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Cassal Lecture in French Culture: 'Antinomies of Citizenship'

12 May 2009, 17:00 - 19:30 Event Type: University Event Speakers Etienne BALIBAR, born in 1942, graduated in France and the Netherlands. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Political and Moral Philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is also a Fellow of the Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, London. Among his recent publications are 'Politics and the Other Scene', and 'We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship'. Description Ever since the origins in ancient societies, the concept of the citizen and the corresponding "community of citizens" (the Greek politeia, the Roman civitas) have moved in polarities which accounted for a permanent tension: between rights and duties, membership and exclusion, participation and representation, etc. In periods of crisis of the political institution such as the current 'trans-nationalization' of the Law and the global Economy, the constitutive tensions can become genuine antinomies, which confront individuals and collectives with radical choices. This Lecture will try to clarify their formulation and show what is at stake in their uncertain perspectives. Venue : Room 274/275 (ST)

Stewart House is at the corner of Russell Square entrance. Take the lift to the 2nd floor, turn left.

1 It is a great honor for me to have been invited to deliver this years Cassal Lecture at the Institute for German and Romance Studies of the University of London in collaboration with Royal Holloway College, and I would like to express my gratitude to these institutions, as well as to the friends, colleagues, and administrators who made the event possible and helped me prepare my visit. In addition to the honor, there is the pleasure and the interest of finding a perfect circumstance to try and push further some reflections, stretching over a long period now, which concern the intrinsic relationships between the categories of citizenship and democracy. I called the lecture Antinomies of Citizenship providing a very general and short abstract which, as you certainly realize, was written before I had a perfectly clear idea of which material I would include and how I would try to organize it. The funny detail is that, when reading it again, I realized that the word democracy itself was missing. This might suggest a preference or a hierarchy, whereby citizenship would appear as the dominant concept, either from the juridical, the political or the historical point of view, whereas democracy would feature only as a qualification or an attribute of citizenship, whether essential or secondary. This is by no means a merely verbal consideration, not only because such ideological issues as the opposition between republican (or neo-republican) discourse and democratic traditions (whether liberal or not) are often presented in terms of such preferences and hierarchies, but because in a sense the very understanding of political philosophy depends on this kind of choice, as contemporary critiques such as Jacques Rancire have rightly insisted. But in fact my position is not to grant citizenship a dominant position with respect to democracy, it is rather to explain that the democratic paradox, to borrow Chantal Mouffes felicitous expression, forms the intrinsically problematic aspect of citizenship, therefore its most determining aspect. What I believe is that citizenships problem, in its various historical figures, with all their enormous differences, lies in its

2 antinomic relationship to democracy. I would gladly submit that conversely democracy as a historical even a material reality (which is not to say a regime, rather a tendency or a process of transformation), can be defined, precisely, as the antinomic element of citizenship, in the complex sense in which the philosophical tradition has elaborated this category: namely this element that brings in contradiction, and a permanent tension between destruction and construction, crystallizing at the same time a problem which cannot or can never be completely solved, and a problem which cannot become ignored or completely suppressed. I will submit that there lies at the heart of the institution of citizenship (for citizenship is an institution, it has no sense outside an institutional cadre) a crucial contradiction which is due to its intrinsically antinomic relationship to democracy. And I have remained enough of a dialectician, even a materialist dialectician, to believe that this kind of intrinsic antinomy forms the essential driving force of historical transformations, indicating the point of articulation of theory and practice. In other terms there is nothing natural in the relationship between citizenship and democracy, even if we must retrieve and retain something essential from those philosophers who, like Aristotle, Spinoza, or Marx, argued that democracy should be considered the natural or most natural form of citizenship. In fact what I believe is such a formula ought to be interpreted, or it should be pushed dialectically to meaning precisely what I said a moment ago: historically it is the democratic antinomy that forms the driving force of the transformations of citizenship as a political institution. Therefore democratic citizenship is a problem, a stake, an enigma, an invention, a lost object or treasure to be sought for and conquered again. Such considerations which certainly involve a definite conception of political philosophy (which I am not going to discuss explicitly today, I prefer to try and illustrate it as well as I can, are anything but entirely speculative. There are circumstances in which the antinomy becomes particularly apparent, where the double impossibility to pure

3 and simply maintain in its established construction a certain figure of citizenship takes the form, precisely, of an acute crisis of democracy, of the democratic practices and rules, of the common understanding of the meaning of the word democracy itself, of the consequences of its dominant use, be it intentionally perverted or naively traditional. This seems to be eminently the case today, not only for what concerns certain qualifications of the notion of citizenship whose historical dominance was more or less unchallenged for a whole period, such as national citizenship or social citizenship, but more profoundly for the category as such, whose capacity to transform itself, to pursue on the route of its historical transformations, seems to have been brutally annihilated. I take it in particular that the interpretation of the effects of the emergence of the so-called neo-liberal paradigm of governmentality as a process of de-democratization, that our colleague Wendy Brown in particular has introduced in the critical debate along Foucauldian lines, and to which I will return, is best understood as an extreme expression of the destructive side of the antinomies of citizenship in the contemporary moment, which also means that it indicates the challenges that any project of rethinking and re-inventing citizenship - little different in my opinion from a project of rethinking and re-asserting politics itself -, should meet. It is some aspects of this complex of contradictions and challenges that I would like to try and discuss tonight. I am going to present now four successive arguments or rather to sketch, describing from a cavalier point a view what seems to me to form a virtual (and partial) dialectic of the antinomies of citizenship. They concern respectively: 1) what I call the political trace of equaliberty in the construction and the contradictions of modern citizenship (therefore essentially modern national citizenship), which I identify with a recurrent differential of insurrection and constitution; 2) what I consider to be the effective democratic albeit limited character of social citizenship, as it was instituted in the form of the (mainly European) national and social State (an expression which I prefer, for materialistic reasons, to that of

