Violence and Civility by Étienne Balibar

Author:Étienne Balibar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI034000, Philosophy/Social, PHI019000, Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

With that, I enter the last stretch. Everyone knows that it is the toughest. I now come to the question of the different strategies of civility. I shall not broach it from the standpoint of programs or slogans (I am not out to write a manifesto) but from that of the philosophical distinctions that such an idea requires us to introduce. What interests me, ultimately, is the intrinsic pluralism of the notion of civility as such, once one sets out to think it as a “politics” at the heart of politics itself.

I shall consider three approaches that are, ideally, distinct. Each is an intellectual construction; thus, the point is not that they belong to actually separated worlds. In reality, the simple fact that it is not only not possible to determine, outside a particular conjuncture, which of them is “true,” but even which of them corresponds to a “correct [juste] line,” means that we take the measure of the inadequacy of theory in the very moment in which we try to adjust [ajuster] it. History shows that no situation of extreme violence is characterized by the presence of a single danger, a single adversary, or a single aspect of the adversary: this was true even in the conditions of the struggle against fascism, and is a fortiori true in the context of the neo-fascist (or, as is sometimes said, “populist”) developments to which nationalism today lends itself, especially in Europe. The multiplicity of the conceivable strategies of civility by itself constitutes a way of reflecting on the complexity of the problem posed by “opening up (or reopening) the space for politics.” Yet, if it seems to me worthwhile to construct ideal types, particularly by referring to the work of the philosophers, it is also in order to try to understand what takes place “between” the strategic perspectives, at the points of their mutual interference or disjunction.24 This is the very object of a philosophy of practice. The fact is that Hegel and Foucault here interest us less as the authors of a systematization of this or that conception of civility taken by itself than as writers whose work is engaged in a movement of overcoming or adjusting theory.

The first of the approaches I have singled out is based on a return to Hegel (as in the first of these lectures) or, more exactly, on an examination of the problem that his doctrine of Sittlichkeit (“custom,” “ethical life,” or “objective morality,” depending on the translation) leaves unsolved. I call it hegemonic strategy, projecting back onto Hegel’s texts about Sittlichkeit questions that come to us from Gramsci, so as to make it possible to discuss conjointly problems bearing on citizenship, education, universality, and normality.25 The second approach—which I will discuss more rapidly because of everything I have just said about the Marxist tradition and the alternatives it includes—could be called majoritarian strategy. The most interesting procedure here, it seems to me, consists in proceeding from the elements of civility found in Marx

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