An Interview With tienne Balibar

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE STAFF

tienne Balibar is a French philosopher. As a student of Louis Althusser, he coauthored the influential Reading Capital. His
extensive writings have analyzed the nation-state, race, citizenship, identity and, most recently, the problem of political violence. Balibar is a visiting Professor at Columbia Universitys Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. The Harvard
Advocates Art Editor, Brad Bolman, sat down with Balibar on the occasion of his lecture, Violence, Civility, and Politics
Revisited, at Harvards Mahindra Humanities Center on November 5, 2014.

I was wondering if you could speak about your work through the lens of possession. You often write about citizenship, which is
a matter of being possessed by a nation or government, but also in terms of possessing rights, country and space.
This year, Verso published Identity and Difference: John Locke and The Invention of Consciousness, a commentary on John
Lockes An Essay on Human Understanding. This essay is a classic, an absolutely fundamental reference for discussions about
personal identity. Ive always had, perhaps a very continental idea, that a philosophers metaphysics or epistemology and his
politics and political philosophy must have very intimate and intrinsic relations. Thats the case for anybody from Plato to
Spinoza. I found analogies between [Lockes] theory of personal identity and his political theory, where individual liberty is
famously based on the notion of self-ownership, which he called propriety in ones person. So on one side, he has a basic
notion of possessive individualism. And on the other side, a theory of autonomy and conscious identity where the only basis
for an assignation of identity is the consciousness that an individual has that his thoughts, memories, etc. are really his and not
somebody elses.

For Locke, then, individual identity is fundamentally a matter of asserting ones control over ones thoughts. How does he
explain this process?
How do I know that I am myself, and not you? Thats because my thoughts are mine and your thoughts are not mine. And I
can also be sure that my thoughts are not yours, you are not owning my thoughtsowning is an extremely interesting category.
On the other side, you have the idea that ones individual, social and political autonomy comes from the fact that something
is, so to speak, inalienable. So its propriety in ones person, which Locke develops by using a formula that was central during
the English Revolution, one by which English revolutionaries, including such radicals as the Levelers and so on, would claim
they were independent from the state. Its the formula that propriety in ones person is ones life, liberty, and estate, a very
interesting formula which resonates with habeas corpus and a number of issues.

Because in the latter example, at least, it is a matter of maintaining ownership of ones own person against a sovereign power.
Yes. And to continue with your theme of Possession, something interferes, so to speak, an extremely long and bizarre part of
Lockes chapter [which] is devoted to counterfactualscases in which the criterion that he proposes yields results that are
counterintuitive from the point of view of what most people think to be the identity of a person. Cases in which there are multiple personalities or split identities, including an extraordinary passage which seems to directly anticipate and foreground [Robert Louis] Stevensons famous novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Its a question of somebody who does somethinghe calls the
two personalities the Night-Man and the Day-Man, and the Day-Man, not by chance, is an honest man, while the Night-Man
is a criminaland the question is whether the night man, who has absolutely no memory of the crimes that were committed
during the night by his alias, should be held responsible for these actions. The logical answer is no.

Because they are different men to some degree. The parallel with Stevenson is fascinating.
Then there are other cases which are more similar to problems of possession, precisely, or invasion, I would say, of ones identity
by somebody elses thoughts or powers, which are not cases of split identity but cases, so to speak, of fused identities. So Locke
invents a mythical example. He says, What if I could find among my memories the thoughts of somebody who has lived
centuries ago? or What if Plato?thats wonderful because it seems to anticipate [Jacques] Derrida

And particularly his essay Platos Pharmacy, perhaps also his use of specters and haunting to describe the function of
speech and memory.
Yes, of course. So he says, What if Plato did not simply interpret or transmit Socrates thoughts, but actually had Socrates
thoughts in his mind? I find this extraordinary because, though Im not superstitious myself, I think what we learn from psychoanalysis and other deep psychology theories, etc, is the fact that after all its not so easy to distinguish sometimes between
your own thoughts and others that have been somehow adopted. So it appeared to me that Locke was a key figure to investigate
in the classical era, and at a moment when philosophers of his kind are supposed to be pure rationalists, if you like, in fact a
whole array of questions involving the two sides of this relationship: membership, on one side, or relationship to others; and
possession, or property, or appropriation and belonging on the other side.
Now Ive also reached the moment when I want to say something about not only individualism, but the construction of the abstract individual who is supposed to be the bearer, one would say, of rightsand that includes rights to possess and to acquire,
in Marxist terminology, the bourgeois Discourse of Modernity. This combines two sides of the problem: Why is it necessary
to be able to possess rights and things, but also knowledge, etc., to become a normal or a full member of the civic community?
And how can we understand that the kind of legal and social normalcy or normative framework that was progressively built

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in Europe, and therefore in the world during the classical age, especially in England and France and the United States, has a
very strict correlation between membership in a civic community, on the one hand, and being a bearer, being defined, I would
say, as a universal person by ones capacity to possess and acquire, again, not only things, but ones self, ones labor force, ones
knowledge?