4 Welfare State), and the aporia of the progression of this most progressive and progressivist historical figure; 3) the extent to which what has been labeled the neo-liberal response to this crisis or the neo-liberal contribution to this crisis in the form of the absolutization of utilitarian individualism, not only represents a moment of lethal danger for democracy, but could also raise again the possibility of democratic transformations beyond its representative institution; 4) finally, and most allusively I am afraid, the determinations which could become associated with the representation of the agents or actors of this virtual process of the democratization of democracy itself (a term which, for reasons that I shall indicate in passing, I tend to prefer to that of subject, although it clearly refers to some of the issues currently debated in terms of political or post-political subjectivation). Many of these themes are already present in the analyses, both conceptual and conjunctural, that I have carried on over the past twenty years, which some of you may know. But although I am relying on and some times alluding to them, I try not to pure and simply repeat, but also simplify and rectify them in the hope of reaching a better clarity.

Let me start, then, with the trace of equaliberty. In other places I have sketched a genealogy of the Roman formulas aequa libertas and aequum ius which Cicero in particular would present as essential definitions of the regime he calls res publica and I would call a community of citizens in the ancient sense, and I have coined the portmanteau expression equaliberty that I am again using now to encapsulate the unities of opposites lying at the heart of the universalistic notion of citizenship invented by the series of revolutions of the bourgeois era which open and define political modernity: the unity of man and citizen, now considered correlative notions in spite of all the practical restrictions which affect the actual distribution of political rights and powers, and above all the unity of the abstract notions themselves, equality and liberty, which are now seen as components of the same

5 constituent power, in spite of the permanent tensions among them and the tendency of bourgeois political ideologies to grant one of them a primacy or an ontological privilege over the other, presenting it as the natural right par excellence. Tonight I want to insist particularly on the conflictual element which is inherent in this fusion of opposite notions, which accounts for the revolutionary character of simultaneous claims of equality and liberty whenever they are raised to achieve an extension of the powers of the people or emancipation from domination taking the form of a conquest of rights. It is this combination of conflict and institution that I call the trace of equaliberty, or the continuous reiteration of its enunciation. It is true that revolutionary moments where the power inherent in the exercise of rights is reclaimed in the form of a regime change (e.g. from monarchy to republic) or the demise of a dominant class or caste whose privileges need to be abolished, give this reiteration an exceptionally visible and symbolic expression. But the insurrectional element which accounts for the emancipatory effects of the claim of rights (petitio iuris) can and must take many other forms which have a different phenomenology in terms of movements, campaigns, party mobilization, temporal condensation or distension, violent or non-violent relationship of forces, rejection or use of the existing institutions and juridical forms, etc. Think of the various histories of the conquest of civil, political and social rights in Europe, which in fact are not processes isolated from one another, or the various forms of decolonizing processes, or the articulation of the episodes of civil war and civil rights campaign in the century-long history of the emancipation of the Black population in the US, etc. However I maintain that the conflictual element is always determining because there is no such thing as an originary distribution of equaliberty, and no such thing as a voluntary surrendering of privileges and dominant positions of power (in spite of such symbolic moments of fraternity as the Nuit du 4 aot). As a consequence struggles are always necessary, and more than that a principle of legitimacy has to be asserted which Jacques Rancire felicitously called la part des sans-part,

6 or the claim of the share of those who are deprived of a share in the common good. It manifests the essential incompleteness of the people as a body politic, and aims at universalizing it through the development of a conflict in which an exclusion from recognition, or dignity, or rights, or property, or security, or speech, or decision-making, is negated in a relationship of forces. The insurrectional moment, whose past event forms the immanent foundation of any popular constitution which is not deriving either from tradition, or a transcendent justification, or a simple bureaucratic efficacy, however these various sources of legitimacy can contribute to the representation of the political, and whose future return forms a constant possibility in the face of the limitations and the denials which affect the realization of democracy in the constitution, is ineludible. The consequences are obviously considerable. I want to emphasize two interrelated dimensions in this respect. One of them concerns the intrinsically problematic character of the political community which derives from the articulation of citizenship with different forms of insurrection whose horizon is a genuine universality of rights. Such a community is neither achievable as a homogeneous unity nor representable as a perfect totality, but it can also not become dissolved in a purely individualistic notion of juxtaposed subjects brought together by the invisible hand of their common utility, or their mutual dependency, or in the radically antagonistic picture of civil enemies who have nothing in common but the opposition of their interests. We are very close here to the description that Mouffe has proposed of the democratic paradox, but we are also approaching the antinomic character of the institution of citizenship which takes continuously new forms, in particular as the name, the extension, the historical and ideological bases of its recognition by citizen-subjects who identify with its existence and somehow appropriate it in their own way vary. This instable and problematic character of the civic community has been long concealed or, better said, it has been displaced because of the

