it is true that the revolutionary proposition identifying freedom and equality constitutes the incontrovertible and in a certain sense irreversible statement of a Political truth, if it is also true that the inscription of this truth in the very history that produced it is immediately characterized by instability and in a certain sense decline, and if it is true finally that its return in contemporary politics is at least a sign of the demand for a new practical inscription, under what conditions would that inscription be thinkable at the end of the twentieth century? Such a question will have to remain largely open, and no doubt aporetic. At least it will be possible to illuminate the reasons for this by negatively outlining what, in the contradictions of modern politics, has remained silent, and more fundamentally finds itself necessarily repressed in the topos constructed around the Declaration.
FIRST, THEN, WHEREIN LIES the contemporary relevance of the revolutionary statements? I said it a moment ago: in the paradoxical form of an apparently irreducible split between concepts or values that are felt to be equally necessary. No doubt this is a contrario witness to the interdependence of equality and freedom in the form of the periodic return of authoritarian ideologies positing that life in society, or human nature, requires both the imposition of hierarchy and the promotion of individual or even collective in equality. But the permanence of the critique of the rights of man, inaugurated at the beginning of the nineteenth century by counterrevolutionary thought, does not, conversely, make their own consistency self-evident. Contemporary liberalism is not alone in positing that, beyond very strict limits (that have a juridical form), freedom and equality are mutually exclusive. This conviction is widely shared by socialism and more generally by the social progressivism of different minorities at the very moment that, practically, it appears that claims for freedom and equality condition each other, as we see in struggles for democracy in so-called socialist countries just as in anti-racist movements in western Europe or the struggles of black people in South Africa.
This profound contradiction feeds upon several ideas whose self-evidence is seldom questioned, in particular the idea that equality (or, more generally, "real" equality) is essentially economic and social—an elastic notion by definition that today tends to also include the cultural—whereas freedom is above all juridical-political and institutional. But at the same time there is another self-evidence or pseudo-self-evidence on which liberalism and socialism end up agreeing, even if they draw opposite conclusions—namely, that the realization of equality occurs through state intervention, since it essentially has to do with distribution or redistribution, whereas the preservation of freedom is connected to the limitation of this intervention, even to constant defense against its "perverse" effects. It seems to me that this omnipresent but uncritical reference to the state, designated as a block, which constantly reproduces the difference between "formal" and "real" (or "substantial") rights as well as the representation of equality as an exclusively collective goal while freedom (in any case the "liberty of the moderns") would be essentially individual freedom, even in the realm of public freedoms (which would then best be thought of as public guarantees of private freedoms).
From this we proceed directly to the fundamental paradox, which is the split between the discourse of the rights of man and that of the rights of the citizen at the very moment a moralization of Political life or its refoundation on ethics is asserted. Today the discourse of the rights of man (above all formulated as a defense, rather than conquest, of the rights of man) covers a very broad spectrum, from freedom of conscience or individual security to the claim to a right to existence or a people's right to self-determination. But it remains completely distinct from the discourse of the rights of the citizen, which itself oscillates between the proposal or claim to enlarge the Political sphere to new domains (such as ecology) and that of revalorizing the Political in the classical sense—a synonym for the collective institution of deliberation and decision—against the invasion of economism or technocracy. It seems to be very difficult, perhaps more and more difficult, to maintain the equation that is typical of the revolutionary statements of 1789, to which I will return: that of man and citizen, the consequence of which would be, among other things, the idea that the emancipation of the oppressed can be no one's work but their own. As if "man" were in fact nothing other than what remains when we abstract from the "citizen." There is nearly universal agreement on the fact that equating man with the citizen leads invariably to totalitarianism, to what is oft en called the imperialism of "the Political" (tout politique). But the flipside of this agreement is the proclamation that the rights of man, however natural and universally necessary they may be, essentially represent an ideal—which is, if one thinks about it seriously, the exact inverse of the performative statement of 1789, which declared the immediate social relevance of those rights, posited the necessity and the possibility of putting them into effect, and materialized them in a constitution.
