Étienne Balibar en zijn diepgaande #Spinoza-studie [2]

Etienne Balibar. Foto © AFP Ulf Andersen

 

In aansluiting op het blog van 13 mei 2018 “Misschien Étienne Balibar’s Magnum opus: Spinoza politique. Le transindividuel”, wil ik zoals ik in het eerste blog in deze kleine reeks al meldde, wijzen op enige teksten van en over Balibar die op internet te vinden zijn. Eerst iets meer over hem. Van de website van de Universiteit Utrecht neem ik deze korte biografische info over:

Étienne Balibar was born in Avallon (France) in 1942. He graduated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris, later took his PhD from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands) and has an Habilitation from Université de Paris I. He has been teaching at the Universities of Algiers, Sorbonne, Leiden, Nanterre, UC Irvine. He is Professor of Philosophy at Kingston University London and Visiting Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. His books include Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser) (1965), On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1976), Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (1991, with Immanuel Wallerstein), Masses, Classes, Ideas (1994), The Philosophy of Marx (1995), Spinoza and Politics (1998), Politics and the Other Scene (2002), We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004). Forthcoming are The Proposition of Equaliberty, Violence and Civility, and Citizen Subject, Essays of Philosophical Anthropology. [Zie op transversal texts en op en.wikipedia korte biografische informatie over Etienne Balibar.

Waarom (en bij wie) hij aan de Radboud Universiteit van Nijmegen promoveerde, heb ik niet kunnen achterhalen, wel dat hij zijn Theses er verdedigde op 11 dec. 1987 en gepubliceerd kreeg in Raison présente 89 (1989), pp 15-17 (een wel heel bescheiden dissertatie), zo is te lezen in zijn Habilitationsschrift, dat als

Etienne Balibar, “The Infinite Contradiction” vertaald verscheen in Yale French Studies, No. 88, Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey, and the Labor of Reading (1995), pp. 142-164 [In noot 1 staat: “…the same paper I read to present the body of my work during my Research Director habilitation on 16 January 1993 at the Université de Paris I.”] 

Tot zover over zijn biografie. In een volgend blog verwijs ik naar webplaatsen waar werk van hem is gepubliceerd. In dit blog doe ik dat naar waar werk over hem te vinden is.

• Caroline Williams, “Reading Spinoza Today - Review Essay.” In: Contemporary Political Theory, 2002, 1, (371–388) [Cf.] Aldaar als PDF te downloaden (laat je niet afschikken door wat rare fratsen – ’t komt goed). Zij schrijft o.a. over Baibar.

• Diane Enns [McMaster University], “A Conversation with Etienne Balibar.” In: Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 9:2, Fall, 2005 [PDF en academia.edu

• Claudia Aradau, "Only Aporias to Offer? Étienne Balibar's Politics and the Ambiguity of War." In: New Formations, Summer 2006, Issue 58: Of Borders and Discos, pp. 39–46. [Cf. en PDF – ook hier PDF – cf. over professor Claudia Aradau aan het King’s College London]

• James D. Ingram, "Democracy and Its Conditions: Étienne Balibar and the Contribution of Marxism to Radical Democracy" cf. academia.edu
Dit is Chapter 8 in: Martin Breaugh, Christopher Holman, Rachel Magnusson, Paul Mazzocchi, and Devin Penner (Eds.), Thinking Radical Democracy: The Return to Politics in Postwar France. University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp 210 – 233 – books.google

Thinking Radical Democracy is an introduction to nine key political thinkers who contributed to the emergence of radical democratic thought in post-war French political theory: Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, and Miguel Abensour.

• James D. Ingram,  “Why Balibar?” – academia.edu

 

• Warren Montag & Hanan Elsayed (Eds.), Balibar and the Citizen Subject. Edinburgh University Press, febr. 2017 hardback,  1 aug. 2018 paperback. Iets meer over de inhoud bij Jstor – books.google [cf. ook dit blog]

Explores the core of Balibars work since 1980. This collection explores Balibar's rethinking of the connections between subjection and subjectivity by tracing the genealogies of these concepts in their discursive history. The 12 essays provide an overview of Balibar's work after his collaboration with Althusser. They explain and expand his framework; in particular, by restoring Arabic and Islamic thought to the conversation on the citizen subject. The collection includes two previously untranslated essays by Balibar himself on Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes.