To be this subject that constantly seeks to possess and master both itself and everything around it.
Of course this is fascinating in many respects: first, it involves that you accept very strong constraints, I would say, or logical
axioms both concerning community and concerning individuality. And then it is also interesting because, as classical theorists
knew, there are limits. At some point you reach a limit where its no longer reasonable to have this absolute right. Intellectual
property is an obvious example. Philosophers like Kant and Fichte wrote seminal essays on how to define intellectual property
and secure the rights of one individual over his thoughts, his work. What is it that you exactly own? What is it that ought to
be protected? What is it that should not and could not be defined as an object of absolute individual appropriation without
catastrophic consequences? Is it your thoughts? Is it your words? Is it your style when you write something? And so on. Where
does it cease to be rational?
And of course these things are, todayIm not an expert on that, but legal theorists and others are permanently concerned with
it not only because new technologies profoundly modify the ways in which thoughts are shared but for that reason also invented
or appropriatedsubjectively, the relationship of individuals to their own ideas is changing rapidly. If youre on a chat on your
computer, there are words and ideas that flow permanently and circulate among different persons. Its an incredible acceleration which in earlier times would take much more time and, so to speak, give you the time to identify with your thoughts, etc.
And then there are the pathological limits, I would say. It was of course on purpose that I used the formula that what classical
philosophers and, in fact, the law itself characterized as this correlation between possessive individuality and civic membership
is a sort of normalized vision or representation of the human. Im not contesting that we need normalized forms, except theyre
not exactly the same in all cultures and thats an important point. What transgresses the limits of normality is, in some cases,
not only as important or interesting as the normal itself, but it is also something where its not only a question of rights that
individuals have, but its also a question of what kinds of constraints and, in some cases, violent constraints theyre subjected to
and they can exert on each other.

There was one moment in your lecture yesterday when you spoke about cruelty very close to the beginning. You mentioned
the way it stretches or challenges the difference between subject and object and the form of violence that might exist between those two categories. The two examples that you gave of objects, and violence done to or by objects, were Art and the
Museum, and I thought you were maybe referencing Steven Millers War After Death
Its a beautiful book. Its a wonderful book.

I thought of the Buddhas

of Bamiyan, yes.

And so I wondered if you could develop this idea further, in terms of how you think about violence and the object in relation
to art, and perhaps the museum, in particular, which I thought was an interesting example
Not only was it quick, but it was provocative and perhaps reached the limits of absurdity because I simplified [Millers] presentation enormously. Because his presentation involves some considerations on not only the question of death, but the way in
which you apply the adjective dead, which could trace back to our previous discussion, and because the criterion of something being living or being dead suddenly plays a role in every discussion of possessing, appropriating, mastering, and so on.
But of course dead has two different meanings in our languages: either its the result of the action of killing, so what is dead is
what used to be alive, or dead means its not alive because it was never alive. So you say that this table was a dead object which
apparently doesnt mean the same thing as Im sorry you asked about my fathers health, but hes dead. You know?
Some things are dead because they died, but others are dead because they never lived. Now the interesting thing is that progressively you discover there are all sorts of important objects which are in a dubious or intermediary situation between these two
poles. And we are used to saying This is a metaphoric use of the term. But first, again, if you move to another environment,
things become rapidly, extremely different. So of course our rationaland I have to say Eurocentric and colonialway of
looking at things easily pushes into superstition, fetishism, etc. every idea that statues or objects are alive or dead. But we have
our own fetishism, as Marx perfectly well knew and others explained.

The queer agency and life granted to the commodity.

And art finds itself in a strategic situation also because we think that art, I mean we speak of live performances, the fact that
painting, writing, taking pictures, etc. are activities which either bring to life or create life, so to speak, or, on the contrary, kill,
in a sense, their objects. Thats again metaphoric. In a famous passage the poet Mallarm explained that the word, in a sense,
kills the object. You see anthropologists today who pay great attention and respect to the idea very broadly shared and accepted
among Native American Indians, for example, whose religious or cultural objects have been taken in one way or another and
transformed into a museum objectthat they have been killed. You can extend that and say they are in a cage, or have been
killed, or have been held hostage.
And then, if you admit that life has a symbolic dimension and art is an essential discourse or practice to reveal that symbolic dimension, you no longer find it extraordinary or absurd to extend and take seriously such categories as imprisoning, or
enclosing, or killing, etc. to cultural objects. There are moments in which we are all angry and we think that the museum
is sordidwhile it can be beautiful, it can be extremely refined and scholarlybut some artists would say, My works were
not made to be put in a room, in a museum. They were made to circulate. Which in fact of course leads to another form of
appropriation and possession.

THE HARVARD ADVOCATE

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