This piece relates to my ongoing research on the antinomies of citizenship, particularlythose which concern the aporetic definition of the community of the citizens'önotonly in retrospect, but also in a prospective manner. I would like to discuss the difficultquestion: Does the institution of citizenship (therefore the category of the citizen itself ),which has already undergone many revolutions, entirely belong to the past (whichcould mean either that it is unsurpassable or that it is obsolete, though perhaps thesetwo possibilities are not so different)? Or is it open to a different future, possiblythrough radical transformations, in which at least some of the values and the problemscovered by this name (citizen, citizenship) will remain meaningful (albeit underprofoundly different conditions)?

Here is how I want to proceed. First, as concisely as possible, I will summarize aframework of interpretation for the current crisis of democratic citizenship in theworld, but especially in those countries that proudly deem themselves beacons of`democracy': this is precisely where we observe what Wendy Brown has called anongoing process of ` de-democratization'' of the public sphere, which is both philosoph-ical and historical.(1) I admit that this remains extremely general. However it seems tome important to delineate an orientation in which the crisis is not one sidedly attrib-uted to the intrinsic weaknesses or even the fateful contradictions of the so-calledwelfare state (which I have decided to name more accurately the `national ^ socialstate'), or to the ruthless external assault of the global markets and the associatednew practices of governance (usually referred to under the name `neoliberalism'), butto a dialectical combination of both.(2) Second, I will turn to some interrelatedissues that I had the occasion to discuss in previous years, which seem to reflect onthe transformations of citizenship, which are at the same time more difficult and more

The `impossible' community of the citizens: past and presentproblemsÀ

Etienne BalibarUniversite de Paris-Ouest Nanterre,University of California, Irvine;e-mail: e.balibar@wanadoo.frPublished online 1 August 2011

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space advance online publication

Abstract. In the wake of previous reflections on the antinomies of citizenshipöwhich derive bothfrom the tension between an `insurrectional' logic of equal liberty and a `constitutional' project ofbuilding a community of citizens, and more recently from the conflict between (national) socialcitizenship and neoliberal forms of global governanceöthis paper focuses on problems of `representa-tion' and `agency' linked to the idea of democratizing democracy itself. It will try in this sense topropose a more specific determination to the idea of an unfinished, although contingent, history ofcitizenship in the modern world.

doi:10.1068/d19310

ÀThis is a revised version of a lecture given to the Citizenship without Community Workshophosted by the Open University in collaboration with the BISA poststructural politics workinggroup on Monday 10 May 2010, at the British Library, London.(1) Wendy Brown (2006) is borrowing and redefining a category used in particular by Charles Tilly(2003).(2) To a large extent this is a summary of what I exposed about a year ago on the occasion of theCassal Lecture in French Culture that I was asked to give at the Institute of Romance and GermanStudies in London. More recently I returned to the issue in Balibar (2010).

urgent, calling into question the traditional associations between power, representation,political community, and political spaces: `political' and `antipolitical' aspects of theprotests against racial discriminations on the basis of nationality in France (andmore generally in Europe) and `nomadic' and `diasporic' aspects of the contemporarymigrations, which link the prospects of a postnational constellation' of the political(Habermas, 2001) with a redefinition of such fundamental rights as the right ofcirculation and the right of residence. Finally, returning to the general theme of theantinomies of citizenship, I will elaborate on the conceptual problems concerningrepresentation and agency involved in the democratization of democracy.

Antinomies of citizenship: the trace of equalibertyThe history of citizenship (which largely overlaps with the democratization of thepolitical institution) is a permanent dialectical tension between moments of insurrec-tion and moments of constitution, in the sense of a more or less stable, more or less`hegemonic' relation of social forces. `Rights', both individual and collective (and infact granted to individuals through the efforts of collective movements), are vindicated[as Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) once wrote] and they are sanctioned by `Law'. But the`insurrectional' element that accounts for the emancipatory effects of the claim ofrights ( petitio iuris) can take many forms, which have a different phenomenology interms of campaigns, party mobilization, temporal condensation or distension, violentor nonviolent relationship of forces, rejection or use of the existing institutions,juridical forms, and so on. Think of the various national histories of the conquest ofcivil, political, and social rights in Europe, which in fact are not isolated from oneanother, or the various forms of decolonizing processes or the episodes of civil war andcivil rights campaign in the century-long history of the emancipation of the Blackpopulation in the US. However, the conflictual element is always determining becausethere is no such thing as an originary distribution of equaliberty and no such thing as avoluntary surrendering of privileges and positions of power. As a consequence, strug-gles are always necessary, and a principle of legitimacy has to be asserted, whichJacques Rancie© re (1995) felicitously called la part des sans-part, or the share of thosewho are deprived of a share in the common good. It manifests the incompleteness ofthe `people' as a body politic and aims at universalizing it through the development of aconflict in which an exclusion from recognition (or dignity, or rights, or property,or security, or speech, or decision making) is `negated' in a relationship of forces.The insurrectional momentöwhose past event forms the symbolic foundation of anypopular constitution which is not deriving either from tradition, or from a transcendentjustification, or from simple `bureaucratic' efficacy (however these various sources oflegitimacy can contribute to the representation of the political), and whose future returnforms a constant possibility in the face of the limitations affecting the realization ofdemocracy in its current constitutionöis ineludible.

