Balibar die nation form pdf

Author: Balibar, tienneProQuest document link Abstract: This essay is based on a reading of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach from , especially Thesis 6,which discusses its wording with reference to signifying chains tracing back to the constitution of Western Metaphysics.

The claim that "the human essence is not an abstract being inhabiting the singular individual" not only rejects post-Aristotelian metaphysics, but also theologies of the interpellation of the subject. Saying that "in its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations" opens the possibility of a multifaceted ontology of relations.

Links: Linking ServiceFull text: The Theses on Feuerbach, an ensemble of eleven aphorisms apparently not destined for publication inthis form, were written by Marx in the course of while he was working on the manuscript of the German Ideology, also left unpublished.

They were later discovered by Friedrich Engels, who published them with some corrections not all insignificant as an appendix to his own pamphlet, "Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy" Some of the best-known aphorisms have achieved a posteriorithe same value of a turning point in philosophy or in our relationship tophilosophy as, for instance, not only Parmenides's and Wittgenstein's respective "tauton gar esti noein te kai einai"2and "Worber man nicht sprechen kann, darber muss man schweigen" 27 , but also Spinoza's "ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et connexio rerum" EthicsII, Prop.

But it is also inevitable that we return to the letter of the Theses, checking our understanding of their terminology and phrases, whenever we decide to assess the place of Marx and an interpretation of Marx in our contemporary debates. This is what I am trying to do in this presentation, at least partially, with regard to an ongoing discussion of the meaning and uses of the categories "relation" and "relationship" both possible equivalents for the German Verhltnis.

The implications of this discussion range from logic to ethics, but involve in particular a subtle, perhaps decisive nuance separating a "philosophical anthropology" from a "social ontology" or an ontology of the "social being," as Lukcs, among others, would put it. My purpose quite naturally leads to emphasizing the importance of Thesis Six, which in Marx's original version reads as follows: Feuerbach lst das religise Wesen in das menschlicheWesen auf. Aber das menschliche Wesen ist kein dem einzelnen Individuum inwohnendes Abstraktum.

In seiner Wirklichkeit ist es das Ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhltnisse. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.

In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled to abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract - isolated- human individual.

Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as "genus," as an internal, dumb generality which naturallyunites the many individuals. For Althusser, the Thesesare symptomatic of the theoretical revolution or "epistemological break" through which Marx would have dropped an essentially Feuerbachian, "humanist" understanding of communism to adopt a scientific non-ideological problematic of social relations and class struggles as the motor of history.

There are, necessarily, essential continuities, first of all because ways of thinking and of representation that are rooted in feeling of belonging and the image of community only evolve very slowly; but above all, because — contrary to what my previous remarks might lead you to think — racism is not simply a psychological phenomenon: it always has an institutional racism.

The second is xenophobia, or what I called — in the book I wrote together with Wallerstein , Race, nation, class. This representation, which was considerably developed by colonialism, has also been reproduced in the post-colonial period, in the world of the new global relations of force.

Since what flows from it is no longer mutual recognition and the consciousness that we belong to one same humanity, but, instead, an intensification of intolerance and falling back on identities. How can we collectively oppose racism and xenophobia? What forms of anti-racist struggle ought to be given priority? There is no simple recipe for answering this question. I am tempted to say three things.

Firstly, in order to reinforce the idea that this question is of fundamental importance for all our societies, I would say that the development of racism in its various forms is inversely proportional to the vitality of democratic citizenship. That is why I insist so much on the institutional dimension. There is a constant oscillation in the rise and fall of discrimination: one should neither believe in guaranteed progress nor become fatalist about it.

What does it mean to be oneself? However, these direct and indirect efforts must be inscribed within a horizon that allows us to explain their meaning. We can then speak of a practical cosmopolitanism, a cosmopolitanism from below in our neighbourhoods and daily lives, which can become the substance of a rebuilt citizenship. The interview was originally published by Revue Relations and was translated by David Broder.

This critique should not, however, be allowed to prevent our perceiving the continuing power of myths of national origins. One perfectly conclusive example of this is the French Revolution, by the very fact of the contradictory appropriations to which it is continually subjected.

