Citizen Subject

Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology

Étienne Balibar, Steven Miller

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823273614, 9780823273607
• eBook ISBN: 9780823273621
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience "the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship"? Citizen Subject is the summation of Étienne Balibar's career-long project to think the necessary and necessarily antagonistic relation between the categories of citizen and subject. In this magnum opus, the question of modernity is framed anew with special attention to the self-enunciation of the subject (in Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, and Derrida), the constitution of the community as "we" (in Hegel, Marx, and Tolstoy), and the aporia of the judgment of self and others (in Foucualt, Freud, Kelsen, and Blanchot).After the "humanist controversy" that preoccupied twentieth-century philosophy, Citizen Subject proposes foundations for philosophical anthropology today, in terms of two contrary movements: the becoming-citizen of the subject and the becoming-subject of the citizen. The citizen-subject who is constituted in the claim to a "right to have rights" (Arendt) cannot exist without an underside that contests and defies it. He—or she, because Balibar is concerned throughout this volume with questions of sexual difference—figures not only the social relation but also the discontent or the uneasiness at the heart of this relation. The human can be instituted only if it betrays itself by upholding "anthropological differences" that impose normality and identity as conditions of belonging to the community.The violence of "civil" bourgeois universality, Balibar argues, is greater (and less legitimate, therefore less stable) than that of theological or cosmological universality. Right is thus founded on insubordination, and emancipation derives its force from otherness.Ultimately, Citizen Subject offers a revolutionary rewriting of the dialectic of universality and differences in the bourgeois epoch, revealing in the relationship between the common and the universal a political gap at the heart of the universal itself.

PART ONE

“Our True Self Is Not Entirely Within Us”

ONE

“Ego sum, ego existo”: Descartes on the Verge of Heresy

Mister President, you have imposed Draconian limits upon me. As a result, I must cut to the chase. The abstract that you might have received is not, as you no doubt grasp, a summary of my talk: not only because I hadn’t yet given my text a definitive form but also because what I have to say, since it remains highly open to discussion, is very difficult to summarize. Rather than drawing conclusions, my goal today is merely to arrive at questions; and I would consider myself a very happy man if, to some extent, you were to concur that these questions can indeed be posed. Although I speak there of “sketching out what is, in certain respects, a renewed interpretation of Cartesian ‘metaphysics,’ ” I make no pretense of articulating ideas that are wholly new. On the contrary, what I have to say, for the most part, has already been established thanks to the work of eminent Descartes scholars. But it seemed to me that these very ideas fare better, and, on a few important points, can be understood otherwise by restoring a key to their analysis that, to a remarkable degree, hasn’t ever been elucidated—even if it occasionally shows up in what used to be called, in a now outmoded jargon, the “unsaid” of discussions.1 On the basis of this restoration—“symptomatic,” if you wish—I would like to attempt a rereading of a text that is constitutive of our philosophical culture, in which we have never stopped finding the unexpected, or even the unknown. In order to assure that this exercise wouldn’t be without effects of titillatio, then, I lent my abstract a somewhat provocative form. You might surmise that this provocation, in the etymological sense, was addressed to myself first of all.

Absence of the Cogito

Let us begin, if you will, with what is already known. Commentaries on Descartes’s Meditations, for a very long time now, have tended to isolate an argument that occurs at the beginning of the Second Meditation. This argument is what they designate under the name of the cogito, assigning it a fundamental place within the economy of the text, or within what Martial Gueroult, who borrowed from Descartes himself what has become the unavoidable formula, called the order of reasons. As a result, one speaks of “the cogito” and thereby designates: either, globally, the reasoning whereby, upon release from the “metaphysical doubt” that he instituted through various “hyperbolic hypotheses,” Descartes discovers the certainty of his existence in the irreducibility of his own thought, the first truth necessary to reconstruct the other elements of science; or, more specifically, the phrase that, at the heart of this reasoning, presents us with the very moment when certainty is acquired, the cusp of the meditation; or, finally, the very utterance, isolated by Descartes himself, which can be said to be absolutely certain. From this point in the text onward, commentaries proceed in one of two complementary directions: on the one hand, to the study of the intimate relationship between this argument and the whole system of Cartesian metaphysics insofar as it privileges the subjectivity of the Ego and the being of thought; on the other hand, to the analysis of the utterance itself (often designated, today, as a “canonical” or “protocolary” statement) in terms of its structure and its discursive function—an analysis that was already well under way during Descartes’s own lifetime in the discussions that he undertook with various readers and naysayers.