7 strong degree of identification of the notions of citizenship and nationality - what in other places I have called the constitutive equation of the modern republican State, which derives its apparently eternal and indisputable character from the permanent strengthening of this State, but also, as we know, from many mythical, or imaginary, or cultural justifications. However, in the end of a certain historical cycle (probably the period in which we find ourselves nowadays, at least in certain parts of the world), the contingent character of this equation becomes also apparent, which means at the same time its historical grounding and its fragility, or its exposure to decomposition and mutation. This is also the moment (or perhaps it is once again the moment) in which it becomes apparent that the national interest is never a factor of absolute unity of the civic community. But, from the theoretical point of view, this is only one aspect of the discussion, since the nation, or the national identity, however effective it has been in modern history, is only one of the possible institutional forms of the community of citizens, and does neither encapsulate all of its functions, nor completely neutralize its contradictions. The main point, therefore, is to understand that citizenship as a political principle, cannot exist without a community, but that this community cannot be completely unified, that its essence cannot be the consensus of its members. This makes all the equivocity but also the strategic function of such terms as res publica, central in the European tradition of defining and instituting citizenship, which was considered as the Latin equivalent of Greek politeia, or constitution of the citizen, and whose translation in classical English, we may remember, was commonwealth. Citizens as such do not exist outside a community, whether territorial or not, whether seen as a natural or cultural legacy, or as a contractual or historical construct, for a fundamental reason which was already expressed by Aristotle, namely that the principle of citizenship, or perhaps we should better say co-citizenship, coincides with the idea of a reciprocity of rights and duties which, as such, binds together the co-citizens, inasmuch as it is

8 effectively implemented and obeyed. Perhaps we should say, in a slightly more complicated manner, that it coincides with the idea that the reciprocity of rights and duties involves a limitation of power of the rulers and a discipline of the ruled, in particular in the form of the accountability of the magistrates before their constituencies, and the obedience of the citizens to the rule of law. But the necessity of the community is not identical with its absolute unity or homogeneity, far from, because, as I recalled a moment ago, the rights have to be conquered, i.e. imposed against the resistance of vested power interests and existing dominations: they have to be invented (in the words of Lefort) in the modality of a conquest, and the content of the duties, or the responsibilities, has to be redefined according to the logic of this agonistic relationship. With this idea we come to the second aspect of the dialectic of citizenship. The idea of a community that is neither dissolved nor unified is hardly reconcilable with a purely juridical or constitutional definition of the community, therefore of citizenship itself. But it is conceivable as a historical process and a principle of permanent reproduction and transformation. And in fact this is the only way to understand the temporality, therefore the historicity of citizenship as an institution. It is not only that citizenship is permanently traversed by crises and tensions, that it is a fragile institution that over the long run has been destroyed and reconstituted several times on new bases, within a different institutional framework, from the city-state to the nation-state and perhaps beyond the nation state, if transnational and post-national federations become realities. But it is that citizenship as a constitution is threatened and destabilized, and delegitimized by the very democratic power that forms its constituent power (or whose constituted power it represents), namely the insurrectional power of universalistic civic movements claiming inexistent rights, or broader rights, or an effective realization of equaliberty. This is what in the beginning I have called the differential of insurrection and constitution, which no purely formal or juridical

9 representation of the political can account for, and precisely for that reason essentially belongs to the concept of the political, as a concept which is embedded in history and collective practice. Otherwise we would be reduced to imagining that the inventions and conquests of rights, the new definitions of duties or responsibilities which correspond to broader and more substantial conceptions of rights derive from an idea that is always already given, either as a pre-historical origin or as a post-historical destination, or, even more paradoxically, to advocating a notion of citizenship that is purely conservative, resisting its own democratization and probably for that reason I will return to this unable to counteract its own de-democratization. This would be, not a political concept of citizenship, but an anti-political one, inasmuch as politics means the transformation of given realities and the adaptation to their changing conditions. With the help of concrete historical analyses, against any deductive or normative or prescriptive concept of politics, we should be able to demonstrate that citizenship was a permanent oscillation between destruction and reconstruction, where the insurrectional moment at the same time was feared by and necessary to the institutions. As a consequence, if we admit that citizenship as a more or less partial realization of the principle of equaliberty is also one of the material embodiments of universality in the field of politics, we will have to admit that there is no such thing as possessing or inhabiting for ever the realm of universality, in the manner in which classical philosophers imagined the achievement of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, or defined the human subject (in fact the modern citizen) as a representative of the universality of the human species, or its eternal destination. To borrow an expression used by Deleuze, particularly in his analysis of the function of the movie art in colonial countries during the process of their own emancipation, this universality should rather become conceptualize in the modality of a missing people (un peuple manquant), which it is a question of producing out of its own absence or negation.

10 To finish on this first point, I would like also to draw the attention to the fact that such a differential of insurrection and constitution, combined with the disharmony of the community that it seeks to transform, is not a purely speculative notion of contradiction, but involves conflicts that can be very violent. I am thinking here in particular of conflicts on the side of the state and conflicts which affect the history and the figure of emancipatory movements. Until now I have used a fairly generic notion of institution, describing citizenship as an institution and also suggesting that equaliberty inscribes a trace within institutions, but also a trace whose reactivation confronts their specific resistance. But I have avoided the term State, not because I would consider that the question of the state is irrelevant, but on the contrary because I wanted to keep the possibility of indicating now how the identification of political institutions with the form of a State construction, where the political practice of agents is strictly predetermined by their relation to a bureaucratic apparatus of power, intensifies the antinomic character inherent in the figure of citizenship. It may be useful in this respect to recall that the notion of the constitution, or the constitution of citizenship, has been profoundly transformed along the path of historical development, in a direct relationship to the growing importance of the state, itself intensified by the hegemony of the capitalist market and relationships of production. Ancient constitutions, centered on the direct distribution of rights, the rules of exclusion and inclusion, and the organization of the accountability of the magistrates, were essentially what we can call material constitutions, i.e. constructions of an equilibrium of competing powers, lacking the sovereign neutrality of the legal form. Modern constitutions are formal constitutions, couched in the universality of the legal form, which corresponds to the autonomization and the monopoly of representation of the community by the state. Modern constitutionalism which performatively declares the universality of rights and protects them from violations is therefore hardly to be separated from a principle which, in her commentary of the Weberian distinction of types of political

