Violence and Civility

Etienne Balibar is emeritus professor of philosophy at Paris X Nanterre and emeritus professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently professor of modern European philosophy at Kingston University, London, and visiting professor at Columbia University. His books include The Philosophy of Marx (1995); Spinoza and Politics (1997); and Equaliberty: Political Essays (2010). G. M. Goshgarian has taught at universities in the United States, Armenia, Germany, and France, and he is the author of To Kiss the Chastening Rod. He has edited and introduced Etre marxiste en philosophie by Louis Althusser and has translated four other books by Althusser into English. His recent translations from Armenian and German include Zabel Yessayan's In the Ruins, Hagop Oshagan's novel Remnants: The Way of the Womb, and Boris Groys's On the New.

Contemporary political thought has had little success moving from the empirical to the theoretical. This is what Balibar does so well in Violence and Civility by working with the concept of Gewalt, the conflation of power and violence. -- Donald M. Reid, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Nothing could be more of our moment than violence, which is to say that nothing is more in need of a proper and strenuous philosophical treatment. That's what you have in this erudite and brilliantly unpredictable book. -- Bruce Robbins, author of Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence Violence and Civility offers both a probing philosophical exploration of the relationship of violence to politics and a political philosophy of 'anti-violence' responding to the structural and overt violences of capitalist modernity. Balibar's philosophical archive is extensive and deep-he thinks with Hobbes, Spinoza, Hegel, Weber, Luxemburg, Lacan, Derrida, and, of course, his beloved and inexhaustible Marx. Braided together by his singular philosophical imagination and passion for justice, Balibar's subtle readings result in nothing less than revolutionary political theory for the twenty-first century. -- Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley and author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution There is no better diagnostician of the enigmas and aporiae of our political condition than Etienne Balibar. His great strengths lie in confronting paradoxes and contradictions that shape contemporary forms of governance and states of subjection. Violence and Civility is an exploration of the extremities of historical experience, reconfiguring the place of politics and proposing new forms of representation. This fine work extends his remarkable engagement with 'Equaliberty' and reveals the drama of dialectical practices that drive the lifeworlds of global transition. -- Homi Bhabha, Harvard University Balibar is one of the most rigorous thinkers of contemporary politics... Balibar's reflections in Violence and Civility, as elsewhere in his work, are subtle and at times profound. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

• Preface Introduction: Violence and Politics: Questions 1. From Extreme Violence to the Problem of Civility 2. Hegel, Hobbes, and the "Conversion of Violence" 3. "Inconvertible" Violence? An Essay in Topography 4. Strategies of Civility Apres-Coup: The Limits of Political Anthropology Appendix Notes Index