Étienne Balibar

Étienne Balibar appears as a thinker of modernity’s unresolved political possibilities: new freedoms coexist with new dangers, and neither historical progress nor catastrophe is guaranteed to prevail. The book draws on his work to challenge theories that turn violence into a necessary instrument of Reason, to examine how human rights depend on political belonging, and to ask what emancipatory action can mean when violence cannot simply be mastered or renounced.

Modernity as an Open Political Struggle

The book distinguishes Balibar’s position from two influential accounts of the Enlightenment. In one, associated with Jürgen Habermas, Enlightenment remains an emancipatory project whose failures show that it is unfinished. In another, associated with Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Giorgio Agamben, the administered world and its catastrophic potential are treated as inherent in Enlightenment itself. Balibar’s approach, as presented here, avoids both a confident promise of completion and a story in which modernity’s disasters were inevitable. Modernity opens a field of freedoms and dangers; the struggle over its outcome remains undecided.

That openness matters because political history cannot be made safe by assigning every violent episode a role in the march toward a better order. The book locates Balibar’s argument in a wider debate over whether violence can be converted into an instrument of historical Reason. Against that teleological assurance, his work sustains the possibility of antagonistic struggles without a final guarantee that their outcome will be positive. The future might be emancipatory, but it might also be barbaric; no encompassing historical necessity settles the contest in advance.

Violence and the Limits of Historical Reason

Balibar’s critique targets the effort to sublate brutal violence into a useful stain on the record of progress. Such a reading makes suffering contribute to an eventual harmony, as though the violence were redeemed by the social formation that followed. The book argues that this is not only ethically unacceptable but theoretically mistaken: it turns catastrophe into evidence for the very historical logic that should be questioned. Twentieth-century disasters, including those directed against Marxist forces and those produced by Marxist political engagement, cannot be made innocuous by describing them as instruments of a rational historical process.

The problem is also structural. As the book presents Balibar’s argument, Marxism has difficulty theorizing violence that exceeds political control and cannot be integrated into a narrative of historical progress. This difficulty is especially grave in relation to Fascism, Stalinism, the Shoah, and the Gulag. Violence can engulf the political agent that seeks to wield it, creating a self-destructive cycle rather than serving as a reliable means to a chosen end. The task is therefore twofold: to account for violence that no political actor can fully master, and to consider how a revolutionary process might itself become a civilizing force.

The book makes that danger concrete through the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. Catherine de' Medici’s limited design was to have Admiral de Coligny assassinated and shift blame to the Guise family, weakening both houses and strengthening the unity of the French state. The plan instead became an uncontrolled frenzy of bloodshed. In the book’s argument, the episode illustrates how ruthless political calculation can fail to reckon with the intensity of people’s attachment to their beliefs. A controlled plot does not remain controlled simply because its author intended a limited result.

Power, Violence, and Humanitarian Politics

Balibar’s account of political violence also appears alongside Hannah Arendt’s distinction between political power and the direct exercise of social violence. The book uses this distinction to complicate any clean separation between legitimate public authority and supposedly nonpolitical coercion. Armies, churches, schools, and families may operate through command and subordination rather than politically grounded authority; yet these relations are not outside politics. Their apparent neutrality can conceal the political struggles and decisions that sustain them. Conversely, political power itself depends on an obscene supplement of violence: it is never wholly pure or free of coercive support.

This framework informs the book’s criticism of humanitarian intervention conducted in the name of human rights. Such intervention can present itself as an antipolitical defense of vulnerable individuals against powerful institutions, while advancing a particular political and economic program. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein, justified partly as a means of ending Iraqi suffering, also served other political-economic interests, including interests in oil, and was linked to a vision of Western liberal democracy, private property, and inclusion in the global market. A policy framed as simply preventing suffering can thereby prohibit debate over a positive collective project of social transformation.

The question is not only whether intervention opposes an existing power, but what kind of political order it sets in motion. It may support a different account of justice, or it may obstruct collective efforts to define justice on their own terms. In this way, humanitarianism cannot be evaluated solely by the benevolence of its stated purpose: the political consequences of its preferred social and economic arrangements matter as well.

Human Rights, Citizenship, and Political Belonging

Balibar’s intervention into the debate over human rights concerns the relation between the universal figure of the human being and the particular status of the citizen. The book draws on his argument for reversing the presumed order between them: rather than treating citizenship as a secondary addition to an already complete human subject, it asks how political practices and citizenship make people recognizable as human beings with effective rights.

The problem becomes stark in the case of refugees. Hannah Arendt’s analysis, as cited in the book, shows how the ideal of rights possessed by human beings simply as such fails when people lose their particular social relationships and political membership. The apparent reduction to a universal human being does not secure universal protection. On the contrary, someone deprived of citizenship and other specific affiliations may cease to be recognized or treated as human in social reality. The person who seems to embody the universal bearer of human rights most completely can therefore be precisely the person most exposed to their loss.

The book connects this paradox to Giorgio Agamben’s account of bare life, while resisting the idea that the overlap of sovereign power and biopolitics forecloses the emergence of political subjectivity. It also rejects two easy resolutions: human rights cannot be secured as timeless natural rights outside political struggle, but they should not be dismissed as mere historical products without independent force. Their universal claim and their realization through political membership remain in tension. That tension is not an abstract puzzle; it concerns who can appear as a rights-bearing person and who is excluded from the protections that the language of humanity promises.

Emancipation, Nonviolence, and the Unsettled Outcome

The book turns to Mahatma Gandhi as an ambiguous endpoint for Balibar’s reflection on emancipation. Gandhi’s maxim, as discussed here, captures the demand not to wait for objective historical conditions to produce change: the person seeking change must enact it and accept the risk involved. Yet the book also questions the limits of this strategy when those in power do not answer ethical appeals with conscience. Gandhi’s proposal that Jews in Germany commit mass suicide to awaken world opinion exposes the peril of assuming that self-sacrifice can compel a humane response from a murderous regime.

The alternative the book develops from Balibar’s plea for renouncing violence is Bartleby politics. Rather than treating nonviolence as passive acceptance, it considers forms of refusal that interrupt the expected operation of power. The figure of Bartleby offers a way to think about withdrawal and noncompliance without pretending that every refusal already constitutes a successful political transformation. This emphasis preserves the unresolved character of Balibar’s position: violence cannot be justified as an assured engine of progress, but renunciation alone supplies no guaranteed path to justice. Emancipation remains a risky political practice whose outcome must be made, not promised by history.