©2025 Fable Group Inc.

Thinking with Balibar

By Ann Laura Stoler & Stathis Gourgouris &
Thinking with Balibar by Ann Laura Stoler & Stathis Gourgouris &  digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French political philosopher Étienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar’s thought. The result is a hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance of Balibar’s contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary thought.

The book shows the continuing vitality of materialist thought across the humanities and social sciences and will be fundamental for understanding the philosophical bases of the contemporary left critique of globalization, neoliberalism, and the articulation of race, racism, and economic exploitation.

Contributors: Emily Apter, Étienne Balbar, J. M. Bernstein, Judith Butler, Monique David-Ménard, Hanan Elsayed, Didier Fassin, Stathis Gourgouris, Bernard E. Harcourt, Jacques Lezra, Patrice Maniglier, Warren Montag, Adi Ophir, Bruce Robbins, Ann Laura Stoler, Gary Wilder

Download the free Fable app

app book lists

Stay organized

Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
app book recommendations

Build a better TBR

Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
app book reviews

Rate and review

Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
app comments

Curate your feed

Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities
app book lists

Stay organized

Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
app book recommendations

Build a better TBR

Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
app book reviews

Rate and review

Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
app comments

Curate your feed

Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities

No Reviews

About Ann Laura Stoler

Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research, Founding Director of its Institute for Critical Social Inquiry since 2014, and one of the founding editors of Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. Her books include Race and the Education of Desire (1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (2002), Along the Archival Grain (2009), and Duress (2016).

Stathis Gourgouris

Stathis Gourgouris is Professor of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece; Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era; Lessons in Secular Criticism; and Ενδεχομένως αταξίες (Contingent Disorders). His most recent book is The Perils of the One.

Jacques Lezra

Jacques Lezra is Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent publications are República salvaje (2019), On the Nature of Marx’s Things (2018), Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought (2017), and Contra todos los fueros de la muerte
(2016).

Emily Apter

Emily Apter is Silver Professor of Comparative Literature and French at New York University. She has published extensively in translation theory and is the author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Verso, 2013) and co-editor with Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood of the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton University Press, 2014). Her most recent book is Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018).

Étienne Balibar

Étienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Université de Paris X Nanterre; Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine; and Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. His research in the fields of political, moral, and Marxist philosophy focuses on emancipation, citizenship, and on what he terms “equaliberty.” The breadth of his thought can be gauged from his published works, from Reading Capital, released in 1965 and coauthored with his mentor Louis Althusser, to the more recent We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2003), Equaliberty (2014), Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (2015), Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (2017), and Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (2018).

J. M. Bernstein

J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His writings include The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (1992), Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (1995), Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2002), and Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (2006). His most recent book is Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (2015). He is working on a manuscript with the tentative title Human Rights: On the Foundations of Ecological Socialism, from which the essay in this volume is drawn.

Monique David-Ménard

Monique David-Ménard is a psychoanalyst and philosopher. She has taught at the Université de Paris VII–Diderot and at universities throughout North and South America and Europe, and she maintains a private psychoanalysis practice. Her publications include L’hystérique entre Freud et Lacan: Corps et langage en psychanalyse (Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis) and Deleuze et la psychanalyse: L’altercation.

Hanan Elsayed

Hanan Elsayed is Associate Professor of French and Arabic at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Her research interests include Islam and history in Francophone literature from the Arab world, twentieth-century French literature and thought, and the French colonial legacy. She is the author of L’histoire sacrée de l’Islam dans la fiction maghrébine.

Didier Fassin

Didier Fassin is Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He holds an Annual Chair at the Collège de France. He is recently the author of Life: A Critical User’s Manual (Polity) and The Will to Punish (Oxford University Press).

Stathis Gourgouris

Stathis Gourgouris is Professor of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. He is author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece; Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era; Lessons in Secular Criticism; and Ενδεχομένως αταξίες (Contingent Disorders). His most recent book is The Perils of the One.

Bernard Harcourt

Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, and Director d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author most recently of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War against Its Own Citizens (Basic Books, 2018) and an editor of the work of Michel Foucault.

Jacques Lezra

Jacques Lezra is Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent publications are República salvaje (2019), On the Nature of Marx’s Things (2018), Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought (2017), and Contra todos los fueros de la muerte
(2016).

Patrice Maniglier

Patrice Maniglier is Maître de Conférences in the Philosophy Department of Paris Nanterre University. He has written on Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Badiou, and Latour. He is the author of La vie énigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme, Foucault va au cinéma, and La philosophie qui se fait.

Warren Montag

Warren Montag is the Brown Family Professor of Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. His most recent books include Althusser and His Contemporaries (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2014).

Adi M. Ophir

Adi M. Ophir is a Visiting Professor at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University and Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University. Among his works are Goy: Israel’s Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile, co‑authored with Ishay Rosen-Zvi (Oxford University Press, 2018); Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster (The Van Leer Institute, 2013); The One-State Condition, co‑authored with Ariella Azoulay (Stanford University Press, 2012); and The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals (Zone, 2005).

Bruce Robbins

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. His latest books are The Beneficiary (2017) and Cosmopolitanisms (2017), which was coedited with Paulo Lemos Horta. He is also the director of a short documentary titled “Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists.”

Ann Laura Stoler

Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research, Founding Director of its Institute for Critical Social Inquiry since 2014, and one of the founding editors of Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon. Her books include Race and the Education of Desire (1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (2002), Along the Archival Grain (2009), and Duress (2016).

Gary Wilder

Gary Wilder is a Professor of Anthropology, History, and French and Director of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Duke, 2015) and The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars (Chicago, 2005). He is co-editor of The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham, 2018) and The Fernando Coronil Reader: The Struggle for Life Is the Matter (Duke, 2019).

Start a Book Club

Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!

FAQ

Do I have to buy the ebook to participate in a book club?

Why can’t I buy the ebook on the app?

How is Fable’s reader different from Kindle?

Do you sell physical books too?

Are book clubs free to join on Fable?

How do I start a book club with this book on Fable?

Error Icon
Save to a list
0
/
30
0
/
100
Private List
Private lists are not visible to other Fable users on your public profile.
Notification Icon
Fable uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB