Balibar without Althusser, or On the Question of the Transindividual Subject

Abstract

The article analyzes different aspects of political philosophy of the French philoso­pher Etienne Balibar. Particular attention is paid to his concept of «transindividua­lity», which is currently a unique example of critical analysis of the social op­position between individual and collective forms of identity. The subsequent consolidation of the discourse on the need to create a new concept of egalita­rian freedom historically coincided with Balibar’s departure from Althusser.
The author proposes to trace the evolution of Balibar’s philosophy from his ori­ginal interpretations of texts by Marx, Spinoza and Locke to the creation of his own political-philosophical concepts. The paper scrutinizes Balibar’s criticisms of various other strands of contemporary political philosophy, in which such ideas as citizenship and equality become central themes. Balibar’s further cri­tique of modern institutionalism, according to which it is political institutions that should create political rights, led him to describe the idea of a global citizen­ship without any restrictions. At the same time, as the article shows, Balibar’s philosophical thought remains contradictory due to the intertwining of certain provisions of the Althusserian approach to the history of thought within his own conception with the ideas of theorists of deliberative democracy. Finally, the author compares Balibar’s thought with the ideas of other post-Marxist theo­rists, pointing out many non-obvious differences. In particular Balibar turns out to be one of the few supporters of the primacy of the economic factor in relation to the study of social processes, which brings him very close to the theorists of classical Marxism. Thus, Balibar turns out to be one of the rare contemporary philosophers who were difficult enough to categorize in any rigid way, what to speak of the complexity of his thought.