11 legitimacy and his thesis of the increasing domination of the rational bureaucratic type, Catherine Colliot-Thlne has called the principle of the ignorance of the people, or the ignorant people, which we could also rephrase as principle of the incompetence of the people. This shows how acute the contradiction becomes between participation and representation in modern citizenship and why the differential of insurrection and constitution crystallizes in particular in the development of systems of education. Many of us, myself included, would consider that the development of a public system of mass education, whatever its imperfections, is an essentially democratic result and precondition for the effective democratization of citizenship. We also know that democracy and meritocracy compete here in a very versatile manner. The articulation of the representative state with systems of mass education contributes to enable the commoner or the average citizen to participate in political discussions and contestations of the power monopoly of the State apparatus, as it contributes to the inclusion of social categories formerly excluded from the public sphere. Borrow the famous Arendtian expression, it constitutes a basic form of the right to have rights, which is not a bad expression for the objectives of what I call the insurrectional moment of citizenship. But the meritocratic principle of the same systems of education (and what would be a non-meritocratic system of mass education? This is profoundly enigmatic) is also a mechanism of selection and exclusion of the mass from the possibility of really controlling the action of the magistrates and participating in the administration of the public affairs. It excludes the possibility of collective self-government by creating a hierarchy of knowledge which is also a hierarchy of power, even without taking into account the class character (or the oligarchic mechanisms) that, more than ever, characterizes our contemporary school systems. By recalling the class dimension of contemporary constitutions of citizenship, however, I want not only to describe a tension

12 between official democratic principles and oligarchic realities, but also, more disturbingly, to point at another kind of contradictions affecting modern constitutions of citizenship, this time on the side of the insurrectional movements themselves. I will not justify at length the idea that the class struggles have played and still play an essentially democratic role in the history of modern citizenship, notwithstanding their totalitarian deviations. This was the case not only because class struggles, especially the organized class struggles of the working class in the whole spectrum of their reformist and revolutionary tendencies, were an essential agent in the definition and the recognition of basic social rights, rendered at the same time more necessary and more difficult by the rise of industrial capitalism, decisively contributing to the emergence of what I will discuss in a minute under the heading of social citizenship, but more directly relating to my current concern because they illustrated in a typical manner the articulation of the individual and the collective which is essential to the very notion of insurrection. As I have argued elsewhere, it is an crucial aspect of modern citizenship that the rights of the citizen are borne by the individual subject but conquered by collective movements and campaigns which each time invent new forms and languages of solidarity. The reciprocal thesis is indeed that, within the forms and institutions of solidarity and collective inventions of equaliberty in the form of extended rights, there takes place an essential process of subject-formation or autonomization of the individual. This is indeed what the dominant ideology stubbornly denies, suggesting that collective political activity is alienating by its very nature. We must resist this prejudice, but we cannot all the same believe that the class struggles represented an unlimited or unconditional principle of universality. It is not by chance that the mainstream of the class organizations of the labor movement in spite of many efforts and acute conflicts which formed so to speak an insurrection within the insurrection have remained largely blind to the problems of colonial, cultural, or domestic oppression, both theoretically and practically,

13 when they were not directly nationalist, racist and sexist. This was due to the fact the resistance and the protest against definite forms of domination created or relied on countercommunities which included their own principles of exclusion and hierarchy. Our attention is therefore drawn to the fact that there is no such thing as absolute universalities or emancipations, but only finite or limited moments of insurrection, and that the internal contradictions of the politics of emancipation are transferred and reflected within the most democratic constitutions of citizenship, contributing at least passively to its dedemocratization.

Given the amount of time that I have already spent discussing my first point, which is also the most theoretical, I will now cut through the three other points which indeed form a dialectical progression, in order to give an idea of how I see their articulation from the point of view of the current conjuncture. Allow me to be rather brief on the issue of social citizenship and its relation to the transformation of the representative function of the state and the modes of organization of politics itself, in spite of the rather fascinating complexity that this subject has acquired in discussions about the dramatic change that it has suffered in the last three decades. Whether the notion of social citizenship entirely belongs to the past, and to what extent, is a question that is anything but easily resolved, especially now that the financial crisis has brought the attention to the importance of the capacities of resistance of social systems to what Robert Castel called the negative forms of individuality. But, let us note in passing, this is a moment when our descriptions and judgments are heavily dependent on the geo-political place I would prefer to say the cosmopolitical place, in the etymological sense where our discourse is constructed and enunciated. The extent to which social citizenship, as it was developed in Western Europe in the 20th century, and to as lesser extent in the US, i.e. in the dominant capitalist society of the period, represents a

14 general form or a virtually universalistic invention in the history of citizenship, is a fairly open question, whose answer depends at the same time from how we understand its dependency on imperialist global structures, and how we analyze its own contradictions. It is on this second aspect that I want to propose some remarks to open the possibility of a reflection on the consequences of its current crisis. The notion of social citizenship was proposed initially by Thomas Humphrey Marshall in the wake of the great transformations prompted by World War II in the rights of organized labor and the protection of individuals against the risks considered typical of the proletarian condition (but more or less associated with every form of social life not guaranteed by the revenues of property). It has been recently the focus of intense scrutiny and redefinition that has highlighted both its political and its anthropological dimensions (by Sandro Mezzadra, Robert Castel, and Margaret Somers among others). Of primary importance in my view is first the fact that after heated debates which trace back to the controversies of the Industrial revolution on the connection between charity, philanthropy and the disciplining of the workforce - it was not conceived as a simple mechanism of insurance or compensation for the most degraded forms of poverty or the exclusion from the very possibility of a decent family life for the paupers, but as a universal mechanism of social solidarity that concerned virtually all citizens and encompassed all social strata (the rich were entitled to this protection as were the poor, which symbolically means not so much that the poor be treated like the rich than the reverse: the rich be treated like the poor, especially given the fact that most of the new social rights are linked to the actual engagement in a profession, in other terms a formal universalization of the anthropological category of labor as a defining character of the human. Note here once again that this poses a sharp problem of gender equality, especially in a historical moment in which most women were still incorporated in social life mainly as wives of active men, subjected to them). Equally important is the fact

