On the Politics of Human Rights

Etienne Balibar

I have argued in the past in a somewhat formalistic manner that human rights are not
really different from civic rights (or “Rights of Man” from the “Rights of the Citizen,” to
return to the 18th century formulation that circulated between the American and the French
Revolutions). So that a “politics of human rights” – which I do not identify with “humanitarian
politics” – is a quasi-tautological notion: apart from politics, or without a political system
of institutions and actions, not only is there no implementation of human rights, but there
is also no “right” within these “rights.” This sounds Spinozistic: ius sive potentia, and I
may have to return to the meaning of this equation, but it is also not incompatible with an
Arendtian proposition (or a certain way of understanding it), especially if we consider its
negative side: when civic rights are destroyed or annihilated, “human rights” are not simply
suspended, they are in fact deprived of any content and meaning. As I argued (admittedly, I
was not the first), this does not mean that we must shift foundations, exchanging a humanistic-
naturalistic-universalistic “ideal” foundation, the kind adopted by Natural Rights theorists,
for a political-historical-institutional “positive” foundation, but rather that we must give
up the intention of “founding,” while certainly not giving up (much less) the objectives
of a politics of human rights; hence, the idea of a foundationless [grundlose] politics of
rights and the idea of “rights” being themselves without foundation, whether ontological or
transcendental, but with a conflictual history of conquests and resistances. It is my intention
in this paper not simply to reassert these propositions, but to reflect on their difficulties and
their consequences. But I want to do it by taking into account another dimension of the
problem, which perhaps is underlying the question that we have been asked to address in this
conference: why is it that the explicit notion of a “politics of human rights” was enunciated
and, in fact, acquired meaning only relatively recently, in the course of the second half of
the 20th century? Was this simply the result of a historical décalage, a naming a posteriori
of what had always existed since the beginning, which emerged only in the process of a
subsequent iteration and generalization? Is there a substantial difference between the politics
of human rights of, say, Toussaint Louverture and that of Martin Luther King? Or was this
the result of the fact that a politics of human rights, always involved in the very constitution
of such rights, increasingly met with external obstacles and internal contradictions, which
called not only for a reiteration of their importance, but also a new critical reflection on their
relation to the political? So, perhaps, the motto of human rights could remain a guideline
in politics only on the condition of being radically revisited, in particular from the point of
view of its alleged “foundations.” Before I enter into discussion of this difficult issue, I want
to briefly recall some of the circumstances in which a debate around the very notion and
contents of the politics of human rights, pro et contra, has developed in the last decades.
It seems to me that, after the category of human rights was universalized and codified as
the horizon of international law and the program of action of international institutions after
the Second World War in the framework of reflections on a recent genocide and a growing
awareness of the unacceptability of racism (but it is important to notice here that, although
they had a substantial relation to them, anti-colonialist struggles were not mainly fought
in the name of human rights, perhaps they had to take often the form of national wars of

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 On the Politics of Human Rights: Etienne Balibar 19

