Étienne Balibar

Conjectures and conjunctures

Étienne Balibar was one of the brilliant group of students around Althusser in the early 1960s, who co-authored Reading Capital (1965, 1968; trans. 1970). Since then he has established himself as one of France's foremost philosophers on the Left. Following on from Cinq Études du matérialisme historique (1974) and On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1976; trans. 1977), his more recent writings available in English include Spinoza and Politics (1985, trans. 1998), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (with Immanuel Wallerstein, 1988; trans. 1991), The Philosophy of Marx (1993; trans. 1995) and Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx (1994). A new collection of essays on the theme of universalism and difference in the politics of Europe, Politics and the Other Scene, is forthcoming from Verso later this year.

PO: In Spinoza and Politics you set out to show that the relationship between philosophy and politics is such that `each implies the other'. Was this true of your own intellectual development?

Balibar: I think so, yes. The two things were closely connected in the circle around Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure, but before that there had already been some indications. I was born in 1942, so was still very young in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was a period in which young intellectuals - educated people belonging not to the middle class in the English sense, but to the class moyen in the French sense; that is, people whose families were officials and teachers - formed their political consciousness and commitments in the circumstances of the colonial wars. My parents were secondary-school teachers and on the Left. My father was a mathematician. He was taking part in protests against torture by the French Army in Algeria, because a French mathematician who was a communist had been killed there, for helping the Algerians. I came to Paris in 1958, after the lycée, to join the special classes where you study for the exams for the École Normale. So I left the family. In Paris, I immediately joined the demonstrations against the war and acquired some sort of anti-imperialist consciousness. By the time the war was over in 1962, I was a student at the École Normale, which was extremely politically active then. All of us were members of the Students' Union and were engaged constantly in demonstrations and discussion. Most of us belonged to political groups or parties.

The Left was divided between the communist wing - very strong at that time - to which I belonged, and the left socialists, the PSU, which was a small breakaway party from the Socialist Party, opposed to the colonial war, which the Socialist Party had been waging before it lost the election. Badiou and Terray, for example, who were a little older than me, belonged to that group. We had fierce quarrels, but were united on the main roads. If I had been a little older, perhaps I would have had more difficulties in joining the Communist Party's youth organization, because of the events in Hungary in 1956. But at the time, a number of us thought that the Communist Party - with all its errors and mistakes and questionable aspects - was the strongest and most powerful organization on the Left, particularly in opposing the colonial war. So we joined it. I became a member of the Union des Étudiants Communistes in 1960 and of the Party itself in 1961. From the beginning that meant taking part in internal debates and controversies. I hoped that the Party, and more generally the system of organizations around the Party, would allow a young intellectual not to remain imprisoned in a purely intellectual environment. This factor was very influential some years later in pushing many friends and comrades in our group towards Maoism, because the idea was always to join the working class, not just symbolically, but also physically, so to speak. Of course we were to be very disappointed, because in a place like Paris the Party carefully reproduced the bourgeois division of labour, and isolated intellectuals from the working class, particularly those intellectuals who were critical in one way or another. So that was the beginning of my political commitment.

As for philosophy, it came a little later. At the École Normale the exam was a multidisciplinary one, which meant that it provided a fairly complete education in the humanities. I still benefit from that. So I studied literature and ancient languages, German, and some philosophy, but no more than other subjects. History was very important and I had an interest in mathematics too. Initially, I hesitated between ancient history and archaeology, which were extremely prestigious and attractive to young humanists like me. I started to follow courses in literature and ancient history, but found them terribly boring. At the same time I realized that the philosophical conjuncture was extremely exciting. Sartre had just published the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Merleau-Ponty was delivering his lectures at the Collège de France (he died a year later). Lévi-Strauss, whom we always considered a philosopher, was publishing his most brilliant essays. And I was strongly attracted by that. I thought, why not? Why not me? I should add that the director of the École Normale at that time, who also taught, was Jean Hyppolite, the French translator of Hegel. The three people who were most influential on my philosophical education in those early years were Hyppolite, Althusser and Sartre - whom I first heard speak soon after I decided to change disciplines. A little later, there was Georges Canguilhem at the Sorbonne; my friend Pierre Macherey, who was a little older than me, took me to his seminars. But Hyppolite was the first, though I didn't understand much of Hegel at that time. I found it extremely difficult, but it was a challenge. In my first year I decided that I would read simultaneously the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Dialectical Reason: Kant and Sartre. I didn't succeed, because we were spending all our time on political initiatives, but it provoked a great intellectual enthusiasm. I was certain I had made a choice, but for a long time I felt a doubt. I was never sure that I was a proper philosopher. Now I know that nobody is a philosopher in that sense. Althusser would always say that you are not sure of your identity, but you do as if. You're not sure that you're a philosopher, but you do as if, because your students need you to represent that figure.

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