15 that the negative element of the protection from and prevention of insecurity (in fact a typical negation of the negation) was also, for very powerful economic and ideological reasons, at least indirectly associated with an agenda of the reduction of inequalities, to which no political party could not at least formally adhere. It included in particular a maximization of the chances of upward mobility through the opening of educational institutions to any citizen or future citizen, or the ideal dismantling of the cultural monopoly of the bourgeoisie (its exclusive access to the famous capacits or capabilities), and the progressive taxation of the revenues of capital, which had been completely ignored from classical capitalism (and is today again increasingly neglected). For these reasons the political system tendencially instituted or aimed at in the form of social citizenship (largely anticipated in the name of a social-democratic program) was not reducible to a collection of separated social rights, especially not a collection of social rights granted from above to weak individuals who should be seen as passive beneficiaries, whose entitlements should be scrutinized in permanence and adjusted by the State, as liberal ideologists were never tired of claiming. More precisely it made these social rights a fluctuating reality whose movements of increase and decrease, in the face of persisting inequalities and a structural dissymmetry of the social powers of capital and labor which was never really challenged, completely depended on a permanent relationship of forces. It is important to remark here that in no social-democratic regime of Western Europe the complete system of social rights was incorporated into the formal constitution or the superior norm (Grundnorm) of public law - Britain being in this respect a special and perhaps an emblematic case because lacking a unified formal constitution. In fact the relevant notion here is again that of a material constitution of citizenship, no doubt sanctioned by law at various levels, but essentially made of the equilibrium of powers among social classes, the contingent reciprocity of rights and struggles, therefore social movements. There is no doubt

16 to me that the idea - broadly shared among Marxists - that the so-called Keynesian compromise trading the recognition of social rights and an institutional representation of labor in politics against the moderation of salaries and the practical abandonment of the revolutionary perspective of the overthrowing of capitalism on the side of the working class, therefore in a sense the end of the proletariat in the classical sense (according to Marx a class whose project of emancipation is radical because its chains are themselves radical) and as a consequence the relative neutralization of the violence of social conflict, contains an essential element of truth. This neutralization was sought in permanence, but it was one side of the medal. The other side was the permanence of the struggle, as became clear a contrario when the imbalance of forces at the global level combined with the ossification of the system itself to launch a new cycle of proletarianization (which Castel calls the emergence of the precarious class, or prcariat). It produced also the displacement of social violence towards other fields than the direct political confrontation: the colonial and post-colonial arena to be sure, the periodic outburst of warfare among nations, but also the whole range of what the Durkheimian school of sociology called anomy, namely the individual and collective forms of interiorized irrational violence, or violence without a utilitarian goal. It was correlative of the imposition of social norms of morality and rationality, the essential form taken by the category of duty when the rights of the individuals are not only civil and civic, but also social. I want to conclude this very schematic attempt of a definition of social citizenship by emphasizing once again the crucial character of the tension between conflict and institution, in other terms the persistence of the political dimension which continues in other ways the dialectics of insurrection and constitution. It is insufficient in my view, as well as historically wrong, to think of the emergence of social citizenship either as a unilateral concession granted by the bourgeois state in the name of its integrative function, or a logical consequence of the

17 necessity of a regulation of the free play of the market due to the fact that market capitalism tended to threaten the integrity of the workforce on whose utilization it relied. These factors existed, no doubt, but a third conflictual element was needed in order to have them work in the same direction. Historically this element was socialism, in the variety of its formulations and implementations. In other places I have insisted on the idea that the State which implemented social citizenship to a greater or lesser degree was to be defined as a national and social state: not only in this sense that the social agenda of reforms was by definition carried on within national boundaries under the aegis of national sovereignty, which also required a sufficient degree of autonomy and economic control for the nation, but in this sense that especially in periods of acute crisis, such as the modern total wars- it was only on the condition of universalizing social rights that the nation-state could survive. Therefore the two attributes of the State, the national and the social, were knit together in a system of reciprocity, or mutual presupposition. But this description ought to be carried one step further. In fact the socialist element, which belongs at least momentarily to the insurrectional side of citizenship, or embodies for a certain historical period some of the radical sides of democracy, became embedded in the national horizon but was never simply identical with nationalism, except let us not forget when in conjunctures of acute crisis they become merged in a totalitarian discourse and practice. It has powerfully contributed to granting reality and relative autonomy to a political public sphere that was reducible neither to the bureaucratic operations of the State nor to the private contractual dimensions of civil society. Socialism in this sense was never achieved, it was a contested project or an agenda of reforms that continuously reignited conflict in the middle of the institutional articulation of capital and labor, property and solidarity, market logics and state rationality, therefore maintaining a political character for the public sphere. This was the case in certain limits only, however, due to the articulation of social citizenship with a reproduction of capitalist social