liberation), four main debates have led to problematizing the notion of a “politics of human
rights.” The first was launched internally and internationally by the growing resistances
and tensions inside the “socialist camp,” announcing its future collapse, which included the
protest and repression of Soviet dissidents, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, and Solidarnosc in
Poland. The intimate link between the recognition of basic civil and political rights and the
conquest of democracy (to borrow ironically a formula from Marx’s Communist Manifesto)
was there absolutely clear. A second debate (which to some extent would reverse the lessons
from the first) was launched in the wake of new genocides or mass massacres, combined
with famines and other seemingly natural catastrophes, especially in Africa before and
after Rwanda. These events led to the introduction of the notions of humanitarian crisis,
humanitarian right, and humanitarian intervention. They remain deeply contested to this
date, not only, juridically speaking, because they conflict with an international order based on
the sovereignty of nation-states, but because “humanitarian right” turns out to be intimately
combined with imperialist strategies for policing the world.1 The third and fourth debates
that I want to mention are less easily connected to singular events. Instead, they take the form
of steadily mounting tensions between claims of rights and a conservative social order, which
is protected by the law and states but which must also face the possibility of a true revolution
in its principles. I am thinking, first, of the internationalization of the movement for the
equal rights of women and for the abolition of violences to which women are subjected in
both the public and the domestic sphere. It culminated, officially, in the 1995 Conference
in Beijing, which however was also the moment when it became clear that feminism was
torn between different languages and strategies, or itself divided along class and especially
culture lines. And I am thinking, second, of the growing importance of the issue of “cultural
rights” that, arising from the old problem of the protection of minorities, now stretches over
a broad spectrum of political questions. They include on one side the recognition of the
rights of indigenous peoples to resist ethnocide and the destruction of their environment
(as stated in the Vienna declaration of 2001)2 and on the other side what Jürgen Habermas
calls a “strategic claim” of cultural rights (as distinct from a “normative” one), which is the
instrument of new powers emerging on the global stage, seeking to challenge the Western
hegemony not only in the field of economy, diplomacy, or the military, but also in the field
of values.
From these hasty allusions, I want now to draw three lessons.
One, the inclusion of human rights in the field of politics – as driving motives and forces,
which means indeed that they cannot remain at the level of moral principles or values and
which thus retrieves something of the Kantian notion of Weltbürgerrecht (which is already a
political or a meta-political notion) but with a new capacity to challenge and in fact destabilize
the constitution of existing states – is bound to remain controversial. For some, it is much
too political, for others it is not enough. We are in a zone of constitutive uncertainty. In an
important controversy taking place in France in the early 80’s, Claude Lefort argued against
Marcel Gauchet that a politics of human rights does exist, and it is not concerned only with
securing, guaranteeing, and protecting existing rights, but with asserting and conquering
them, and in fact defining them, since their content is never derived from some pre-existing
heaven of ideas, but emerging from the immanent claims of emancipation of the citizens
themselves.3 In adopting this position, he was certainly influenced by the contemporary
action of Solidarnosc and similar movements, and he would call the process in which basic
rights are simultaneously defined and vindicated an invention of democracy, meaning that its
forms and principles are not inherited or established once for ever but historically produced,
with ever new contents that could not be anticipated and, to some extent, may become


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irreversible. This idea has explicit Arendtian roots, but it seems to me that it is also not
incompatible with Habermas’ notion of the Ebenbürtigkeit of human rights and democracy,
except that the accent is not on the correlation between a constituted normative order and
a constitutive intersubjectivity of equal liberties, but rather on the historical breakthrough,
the movement of “permanent revolution” so to speak, without which rights would be neither
conceived nor recognized.4
A second lesson derives from debates on humanitarian policies and humanitarian interven-
tions, which brought to the fore another, more antinomic aspect of the question. This was the
case, in my opinion, because humanitarian crises and urgencies, whose causes are ultimately
political or rooted in a political system through the mediation of “natural” processes, do
really exist and (as in the case of past genocides) are made partly possible by the more or
less intentional passivity of other nations. But, while this urgency could lead us to have a
notion of human rights prevail over the representation of state sovereignty as an absolute, it
makes it in fact all the more intolerable ethically and untenable logically when we see the
combination of humanitarian discourse with the militarization of politics (which most of the
time aggravates the crises it is supposed to heal), and above all the instrumentalization of
the notion of humanitarian crisis to serve imperialist strategies. The crises to be addressed
are selected according to economic interests, propaganda patterns, or hopes of easy victory.
What destroys their legitimacy from the inside is also the fact that the same powers who
carry on or decide most of humanitarian interventions (mainly in the space of ex-colonial
empires) are also nowadays waging a latent war against refugees and migrants on or outside
the borders of their sovereign territories.5 Thus, they completely except themselves from
the application of the rules whose universal validity they are eager to proclaim. There are
three ways of interpreting this contradiction, which blatantly affects the idea of a politics of
human rights. One of them is to declare, along traditional Marxist lines, that human rights,
and, a fortiori, “humanitarianism,” were never anything else than a cover for imperialist
policies that needed moral justification, in other terms an ideology (a name in which we must
hear the etymology: “ideo-logy”). Another one is to consider that there are two independent
realms: one of ideas and one of practices, where, depending on the quality of the agents, the
ideas can become used either for good or for bad, i.e. either there is a right use of the right
taking place or there is a wrong, perverse, use of the right, between which we must choose,
exercising judgment.6 This is a Platonic view of politics, which sees it as a continuous (but
also essentially desperate) attempt at reaching the harmony of ideas and realities and bridging
the gap between them. In fact the two interpretations are completely symmetrical. I prefer
a third interpretation (which tries to be more “dialectical”): the politics of human rights is
intrinsically ambiguous, it involves (on both sides of the ideal combination of a democratic
constitution with the protection of basic rights and the implementation of new, expanded
rights) the insurrectional movements linked with the invention of democracy, but also the
instrumental uses of the idea of human rights to legitimize the status quo and strategies of
domination.
This is an intrinsic antinomy, which we can address only from the inside, i.e. politically,
and which is impossible to leave to moral judgment alone (even if, clearly, it involves an
ethical choice). Therefore, a politics of human rights must be also a politics of the second
order or a “politics of politics” as it were, reflecting the consequences of its insurrections
and resisting the modalities of its perversions.7 In my opinion this is a powerful hint at the
validity of the Arendtian view of a “groundless” politics, which I interpret in a Machiavellian
sense, indicating that there is no transcendental or normative guarantee that the use of human
rights in politics will produce the anticipated results or realize the right (justice, if you like)


