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Thinking with Balibar
A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice
Edited by Ann Laura Stoler, Stathis Gourgouris and Jacques Lezra
Contributions by Emily Apter, Étienne Balibar, J. M. Bernstein, Judith Butler, Monique David-Ménard, Hanan Elsayed, Didier Fassin, Stathis Gourgouris, Bernard Harcourt, Jacques Lezra, Patrice Maniglier, Warren Montag, Adi M. Ophir, Bruce Robbins, Ann Laura Stoler and Gary Wilder
Published by: Fordham University Press
Series: Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory
This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French political philosopher Étienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar’s thought. The result is a hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance of Balibar’s contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary thought.
The book shows the continuing vitality of materialist thought across the humanities and social sciences and will be fundamental for understanding the philosophical bases of the contemporary left critique of globalization, neoliberalism, and the articulation of race, racism, and economic exploitation.
Contributors: Emily Apter, Étienne Balbar, J. M. Bernstein, Judith Butler, Monique David-Ménard, Hanan Elsayed, Didier Fassin, Stathis Gourgouris, Bernard E. Harcourt, Jacques Lezra, Patrice Maniglier, Warren Montag, Adi Ophir, Bruce Robbins, Ann Laura Stoler, Gary Wilder
Preface | vii
Introduction: Balibar and the Philosophy of the Concept
Warren Montag | 1
Anthropological
Bruce Robbins | 15
Border-Concept (of the Political)
Stathis Gourgouris | 28
Civil Religion: Secularism as Religion?
Judith Butler | 45
Concept
Étienne Balibar | 54
Contre- / Counter-
Bernard E. Harcourt | 71
Conversion
Monique David-Ménard | 85
Cosmopolitics
Emily Apter | 94
Interior Frontiers
Ann Laura Stoler | 117
Materialism
Patrice Maniglier | 140
The Political
Adi Ophir | 158
Punishment
Didier Fassin | 183
Race
Hanan Elsayed | 193
Relation
Jacques Lezra | 211
Rights
J. M. Bernstein | 230
Solidarity
Gary Wilder | 253
Bibliography | 275
List of Contributors | 311
Index | 315
Stathis Gourgouris is Professor of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece; Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era; Lessons in Secular Criticism; and Ενδεχομένως αταξίες (Contingent Disorders). His most recent book is The Perils of the One.
Jacques Lezra is Distinguished Professor in the Departments of English and Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent publications are República salvaje (2019), On the Nature of Marx’s Things (2018), Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought (2017), and Contra todos los fueros de la Muerte (2016).
Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature, and Chair of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at New York University. Her books include Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (coedited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006). Her current project, What Is Just Translation? takes up questions of translation and justice across media. Her essays have appeared in Public Culture, diacritics, October, PMLA, Comparative Literature, Art Journal, Third Text, Paragraph, boundary 2, Artforum, and Critical Inquiry. In 2019 she was the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017–18 she served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association. In fall 2014 she was a Humanities Council Fellow at Princeton University, and in 2003–4 she was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. She edits the Translation/Transnation book series at Princeton University Press.
Étienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Université de Paris X Nanterre; Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine; and Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. His research in the fields of political, moral, and Marxist philosophy focuses on emancipation, citizenship, and on what he terms “equaliberty.” The breadth of his thought can be gauged from his published works, from Reading Capital, released in 1965 and coauthored with his mentor Louis Althusser, to the more recent We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2003), Equaliberty (2014), Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (2015), Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (2017), and Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (2018).
J. M. Bernstein (Author)
J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York City.
Claudia Brodsky (Author)
Claudia Brodsky is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is the author of The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge, Lines of Thought: Discourse, Archetonics, and the Origin of Modern Philosophy and the editor, with Toni Morrison, of Birth of a Nation ’hood.
Anthony J. Cascardi (Author)
Anthony J. Cascardi is Professor of Comparative Literature, Rhetroric & Spanish, U.C. Berkeley.
Thierry de Duve (Author)
Thierry de Duve is Professor at Université Lille 3, Département Arts Plastiques in Villeneuve d'Ascq, France.
Ales Erjavec (Author)
Aleš Erjavec is at the Institute of Philosophy, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Robert Kaufman (Author)
Robert Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, U.C. Berkeley.
Fred Rush (Author)
Fred Rush is Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Undoing Gender; and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
Elizabeth Weed is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and Director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She is editor of Coming to Terms: Feminism/Theory/Politics and editor (with Naomi Schor) of Feminism Meets Queer Theory (IUP, 1997) and The Essential Difference (IUP, 1994).
Monique David-Ménard is a psychoanalyst and philosopher. She has taught at the Université de Paris VII–Diderot and at universities throughout North and South America and Europe, and she maintains a private psychoanalysis practice. Her publications include L’hystérique entre Freud et Lacan: Corps et langage en psychanalyse (Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis) and Deleuze et la psychanalyse: L’altercation.
Hanan Elsayed is Associate Professor of French and Arabic at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Her research interests include Islam and history in Francophone literature from the Arab world, twentieth-century French literature and thought, and the French colonial legacy. She is the author of L’histoire sacrée de l’Islam dans la fiction maghrébine.
Didier Fassin is Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He holds an Annual Chair at the Collège de France. He is recently the author of Life: A Critical User’s Manual (Polity) and The Will to Punish (Oxford University Press).
Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and Director d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author most recently of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War against Its Own Citizens (Basic Books, 2018) and an editor of the work of Michel Foucault.
Patrice Maniglier is Maître de Conférences in the Philosophy Department of Paris Nanterre University. He has written on Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, and Latour. He is the author of La vie énigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme, Foucault va au cinéma, and La philosophie qui se fait.
Warren Montag is the Brown Family Professor of Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. His most recent books include Althusser and His Contemporaries (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2014).
Adi M. Ophir is a Visiting Professor at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University and Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University. Among his works are Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile, co‑authored with Ishay Rosen-Zvi (Oxford University Press, 2018); Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster (The Van Leer Institute, 2013); The One-State Condition, co‑authored with Ariella Azoulay (Stanford University Press, 2012); and The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals (Zone, 2005).
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the editor of Cosmopolites and the author of Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Inequality.
Gary Wilder is a Professor of Anthropology, History, and French and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005). He is co-editor of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham, 2018) and The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for Life Is the Matter (Duke, 2019).