Indeed the nation, or the national identity, however effective it has been in modernhistory, is only one of the possible institutional forms of the community of citizens, and itneither encapsulates all of its functions nor completely neutralizes its contradictions.The main point, therefore, is to understand that citizenship as a political principlecannot exist without a community, but this community cannot be completely uni-fiedöits essence cannot be the consensus of its members. This makes all the ambiguitybut also the strategic function of such terms as res publica, central in the Europeantradition of defining and instituting citizenship, which was considered the Latin equiva-lent of Greek politeia, or constitution of the citizen', and whose translation in classicalEnglish, we may remember, was common-wealth. Citizens as such do not exist outsidea community, whether seen as a natural or cultural legacy, or as a contractual or

2 E Balibar

historical construct The reason was already expressed by Aristotle: namely that theprinciple of citizenship coincides with a reciprocity of rights and duties that bindstogether the cocitizens, inasmuch as it is really implemented and obeyed. Perhaps weshould say, in a slightly more complicated manner, that it coincides with the idea of areciprocity involving a limitation of power of the rulers and a discipline of the ruled,particularly in the form of the accountability of the magistrates before their constitu-encies, and the obedience of the citizens to the rule of law (cf Riesenberg, 1992,page 42ff ). But the necessity of the community is not identical with its absolute unityor homogeneity. Far from it, the rights have to be conquered, imposed against theresistance of vested power interests and existing dominations: in the words of Lefort(1981) they have to be `invented' in the modality of a conquest, and the content of theduties, or the responsibilities, must be redefined periodically according to the logic ofthis agonistic relationship.

From this preliminary description, we can pass to the issue of `social citizenship'.Over time, I became convinced that we can understand the developments of the crisisof the `Welfare State' (Sozialstaat, Etat Providence) that was once apparently so strongin Western Europe only through the articulation of three interrelated concepts: `socialrights', `social citizenship', and the `national (and) social state'. Why could this articula-tion prove useful, indeed necessary, to discuss the new contemporary developments ofthe `antinomies of citizenship', especially in `the North'? It is a crucial question for ouranalysis of social citizenship and the progressive dismantling of its realizations, whichis also a deep crisis of the democratic principle, to decide whether this crisisöaffectingsocial rights in the fields of job security or medicare or access to superior education aswell as the legitimacy of political representationöis due only to the external' assault ofa neoliberal form of capitalism empowered by the transnational scale at which finan-cial markets now operate, or also due to the `internal' contradictions and limits ofsocial citizenship itself. In that sense the perspective of continuous progress towardsgreater and bolder enunciations of rights, and more intensive articulations of theautonomy of the individual and the importance of solidarity, would be prevented notonly because of the interests it confronts but because of its intrinsic contradictions.

I believe that this second hypothesis is the correct one. It is more dialectical thanthe idea of a conspiracy of nasty capitalists, and it is also more political, since it allowsus to imagine practical possibilities, as it does not picture the popular classes, oncebeneficiaries of relatively important social conquests and now progressively deprived oftheir security and collective hopes, as simple victims. They are genuine actors, whosecapacities of influencing their own history depend on the transformations of externaland internal conditions, but also on their own representations of the system in whichthey act. It is on this basis, however allusive and incomplete, that I consider someaspects of the current discussion on the meaning and effects of so-called `neoliberal-ism'. I rely on the presentation that has been offered for this issue by Brown (2005) inher essay ` Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy'', which has been widelydiscussed and is becoming increasing influential in critical circles.

In her essay Brown argues that neoliberalism is essentially different from classicalliberalism, as it removes the distinction between political and economic liberalism,more precisely the relative autonomy of the economic and the political sphere thatwas so crucial for the representation of the state as an agency external to the field ofeconomy, whose interventions should be reduced to a minimum. This crucial changemakes it possible to combine deregulations of the market with permanent interventionsof the state throughout the field of civil society (and even the intimate life of subjects)in order to create citizens whose subjective concern is purely the utilitarian calculus.This allows Brown to give a convincing account of the apparently contradictory