18 relations on the one side, and to the exigencies of the relative neutralization of antagonism, or violent antagonism within the public realm on the other side: in other terms the construction of apparatuses of political consensus which prevented adversaries from becoming enemies, but also tended to freeze existing relationships of social forces and achieved compromises. Hence what I have called in anticipation the aporia of progress to which the history of social citizenship provides an almost perfect realization. It is only in the name of unlimited progress, or the possibility of pushing the movement toward equal capacities in society, as an ideal and a collective desire, that the transformation of vested forms of domination and the conquest of an enlarged horizon of liberties for the mass can be pushed ahead. But the limits of the progression are structurally inscribed in the material constitution (we might also say, in the traditional way, the mixed constitution) that combines the national and the social, the reproduction of capitalism and the effective generalization of equal rights. So that the very real achievements of democracy in the National Social State, or the progressive moments in its construction, are inseparable from a periodically renewed imposition of its limits, which may take the form of counter-reforms or more violent reactions. It is a crucial question for our analysis of the contemporary crisis of the idea of social citizenship and the progressive dismantling of its realizations, which is also a deep crisis of the democratic principle, to decide whether this crisis which affects the contents of social rights in the fields of job security or medicare or access to superior education as well as the legitimacy of political representation, is due only to the external assault of a liberal or neo-liberal form of capitalism empowered by the transnational scale at which it now massively operates, or also due to the internal contradictions and limits of social citizenship itself. In that sense the perspective of continuous progress towards greater and bolder enunciations of rights, and more intensive articulations of the autonomy of the individual and the importance of solidarity, which we might want to call Bernsteins theorem remembering Eduard

19 Bernsteins famous formula: the final goal is nothing, it is the movement that is everything would be prevented not only because of the interests it confronts, but because of its intrinsic contradictions. I believe that this second hypothesis is the correct one. It is more dialectical than the idea of a conspiracy of nasty capitalists and it is also more political, since it allows it to think practical possibilities, as it does not represent the popular classes, once beneficiaries of relatively important social conquests and now progressively deprived of their security and collective hopes, as simple victims: they are genuine actors, whose capacities of influencing their own history depend on the transformations of external and internal conditions, but also on their own representations of the system in which they act. It is on this basis, however allusive and incomplete, that I will now consider some aspects of the current discussion on the meaning and effects of so-called neo-liberalism. I will rely at least partially on the presentation of the issue that has been offered by Wendy Brown in her essay on Neoliberalism and the end of liberal democracy (2003, now reproduced in Edgework, 2005), which has been widely discussed and is becoming increasing influential in critical theory circles. As you probably know Brown argues that neo-liberalism is essentially different from classical liberalism, as it removes the distinction between political liberalism and economic liberalism, more precisely the relative autonomy of the economic and the political sphere that was so crucial for the classical representation of the State as an agency external to the field of economy, whose interventions should become reduced to a minimum. This crucial change makes it possible to combine the deregulation of the market with permanent interventions of the State throughout the field of civil society (and even the intimate life of subjects) in order to facilitate the emergence of citizens whose general concern is the utilitarian calculus. This allows Brown to give a very convincing account of the apparently contradictory mixtures of

20 libertarian discourses and coercive moralizing or religious programs that have be so influential since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 80s. I completely agree with this side of her analysis, which other critics have complemented in their own way. It includes a description of the unlimited extension of market criteria such as the individual or aggregate calculus of ratios of inversions (costs) and results (profits) to private and public activities which, in the classical model or bourgeois capitalism (and even more in what I have called the National-Social State), were in principle considered irreducible to the principle of commodity production and the law of value, such as education and scientific research, the quality of public services and administration, public health and judiciary processes, national security, etc. (the list is arguably not complete). I will take this description for granted, and I want to concentrate on Browns more philosophical idea that neo-liberalism is indeed a powerful form of political agency whose actors are in fact spread throughout society. However it is a political agency or political formation which could be called also anti-political, since it not only neutralizes the element of conflict inherent in the classical Machiavellian picture of politics (not to mention the idea of a constitutive insurrection without which there would be no collective assertion and constitution of rights), but renders it a priori meaningless, by creating the conditions of a society (or civilization) in which the actions of the individuals and the groups including their possible violence are measured against a single criterion of utility. It is in order to describe this preventive neutralization or suppression of social and political antagonisms that Brown would retrieve Foucaults notion of governmentality and draw its political consequences. Governmentality as defined by Foucault, we remember, encompasses the whole set of practices which allow it to modify the spontaneous behavior of individuals or exercise power over their own power of resistance and action, either through the use of coercive, disciplinary, methods, or through the diffusion of cultural and ethical models, or a

21 combination of both. Why is there a challenge of neo-liberalism so lethal to the traditional definition of politics, including class politics or the kind of liberal politics which made it possible to develop an internal critique of existing dominations, which she calls dedemocratization but which is also clearly a disqualification of the very notion of active citizenship? This is apparently because neo-liberalism does not simply advocate a retreat from the political, but has embarked on a new definition of its subjective motivation as well as its institutional instruments. This new definition is also what Brown calls a new rationality, because it simultaneously modifies the subjective and objective conditions of the political experience, the material constraints under which increasingly numerous individuals of all classes find themselves situated, and the values or conceptions of the good (and the bad) to which they submit the evaluation of their own actions, ultimately their possibilities of valorizing their own life and prizing themselves. Allow me to simply and quickly indicate which problems in particular I believe are involved in such a theorization (each of which of course would deserve a long and careful discussion). A first problem it seems to me concerns the very diagnosis of a crisis of traditional political systems, be they liberal or authoritarian, that is involved in this description. Admittedly this crisis ought to be considered not a simple episode of tension and doubt, but a deep and irreversible phenomenon, precluding any return to the previous paradigms of social action in an unmodified form. We can agree on that, but there remain two opposite possibilities: one which would view this transformation of the figure of the social subject as essentially a negative symptom of the decomposition of traditional structures, which were both structures of domination and structures of resistance to domination, but leading per se to no sustainable regime of social life, therefore corresponding to an extremely unstable situation in which many different and largely unpredictable evolutions become possible (this is very much, for example, Wallersteins view); the other one it seems to me the one that, in