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designated in “the rights.” What is important in Arendt, coinciding with her insistence on
the fact that politics, judgment, and uncertainty are coextensive, is the fact that she inscribes
a lack of a guarantee within the very notion of human rights as basic rights. The issue of a
“right to have rights” is not to be understood, I think, in terms of a higher level of abstraction
(or a transcendental “condition of possibility”), the equivalent of a Grundnorm from which
all the concrete rights could be deduced or justified. Instead, it should be seen as an immanent
practical problem, both institutional and militant, that commands the effective realization of
justice within rights. However, there is a question that cannot be ignored about this point.
It was raised by several readers of Arendt, including Habermas, who is rather favorable to
her, and France Jacques Rancière, who is much less favorable and in fact is opposed to her
concept of the political. Is not there a tendency in Arendt to replace transcendental idealism
with another idealism, which we could call political, or still better, republican, whereby –
mainly following ancient models of the Greek city-state – a politics of human rights becomes
oriented towards an idea of the community of citizens: a polity which also involves limiting
the realm of human rights?8 In particular, it would exclude what is deemed to belong to the
private sphere, thus finally reinforcing the public vs. private divide with which many claims
of emancipation have been historically colliding. This is a serious question, one which I leave
aside for the moment, to suggest a third lesson to be drawn from contemporary debates. It will
reinforce the picture of a politics of human rights that is intrinsically antinomic – therefore,
in my opinion, all the more congenial to a rigorous concept of the political.
A moment ago, I alluded to the central function of the vindication of the rights of women
(as Mary Wollstonecraft wrote already more than 200 years ago or the equality of the sexes,
as we would more likely say today), which clearly has become one of the cutting edges in
the future invention of democracy (also, I would suggest, because such “rights” are not to be
univocally located in any of the categories that have become codified to hierarchize different
“generations” of basic rights).9 Simultaneously, I referred to the progressive emergence of a
broad notion of cultural rights and rights to cultural preservation, cultural integrity, whose
cutting edge, again, can be located in the terrain of post-colonial contradictions. It is now
fairly perceptible that there is a latent contradiction between different, heterogeneous claims
of rights. This contradiction sometimes becomes open, violent, and of course can also become
instrumentalized by existing powers according to their own agendas but, I believe, is not
created by them. The question is: at what level, in which anthropological realities, is this
contradiction to be located? Is it at the very level of the conditions of human and social life,
or “only,” so to speak, in the historical, traditional forms of political institutions? But is this
distinction itself relevant here? Better said, is it not becoming an absurdity when we reason
not in terms of some abstract definition of what would be essential to the human condition
abstractly defined but in terms of the agencies and transformations within the institutions
themselves? And the question is also: how can we resolve this kind of contradiction (which
is not a contradiction between the universal and the particular, or different particularities, but
in fact between “conflicting universalities”)?10 Is it perhaps through the ordering of human
rights, declaring that some rights are more basic than others (a move that, let us note in
passing, the French and American authors of the Bills of Rights and Declarations carefully
avoided but emerged again later in the “liberal” era in the form of declaring personal liberties
more basic than, for example, social rights)?
Now we should be extremely careful in describing the nature of the conflict between,
for instance, the claim of the equality of the sexes and the defence of cultural integrity
threatened by culturalist hegemony or by modernization processes prompted by deregulated
capitalist expansion. Much depends politically, especially in terms of the capacity of “solving