One could—one should—investigate the reasons for this split, which becomes glaring the moment the reference to juridical universalism is renewed. Many well-known explanations are available. One invokes human nature: the gap between the "rights of man" and the "rights of the citizen" is the same as between the essential, theoretical goodness of human nature, without which true community would be impossible, and the practical malevolence of empirical individuals subject to the constraints of their passions, their interests, and the conditions of their existence. Homo homini deus, homo homini lupus. At the improbable point of equilibrium of this contradiction we find precisely law, which Jean-Denis Bredin recently suggested be defined as the "art of solving the insoluble question," rediscovering Kant's "unsocial sociability" as its basis. Another common explanation is historicist: time has passed, so the material and cultural conditions under which the statements of 1789 could be constitutively self-evident no longer exist. We are no longer, no doubt, "men" of the eighteenth century, and it is doubtful that we are still "citizens" of the nineteenth. We are more than that, in one sense (for example, we live in a world of communications and global culture that relativize national citizenship, the unsurpassable horizon of the constituents of the revolutionary period); in another sense we are less, since our differentiated societies are organized not only by class, but above all by status. It is not impossible to combine these two types of explanation, emphasizing the original utopianism of the rights of man by positing that from the start their proclamation—which furnished Political and social modernity with a means of asserting itself against the hierarchical social orders of the past and their own, above all, theological imaginary—only served to announce an ideal, that is, to crystallize a new imaginary.
I will privilege another mode of explanation, one that is more dialectical or, if you like, more intrinsic: it suggests that, from the beginning, the "founding" statements, by reason of their very simplicity and their revolutionary radicality, hide within themselves a contradiction that prevents them from becoming invested in a stable order. Or better still: the contradiction, to the second degree, resides in the instability of the relation between the aporetic character of the statements and the conflictual character of the situation in which they arise and which serves as their referent, so that every attempt to reactivate the statements of the rights of man and citizen, based on its very truth, cannot help but run into the effects of the development of its own tensions. This path seems to me the most fertile, but it can be pursued in different ways that I will not discuss in detail. Here it is especially the interpretation of the development of the Declaration in the course of the revolutionary process of 1789–95 that acquires a differential importance, especially the comparison of the original text and its more or less abortive rewritings (which were not, however, without impact) of 1793 (the Montagnard Declaration) and 1795 (the Thermidorian Declaration). This development, with its characteristic oscillation between two readings of the relation between man and citizen, one plebeian and the other bourgeois, supported by antagonistic forces within the Revolution itself, already reveals the contradictions at work from the beginning.
In a remarkable book, La révolution des droits de l'homme (The revolution of the rights of man), expressing a neoliberal if not conservative perspective, seeking reasons why the Revolution is "finished" for us (but also what delayed this result for so long), Marcel Gauchet has followed what seems to him to be the development of a fundamental aporia from text to text: the fact that the kernel of the Declaration of 1789 was the establishment of an absolute notion of national sovereignty, the mimetic inversion of the monarchical sovereignty it opposed, in order to legitimate the representation of the people. For the "one and indivisible" will of the absolute monarch, the Constituent Assembly had to make a corresponding "general will"—equally one and indivisible, equally the depository of all authority, but founded in the last analysis only on the individuals who make up the nation. Such a notion is condemned to oscillate between direct democracy and revolutionary dictatorship. With the exception of the partial but determinate liberties inscribed in the American model of the Bill of Rights, it proves to be incompatible with the pragmatic institution of a juridical framework for modern politics, whether it is a matter balancing the powers of the legislature and the executive or state prerogatives and individual independence. This is why the Revolution was an immediate failure, while in another context, aft er a century of Political confrontations and regime crises, its symbolic statements acquired the function of a more or less consensual regulatory ideal.