It is possible to suggest with Hegel and Marx that, in the history of every modem nation, wherever the argument can apply, there is never more than one sin e foundin. The myth of origins and national continuit:y:, which we can easily see being set in place in the contemporary history of the 'young' nations such as India or Algeria which emerged with the end of colonialism, but which we have a tendency to forget has also been fabricated over recent centuries in the case of the 'old' nations, is therefore an effective ideological form..!

The 'origins' of the national formation go back to a multiplicity of institutions dating from Siiti widely differing periods. It is connected with the process by , which monarchical power became autonomous and sacred.

Similarly, the progressive formation of absolute monarchy brought with it effects of f! We can therefore acknowledge the fact that the national formation is the product of a long 'pre-history'. This pre-history, however, differs in essential features from the nationalist myth of a linear destiny. First, it consists of a multiplicity of qualitatively distinct events spread out over time, none of which implies any subsequent event.

Second, these events do not of their nature belong to the history of one determinate nation. They have occurred within the framework oL J2Qlitical units other thin thosewhicli seem t6 us today endowed with.

It is not a line of necessary evo utlon ut a series of conjuncturL " relations which has inscribed them after the event into the pre-history of the nation form.

It is the characteristic feature of states of all types to J represent the order they institute as eternal, though practice shows that more or less the oPPpsl41 is the case.

The fact these eveu. And the closer we come to the modern period, Jb. Which raises the crucial j question of Jhe threshold of irreversibility. U moment and for what reasons has this threshold been crossed - an event which, on the one hand, caused the configuration of a s stem of soverei states to emerge and, on the other, rogresslve d' ion 0 e nation orm to almost all human societies over two centuries of violent conflict?

I admit that this threshold which it is obviously impossible to identify with a single date 2 corresponds to of the market structures and class relations specific.!? Neverthe ess this commonly accepted thesis needs qualifying in several ways.

It is quite impossible to 'deduce' the nation fornLfrom capitalist relations of production. Monetary circulation and the exploitation of. It seems, however, that we might overcome this difficulty if we return to Braudel and Wallerstein's perspective - the view which sees the constitution of nations as being bound up not with abstraction of the capitalist market, 2J!! More exactly, they form against another as competing instrumentti! J the service of the core's dominatiolJ. In a sense, every modem nation is a product of colon-!

I have d and he' i e ore finally being repressed or instrumentalized: the form of empire and, most' 'imporfiiliuy,-mat-oftfie transnational politico-commercial comple;, centred on one or morecmes. There is, then, nothing to prevent us from examining whether in a this alternative which echoes through the whole of its social life, new phase of the wQrld-economy rival state structures to that of the including religious and intellectual life.

Or let us rather say that evolution of social formations and the uncritical acceptance of the there existed di eren! I' ",. In other words, which are the social formations which,,in spite. ConcentratIOn has beeneffected. The pnvileged status of the nation form larly, with its' niling bourgeoisie whether it be a private capitalist ",.

It clearly seems, however, if one accepts this hypothesis, that and cosmoPQlitanjsm. L Contemporary nationalism, whatever its language, tells us. In reality more light on tliis quesboii; we. A historian like Eugen Weber has shown as have other subsequent studies that, in the case of France, universal schooling and the unification of customs and beliefs by inter regional labour migration and military service and the subordination of political and religious conflicts to patriotic ideology did not come about until.

We must also ask how cA,, We may say that in France as, mutatis ffcutanl1ls, in the other old bourgeois formations, what made it possible to resolve the contradictions capitalism with it and to begin to remake t. Producing the People 50 A social formation only reproduces itself as a nation to the extent through a network of apparatuses and daily ractices the in.

The crucial point is ,this: What makes the nation a Or rather in what way is:the form of community instituted by the nation distinguished s ecificall from other historical communitiesn'- et us dispense right away with the antitheses traditionatIY attached to that notion, the first of which is the antithesis between the 'real' and the. Ever social communit re rodu-;;;i b the. But this comes down to acceptin , under certain conditions, only imaginary communities are rear.

In the case of national formations, the imaginary which inscribes itself. It is that itself in advance in the institution of the state, which o"! But such a people does'not 'eXist nattifally;'iiiiirevenwfien It is tendentially constituted, it does not eXist for all time. No modern nation possesses a given 'ethnic' basis, even when it arises out of a national independence struggle.

And, moreover, no modern nation, however 'egalitarian' it may be, corre- sponds to the extinction of class conflicts. The fundamental 1 therefore to produce the eopIe, More exactly, it is to make!