The `impossible' community of the citizens 3

mixtures of libertarian discourses and coercive moral or religious programs, whichhave been so influential since the `Reagan ^ Thatcher revolution' of the 1980s. I com-pletely agree with this side of her analysis, which other critics have complemented intheir own way (Harvey, 2005; Renault, 2008). It includes a description of the unlimitedextension of market criteria (the individual or aggregate calculus of ratios of costs andprofits) to private and public activities, which in the classical model of bourgeoiscapitalism (and even more in what I have called the national ^ social state) wereconsidered irreducible to commodity production and the law of value: eg educationand scientific research, the quality of public services and administration, public healthand judiciary processes, national security, and so on. I will take this description forgranted, and I concentrate on Brown's more philosophical idea that neoliberalism is apowerful form of political agency whose actors are spread throughout society. However,it is a political formation that also could be called antipolitical, since it not onlyneutralizes the element of conflict inherent in the classical Machiavellian picture ofpolitics but renders it a priori meaningless, by creating the conditions of a society (orcivilization) where the actions of the individuals and the groupsöincluding theirpossible violenceöare measured against a single criterion of utility. It is in order todescribe this preventive neutralization or suppression of social and political antago-nisms that Brown would retrieve Foucault's notion of governmentality and draw itspolitical consequences.(3)

Internal exclusion and the dilemmas of political subjectivityIn order to illustrate the kind of contradictions produced by the progressive destructionof social rights and social citizenship itself in the framework of global `governance', Iwill take the liberty of quoting from two discussions that I have proposed in the past.They seem to take place on both sides (`internal' and external') of a political border,which has been destabilized by the increasingly conflictual confrontation betweenthe nation-form of the economic and social effects of mass migrations, or the newanthropological figures of nomadism and sedentarism.

Urban violence as politics and antipoliticsIt has been endlessly repeated that the violence of the French banlieuesöbrieflyunleashed in the fall of 2005 and thrown in the face of French society and State byyouth who are, of course, `minorities' (adolescent, male, undereducated, coming for themost part from immigrant families) but also representative of the general condition intowhich their social, familial, and generational environment has been plungedöwasinfrapolitical violence. But this formula can mean two things: either that the riot does

(3) ` This mode of governmentality ... convenes a `free' subject who rationally deliberates aboutalternative courses of action, makes choices, and bears responsibility for the consequences of thesechoices. In this way, Lemke argues, `the state leads and controls subjects without being responsiblefor them;' as individual entrepreneurs' in every aspect of life, subjects become wholly responsible fortheir well-being and citizenship is reduced to success in this entrepreneurship. Neo-liberal subjects arecontrolled through their freedomönot simply ... because freedom within an order of dominationcan be an instrument of that dominationöbut because of neo-liberalism's moralization of theconsequences of this freedom. This also means that the withdrawal of the state from certaindomains and the privatization of certain state functions does not amount to a dismantling ofgovernment but, rather, constitutes a technique of governing, indeed the signature techniqueof neo-liberal governance in which rational economic action suffused throughout society replacesexpress state rule or provision. Neo-liberalism shifts `the regulatory competence of the state onto`responsible,' `rational' individuals [with the aim of] encourag[ing] individuals to give their lives aspecific entrepreneurial form' (Thomas Lemke, ` The birth of bio-politics: Michel Foucault'sLecture at the Colle© ge de France on neo-liberal Governmentality,'' Economy and Society 30:2,May 2001, page 202)'' (Brown, 2005, page 43ff ).

4 E Balibar

not (and will not) reach the level of collective political action, be it because that is notits aim or because, as such, it `has no aims' aside from a cry of rage, or that a riot isstill far from political action, separated from it by several steps that have yet to betaken, and that it does not in itself contain all the conditions (consciousness, ideology,organization, tactics and strategy, and so on). In both cases the questions of illegalismand confronting repression (which are closely connected, since repression takes itspretext from illegalism, draws its legitimacy from it and thus favors it as much aspossible) play a crucial role. A movement's continuity and its becoming politicaldepend on its capacity to transform the sense conferred on illegalism by the dominantsystem and to resist repression. But in both cases we have an abstract, dangerouslylinear schema that makes the `political' a simple surpassing or outcome of `sponta-neous' social conflict. It is important in my view to complicate this scheme in order tosee how politics can also occur through its oppositeöwhat we could call antipoliticsöand thus emerge from the very conditions of its impossibility, but also, of course, finditself blocked by its internal contradictions.