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the contradictions within the people” (as Mao would have said), on how we describe the
contradictions and according to whose point of view we choose to describe them.11 We should
particularly avoid (as was importantly recalled by Suzanne Baer)12 confusing a defense (or
a protection or vindication) of the cultural rights of subjects who are embedded in a given
culture (be it Western or Oriental, individualistic or holistic) with a defense of the rights, i.e.
the powers, of a hypostasized group over its own members. The difficulty however begins
when we stick to the democratic notion that a right “empowers” its bearers, i.e. it can be
defined and authorized only by those subjects who need it and fight for it. Remember the
formula coined by Marx in the Provisional Statutes of the International Working Men’s
Association: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working
classes themselves,” which I take to be a perfect illustration of the insurrectional aspect of the
“right to have rights.” It could be replicated in the form: “the emancipation of women must
be conquered by the women themselves”, and many other variations. The difficulty comes
from the fact that the hierarchy of claims and rights can prove aporetic or it can depend on
conjuncture – which is often one of violent constraint for the subjects, since they are torn
between conflicting interests. Where begins the destruction of the personality associated with
a violent disruption of the cultural framework (most of the time also hierarchic) within which
this personality was formed? How do we assess the differential effects of such a disruption
on different individuals, males and females respectively, if we do not listen carefully to their
own voices, which are never disinterested voices? But how do we hear the multiple layers
of these voices, especially if they are constrained by some social order, unless there is a
political movement to make the mute audible? Who is to be defined the subaltern of the
subaltern, which is to say who is the ultimate agent of the politics of human rights? Is this the
woman, doubly oppressed within the dominated societies and cultures on the global market?
Or is this the woman of color, of non-western culture, again doubly oppressed within a
world of persisting male dominance? My tentative answer would be: the answer depends
on the exact local situation, the cases considered, the type of issue (be it education, or the
division of labor, or the sexual rights within marriage, etc.), and also the choices made by
the agents themselves, which can certainly change over time. Nobody else can speak for
them.
This leads us to a more general consideration, deeply affecting our representation of the
relationship between claims of rights, conditions of democracy, and the ideal line of progress
in history. The representation of a linear progress, even ideal, can hold only if basic rights
can be added to one another while remaining essentially coherent, i.e. if equal liberty, the
core formula of the universality of human rights and the key to its equivalence with an
expanding democracy, cannot contradict itself. But this is not the case, neither historically
nor logically (it would be very important, philosophically, to reflect again about the reasons
why we tend to believe that the universal must be non-contradictory . . . ). The experience
that we are having now is that of permanent conflicts between different forms, or aspects,
of emancipation (different “emancipatory interests”), therefore also between their bearers
– or even sometimes within the experience and consciousness of the bearers themselves,
who are considered and consider themselves acting under different relations, with different
“identities” if you like (but identities are always relations). This was truly unthinkable for
the classical theorists of equal liberty. As I understand it, it is not the same thing as a conflict
between juridical norms, which can be resolved either through the use of force (remember
Marx’s phrase in Capital about the social conflicts concerning the organization of labor:
“zwischen gleichen Rechten entscheidet die Gewalt”),13 or, in the positivist representation of
the constitutional order, through their parallel derivations from and limitations by the same


