Maison Française, Columbia University
Maison Française, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
Cosmopolitical Agency: a Necessity and an Aporia?
A talk by Etienne Balibar
As our Planet is entering an era of immediate urgencies and perils linked to global warming, regional wars, pandemics, but also migrations, communications, intercultural creativity, every politics becomes cosmopolitical: a politics of the Human Race as such. Etienne Balibar explores how the old philosophical question of a citizenship of the world must be elaborated in its concrete figures and obstacles.
Etienne Balibar has been teaching as a Visiting Professor in French and Comparative Literature at Columbia from 2012 to 2020. He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He also holds a part-time Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He has published widely in the areas of epistemology, Marxist philosophy, and moral and political philosophy in general.
Etienne Balibar’s talk will be introduced by Madeleine Dobie, and the Q&A moderated by Anupama Rao.
This lecture is co-presented by the Maison Française, Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, and Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, as part of the ICLS lecture series on “Understanding Systemic Racism.”