But this is where the difficulties commence. As we know, there is no doubt that the text of the Meditations features an utterance that one might call canonical, that even becomes the object of a particularly spectacular “staging,” and that it is easy to suppose strategically governs the whole construction of the work. But this statement can only be called “cogito” by amalgamating it with statements from other equally “foundational” works in which Descartes elaborates similar arguments with more or less detail, and which actually contain, in Latin, the verb cogito or, in French, je pense. These other works are, principally, Part IV of Discourse on Method: “je pense, donc je suis [I think therefore I am]”; and the Principles of Philosophy: Ego cogito, ergo sum (translated back into French as “je pense, donc je suis”). But the utterance from the Meditations is different. It is simply Ego sum, ego existo—without any immediate, internal reference to cogitare or cogitatio. The designation of this utterance as the “cogito” or as the truth of the “cogito” is thus, at best, an interpretation. Naturally, this interpretation has been explained, even explained well. Although the Meditations does not contain the better known formulation, Descartes himself, in his Responses to Objections, had no problem discussing this text as if it could help understand whether the passage from cogito to sum entails a mediate or immediate inference or why the statement cogito (“I think”) is privileged over other verbs that express subjective actions, such as ambulo (“I walk”). Moreover, there is no lack of evidence to suggest that the discourse of the Meditations, by virtue of its very singular form—that of a reflexive argumentation in the first person that reconstitutes or even constitutes the movement of thought—would be a sort of original version, or the reconstitution of the original version of the foundational argument, which was inscribed, not to forget, in a real intellectual experience and was inseparable from this experience. The “other” versions, expounded in the works that I listed before, can and must be presented either as the narrative of this experience or as a commentary on its metaphysical function; and, in this respect, they unambiguously indicate the place, indeed the very point in the written text of the Meditations to look for what they propose to call the “cogito.” But it becomes difficult not to see that the more we accumulate incontestable reasons to identify the “cogito,” or even the originary “cogito,” with precisely this utterance from the Meditations—Ego sum, ego existo (“I am, I exist”)—which Descartes called “necessarily true each time that I pronounce it or conceive it,” the more the fact that it does not take the form of “I think, I am” (with or without therefore) becomes enigmatic and challenging.

Confronted with this enigma, as you know, the commentators have reacted very differently. I will quickly rehearse some of these reactions. Many of the greatest commentators purely and simply ignore it and, in order to discuss the Meditations, never fail to rely on a passage from Descartes’s other works. Others notice it and treat it as a problem: either as the necessity of proving the equivalence of Ego sum, ego existo and (Ego) cogito, ergo sum, showing that “thought” and the “I think” are implied in the statement from the Meditations; or as the invitation to recognize the originality of the writing of the Meditations, the thought that is written in the Meditations, or even the thought of the subject who writes himself in the Meditations. The risk, then, is that the apparent and purposeful univocity of the Cartesian “system” would belie an insistent plurality, or, in any event, the singularity of his separate works, each of which must henceforth be considered as inherently self-sufficient, as a work that constructs its own language in its own way and according to its own “reasons.”

Even such an approach, however, appears still to lack an element that would explicate this singularity, an element that would pertain to the very letter of the text, and that Descartes himself had no need to comment on, because, whether or not he was clearly conscious of it (not omitting to discuss what it means to be “clearly conscious”), this element can function as such only if it goes without saying. Or rather, I would prefer to say that it goes with saying; that is, it can only be understood (or read) in and through the text of the “meditation” itself and can never be extracted from this text nor made the object of a metadiscourse (unlike exactly what happens with “I think, therefore I am”), except at the price of immediately sapping it of its very effectiveness and signification. Nonetheless, this is exactly what I intend to do. I will explain.