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Grundnorm. It is rather a case of the antinomy of politics itself, located in the identification of
its agents and their non-negotiable interests. Therefore, albeit from a different angle, it raises
again the issue of what I have called a politics of politics: particularly in order to decide which
compromises or articulations of rights must be left to authorities and which ones must be
elaborated by the people themselves, in the form of intellectual debates and social movements.
Clearly, from a democratic point of view, the second solution should be preferred but this is
only a tendency (as democracy itself is only a tendency towards its own “democratization”),
it is only partially possible and ought to be maximized in given circumstances. In any case,
we are faced with an additional indication that the issue of a politics of human rights must
abandon the ideal picture of being either a revelation of the eternal laws of justice or a linear
evolution on the line of rationality. The idea of an invention, which I borrowed from Lefort
a moment ago, must now be taken in an even stronger sense: it involves a struggle against
forms of oppression and discrimination which were not previously recognized, but also a
struggle with its own internal antinomies. Therefore it is doubly hazardous, “aleatory” as my
master Althusser would have said.
It seems to me that this in fact takes us back to what had defined from the beginning the
recognition of the political character of human rights, in the form of the equivalence between
“rights of man” and “rights of the citizen,” or rights of man as conditions of unlimited
access to civic responsibility and participation, because this recognition was centered on
the reciprocity of freedom and equality. But such a form of reciprocity, as I have argued
elsewhere,14 can become exposed only in a negative form, the form of a logical elenchus:
there is neither a realization of freedom without equality nor a realization of equality without
freedom. It presents us always with a problem, or with aleatory solutions, rather than the
image of a consistent “normative order.”
From this I will return to the question that I had left aside, albeit mentioning it as a
possible objection against the Arendtian idea of a groundless politics of human rights –
therefore a notion of human rights that is absolutely anti-foundationalist. You may want to
say in more philosophical terms that it inscribes them in the horizon of radical finitude.
This is the question of the model of community that is involved in defining human rights as
civic rights – if there is one. It is a question that could be directed at Kant because of the
well-known oscillations of his notion of “Weltbürgerrecht” between different historical and
institutional modalities. It is also a question that can be asked (or an objection that can be
made) imaginarily to Arendt. But it is in fact rather an intrinsic problem that we can try to
discuss with the help of Kant and Arendt through a disclosure of tensions that are latent in
their own work.
Leaving aside (with regret) Kant for another occasion, I believe that it will be useful
here to start again from the crucial event that repeatedly confirmed Arendt’s philosophical
argument: totalitarian regimes policies of extermination (themselves part of a general triumph
of ideologies involving the suppression of personal and political liberties, and also the
institution of “permanent revolution,” at least ideally, since in practice the revolution soon
became, literally speaking, a “conservative revolution”). The historical lesson is drawn in
advance in the now famous chapter on “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the
Rights of Man,”15 in the form, once again, of a negative theorem, a refutation or an elenchus:
it is not the case that human rights, qua rights of the human Person, can be preserved (not only
materially, but, I would say, conceptually, with a definable substance) if the civic community
to which individuals “belong,” where they are recognized as bearers of rights (where their
“dignity” is recognized, if you like), is itself destroyed. Hence the ironic reference to a
Burkean argument, once directed against the proclamation of the Rights of Man: there is no