22 agreement with Foucaults notion of the productivity or positivity of power, Brown herself would endorse would see it not as a dissolution, or not mainly, but precisely as an invention or an alternative solution to the problems of the adaptation of the individuals behavior to the necessities of capitalism and its political organization. This is indeed where the idea that the current crisis of the model of social citizenship (wherever it was sufficiently developed) was due not only to the increasing power of its adversaries, the revenge of the capitalists as it were, but also to the development of its internal contradictions, could play a significant role. But we must be aware also of what such a thesis ultimately means, namely that a social and political regime is historically possible that is not so much anti-democratic, as are various forms of authoritarian, dictatorial or fascist regimes, than a-democratic, in the sense that democratic demands, movements and values (such as equaliberty) no longer play any significant role in its development (which could be ironically one of the reasons why the discourse of democracy (and the spread of democracy) has been so banalized and officialized, therefore deprived of discriminating function in the contemporary language of administration and power, that it partakes completely of the processes of dissolution of citizenship. This would be a real change of the forces of historical change, or a way of transiting from history to something like a post-history, that we must take very seriously. Much more seriously in any case than the lenient visions of Francis Fukuyama at the time of the collapse of the Soviet system in Europe. However I dont think that the story can stop here. On the one hand (but I will set this aside for today), it seems to me that one should discuss the extent to which Browns view of the processes of de-democratization and similar analyses are dependent on the particularity of the US history and society (which, to say it in passing, was not the typical site of the development of social citizenship and the national-social state, for reasons both geopolitical: the US hegemony in the capitalist world, and cultural: tracing back to its ideology of the

23 frontier). It would be utterly unfair, of course, to reproach Brown for not taking into account six years ago what the current financial crisis is suddenly revealing, namely that the neoliberal model has its own internal instability and lethal contradictions, or that it is in any case rather a model of permanent crisis than a new model of relative stabilization of contemporary capitalism. It will be most interesting to observe the ways in which she includes in her analyses the typically north-American dimensions of the neo-capitalist model revealed by the crisis, and also the meaning of the political reactions that, as to now, it has elicited in the US society. Nothing has taken a final shape in this respect. But I have another question, which concerns the latent apocalyptic consequences of the idea of de-democratization as it is constructed here. This question, I must admit, is prompted by both the analogies and the differences which I perceive between this description and what I would call Karl Marxs nightmare. By this formula, I refer to the model of the so-called real subsumption, which Marx elaborated in an additional chapter of Capital Book I (the so-called unpublished chapter, published posthumously). Clearly Marx left this chapter aside in the end because its implications were devastating for the very idea of proletarian or revolutionary politics, which it would condemn to the alternative of withering away or messianic reconstitution out of its conditions of impossibility. The idea of real subsumption is the idea of a capitalism that does not only use (or consume) the labor force of the workers and pushes to a maximum its production of surplus labor or its capacities of exploitation, it is the idea of a capitalism that in the end produces (or reproduces) the labor force itself as a commodity, by determining in advance and imposing on it useful and manageable qualities, through the modeling of human needs and desires (Marcuse will combine this view with post-Freudian concepts in OneDimensional Man). The Marxian apocalyptic vision sees the extinction of politics qua constitutive dimension of history as a result of an extreme, pure economic logic, whereas the

24 post-Foucauldian discourse sees it as a result of power logic and the invention of a new rationality. But both representations are clearly haunted and rightly so - by the problem of the production of voluntary servitude in modern societies, which would not be so much the result of the imaginary fascination for a personal sovereign (as in La Botie), than the combined effect of multiple mass practices, micro-powers and everyday behaviors. I am aware that Brown is very cautious in her anticipations and diagnoses, but others are less, and in fact there are various forms under which we see the return of the apocalyptic in contemporary critical theory: ranging from the idea of a transformation of history into simulacrum or a virtual process, to the idea of self-destructive bio-politics reducing social life to bare life. More rapidly, I will indicate two other problems that seem to me worth discussing extensively within the perspective of a process or moment of de-democratization provoking the crisis of the national-social state, exploiting it, or resulting from it. Such a dedemocratization is clearly linked with an intensification and increasing technological sophistication of procedures for controlling the life, movements, opinions, and attitudes to others of the individuals and the groups, which are territorial and mobile, national and transnational. One thinks of the technologies of electronic and biological identification and registration, which Agamben among others has denounced. But there is also the psychiatric and behaviorist classifications of individuals since early childhood, onto the measurements of alleged dangerous character of adults, which are even much more destructive from the point of view of the suppression of freedom and self-ownership. However the positive counterpart of these procedures of control, namely the development of a new ethics and care of the self, in which individuals are called to moralize their own conduct according to the universal principle of maximizing ones own utility or productivity, has in fact a dark side that does not stop in the production of voluntary servitude. I am thinking in particular of the

25 description proposed by Robert Castel of what he calls a phenomenon of negative individualism associated with the dismantling or the decay of the social institutions and the forms of public solidarity and socialization which secured a more or less complete incorporation, or to borrow Castels favorite category, an affiliation of individuals to a community of other citizens over several generations, that could be experienced as local or national or usually both (which is necessarily the case when it relies on the pervasiveness of public services such as education and health). A de-affiliated individual for example a young jobless national or immigrant - is a subject to whom contradictory injunctions are continuously addressed, such as to display the capacities of an entrepreneur of himself, whereas all the collective conditions which make self-reliance possible are in fact denied to him. This produces not only despair, sometimes self-destructive violence, it produces a tendency towards the demand for compensatory communities based on the imaginary of collective hyper-power (or auto-immunity as Derrida and Esposito would say), which are negative or impossible communities in the same sense in which de-affiliated individuals are negative or impossible individuals. They can be local, based on the development of gangs, but they can also become tendencially global, based on a religious or a national and racial imaginary. This raises the problem of the new function of populism in contemporary politics. I agree with Ernesto Laclau that populism should not be demonized, because in a sense there is no more a people in the political without a populism than there is a nation without a nationalism or a common without a communism. Therefore some forms of populism, in spite or because of their very ambivalence, are the necessary condition for the formation of a universalistic political discourse which looks beyond the particularity of the democratic demands of different groups or movements seeking emancipation from heterogeneous forms of domination. In that sense we may have to admit that the specter of populism, for better or worse, is always already haunting the dialectic of insurrection and

