Description
Book SynopsisA collection of Essays over the last 20 years, exploring different dimensions (historical, political, philosophical, literary) of the philosophical debate on “subjecthood” and “subjectivity” in Modernity, as it was framed by the “Controversy on the subject” from the 1960’s, and showing how it is now continued in a “controversy on the Universal”.
Trade Review"The appearance of this book in France was something of a historic event. Under the heading of 'universality,' a concept that Balibar has almost single-handedly salvaged, Citizen Subject tries to rethink political belonging in our time, so as to redeem a humanism capable of contesting itself from the inside and available to serve the struggles of our day. Balibar rewrites a central tradition of Western philosophy from Descartes through Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, and from Wolstonecraft through Fanon, showing in case after brilliant case that the very writers most invoked as origins (or critics) of the subject had in fact been engaged in a common enterprise of thinking a social, nontranscendent self, the democratic citizen under the contradictory conditions of modernity. The result is one of the strongest, most ambitious, and most pertinent rewritings of the history of philosophy that readers are likely to encounter in their lifetimes." -- -Bruce Robbins Columbia University
Table of ContentsForeword-After the Quarrel INTRODUCTION Citizen Subject Response to a Question from Jean-Luc Nancy: "Who Comes After the Subject?" ANNEX: Subjectus/subjectum PART ONE "Our True Self Is Not Entirely Within Us" 1. "Ego sum, ego existo": Descartes on the Verge of Heresy 2. "My Self," "My Own": Variations on Locke 3. Aimances in Rousseau: Julie or The New Heloise as a Treatise on the Passions 4. From Sense Certainty to the Law of Genre: Hegel, Benveniste, Derrida PART TWO Being(s) in Common 5. Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist: Spirit's Dictum 6. The Messianic Moment in Marx 7. Zur Sache Selbst: The Common and the Universal in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit 8. Men, Armies, Peoples: Tolstoy and the Subject of War 9. The Social Contract Among Commodities: Marx and the Subject of Exchange PART THREE The Right to Transgression 10. Judging Self and Others (On the Political Theory of Reflexive Individualism) 11. Private Crime, Public Madness 12. The Invention of the Superego: Freud and Kelsen 1922 13. Blanchot's Insubordination (On the Writing of the Manifesto of the 121) CONCLUSION The Uneasiness of the Subject Bourgeois Universality and Anthropological Differences
