Introduction: Revisiting the Citizen-Subject

In 1989, Étienne Balibar responded in Cahiers Confrontations to the question Jean-Luc Nancy had posed to a number of well-known French philosophers earlier that year: “who comes after the subject?” The apparent simplicity of the question belies Balibar’s apparently simple answer, which is in fact as difficult as it is unequivocal. Beginning by articulating a reading of Descartes that calls into question Heidegger’s interpretation of the cogito as the inaugural moment of the sovereignty of the subjectum and the birth of modernity, Balibar defines what, for him, lies beyond the age or epoch of the subject in starkly simple terms: “After the subject comes the citizen” (38). This response shifts the chronology implied by the question, which seems to gesture at something that awaits a future unfolding, something that will come after the age of the subject. Balibar instead directs our attention towards an event that has already taken place and gives the moment of the shift from the subject to the citizen a particular date: 1789. Though, as Balibar himself acknowledges, it is too straightforward to treat this date as if it were the culminating moment at which the subject became the citizen, the date of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen at least in principle marks a rupture with a particular understanding of the subject as subditus, the individual “submitted to the ditio, to the sovereign authority of a prince, an authority expressed in his orders and itself legitimated by the Word of another Sovereign (the Lord God)” (36). What comes after the subject is—in principle—the end of the subjection of the subject, and the replacement of the prince with the self-subjected autonomy of the citizen.
 
Of course, a rupture in principle is hardly a rupture in fact, as Balibar several times notes throughout the essay. However, the shift from the subject to the citizen in fact fundamentally disrupts the ground on which the problem of subjection can be thought. As Balibar insists, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen produces a “truth-effect that marks a rupture” with previous conceptions of the subject (44), introducing a whole new set of aporias into the newfound autonomy of the citizen. Once sovereignty has devolved to the citizen, for example, what must be accounted for is how modern sovereignty, previously modeled on an absolute hierarchy involving subjection to the prince in the name of obedience to God, becomes the shared sovereignty of equals. Since sovereignty implies a transcendent hierarchical relation between subject and subjected, what must be accounted for is how the new principle of free equality that arrives co-extensively with the citizen is capable of making him or her sovereign without collapsing into paradox. As Balibar argues, in the absence of the hierarchy of obedience, what emerges is a form of autonomy that involves the (self)-limitation of the citizen’s own radical freedom. The figure of the citizen, endowed with natural rights, free and equal with every other human, becomes the subject to which he is subjected. Subjection, in other words, no longer passes by way of an exterior transcendence such as God, but is now a problem internal to the citizen itself.
 
What Balibar goes on to call the citizen’s “becoming-subject” (devenir-sujet) certainly entails the invention of new regimes of subjection, ones that are, as Foucault shows, predicated on the transition from subjection to the world of rights and discipline. But it is also a point of acute tension that threatens to continuously reconstitute the relationship between the citizen and his or her subjection. The principle of equality, for example, begins as the cornerstone of natural right. But this alleged universalism is quickly undermined by new forms of subjection that come to be reiterated at the very heart of its universal claim, emerging directly out of the principle’s presumption of a correspondence between the capacities of the human and the capacities of the citizen. On the one hand, once this correspondence is established, it becomes possible to deny some citizens their full humanity, and consequently their freedom. On the other hand, the principle of equality also becomes a limit-concept by appearing simultaneously as the cornerstone of natural right and as a historical demand that Hannah Arendt calls the “right to have rights.” The “right to have rights” emerges where individuals or communities are not simply given rights by an external sovereign power, but confer them upon themselves, demanding them in the name of a full civic universality. Thus, when the principle of equality is officially valid but essentially denied, they transform it into a historical demand that aims to overturn the political situation that the principle instituted. What this produces is the enigma or contradiction of a sovereign equality, a sovereignty and a subject that open themselves to a hyperbolic excess that constitutes them: “the wording of the statement always exceeds the act of its enunciation” (52). The citizen-subject henceforth becomes a site for thinking, at one and the same time, the aporia of a subject who is bestowed with universal sovereignty, but whose subjectivation remains open to the finite and historically specific moment of its constitution. This openness makes it a thoroughly ambivalent phenomenon, since it becomes at once the source of powerful new forms of oppression and the possibility of the transfiguration of subjection itself.
 
