Etienne Balibar

Europe as Borderland

The discussion in this paper moves through three stages. In the first the relation of political spaces and borders to citizenship is interrogated; in the second, notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization are examined in relation to ideas of the material constitution of Europe; and, in the third section it returns to the issue of citizenship and its relation to cosmopolitanism. Rather than being a solution or a prospect, Europe currently exists as a ‘borderland’, and this raises a number of issues that need to be confronted.

Difference, Otherness, Exclusion

I am extremely grateful for the invitation to talk at Columbia once again on the occasion of my annual visit to the United States. This is an ever renewed pleasure and honour. Two years ago, in a similar circumstance, Edward Said made me the gift of being in the audience. I remember this graciousness with deep emotion. With your permission, I will also present this lecture delivered in his University as a tribute to his memory.

The Creolization of Theory

Introducing this collection of essays, Francoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih argue that looking back—investigating the historical, intellectual, and political entanglements of contemporary academic disciplines—offers a way for scholars in the humanities to move critical debates forward. They describe how disciplines or methodologies that seem distinct today emerged from overlapping intellectual and political currents in the 1960s and early 1970s, in the era of decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, and antiwar activism. While both American ethnic studies programs and “French theory” originated in decolonial impulses, over time, French theory became depoliticized in the American academy. Meanwhile, ethnic studies, and later also postcolonial studies, developed politically and historically grounded critiques of inequality. Suggesting that the abstract universalisms of Euro-American theory may ultimately be the source of its demise, Lionnet and Shih advocate the creolization of theory: the development of a reciprocal, relational, and intersectional critical approach attentive to the legacies of colonialism. This use of creolization as a theoretical and analytical rubric is placed in critical context by Dominique Chance, who provides a genealogy of the concept of creolization. In their essays, leading figures in their fields explore the intellectual, disciplinary, and ethical implications of the creolized theory elaborated by Lionnet and Shih. Edouard Glisssant links the extremes of globalization to those of colonialism and imperialism in an interview appearing for the first time in English in this volume. The Creolization of Theory is a bold intervention in debates about the role of theory in the humanities. Contributors . Etienne Balibar, Dominique Chance, Pheng Cheah, Leo Ching, Liz Constable, Anne Donadey, Fatima El-Tayeb, Julin Everett, Edouard Glissant, Barnor Hesse, Ping-hui Liao, Francoise Lionnet, Walter Mignolo, Andrea Schwieger Hiepko, Shu-mei Shih

At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in Translation?

Borders are never purely local institutions, never reducible to a simple history of conflicts and agreements between neighboring groups and powers. Borders are already global, ways of dividing the world into regions and thus make possible place and a ‘mapping imaginary’. Borders are characterized by an intrinsic ambivalence that derives from their internal and external functions, as the basis of collective belonging and state control over mobility and territory. The construction of political space takes place through modes of translation between inside and outside that the border signifies.

Historical Dilemmas of Democracy and Their Contemporary Relevance for Citizenship

This essay discusses the dialectical relationship between the concepts of “democracy” and “citizenship,” by relating to current debates which combine a transformation of the philosophical tradition and an evaluation of situations where the legal distinction between the “citizen” and the “national” is challenged. Starting with considerations on the semantic tensions of the “Greek” and “Roman” categories (politeia, dèmokratia, isonomia, ius civitatis), it discusses the aporias of “democracy” as a model or an ideology, which philosophers like Jacques Rancière and Hannah Arendt allow us to overcome by defining democracy as a process of permanent anti-oligarchic “insurrection” rather than a stable regime. It is not the spread of democracy, therefore, that constitutes the primordial object of political theory, but the “democratization of democracy” itself, especially in the form of the elimination of its internal exclusions. This theory is illustrated and further refined by referring to debates about class and race discrimination, violent struggles for recognition affecting republican institutions, “nomadic” or “diasporic” forms of citizenship, and the relationship between social and political rights.

