Secularism and Cosmopolitanism by Étienne Balibar

Author:Étienne Balibar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI019000, Philosophy/Political, SOC026040, Social Science/Sociology/Social Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL COMPLEX, NATION AS “COMMUNITY OF CITIZENS,” AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF “CIVIC RELIGION”

This is my first point—Rousseau is constantly behind us, but also ahead of us, as he was behind the revolutionaries and ahead of them: continuously revived, read otherwise, and criticized each time a restoration or a renovation of the republican form of the state was on the agenda during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was the case several times, as we know. But Rousseau ought not to be the only reference. Contemporary scholars have initiated an original use of the work of Kantorowicz to interpret the process of secularization or laicisation of politics in what might appear at first as a paradoxical manner: since the famous scheme of the sovereign’s dual nature in medieval and classical Europe, apparently concerns just the opposite, a persistent anchorage of the political in the realm of the sacred.8 The problem here would be: what happens to the “two bodies” when the sovereign is no longer a real person, or an individual, but an ideal and practical community, i.e., a polity or citizenry. It would seem that this community must become duplicated itself, in order to allow for a transcendent foundation of its unity. This was more or less, we may remember, Marx’s vision of bourgeois politics, especially in its French version (but he considered it “typical”): it worked as a “projection” of the actual divisions of the civil society into the “heavens” of the national unity, without which there would be no “body politics” (Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 1844).9 But in Rousseau we find a different conceptualization, which does not operate at the level of transcendence: on the contrary, it operates in the horizon of immanence, forming an internal, and practical, relationship of the community with (and within) itself, with its own members. This is what Rousseau in the Social Contract defined as a “double rapport” (a twofold or double relation), which from one point of view regards the legislative function of the citizen, his (rather than her…) forming an “indivisible” part of the Sovereign, or the Nation expressing its perfect unity in the General Will (but also creating this unity through the General Will, which acts as causa sui); whereas from the opposite point of view it concerns the differential belonging of the citizen—qua “subject”—to what Rousseau (only then) calls l’Etat (the “state”): in this sense we would rather say today la société, since it is on this side that individual citizens emerge with their particular interests which, whatever their nature, can become the basis for the formation of “parties,” claiming to represent their particularity in the realm of politics.10 The key idea is that the Law is not transcendent, it is immanent to the community of the citizens, and the citizens have a double relation to it: collectively but also ideally, they make it, thus transforming themselves into a unitary or indivisible (“mystic”) body; individually—singulatim, as Foucault would write—they are subjected to it, and it regulates their activities from outside.

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