Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2020
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823288519.003.0006
Abstract
Examines the “counter-” move in Balibar’s thought, analysing it not in the Kantian or Hegelian sense of a synthesis that resolves an antinomic opposition (not the least of which, because the particle “contre-” functions differently than the particle “anti-”), but rather as an original counterpoint that itself becomes so powerful as to liberate itself from the oppositional relationship and transform itself into a free-standing concept, intervention, or even mode of governmentality. It is not an opposition that leads to a synthesis, but instead to a stage of “perfection” that (1) merely indexes its former counter-partner, and (2) becomes a fully independent concept, all to itself, that does not incorporate its opposition and is no longer a reaction against anything.
Disciplines
Law | Military, War, and Peace | Political Theory
Recommended Citation
Bernard E. Harcourt,
Contre-/Counter-,
Thinking with Balibar: A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice: Ann Laura Stoler, Stathis Gourgouris & Jacques Lezra (Eds.), Oxford University Press
(2020).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4312