Or again, it is to produce the effect of unity by virtue of which the people will appear, in I 95 ;I WInch enables us to put aside from the outset another artificial diie'mma: it is not a question of setting a collec tive identity against individual identities. Individuals never identify with one another not even in the 'fusional' practices of mass movements or the 'intimacy' of affec tive relations , nor, however, do they ever acquire an isolated identity, is.

Jlll intrinsically contradictory notion. The real question is how of individual identity change over time and. The individuals destined to perceive themselves as the members of a single nation are either gathered together externally f Om diverse geographical origins, as in the nations formed by immigration France, the USA or else are brought mutually to recognize one another within a historical frontier which contained them all.

The people is constituted ou! In every case, however, a model of their unity must :anticipate' that tw process of unificatWD the of which can be measured, for example, in collective mobilization in wartime, that is, in the cagacity to confront death collectively gre supposes the constitution of a specific ideological form. It must at one and the same time be a mass phenomenon and a phenomenon of individuation, must effect an 'interpellation of individuals as Althusser which is much more potent than the mere inculcation of political values or rather one that integrates this inculcation into a more elementary process which we may term 'primary' of fixation of the of love and hate and representation of the 'self.

That ldeological form must ,individuals the 'citizens' and between socia! Ao 'ourselves' and 'foreigners' which wins out and which is lived as irre ducible. In other words, to use the terminology proposed by Fichte in his r. What mighitliat IdeolOgIcal form be? Depending on the particular circumstances, it will be called patriotism or nationalism, the events which promote its formation or which reveal its potency will be recorded and its origin will betrllced back topoliticafmethods - theQmhination of 'force' and 'education' as Machiavelli and Gramsci put it - which -enable the state to some extent to fabricate public consciousness.

But this fabrication is merely an To grasp the deepest reasons for its effectiveness, attention will tum then, as the attention of political philosophy and sociology have turned for three centuries, towards the analogy of religion, making nationalism and patriotism out to be a religion - if not indeed the religion - of modern times.

Inevitably, there is some truth in this - and not only because religions, formally, in so far as they start out from 'souls' and individual identities, institute forms of community and prescribe a social 'moraliJy'; but also because theological discourse has prOVided models for the idealization of the nation and the sacralization of the state, which make it possible for a bond of sacrifice to be created between individuals, and for the stamp of 'truth' and 'law' to be conferred upon the rules of the legal system.

Nevertheless, the political philo sophies of the Classical Age had already recognized the inadequacy of this analogy, which is equally clearly demonstrated by the failure of the attempts to constitute 'civil religions', by the fact that the 'state religion' ultimately only eonstituted a transitory form of national ideology even when this transition lasted for a long time and produced important effects by superimposing religious on national struggles and by the interminable con flict between theological universality and the universality of nationalism.

In reality, the opposite argument is correct. Incontestably, Wional ideology involves ideal signifiers first and foremost the very name of the nation or 'fatherland' on to which may be transferred the sense of the sacred and the affects of love, respect, sacrifice and fear which have cemented reli ' munities; but that transfer only takes place becau e of co mum is involved here.

Balibar b: 19f. Die Demokratisierung der Demokra- tie ist also weit davon entfernt, abgeschlossen zu sein. Balibar b: ff. Balibar a. Ich werde in diesem letzten Abschnitt jedoch einen anderen Weg ge- hen, den Balibar in einigen seiner Texte ebenfalls andeutet, aber selbst nicht beschreitet. Ba- libar 10, 17ff. Sie erzwingt gegen die sei es privatwirtschaftliche, sei es staatliche und administrative Usurpation oder Einhegung demokratischer Selbstbestimmung politische Partizipa- tion dort, wo die Entscheidungsfindung monopolisiert oder privatisiert wird.

Bevir ; Honig Balibar 91; ders. Balibar d, a: 60, f. Literatur Balibar, Etienne : »Propositions on Citizenship«. In: Ethics 98, S. Balibar, Etienne : »Citizen Subject«.

In: Who Comes After the Subject? Eduardo Cadava u. Balibar, Etienne : La crainte des masses. Balibar, Etienne a : »Sub specie universitatis«. New Reflections on Equaliberty«. Balibar, Etienne c : »Constructions and Deconstructions of the Universal«.