[This post was written by Pom, reading Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy.]
The brief excerpt from Rancière’s La Haine de la democratie that I saw on the website of “les mots son important” last spring on what, in France, was one of the bubbling-pot days, seemed like another exciting sign of cross-pollination between a radical political thinker and an activist collective engaged in issues of north-African and sub-Saharan migration and anti-racism struggle in France.
The book, or, more aptly, the pamphlet has recently come out in English. It will likely surprise the readers of Disagreement to find a fork-tongued, caustic, igniter Rancière, and lead them to rethink the common charge that his sedate politics “lacks a call”. 
Fred Moten ………Achille Mbembe …Etienne Balibar ….Tina Chanter
[quicktime videos - tRACEs conference, 2003]
Etienne Balibar’s “Sub specie universitatis“:
Philosophy as we practice it (”we,” the addressees of Ermanno’s interpellation, or more generally “we,” the individuals who collectively are given the name philosophers by institutions and public opinion, with more or less agreement among us about the objectives and the standards that such a designation may imply) has become (mainly) an academic discipline, i.e. a discipline learnt and practiced at “the University”
As promised, an excerpt from “Borders, Citizenship, War, Class”, a discussion between Étienne Balibar, Sandro Mezzadra, Manuela Bojadžijev and Isabelle Saint-Saëns (New Formations). The conversations deals with a number of related topics: borders, multiculturalism, tolerance, European constition, war, anti-Islamism, and so on.
Below, I’ve excerpted that part of the discussion that turns around the question of the ubiquity of war, though the rest is of interest. This part, however, might offer a quite different understanding of the war than that which might only conceive of an antiwar strategy as the proliferation of borders, not least through the phraseology and practice of the ‘exit strategy’, or Cliffnotes leninism and its geopolitical fantasies.
Balibar on Arendt and Foucault, excerpted from “Difference, Otherness, Exclusion”, Parallax, 34 (2005) [paragraph breaks inserted]:
[…] What is strikingly similar in Arendt and Foucault (and probably not by chance, although Foucault carefully avoids any reference to Arendt, even when he is commenting on the ’same’ historical sequences), is the fact that neither of them belives that processes of mass extermination, or more generally elimination, ever were possible in history, especially in Modern history, and especially from within States and Societies, without their victims being so to speak prepared for elimination, ie., progressively and institutionally marked as potential, future victims, and collectively pushed into a social symbolic corner where they acquired the status of ‘living corpses’, or masses of individuals who are neither completely ‘alive’ nor yet, already ‘dead’.
Get free blog up and running in minutes with Blogsome | Theme designs available here
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Nov | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 |
| 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |||