Let us return to the Meditations, then, or rather to the Meditationes; for, what matters most, by necessity, is the first Latin text that Descartes wrote, and thus thought while writing, thought through writing. The translations of the text, whether the one that Descartes personally reviewed, or the modern one that Michelle Beyssade recently made available to us,2 should come into play only when they reveal certain knots or textual difficulties. Let us make believe that we have never read this text; let us pretend, above all, that we know nothing about the “Cartesian system,” or that, in order to gain access to it, we are strictly limited to the text of the Meditationes, which never presents itself as the description of a system but rather as the protocol of a singular reflection—a reflection that, nonetheless, by virtue of its writing, and precisely under the condition that this writing suits it perfectly, is open to the universal participation of all its potential readers. Let us turn to the beginning of the Second Meditation, to the moment when Descartes is about to discover what he himself calls the “Archimedian point,” vel minimum quid … quod certum sit et inconcussum, making it possible to leave behind the “grave doubts” in which “yesterday’s Meditation” had embroiled him. After he summarizes the arguments that found absolute skepticism (Quid igitur erit verum? Fortassis hoc unum, nihil esse certi), after recalling the hypotheses of the “deceptive God” and the “Evil Genius,” here is what we read:

Haud dubie igitur etiam sum, si me fallit; et fallat quantum potest, numquam tamen efficiet, ut hihil sim quamdiu me aliquid esse cogitabo. Adeo ut, omnibus satis superque pensitatis, denique statuendum sit hoc pronuntiatum, Ego sum, ego existo, quoties a me profertur, vel mente concipitur, necessario esse verum.3

In Michelle Beyssade’s modern French translation:

Il n’y a donc pas de doute, moi aussi je suis, s’il me trompe; et qu’il me trompe autant qu’il peut, il ne fera poutant jamais que je ne sois rien tant que je penserai être quelque chose; de sorte que tout bien pesé et soupesé, il faut finalement poser que cet énoncé, je suis, j’existe, moi toutes les fois que je le prononce ou que je le conçois mentalement, est nécessairement vrai.

Finally, in John Cottingham’s English translation:

In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.4

No major difficulties, it would seem. Nonetheless, a few remarks are necessary. Michelle Beyssade has good reason to want to underscore the insistence of the Ego (since the Duc du Luynes did not do so) which is not necessary in Latin to express the first person: “moi aussi je suis,” “je suis, j’existe, moi.” There is not the slightest doubt, upon an initial reading of this text, that the moi or the Ego supports the essential argument. It is he (me) who—being, existing, discovering (myself) and thus thinking (myself) as such—constitutes the “Archimedean point.” But one little problem remains: Ego in Latin and moi in French do not at all function in the same manner; the reflexive pronoun moi could be read as the designation of the subject whereas Ego is the subject itself. Furthermore, I believe that we should take this insistence as far as possible, as Descartes himself did, translating the Latin in this way: “Moi je suis, moi j’existe” (or: “je suis, moi, j’existe, moi”—a formulation that better conveys the assertive mode or the tone whereby I exit from the fictive nothingness into which the hypothesis of the Evil Genius threatens to plunge me and affirm my existence against this supposed negation).

Let us now adumbrate an initial commentary. There are three main points:

1. Descartes presents us with an “utterance”—that is, a phrase that he pronounces himself (hoc pronuntiatum: my utterance, this utterance that I now proffer) and whose exact formulation he reproduces, as if between quotation marks; the necessary truth or certainty of the utterance then inheres in its pronunciation or proffering. Quoties a me pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Emily Apter
• Half Title
• Introduction: After the Controversy
• Overture: Citizen Subject. Response to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Question “Who Comes After the Subject?”
• Annex: Subjectus/subjectum
• Part I. “Our True Self Is Not Entirely Within Us”
• Part II. Being(s) in Common
• Part III. The Right to Transgression
• Part IV. The Ill-Being of the Subject
• Notes
• Index
• Series Page