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subject of rights (or bearer of their corresponding duties), outside membership in a political
community or prior to it.
Now this negative theorem calls for two qualifications before we can decide whether it
leads to sacralizing the existing form of political community – the nation – or not. First,
as extensively demonstrated in her book, Arendt is not so much interested in the brute fact
of extermination, although it keeps extending its shadow on the whole situation considered,
reminding us that this is a situation of extreme violence in which the social bond itself
becomes negated or radically perverted (and maybe this is always the horizon within which
certain rights can become recognized as fundamental or “human,” i.e. such that the divide
between humanity and inhumanity or the presence of the inhuman inside the human becomes
perceptible). She is indeed interested not so much in this fact than in the modalities, i.e. the
social production of “non-persons” or “superfluous human beings,” likely to be eliminated
through a variety of legal and ideological means. The problematic of phenomena like elim-
ination, radical exclusion, and disposable humans is indeed crucial today more than ever,
and I would suggest that Alessandro Dal Lago has given an exceptionally brilliant analysis
of its meaning.16 Seyla Benhabib should also be mentioned here in the first place, for what
concerns in particular the production of the stranger as interior enemy in Western developed
societies (and possibly others) today.17 The second qualification is what we call a destruction
or a collapse of the community of citizens here is again a very paradoxical one, since it takes
often the form of an intensification of the ideological and political forms that are supposed
to produce – and do actually produce to an amazing extent – the fusion of citizens into a
substantial unity, be it “racial” or otherwise ideological (particularly in the form of what
Eric Voegelin had called political religions). So in a sense the collapse of the community,
which produces “non-persons,” is in fact an absolutization of the community. We are thus
tempted to read in Arendt an antinomic proposition: just as she would later reflect on the
devastating effects of the positivist tautology: law is law (and it must be obeyed because it
is the law), she would have already inscribed a self-destructive dimension in the very heart
of the community’s constructive principle, the gathering of free and equal citizens under the
authority of the same law.
It is from here that, I believe, we can return to the dilemma of the sacralization of the
community. I will entirely grant Habermas and Rancière that there is in Arendt a tendency
to draw the lessons of the processes of extermination in terms of a vindication of an existing
model of the community of citizens (or rather an imaginary model strangely combining
yearnings for the ancient polis with an idealization of the “lost treasure of revolution,” i.e. the
early modern, not to say the romantic universalistic nation-state). This is especially influential
in her resistance to the idea of politically challenging the “public vs. private” division of
social life, possibly because the invasion of the private sphere by political surveillance and
ideological constraint was so typical of totalitarian regimes (today it is mainly commercial
TV and computer games or “social networks” that invade privacy). Let me also suggest that
this is not inconsistent with the way in which the Charter of the UN was believed to be able
to solve the dramatic issue of stateless people, refugees, and displaced victims of the world
wars by simultaneously codifying an individual’s right to nationality and right to change that
nationality.18
But perhaps there is another way to read Arendt, or to think with Arendt beyond Arendt
herself: this is to suggest that what “exterminist” processes, and more generally the production
of “non-persons” on a mass scale, demonstrate is the reciprocity or the mutual inherence
of a universalistic notion of human rights, and the belonging – not necessarily in the form
of exclusive belonging – of individuals, qua “citizens” in the broad sense, to a political


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community. Now a political community, however flexible its forms, can certainly not remain
ideal, it must be instituted, legally but also socially and morally. If it is not to become
absolutized, therefore self-destructive, it must remain conflictual (or, as Weber would say,
it should remain essentially “illegitimate”)19 : which is also the condition for basic rights
to become vindicated or “invented” politically inside its limits or against its positive laws,
e.g. through civil disobedience and through the exercise of the right of resistance (another
instantiation of the “right to have rights”). In short, it is historically finite, distinct from a Stoic
or Kantian idea of the moral community. But it is not identical with the nation-state per se,
especially if the circumstances leading to the manifestation of hitherto unrecognized basic
rights, making contradictions between heterogeneous rights impossible, substantializing
identities, or entirely excluding entire groups of residents, can be shown to have an intrinsic
relationship to the nation-form. In these conditions, the “community of citizens,” which
the Arendtian argument calls for, is no longer an existing community or an existing form
of community to be ideally located in the past. It becomes – to put it in quasi-Derridian
terms – a “community to come,” or a community without a model, which is bound to appear
first as a “non-community,” but is virtually there in the struggles themselves. From this
point of view, it is tempting to say that human rights are neither “moral” nor “juridical,”
they are insurrectional, which means that they are political, but also that the political is not
isolated from its “impolitical” side, the democratic invention of the institution beyond its
given limitations.