“After the subject comes the citizen.” Balibar’s deceptively simple reply to Nancy’s deceptively simple query not only shifts Nancy’s implied chronology back in time, but it also historicizes both subject and citizen, perpetuating and extending the question in both directions and demanding that we revisit it again and again. As something comes after—and has presumably come before—the subject, so something will come after the citizen. But beyond this temporal extension, Balibar’s “Citizen Subject” essay also functions like a wedge, as Warren Montag argues below, prying open the history of the subject and situating the ambivalent history of the citizen within it. Both defined and threatened by its historical specificity and its own internal antinomies, Balibar’s citizen-subject nevertheless preserves the possibility inherent in the hyperbolic excess of its articulation, making it a figure of complex temporality and radical transience at once. Balibar closes his essay with an image of the citizen-subject’s ephemerality: “As to whether this figure, like a face of sand at the edge of the sea, is about to be effaced with the next great sea change, that is another question” (55).
 
The essays in this special issue of PMC address themselves, in eclectic and dynamic ways, to this other question more than two decades after Balibar’s groundbreaking essay. Originally conceived for a one-day symposium—”The Citizen-Subject Revisited”—held on 24 October 2011 at the University at Albany, SUNY, each of these essays interrogates the history of the citizen-subject in its broadest terms, reflecting on its eighteenth-century origins as well as its continued viability amid the “great sea changes”—social, political, environmental, and philosophical—of the twenty-first century. In the 23 years since Balibar’s essay appeared, these papers ask, have we witnessed a transformation in forms of subjection only, or have we also seen the citizen-subject’s hyperbole open further possibilities for citizenship? At the same time, these essays consider the status and contemporary resonance of the citizen-subject as a critical and theoretical category. In recent years, critical theory has focused increasingly on questions that would seem to come both before and after the citizen-subject, with the analytic frame of biopower on one side and the problem of statist sovereignty on the other seeming to bracket the category of citizenship or suspend it altogether. Given the reorientation that biopolitical studies have effected on the life of the organism and the population (figures which seem at once to precede and exceed the citizen-subject), how might we reassess the viability of the category of citizenship in the neo-liberal, biopolitical state? Similarly, as recent studies of state sovereignty have detailed the many ways in which democratic sovereignty often replicates the exceptional violence of absolutism, what might be the value of recalling Balibar’s insistence in “Citizen Subject” on the dissymmetry of sovereign equality from transcendent sovereignty? The goal of this special issue—like that of the symposium itself—is to revisit the citizen-subject in light of the challenges posed to citizenship by both recent history and recent theoretical work, considering whether it is time to reanimate the category of citizenship, or whether we have moved into another history of the subject altogether.
 
In the essay that opens the issue, Étienne Balibar’s “From Philosophical Anthropology to Social Ontology and Back: What to do with Marx’s Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach?” (a version of which he delivered as the symposium’s keynote¹ ), Balibar addresses such questions through the broad category of anthropological difference on which much of his recent work has focused. In his meticulous close reading of Marx’s short thesis, Balibar argues that the “human essence” that Marx seeks to identify with “the ensemble of social relations” opens up the possibility of a non-or even an anti-humanist anthropology. If the citizen-subject emerges co-extensively with the “rights of Man,” the question that immediately follows is how this universal declaration becomes re-articulated into new processes of subjection. There is, in short, a fundamental tension between the universal citizen-subject, and the many (anthropological) differences that constitute it, since these differences often become the basis for new forms of subjection. As Balibar demonstrates, Marx’s sixth thesis opens up a new way of understanding the relation between these differences and the universal category of the citizen-subject. Marx’s thesis, in Balibar’s reading, demonstrates that anthropological differences, as part of the “ensemble of social relations” that constitutes the human, do more than merely affect the universality of the citizen-subject from the outside. Instead, these differences remain intrinsic ones that are internal to the citizen-subject itself, part of the very “ensemble of social relations” that constitute it. Thus, Balibar locates in Marx an insistence on the definition of the human according to the irreducible anthropological differences that constitute it, finding in these differences conflict, contestation, and ultimately the possibility for political and social transformation.
 