Symmetrically, in a series of recent articles, Florence Gauthier, rediscovering and renewing the tradition of revolutionary idealism (as it can be traced from Robespierre and Fichte to the young Marx and Ernst Bloch), has tried to show that a rupture took place between the Convention's Montagnard, Jacobin phase and its moderate, Thermidorian phase. There is a continuity between the statements of 1789, centered on the primacy of freedom and the pursuit of its universality, and those of 1793, which develop the latent egalitarianism of this conception as universal reciprocity or the universal reciprocal recognition of freedoms, including the fundamental right to exist (the right to existence, with its economic consequences). They proceed from the classical, essentially Lockean idea of a declaration of natural right founding association or citizenship, which delimits the Political sphere and the role of the state on the basis of human nature. On the contrary, with the Thermidorian Declaration of 1795, centered on the untouchable character of property and the reciprocity of rights and duties, a determinate social foundation is substituted for the natural, universal foundation of citizenship: there is a rupture, even a reversal. This of course expresses counterrevolutionary reaction to the development of social conflicts, and especially to the way the popular, nonbourgeois elements of the Revolution continually used the universalism of the rights of man Politically, against the practical restrictions placed on them by their own authors—the distinction between active and passive citizenship on a censitary basis, and the exclusion of de facto equality from the domain of natural rights.
For my part, I will adopt exactly neither of these two ways of interpreting the intrinsic contradiction of the revolutionary moment. Both of them seem to me, for completely different reasons, to lack specificity: the specificity of the text of the Declaration of Rights, and the specificity of the revolutionary conjuncture, outside of which one can understand neither the immediate development of the statements nor their retroactive effects, which continue today. It is unfortunately impossible to go into all the details one could wish for. But, to put it schematically, I believe neither that the concept of national sovereignty forged in 1789 under the influence of circumstances is a simple reversal, within the framework of a fundamental continuity, of the concept of monarchic sovereignty, in a way substituting one transcendence for another, nor that the reference to man and the universality of his nature as founding the rights of the citizen can be traced back to the average content of its ideological sources, which can be generically designated as classical natural right.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from EQUALIBERTY by ÉTIENNE BALIBAR, JAMES INGRAM. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword viiIntroduction. The Antimony of Citizenship 1
Part One. The Statement and Institution of Rights 33
1. The Proposition of Equaliberty 35
2. The Reversal of Possessive Individualism 67
3. New Reflections on Equaliberty: Two Lessons 99
Part Two. Sovereignty, Emancipation, Community (Some Critiques) 133
4. What Is Political Philosophy? Notes For a Topography 135
5. Communism and Citizenship: On Nicos Poulantzas 145
6. Hannah Arendt, the Right to Have Rights, and Civil Disobedience 165
7. Populism and Politics: The Return of the Contract 187
Part Three. For a Democracy Without Exclusion 197
8. What Are the Excluded Excluded From? 199
9. Dissonances within Laïcité: The New "Headscarf Affair" 209
10. Secularism and Universality: The Liberal Paradox 223
11. Uprisings in the Banlieues 231
12. Toward Co-Citizenship 259
Conclusion. Resistance, Insurrection, Insubordination 277
Notes 295
Works Cited 343
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Today many of the key concepts of our political vocabulary—including equality, freedom, democracy, and emancipation—seem so corrupted and vacuous that they are almost unusable. Étienne Balibar makes an important contribution by engaging critically and restoring these and other crucial political concepts. Equaliberty is a major book that displays Balibar's exemplary combination of erudition and clear, accessible argument."
"This outstanding book is Étienne Balibar at his most powerfully synthetic and politically incisive. In Equaliberty, Balibar works his way through the house of left-wing political thought, performing a sort of philosophical spring cleaning. He disarticulates complex concepts only to reassemble them in better, more usable combinations. It is a call to action."—Bruce Robbins, author of Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence
"This outstanding book is Étienne Balibar at his most powerfully synthetic and politically incisive. In Equaliberty, Balibar works his way through the house of left-wing political thought, performing a sort of philosophical spring cleaning. He disarticulates complex concepts only to reassemble them in better, more usable combinations. It is a call to action."