Citizen-Subject and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar

In: Postmodern culture, Band 22, Heft 3

Abstract

The work of Étienne Balibar has long emphasized the link between the juridico-political forms of citizenship and subjectivity implied by the transition to a world order of "bourgeois universalism," while also linking the emergence of the nation-form and accompanying regime of "anthropological difference" to the specific concerns of the Marxian critique of political economy. Taking a series of clues from the entire range of Balibar's work, this essay reinvestigates the centrality of the national question to the capital-relation itself, particularly around the problem of the labor power commodity.