Warren Montag’s contribution, “Between Interpellation and Immunization: Althusser, Balibar, Esposito,” traces a kinship—without the presumption of chronological progression — between the conceptual models of the subject that Louis Althusser, Balibar, and Roberto Esposito have variously theorized. Rather than an intermediate term, Montag argues, Balibar’s citizen-subject is best understood as a theoretical wedge between Althusser’s Marxian notion of “interpellation” and Esposito’s biopolitical model of “immunization” in much the same way that the citizen-subject wedges itself between power and the resistance to power that prompts subjection. Where Althusserian interpellation describes that vertical process whereby the subject’s freedom is the retroactive effect of its “freely” chosen subjection, Esposito’s immunization both precedes and coincides with this process, which posits political community as a munus, or debt, that prevents horizontal, trans-individual bonds from forming that might weaken vertical subjection. Montag argues that Balibar’s citizen-subject intervenes by wedging itself between interpellation and immunization to prevent the convergence of “vertical subjection and horizontal privation” through the continued promise that resides in the hyperbole of its excess articulation.
 
For Gavin Walker, the excess articulation and complex temporality of the citizen-subject point to another problem on which Balibar’s work has long focused—the presuppositional structure of the nation and the national subject in the capitalist world system. In “‘Citizen-Subject’ and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar,” Walker closely tracks the correspondence between Balibar’s history of the citizen-subject and Marx’s account of the transition to bourgeois capitalism, proposing that the citizen is the “figure that remains for us today crucial for an understanding of the dynamics of the national question” in Marx. Like bourgeois capitalism, which remains complicit with its antecedents, the citizen-subject operates in reference to the figure of absolute subjection, which it is presumed to have overcome. But beyond this, the citizen-subject also alerts us to the derangement at the heart of capital’s supposedly rational processes, revealing the ways in which capital “presents itself as a total systematic expression of pure exchange” while it also “produces ‘civil society’ in order to invert itself, and try to derive itself precisely from its own presuppositions.” Ultimately, Walker argues, Balibar’s work effectively “‘incompletes’ our image of the world” by detailing the ways in which in one presuppositional structure—from the nation to civil society to labor power—begets others.
 
Craig Carson’s essay, “Adam Smith and Economic Citizenship,” returns to the question of the development of new theories of the citizen that emerged in the eighteenth century, coextensively with the birth of the citizen-subject. Focusing on the role of the citizen in Adam Smith, Carson demonstrates that recent attempts by liberal humanist critics to resuscitate Smith through a focus on his conceptions of sympathy and natural sociability crucially elide the role of the category of the citizen in his work. Turning first to a reading of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Carson argues that the category of the citizen acts as a limit to natural sympathy. When the spectacle of sympathy is transformed from a theatrical to a societal one, sympathy is transformed into antipathy. What results from this, Carson argues, is a commodification of supposedly natural social relations. In Smith, the category of the citizen, as developed in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, is displaced onto Capital, transforming the citizen into an economic category, thereby producing the notion of a purely “economic citizenship.” Smith’s “economic citizenship,” Carson demonstrates, is predicated on investment and the transformation of the land, not necessarily on belonging to any particular geographical location, whereas the laborer has no claim to citizenship, since he is a mere commodity. As Carson argues, in lieu of a turn towards notions of sympathy, “one must demand the citizen-laborer.”
 