This is where we see the function of the overdetermined `fusion' of racial and classexclusions: precisely to crystallize, and to sanction, the exteriority of the new populacein relation to `politics'öall the more effectively to the extent that class discriminationis assumed not to exist, and racial discrimination is declared absolutely illegitimate(allowing one to deny its existence, or to pretend not to see it where it is practiced innew forms). But it is still more interesting to underline the reconstitution in renewedform of a double exclusion of the extremes outside `the political': those who are`too rich' and those who are `too poor', the owners and executives of multinationalcapitalism, on the one hand, and the subproletariat or underclass of the insecure,immigrants, and especially youth, on the other. However, if the former are tendentiallylocated outside representation, this is voluntarily, because they no longer have an inter-est in `playing the game' of national politics and accepting its constraints ( common'taxation, education, and medical care, participation in a certain `social consensus'),but only in bringing the `logic' of the global market to bear on the state and by meansof one state or another to obtain favorable conditions of exploitation and access toworkers. In sharp contrast, the latter are pushed or left outside representation, whichprevents their existence and their rights claims from finding any conflictual expression,since they are deemed unmanageable by the system and the other classes', includingthe popular classes.(4) The former set themselves up, materially and symbolically,beyond the national ^ foreign distinction (which, in French society, continues to for-mally dictate citizenship), while the latter are, by force, treated as internal foreigners,dangerous or superfluous. At this point we find again the idea of a `void', with itsdifferent social figures (the void of the space of the banlieue as the setting of the revolt,the void of the institutional place where determinations of class and race are super-imposed), but above all a void of representation at the heart of the political institution(including in the provoked form of criminalization, disqualification, preventive evacuation).But the schema of a void can also help us establish the bases of the large problem ofthe becoming political of the revoltöI am tempted to say, in the sense recalled above,of its becoming insurrectional. This problem is the possibility or impossibility of acollectivization. Let us understand by this not just a repetition or a contagion (creatinga series of similar revolts) but an articulation with other rights claims or protestsagainst injustice, heterogeneous among themselves, and thus constitutive of a virtualcitizenship within a democratic framework. On first glance, the practical implications(4) Even the poor, who are convinced or find reasons to believe that their security comes at the priceof others' insecurity, or that their membership in the collectivity, their `identity,' would be threatenedif other memberships, other identities, were recognized and added to theirs.

The `impossible' community of the citizens 5

of the existential, social, and political void are just the opposite; for how couldassociation and communication emerge from exclusion and its doubling, `secession' orprovocation? What constitutes an insurrectional movementöbe it the American civilrights movement and Black power in the 1960s and 1970s, the student movement in1968, or the movement of piqueteros in Argentina in the 2000söis at once its radical-ness and its `transversality', its ability to express or echo other revolts in its own code.

From an enlarged right of circulation to a diasporic citizenship? (5)

It is largely accepted that every freedom involves regulations. It has to be limited, bothin order not to harm its own beneficiaries and to avoid unbearable contradictions withother rights. But the condition is also that the restrictions do not amount to a completenegation, particularly for specific categories of persons when these rights are presentedas universal freedoms. If the institution of national state sovereignty on a territorialbasis produces in the end a genuine exclusion from circulation for some individualsand groups, this will internally destroy the democratic idea of the universal representa-tion and the sovereignty of the people. It is this discovery that today supports the newideal of the `nomadic sovereignty' in a global space, at least as a regulative principle,the overcoming of the repressive aspects of the territorial state (Mezzadra and dal Lago,2002). A citizenship at least partially independent from territory, which would stillincorporate a complete system of subjective and objective rights, such as a right ofcirculation and a complementary right of settlement under `reasonable' conditionsthat make it feasible or manageable, would appear as a new historical moment inthe progress of the idea of citizenship. It would raise the progress of the citizen to thecosmopolitical level by granting a more concrete character to the Kantian idea ofhospitality while avoiding the shortcomings of a World Federation, which still affectthe `postnational constellation' in the Habermassian sense, where the distinctionbetween internal and external space is not really politically `mediated' but progressivelyneutralized and suppressed.(6)

Such cosmopolitical perspectives can become compatible even with the `republican'or `neorepublican' perspectives that are part of the civic culture of progressive move-ments in today's democratic oligarchies. I suggested above (through the example ofurban riots in the banlieues) that there are already elements of internal decompositionin the community of the citizens' that forms the ideal `people' of modern nation-states.But they are not independent from globalization. In a manner that strangely recallssome considerations of Hegel in his Philosophy of Right (1991 [1820]) about the extreme'classes that escape the possibilities of integration of the modern state, we can observethat developed capitalist states today include also extreme groups that tendenciallyescape the civic conversation and representation, albeit in a completely differentmanner: `nomadic' citizenship could appear as a countertendency to this renewedlimitation of the nation-state, which receives more realistic determinations from global-ization itself. However, perspectives of the opening of citizens' rights to migrants,associated with a full recognition of the right of circulation and a measured institutionof the right of settlement, must face powerful objections. Some are practical; others arepurely ideological. It is a crucial task of political philosophy today to disentangle thesedifferent aspects, on the basis of a renewed reflection on the foundations of the verynotion of individual participation in the polity. I take it that a complete suppression of

(5) ` Toward a Diasporic Citizen? Internationalism to Cosmopolitics'' (Keynote Speech, UCLAMellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities, Cultures in Transnational Perspective AnnualConference: ` Migration, Empire, and Transformation'', 16 ^ 18 May 2007, UCLA).(6) Cf Habermas (2001). One must admit that Habermas has been progressively modifying thisconception, particularly in the essays published after 9/11 (see, for example, Habermas, 2006).