NOTES

1. A question which has been brilliantly synthesized by Costas Douzinas. Human Rights and Empire:
The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (New York: Routledge Cavendish, 2007).
2. Cf. Elsa Stamatopoulou, Cultural Rights in International Law. Article 27 of the Universal Decla-
ration of Human Rights and Beyond (Leiden and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2007).
3. Marcel Gauchet’s essential article is “Les droits de l’homme ne sont pas une politique,” Le Débat
3 (July/August 1980), 2–21; this article was reprinted in: Marcel Gauchet. La démocratie contre elle-même
(Paris: Gallimard, 2002); Lefort’s answer to this statement “Droits de l’homme et politique,” Libre 7, (1980),
now forms Chapter 1 of his book L’invention démocratique (Paris: Fayard, 1981).
4. Jürgen Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung. Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des
demokratischen Rechtsstaates (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp,1992), essentially Chapter III.
5. Alessandro Dal Lago and Sandro Mezzadra. “I confini impensati del Europa [The Unimagined
Frontiers of Europe]” in Europa politica: Ragioni di una necessità edited by Heidrun Friese Antonio Negri,
and Peter Wagner (Roma: Manifestolibri 2002). See my commentary: “Europe, an “Unimagined” Frontier
of Democracy,” Diacritics, no. 3/4, Vol. 33 (Autumn – Winter, 2003), 36–44.
6. This critique is already there in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (chapter VI, C.c, on the “dis-
placements” or Verstellungen of morality) (Conscience. The Beautiful Soul, Evil and its Forgiveness), cf.
G.W.F Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
7. I have used this expression already in my book: Violence et Civilité (The Wellek Library Lectures
1996 et autres essais de philosophie politique), (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2010), (forthcoming English
Translation, Columbia University Press).
8. Jacques Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” in The South Atlantic Quarterly
103:2/3, (Spring/Summer 2004), 297–310.
9. T.H. Marshall famously proposed a classification of “fundamental rights” as “civil,” “political,”
and “social,” as corresponding to successive historical stages in the invention of “modernity,” which remains
very influential today (Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (1950) (London: Pluto
Press, 1987)). Without losing every lesson from this classification, one can object that the order of linear
succession is not valid for every national history and is even inverted in the framework of current “neo-liberal”
politics.
10. To answer a question asked by Professor Jürgen Habermas in the oral discussion and clarify as
much as possible my reference to Hegel, I would submit that the defense of a right to cultural identity should
not be confused with a defense of “particularism”: the identity itself may be “particular” (it always is), but


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the right to such an identity is “universal,” as demonstrated by the fact that to deny it can be done only in the
name of some other particular identity (e.g. national, or republican) that is wrongly presented as “universal.”
11. This also means that we cannot not choose a determinate point of view (or there would be no
real conflict). But we are not forced to stay in permanence with the same point of view, without dialogue or
dialectics.
12. Cf. Susanne Baer, “Privatizing Religion. Legal Groupism, No-Go-Areas, and the Public-Private-
Ideology in Human Rights Politics”, in Constellations, 20.1.
13. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, in MEW, no. 23, 1 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1981), 349.
14. E. Balibar, “La proposition de l’égaliberté” (1989) in La proposition de l’égaliberté. Essais
politiques 1989–2009 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010). English translation as “Rights of
Man and Rights of the Citizen,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas. Studies in Politics and Philosophy, (New York:
Routledge, 1994).
15. Cf. Chapter 9, Part II, Imperialism in Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism (Washington:
Harvest Book, 1976).
16. A. Dal Lago, Non-persone. L’esclusione dei migranti in una società globale (Milano: Feltrinelli,
1999).
17. Seyla Benhabib. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).
18. E. Balibar, “Toward a Diasporic Citizen? Internationalism and Cosmopolitics,” in The Creoliza-
tion of Theory edited by Françoise Lionnet, Shu Mei-Shi (Durham: Duke University Press 2011), 207–225.
19. Max Weber, “The Plebeian City,” part of Max Weber, The City (1914) (New York: The Free
Press, 1968) or as part of Economy and Society, Vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

Etienne Balibar is currently Professor of Philosophy at Kingston University London and

Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of Reading Capital
(with Louis Althusser, 1965); Race, Nation, Class (Verso, 1991, with Immanuel Wallerstein),
Spinoza and Politics (Verso 1998); and We, the People of Europe? (Princeton, 2004).


C 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.