Ji-Young Um’s essay, “Citizen and Terrorist, Citizen as Terrorist: The Military, Citizenship, and Race in the Age of the War on Terror,” offers a case study in the more recent history of the citizen-subject, exploring the role of the military in negotiating the citizenship status of immigrants and racial minorities in the post-9/11 United States. Taking as her point of departure General Colin Powell’s reference to a widely circulated photograph of a mourning mother embracing a headstone that visibly shows the star and crescent at Arlington National Cemetery, and analyzing the case of James Yee, a Muslim U.S. Army chaplain subjected to intense scrutiny, Um traces the complex intersections of nationality and race as they are deployed in the war on terror. Um argues that the ways in which the United States has, since World War II, linked citizenship status to military service—and, moreover, to death in battle—precisely literalizes Foucault’s account of the modern biopolitical state’s internalization of race war. “Racialized soldiers in the U.S. military are tasked with an impossible contradiction,” she writes; they are “called upon to stand as proofs of the nation and empire’s capacity for tolerance and inclusivity precisely because they are always already suspects and enemies.” Thus, she argues, the racialized citizen-soldier becomes not only citizen-subject, but also citizen and enemy at once.
 
In “Transgenics of the Citizen (I),” Erin Obodiac offers a more speculative case study on the future life of the citizen-subject, exploring the question of inhuman, non-anthropological differences that continue to define and redefine conceptions of “the human” as well as the category of the citizen that relies on it. Developing the ways that the inanimate, the machine-like, and the automaton become figures for something that haunts the human from within, Obodiac asks what is happening today in recent attempts to codify rights for non-human others, such as robots. Focusing on the South Korean Robot Ethics Charter of 2012, she charts the history of the inclusion, or exclusion, of the inhuman from the rights of citizenship, demonstrating how the very border that presumes to delineate the human from the non-human continuously collapses. One of the results of this collapse is the enigmatic endowment of the machinic, or the robotic, with something approaching the rights of the citizen. Obodiac’s essay demonstrates that “to a certain extent, artificial life and natural life are one and the same, and especially in relation to the state, the automaton and the human being are both personae.” Though applied primarily to the category of the corporation, endowed with the rights of a person, Obodiac concludes with the question that animates her essay: “what are we risking if we allow robota—human, cybernetic, transgenic, or otherwise—to speak up as well?”
 
Finally, in “Environmentality: Military Maneuvers, the Ecosystem, and the Accidental,” Robert Marzec returns us to the question posed by the final image of Balibar’s “Citizen Subject,” asking whether the “great sea change” that will efface the sand figure of the citizen-subject is indeed the rising tide of the ocean itself. His argument begins with an exposition of the gradual militarization of global warming, a process whereby the military becomes the primary means for addressing warming’s geo-political and environmental effects. Marzec argues that this militarization threatens the very liberatory potential of the citizen-subject itself, primarily because the militarization of global warming is more than a reliance on the material and economic resources of the military; it involves the expansion of military modes of thinking into what had hitherto been primarily civilian spheres of decision-making. As a result, the distinction between civilian and military life is slowly eroded. Addressing what he calls a new regime of “environmentality” (which evokes Foucault’s notion of governmentality), Marzec argues that the military response to global warming reformulates the political in relation to the ecological. Focusing on what he calls the “Accidental,” Marzec shows how the logic of necessity that subtends the process of militarization effectively excludes various forms of uncertainty, such as the liberatory potential of the citizen-subject, which cannot be amalgamated into its program. Once this happens, all ecological and environmental concerns become a security matter, allowing for the suspension of law and democracy in the name of fighting ecological catastrophe. As Marzec concludes, ecology “becomes the new universal truth of humanity’s existence in the world…essentially hard-wiring conflict and adaptation to the civilian brain, and erasing the pole of the citizen-subject that potentializes liberation.”
 
However, Marzec’s own argument shows that this potential erasure is not yet complete. In fact, the figure of the citizen-subject remains a productive site for thinking the transformations of subjectivity that inform our present, as the essays in this special issue attest.