6 E Balibar

borders, or state control on borders, far from producing a higher degree of freedom,would rather lead to what Deleuze called a control society', whose practical formcould be a global system of surveillance of individual movements and lives. If there isno border, individuals may have to carry electronic bracelets, their every move perma-nently monitored. A broadened notion of citizenship therefore includes not only whatMezzadra (2006) rightly calls a `right to escape' but also a right to anonymity, or toincognito and multiple personality. On the other hand, if we accept an Arendtian ideathat the political community lacks preestablished ontological or naturalistic bases andis grounded only on the reciprocity of rights and duties among the participants, this ispossibly where a new development of citizenship has to be elaborated: in the form of areciprocity of rights and duties among sedentaries and migrants or nomads (Balibar,2007a; Benhabib, 2004). Implied here is that the `people' cannot be taken as an alreadyestablished notion; rather it consists of an act of permanent creation and recreation.Part of this recreation are very specific claims of rights, particularly concerning thedemocratic control of the use of borders, involving states on a multilateral basis, butalso associations of citizens and migrants and international agencies of human rights.

This would explain, I hope, why we should prefer the expression `diasporic citizen-ship' or `ubiquitous citizenship' to the more fashionable `nomadic citizenship'. In part,this is a conventional choice. What I have in mind is not a `global citizenship' orcitizenship of the world', as if the world could be considered a single constituency,but rather a citizenship in the world', or an increasing amount of civic rights andpractices, in the complex system of spaces and movements that form the reality ofwhat we call `the world', for which we are trying to invent a civilization

Populism and representationLet us now address the question raised by contemporary processes of `de-democratiza-tion', which immediately return us to the decomposition of what I have called thenational ^ social state. It seems hard to deny that there must be a connection betweena reversal in the trend of democratic demands and reforms and the increasinglyrepressive procedures that aim at monitoring individual behaviors, geographic mobility,freedom of opinion, and social movements, using ever more sophisticated technologiesin a national or transnational framework, targeting a territory (like the Schengen systemfor the control of individual displacements in Europe) or a network of communications.It is with these new technologies in view that Deleuze (1990) spoke of the emergence ofa control society'. More recentlyöin the wake of 9/11öAgamben (2004) denounced amassive legalization of `biopolitical tattooing'. We are rapidly heading toward a real-time control of Internet users, already implemented in certain countries. To which weshould add the techniques for the observation of children whose behavior would`predict' their future `dangerosity'.(7) They are all radically destructive of the `propertyin one's person', to put it in Lockean terms, on which the classical notion of citizenshipwas predicated (at least ideally). There is a more `positive' counterpart to the developmentof controlling procedures, which in a sense is no less antithetic to the political formation ofthe citizen: this is the new individualistic ethics of care for yourself ' in which individualsthemselves are supposed to subject their conduct to the criterion of maximum utility, freefrom the imperatives of solidarity and conformity imposed by collective affiliations. Or,as Brown, again quoting a commentary of Foucault, would propose: the individuals areencouraged to ` give their lives a specific entrepreneurial form''.(8) There is a dark side

(7) Which was recently proposed in France to generalize and standardize the methods of psychiatricdiagnosis.(8) This was, in fact, an indirect quotation from Friedrich Hayek himself (see De Brunhoff, 1986).

The `impossible' community of the citizens 7

indeed to this seemingly rational ethics, which takes us into the immediate vicinity of whatsome sociologists, like Robert Castel (1995; 2003), have described as a negative individu-alism: he would relate it to the destruction of the institutions of welfare and more generallysocial security', ie all forms of solidarity and socialization of individuals through which,over several generations, they become affiliated' to a community of citizens'. I myself useCastel's categories of affiliation and de-affiliation to establish the necessary connectionwith the issue of nationality and the nation-state. In practice the community of citizenstook the form of a national community, within which it was supposed that both theconflicts of interests (including the more or less institutionalized class struggles) andthe processes of education and healthcare provided as a public service on a more orless equalitarian basis, would take place. But to a de-affiliated' individual who becomesalso de-incorporated' from this formal solidarity (be he/she a migrant or not) falling intothe abyss of unemployment with no predictable end, contradictory injunctions are perma-nently addressed: according to the new code of neoliberal values, he/she should becomethe entrepreneur' or `manager' of his/her own life, displaying a `freedom' whose socialconditions are simultaneously made inaccessible. No wonder this can produce despair andoccasionally forms of extreme violence targeting others but alsoöat least individuallyöoneself, or one's life environment. This is the very violence of being devalued, like a weakcurrency or a rotten stock. This is also the violence that is involved in the quest forimaginary compensations, the collective omnipotence of `auto-immune' communities [toborrow the language of the late Derrida (2005)]. In fact such communities of immunity,which can become constructed in the imaginary on a local basis (eg through ethnic,cultural, territorial, urban gangs) or become projected onto a global space of communica-tions by mobilizing religious or racial postcolonial narratives, are just as negative andimpossible as the negative and impossible individualities produced by the dismantling ofsocial citizenship within a national community.