26 constitution with which I started this presentation. But I also ask a reverse question: under which conditions is a populist form of identification with the missing community, or the imaginary community, a framework for the mobilization of democratic demands? And when is it merely a screen on which imaginary compensations for the de-socialization of negative individuals, therefore also a collective demand for the exclusion of stigmatized others, becomes projected? I would not, personally, completely separate the discussion of the violent tensions and ambivalent effects of the articulation between affiliation and de-affiliation, or socialization and internal exclusion of the autonomous individual, or positive and negative individualism and communitarianism, from the discussion of the crisis of political representation that, clearly, forms another aspect of the neo-liberal transformation of the structure of the political. This has become quite a commonplace, which produces thousands of pages of more or less interesting political theory a year. But the question of representation, in view of its defense as a fundamental guarantee of liberal political systems the one that totalitarian systems claimed to overcome and in fact reversed in the name of the organic unity of their respective peoples or in view of its critique as a mechanism of expropriation of the citizens initiative and competence, is too often simply identified with the question of parliamentary representation, which represents only one of its aspects and one of its historical possible forms. The crisis of parliamentary democracy is nothing new: some of its symptoms, such as the tendency towards the corruption of the elected representatives of the people who then become intermediaries between the economic corporate interests, the constituencies and the administrative and legislative State machine, are contemporaneous with its very constitution. They present no significant difference over three centuries between the era of the rotten boroughs and the era of the private or public additional salaries or abusive financial compensations for MPs. What is much more interesting from the point of view of a theory of the antinomies of citizenship is

27 the crisis of representation itself, in its general concept, as a capacity for free and equal citizens to delegate their power to representatives at whichever level in order to perform public functions, acquiring power precisely inasmuch as they entrust it to others, as admirably theorized by Hobbes in the framework of a complete identification of the public sphere or a commonwealth with its legal and sovereign incarnation. Let us not forget, however, that in the republican tradition a teacher or a judge as well as a politician is a representative of the people, who was selected according to more or less direct procedures which presuppose a democratic acceptance. There seems to be in the crisis of politics indicated by the term dedemocratization not only a disqualification of this or that form of representation but a disqualification of the principle of representation itself: it is, on the one hand, supposedly made unnecessary or even irrational in view of the calculable optimization of processes of governance of social programs and social conflicts which would result of their essentially utilitarian nature, and on the other hand impracticable and supposedly counterproductive when the responsibility of the citizen-subject is essentially perceived in terms of his or her potential deviancy from social norms. Isnt it here, however, that we might try and sketch what I would certainly not call a hope, but an alternative way of reasoning? We can try and ground it on the interpretation of some forms of resistance, solidarities, collective inventions, individual revolts that are prompted or intensified by the very spread of the neo-liberal style of governance, which taken together might some day delineate the figure of a new kind of insurrectional politics, therefore also dialectically make it possible to imagine new modalities of the constitution of citizenship (in formulating this I cannot avoid referring to the title, and the content, of the recent book published by James Holston on the experience of the organization of illegal communal structures in the favelas of the Brazilian big cities, with the significant title Insurgent Citizenship). I am not abstractly choosing, however, between the two antithetic figures or

28 symbolic modes of subjectivation that may correspond to the idea of insurgent citizenship. One is the deviant subject, resisting procedures of control, moralization and normalization imposed by the rationality of the neo-liberal order, which are even more coercive than that of the National Social State, although they probably make no more than develop the germs already given in the disciplines and punishments of the latter. A deviant citizen-subject is a minoritarian one who invents what Foucault would have called heterotopias rather than utopias, which are also self-imposed protections against the nihilistic forms of violent negative individuality. The other figure that comes to mind is that of the militant or majoritarian subject of collective political action, who joins campaigns for civic or democratic causes which also have a moral dimension, such as the defense of the environment, or the solidarity with illegal migrants hunted and dehumanized by the very militarized society which pushed them into the realm of illegality, or the apparently more traditional causes of the defense of labor rights and popular culture. I am not even sure that the two figures, in fact pure ideal types, can be completely separated. They correspond to heterogeneous political logics, however, and they are occasionally incarnated in separated practices which do not originate in the same parts of the society, or the global world, and above all do not speak the same political language. This is also the reason why they can form only transitional unities or alliances. But these unities or alliances are also justified by the discovery that multiple forms of inequalities and exclusions are combined in a single complex system, or a network of political exigencies. It is on the basis of such remarks that, if I had kept time for that, I would try and elaborate a little more on the idea of a public sphere that is not already given, even if can make use of existing structures of communication and rights of expression, but constructed, or missing, as the people itself, and the idea of a political actor who is not the incarnation of a single empirical-transcendental type - such as the Worker, or the Proletarian, or the post-colonial subject, or the Woman - but rather a collective and

29 composed, or hybrid political actor, working and framing itself across internal and external borderlines. Its permanent task is to overcome its own split interests as much as confronting the power of its adversaries. But this should be for another occasion. You cannot condense two lectures into one, and I have already considerably abused of your patience. I am very grateful for your attention and I expect your critical remarks and questions with great interest.