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<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><div align="center"><font size=6>
Etienne Balibar<br><br>
</font><font size=5> </font><font size=4><b><i>Aporias of the
Community: The Debate Around Derrida in the 80’s<br><br>
</i></font><br>
<h4><b>January 21<br>
4:30 PM<br><br>
HMNSS 1500</b></h4><b><br><br>
</div>
In 1983 some major texts of contemporary French philosophy appeared in a
row : Jean-Luc Nancy’s “The inoperative community”, Maurice Blanchot’s
“The unavowable community”, Jean-François Lyotard’s “The differend”. They
were directly or indirectly the products of the work carried on in a
group created in 1981 around Jacques Derrida, which received also
contributions from Lacoue-Labarthe, Lefort, Rancière, and others. The
discussion which they generated produced many significant contributions.
It centered on the aporia of the community as a notion which produces the
most opposite political effects (emancipatory and genocidal, inclusive
and exclusive), and which seems to be at the same time indispensable and
treacherous for democratic politics. In 1994, in <i>Politics of
Friendship</i>, Derrida proposed a critical assessment of the debate and,
simultaneously, a displacement toward other categories of the political
which refer to the ambivalence of the other rather than the exigency of
the common. The lecture will describe the content of this “philosophical
moment”, trying to synthesize its meaning and discuss its relevance for
contemporary interrogations on the crisis of the political. <br><br>
</b> <br><br>
<div align="center"><i>Etienne Balibar is Emeritus Professor of Moral and
Political Philosophy at the University of Paris 10 Nanterre and
Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California,
Irvine. He also teaches seminars at the Centro Franco-Argentino de Altos
Estudios de la Universidad de Buenos-Aires (Argentina) and the Center for
Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University of New-York. He
is an author or co-author of numerous books including Reading Capital
(with Louis Althusser) (1965), On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
(1976), Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1991, with
Immanuel Wallerstein), Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1994), The
Philosophy of Marx (Verso 1995), Spinoza and Politics (Verso 1998),
Politics and the Other Scene (Verso, 2002), We, the People of Europe?
Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004). He is also a
contributor of the Dictionnaire Européen des Philosophies (sous la
direction de Barbara Cassin, 2004). Forthcoming are Extreme Violence and
the Problem of Civility (The Wellek Library Lectures 1996), and Citoyen
Sujet, Essais d'anthropologie philosophique (Presses Universitaires de
France). <br><br>
This event is sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society and is free
and open to the public. For further information regarding this or
any event sponsored by the Center for Ideas and Society, please visit our
website at ideasandsociety.ucr.edu or call 951.UCR.IDEA<br><br>
</i></div>
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