For these reasons it becomes also impossible to avoid the question of the formsand the functions of populism in contemporary political discourse. I certainly agreewith Ernesto Laclau (2005) that `populism' in general should not be demonized orimmediately amalgamated with fascism. This is typically a `projective' category, which isused to stigmatize the intervention of the masses (the `mob') in politics, and whichcontinues the classical antidemocratic `fear of the masses', on which the privilege of theelites in power' was based. We should admit that there can be no more a `people'in politics without `populism' than there can be a `nation' without `nationalism', anda common' without communism': in each case an ideology is needed, expressing in aperformative manner, through a name and an imaginary, the construction of the `we',the `us'. But this is also where the antinomies return. Laclau's thesis asserts that someforms of populism, because of their very ambiguity or equivocity, form the condition ofa generalization of the political discourse, which overcomes and integrates diverseclaims of emancipation, heterogeneous political movements rooted in different socialgroups, which resist various forms of domination. This is Laclau's reformulation ofwhat Gramsci had called hegemony, aiming at recasting the concept of democraticpolitics on a more concrete basis.We should agree with him, accordingly, that the spectreof populism was always haunting any dialectics of `insurrection' and constitution' asimplied in the democratic foundations of modern citizenship. But it is necessary also toask the symmetric question, for which there is no preestablished answerönot even auniversally valid answeröbecause it entirely depends on the conjunctures. Under whatconditions is a `populist' identification with the missing community (or the imaginarycommunity) the relevant framework for a collective movement aimed at democraticrealizations? Where does the difference rest between the discourses and images of differentgroups, which identify with a single `block in power'? Conversely, when is populism,

8 E Balibar

as a fiction of the community, simply the screen where compensatory satisfactions andimaginary revenge against poverty, de-affiliation, the production of `negative individ-uals', and the exclusion of stigmatized `others' and `aliens', become projected? I am notsure that the two sides of the alternative remain always separated, so that it would beonly a matter of consciousness for the collective political agency to draw the lineof demarcation and implant civility within the `populist' imaginaryöseparating itsdemocratic and its nationalist side.

As I suggested earlier, it would seem that such a discussion, however abstract andtheoretical it remains, can hardly isolate the violent tensions and the ambivalent effectsof affiliation and deaffiliation, national or nationalist incorporation into the commu-nity, internal exclusion, positive and negative individualism, and so on from the issueof representation and its crisis in contemporary political systems. This is one otherobvious aspect of the changing conditions of the political that is widely attributed toneoliberalism becoming a commonplace of contemporary political science and produc-ing thousands of pages a year. I will readily admit that `representation' enormouslymatters from the point of view of any critical understanding of the political in the ageof the so-called end of politics', the promotion of `governance', and so on. Clearly acertain vulgar Marxism (which also has roots in Rousseau and the Jacobin tradition)has been much too quick and simplistic in reducing the issue of representation, ingeneral, to that of parliamentarianism. Parliamentarianism forms only one historicalform and one aspect of representation. It was hailed by liberal political theory as thesingle criterion of democracy because it should provide a guarantee of pluralismagainst the ideologies of the organic unity of the people based on race or class, whichwas promoted by rightwing or leftwing totalitarianism. And it was criticized by thecommunist and anarchist tradition as an expropriation of the direct political capacityof the citizens, their political competence', their right to speak and decide for them-selves, and so on. Let us note, accordingly, that the crisis of parliamentarianism isnothing new. Some of its most commonly accepted symptomsösuch as the corruptionof the elected `representatives of the people' who act as strategic intermediariesbetween their constituencies, the economic lobbies, the administrations, and the statepoweröare as old as the constitution of parliamentarianism itself, as so are the anti-parliamentary reactions that are precisely labelled `populist'. What I would find moreimportant here, in order to address the antinomies of citizenship in their current form,would be a discussion on the crisis of representation as such, beyond the parliamentarymachine: a crisis of the capacity of citizens to entrust or delegate their power to`representatives' at any level of the political institution where a public function isrequested and their capacity to control the effects of the trust or the delegation. This,in my view, is a fundamental `right' or modality of empowerment' of free and equalcitizensöthe reason why I believe it necessary, philosophically, to invert the perspectiveof the sovereign authorization while returning to the question of representation thatHobbes asked in the most general form in his Leviathan (the emergence of a publicsphere or a commonwealth' through a collective procedure of empowerment, whichtakes the form of the transference and the communication of power), albeit from below orfrom a democratic perspective. This was also, with a different conceptual apparatus, thequestion that was raised at the same time by the English Levellers, and by Spinoza. It isa question now of retrieving in different conditions the dialectics of constituent power'and constituted power', or insurrection and constitution, albeit beyond the limits of thenation-state and its political monopoly. We cannot prescribe the limits or the internalboundaries of this dialectic of representation. Let us not forget that in the republicantraditionöwhich far exceeds the officially `republican' regimesöa teacher or a judge ora social worker, whether or not appointed by the state, is just as much `representing the

