Étienne Balibar

Étienne Balibar (born 1942) is a French Marxist philosopher, who first rose to prominence as one of Louis Althusser's pupils at the École Normale Supérieure. Balibar was a participant in Althusser's seminar on Marx's Capital, which resulted in a book called Lire le Capital (Reading Capital) coauthored by Althusser and his students, among whom Althusser considered Balibar's contribution the foremost.

After Althusser's death, Balibar quickly became the leading exponent of French Marxist philosophy.

Balibar is known in France as much for his famous actress daughter, Jeanne Balibar, as for his philosophy, however.

In “In Search of the Proletariat,” Balibar argues that in Das Kapital, the theory of historical materialism (or rather, the radical political economy that Marx developed in his early writings that would latter be referred to as “historical materialism”) comes into conflict with the critical theory that Marx begins to develops in Capital, particularly in his analysis of the category of labor, which in capitalism, becomes a form of property. This conflict involves two distinct uses of the term “labor” (labor as the revolutionary class subject, i.e., the “proletariat,” and labor as an objective condition for the reproduction of capitalism, i.e., the masses or the “working class”). In The German Ideology, Marx conflates these two meanings of labor, and treats labor as, in Balibar’s words, the “veritable site of truth as well as the place from which the world is changed…” In Capital, however, the disparity between these two senses of labor becomes apparent. One manifestation of this is the virtual disappearance in Capital of the term “proletariat.” (as Balibar points out, the term appears only twice in the first edition of Capital, published in 1967: in the dedication to Wilhelm Wolff and in the two final sections on the “General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.”) For Balibar, what this problem implies is that “the emergence of a revolutionary form of subjectivity (or identity)… is never a specific property of nature, and therefore brings with it no guarantees, but obliges us to search for the conditions in a conjunture that can precipitate class struggles into mass movements…” Moreover, “[t]here is no proof… that these forms are always and eternally the same (for example, the party-form, or the trade union.”

Selected Readings

• Reading Capital (1968) (With Louis Althusser)
• Self-Criticism: Answers to Questions from Theoretical Practice (1973)
• On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1977)
• Spinoza et la politique. Presses Universitaires de France. (1985)

External links

Selected bibliography (up to 1998)

Review of Balibar's book: We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship

Etienne Balibar: At The Borders Of Europe (Lecture delivered October 4, 1999, on the invitation of the Institut français de Thessalonique and the Department of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloníki.)

Spinoza et la politique. Presses Universitaires de France. (1985)