Human species as biopolitical concept

I submit that the current situation created by the Covid-19 pandemic and its biopolitical consequences reveals something new in the ontological status of the human species which also involves an anthropological ‘revolution’. 1 This is something more than the fact that the combined tendencies called ‘globalisation’ (which, regardless of whether we assign them a recent […]

How can the aporia of the ‘European people’ be resolved?: Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Left

Dossier: The Greek symptom

How can the aporia of the ‘European people’ be resolved? Étienne balibar The question that I deal with here is by no means a purely speculative one. It certainly evokes theoretical notions from different disciplines and from philosophy, but it does so because of a specific economy of circumstances, a crisis of economics, in a […]

Lenin and Gandhi: A missed encounter?

The theme I shall address today has all the trappings of an academic exercise.* Still, I would like to attempt to show how it intersects with several major historical, epistemological and ultimately political questions. As a basis for the discussion, I will posit that Lenin and Gandhi are the two greatest figures among revolutionary theorist–practitioners […]

Marxism and war

Marxism and war Étienne balibar War for Marxism is not exactly a concept, but it is certainly a problem.* While Marxism could not invent a concept of war, it could re-create it, so to speak – that is, introduce the question of war into its own problematic, and produce a Marxist critique of war, or […]

Structure: method or subversion of the social sciences?: From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)

Dossier: From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought

Dossier From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)The concept of transdisciplinarity is not part of the explicit discourse or self-consciousness of ‘French thought’. Rather, it is used here, imported from the outside as a kind of operator or problematizing device, to begin a process of rethinking one of that body of thought’s most […]