The `impossible' community of the citizens 9

people' as a member of parliament, and the procedures of his/her selection or the resultsof his/her action must be democratically controlled. This, as we know, is far from beinguniversally the case. The crisis of the political institution that we indicate through thecategory `de-democratization' does not consist only in the devaluation of this or thatform of representation: it is linked with a disqualification of the very principle ofdemocratic representation, or controlled delegation of political power belonging to thecitizens collectively. On the one hand, it is suggested today that representation hasbecome unnecessary and irrational because technical forms of `governance' haveemerged that make it possible to implement social programs, calculate economicstrategies, and optimize procedures to reduce social conflicts according to a measureof general utility. On the other hand, it is loudly proclaimed that `representation' is apolitical form that is impractical, even dangerous, when the responsible civic subjectbecomes defined not as bearers of rights but mainly in terms of social conformityor deviancy. The underlying social normality should be controlled from above, notsurrendered to the anarchic expression of `voices' or claims' from below. Thereforeöborrowing Rancie© re's (2007) eloquent titleöI believe that the hatred of representation is,or can be, also part of the hatred of democracy.

4 Politics, agency, and communityHow do we formulate alternative proposals, which are also carrying hopes to overcomethe crisis? We can do it only on the basis of existing forms of resistance, solidaritiesand collective inventions, and individual revolts, interfering with the development ofneoliberal governance and its methodsöwith all the risks involved. But risk is anessential component of the political, just as is experiment. Together, in their fullheterogeneity, these resistances and revolts will delineate a new form (or a newmoment) of `insurrectional' politics, making it possible to imagine new modalities forthe construction of citizenship and for the combination of spontaneity and institutionand active participation and representation in a creative manneröwhat authors com-ing from different angles call `insurgent citizenship'.(9) But we will have to acknowledgethat the imaginary line of progress of citizenship, and its continuous' democratization,has exploded with the crisis of social citizenship, followed by the development of thecontrol society' and the phenomenon of de-democratization pictured as neoliberalrationality and governmentality. Not only have the contents and value of `politicalrights' (ie powers) acquired in the course of modernity in certain parts of the worldbeen drastically reduced through the restriction of the `social rights', but even the civilrights' or the protection of the human person, which seemed irreversible, are not leftuntouched. What I mean is that the antinomies of citizenship and the urgency of ademocratic alternative are intensified in all their dimensions, without a clear strategicpriority or a constitutional hierarchy of rights yet emerging.

However, when speaking of modes of subjectivation that can be associated with an`insurgent' mode of citizenship, it would seem that there exist at least two heteroge-neous forms, which are symbolically and practically diverging. They are not oriented inthe same direction and do not have the same requisites. I try to identify them withabstract terminology derived from a certain reading of Deleuze and Guattari (1980):the distinction of a ``minoritarian'' and a ``majoritarian' subject. What is a minoritariansubject, in general? It is a deviant subject, from the point of view of the dominant normor normality, or it names a form of subjectivation resisting the procedures of moraliza-tion and normalization that are imposed by the neoliberal orderöno less coercive than(9) See Holston (2008), but also Abensour (2004). In the future I will have to discuss carefully theaffinities and nuances with `acts of citizenship' in the sense proposed by Engin Isin and hiscollaborators (Isin and Nielsen, 2008).

10 E Balibar

the disciplines and controlling methods of the national ^ social state, even when they arepresented as its libertarian or individualistic antithesis. A deviant or rebellious subjectemerges as a transindividual subject, who (together with others) is inventing andestablishing places for an autonomous life, also forming a protection against the nihil-istic forms of negative individuality and self-destructive violence: not so much utopiasas what Foucault (1998) had called heterotopias. But this figure is also very differentfrom, if not subjectively incompatible and socially conflictual with, the more tradi-tional figure of the majoritarian subject produced in collective mobilizations: in ourpolitical tradition this is the activist, the militant subject (male, or also increasinglyfemale), who joins a movement or a campaign (not necessarily a `party') for a demo-cratic cause. Most of the time such a cause' combines social and moral dimensions:Just think of the defence of the environment or the solidarity with illegal migrants,whom capitalist society has forced to leave their homeland and pushed into the conditionsof illegality only to completely dehumanize them and treat them like human game thatcan be hunted and killed. And, of course, we should not forget the more classicalcauses of the defence of labor rights, culture, and campaigns for civil rights and theequality of women, which particularly illustrate the continuity of the majoritarian subjectover several generations. Clearly, this is no less decisive a figure of `insurrectional' civicagency.