• Daarin Chapter 3, "The “Other Scene” of Political Anthropology: Between Transindividuality and Equaliberty" by Jason Read  (pp. 111-131) – books.google

“The political thought of Etienne Balibar is framed between transindividuality and equaliberty. These terms frame much of Balibar’s writing on politics, citizenship, race and philosophy in recent decades yet they do not have the same status. One is borrowed, a citation from Gilbert Simondon, while the other is Balibar’s neologism, a word that combines equality and liberty. The first is situated with respect to Balibar’s investigations in the history of philosophy, constituting a tradition of Spinoza, Hegel and Marx, while the second is deployed in Balibar’s investigations of the intersection of race, nation and class in contemporary politics.”

• William McGillivray McMurtrie, Spinoza: Ontology and the Political. Ph. D.-thesis, The Cardiff school of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University, July 2011 [PDF]

Abstract. Historically, Spinoza has tended to be considered as something of an anomaly within European modernity, a fascinating exception within the Western philosophical canon but one who has largely remained on the margins. More recently, however, there has been a significant revival of interest in Spinoza, a ‘turn’ to Spinoza which has had major impact on leftist philosophicalpolitical thought.

This thesis traces some of the history of this turn, and seeks to determine the nature of this impact. It ranges critically over the readings of Spinoza produced by Louis Althusser and by Etienne Balibar, by Gilles Deleuze and by Antonio Negri, and by Alain Badiou. As the conjuncts and the commas here suggest, these readings are grouped within two broad ‘lines of descent’ from Spinoza: Line 1 comprising Althusser and Balibar, and sharing among other things a problematics of ideology and of the subject in which the influence of Lacan becomes apparent, Line 2 comprising Deleuze and Negri and sharing a certain  qualified naturalism. Badiou, while exhibiting connections with Line 1, at the same time produces his own distinctive reading of Spinoza ( as indeed do each of these thinkers), one which turns on the status of the subject within Spinoza’s ontology, and on what Badiou alleges is a suppression of ‘ the place of the  subject’, and therefore of the negative, within it.

Several broad lines of enquiry run through the thesis. The first of these concerns the relationship between ontology and the ethical-political, between what Balibar terms ‘first’ and ‘second’ philosophy. The second concerns the function of the negative within these various readings, and what I argue is its persistence within an otherwise apparently positive ontology. The third, however, an overarching theme, concerns the ways in which Spinoza is deployed  by these various thinkers as a philosophical and political antidote to Hegelian idealism within Marx, and above all to Hegelian teleology.

In connection with this, the thesis therefore moves towards an examination of the ways in which these various readings of Spinoza have in turn fed into renewed readings of Marx, and considers this both in connection with a preoccupation with primitive accumulation shared by Althusser, Deleuze and Negri, and in relation to the readings of Marx produced by the Italian Marxist traditions of operaismo and autonomia.

The thesis concludes that the turn to Spinoza has had a positive and enriching effect on Marxist thought, and outlines both some of the new dimensions which it has allowed to be developed, and some new lines of investigation which it has opened up within Marxism.

• Daniela Voss, “Immanence, transindividuality and the free multitude.” In: Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. XX #X [apr. 2018], pp. 1–23  [PDF ook op academia.edu - cf. blog van 12 mei 2018, "Dr. Daniela Voß verbindt Deleuze’s en Balibar’s Spinoza-studie"]

 Toevoeging 23-12-2018

• Thomas Clément Mercier, "Review: Étienne Balibar reading Jacques Derrida;"  in:  Derrida Today, Vol. 11/2 (2018), pp. 230-7. [Cf. en PDF ook op academia.edu]