Europe, An "Unimagined" Frontier of Democracy

In my Berlin talk I spoke of the ever more massive and ever more legitimate presence in the old European states of people from their former colonies, and this despite the discrimination to which these people are subjected [see “Europe, Vanishing Mediator?”]. I added that this was the basis for a lesson in alterity that Europe can use to define more uniquely its power (or lack of power—“puissance” vs. “im-puissance”) in the world today. This idea might appear to be excessively optimistic, if not a delusion, but I wish to clarify what it means by examining the ideas of two Italian sociologists, Alessandro Dal Lago and Sandro Mezzadra. These two scholars have for a long time been engaged in analyzing the effects of postcolonial immigration in a Europe caught up in the process of globalization. In their essay “I confini impensati dellʼEuropa,” they examine the way in which, in todayʼs Europe, two meanings associated with “frontier” conflict with each other. They are referring to what Italian calls confini (which I would translate into French as frontières [English “frontiers”]) and frontiere (which I would translate into French as confins [English “confines”/”outer reaches”]).2 The end of the Cold War and the nullification of the Yalta agreements have reopened a historical and philosophical question with respect to the the very meaning we attach to the name “Europe.” In the bloody wars that followed the disintegration of former Yugoslavia, that question took on a particularly dramatic form and prefigured other events of the same kind. Dal Lago and Mezzadra place this question in the context of the changes undergone by imperialism. The fight by the capitalist powers to control world resources and to impose a “Western-style” economic model upon the rest of the world is now becoming a full-scale battle that includes all the social, demographic, and humanitarian aspects that tend to impose a global constraint against the movement of peoples. This constraint is particularly felt in those “frontier-zones” in which political control coexists alongside military control (as in Yugoslavia), but where the two are violently separated. In these zones, men are at once displaced, forced into migration, yet also confined to house arrest. Here we are touching upon the profoundly equivocal nature of the “European” project:

The ‘Impossible’ Community of the Citizens: Past and Present Problems

In the wake of previous reflections on the antinomies of citizenship—which derive both from the tension between an ‘insurrectional’ logic of equal liberty and a ‘constitutional’ project of building a community of citizens, and more recently from the conflict between (national) social citizenship and neoliberal forms of global governance—this paper focuses on problems of ‘representation’ and ‘agency’ linked to the idea of democratizing democracy itself. It will try in this sense to propose a more specific determination to the idea of an unfinished, although contingent, history of citizenship in the modern world.

Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?

The paper I would like to present to you today represents a simple attempt on my part to establish an order among a certain number of texts. My working hypothesis will be that the notion of text occupies a point in between those of work (œuvre) and statement (énoncé ). Both of these possibilities—extension in the direction of totality and restriction in the direction of the elementary—are implicated in the notion of text, but no a priori suppositions are justified concerning either the unity of works, classified by author or by groups of authors, or the univocality of statements, subjected as they are to the inevitable process of dissemination through reading and appropriation. The perspective of assembly and interpretation of texts corresponds to a practical, even professional goal of mine, which forms the immediate background and condition of possibility of my participation in this colloquium. Having signed a contract

Europe at the Limits

Contributors to this special issue of Interventions are asking again, from a complementarity of points of view, whether or not Europe – what is called ‘Europe’ as a geographic, geopolitical, historical entity whose definition, as we know, was never unambiguous and will never be, but which signals nevertheless a unique crystallization of traditions and conflicts – has crossed in the last years a defining limit in its relationship to its own past, in particular its colonial past, which mirrors a radically altered relationship to the rest of the world, therefore its relationship to itself, inasmuch as this self was never anything else than the web of interactions, relations of forces, domination and resistances, articulating it with the non-European Other. Perhaps the limit was crossed some time ago, without becoming fully conscious, and this is like stating the obvious, but it remains necessary to elaborate the intellectual instruments which allow us collectively to understand in which moment and place ‘we’ live and struggle (and by ‘we’, here, I refer as a matter of principle to ‘Europeans’ defined as inhabitants, residents or even virtual residents of the continent, a definition which is broader and more ambiguous than the official constituency of this or that contingent system of nations, which is a political choice in the general sense without which we would have already precluded the possibilities of understanding). We need these intellectual instruments not only because as a general rule citizens

Foucault's point of heresy : 'Quasi-Transcendentals' and the transdisciplinary function of the episteme

Major difficulties for readers of Foucault’s The Order of Things concern the historical function and the logical construction of the episteme. Our proposal is to link it with another notion, the ‘point of heresy’, less frequently addressed. This leads to asserting that irreconcilable dilemmas are in fact determined by the type of rationality governing the emergence of common objects of knowledge. It also introduces a possibility of ‘walking on two roads’: a dialogical adventure within rationality. Foucault is not content with either accepting or rejecting the ‘transcendental’ question ‘What is Man?’: with the help of quasi-transcendental categories performing a ‘transdisciplinary’ function, he wants to reach the ‘heretical’ point where anthropology becomes historicity within the horizon of finitude.