What I am suggesting is not that, in practice, such minoritarian and majoritarianfigures are radically isolated, or even could crystallize without intersecting with oneanother. To be sure, the classical (particularly Marxist) representation of revolutionarypraxis, inasmuch as it combined the idea of `rebellion' with that of `social transforma-tion', had brought them into the unity of one single ideal type. However, it seems clearto me that they symbolically refer to different modalities of acting, and also they areoccasionally supported by different kinds of social practices, which are rooted them-selves in the experiences and living conditions of heterogeneous groups. They comefrom different places in the society, different parts of the world. They speak a differentpolitical language (and sometimes also a different idiom, never fully translatable). Thisis, summarily explained, one of the reasons why I believe that the simple category of`subject'öeven if we conceive it in a dynamic manner, as a process of subjectivationthat never ends, rather than a transcendental origin of actions and representationsöisinsufficient to give an account of the construction of political processes. In my view weneed here several concepts or practical notionsöperhaps at least three: a notion of thebearers of the political (social groups and individuals), a notion of the actors (or moregenerally the types of political agency), and a notion of the subjects (or the becomingsubjects). For that reason we must think of the invention of democracy and try tocontribute to its re-creation through what I would call transitional unities formed by thebearers when they use certain forms of subjectivation to become actors, or active, inpolitics. This is the opposite of a preestablished harmony between social conditionsdeemed objective and forms of political consciousness or organization that are sup-posed to allow for a necessary progressionöin other terms the old Hegelian, Marxist,and Lukacsian teleology of the becoming for itself (fu« r sich) of a subject who existedalready in itself (an sich). To be sure, forms of collective action more or less unified,based on alliances, are always justified by a collective awareness that many forms ofinequalities, discriminations, and exclusions belong to the same `system' and thereforecall for a general process of democratization of citizenship. I would gladly borrow forthis awareness the expression `democratization of democracy', not as it was meant bysuch theorists of the Third Way as Anthony Giddens or Ulrich Beck but as it is usedby protagonists of the alter-globalization theory like Boaventura Da Souza Santos(2005/2007). But such convergences don't have a natural basis, whether it is imagined

The `impossible' community of the citizens 11

in ontological, sociological, or moral terms as origin or destination. Quoting againthe formula that Deleuze himself, I believe, borrowed from Paul Klee the painter, thesphere or the community of political agency is neither given nor anticipated; it is`missing'ölike the `people' is missing. In other terms it makes use of structures ofcommunication that are produced in history, and rights or powers of expression that itmust impose itself, to create a hybrid political actor (or `power'), whose capacityvirtually extends to the whole world (or is always already cosmopolitical'), but whois located, situated, in a certain place, where conflicts with global causes and dimen-sions are crystallizing and reflected in a singular manner. A hybrid political actor, thisis never a transcendental type that becomes projected onto empirical situations, suchas the Worker, the Proletarian, the Colonized (or Post-Colonized), the Woman, theNomad (not even the Multitude), but this is a composition of differences, being formedthrough crossing borders, visible and invisible, internal and external. Its subjectivetask, which is also its permanent problem, consists of overcoming its own divisions,the diverging interests that it covers, as much as confronting adversaries and the hostileforces of `the system'. But probably these two problematic determinations are notreally distinct; they have to merge in practice, for the patterns of oppression thatcombine different forms of subjection and marginalization can become really trans-formed. This does not completely answer our initial question concerning the future ofcitizenship' as a category and an institution, but it certainly allows us to give it a lessindeterminate content.

ReferencesAbensour M, 2004 La democratie contre l'Etat (Eè ditions du Felin, Paris)Agamben G, 2004, ` No to bio-political tattooing'' Le Monde 10 January, English translation at

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/totalControl.pdfBalibar E, 2007a, ` Uprisings in the banlieues'' Constellations 14(1) 47 ^ 71Balibar E, 2007b, ` (De)constructing the human as human institution: a reflection on the coherence

of Hannah Arendt's practical philosophy'' Social Research 74 727 ^ 738Balibar E, 2010 La proposition de l'egaliberte. Essais politiques 1989 ^ 2009 (Presses Universitaires

de France, Paris)Benhabib S, 2004 The Rights of Others (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)BrownW, 2005 Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton University Press,

Princeton, NJ)BrownW, 2006, `American nightmare: neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and de-democratization''

Political Theory 34 690 ^ 714Castel R, 1995 Les metamorphoses de la question sociale (Fayard, Paris)Castel R, 2003 L'insecurite sociale: qu'est-ce qu'eª tre protege? (Seuil, Paris)Da Souza Santos B, 2005/2007 Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon

(Verso, London)De Brunhoff S, 1986 L'heure du marche: Critique du liberalisme (Presses Universitaires de France,

Paris)Deleuze G, 1990 Pourparlers (Eè ditions de Minuit, Paris)Deleuze G, Guattari F, 1980 Mille Plateaux (Eè ditions de Minuit, Paris); English translation by

BMassumi, 1987AThousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of MinnesotaPress, Minneapolis, MN)

Derrida J, 2005 Rogues:Two Essays on Reason translated by PA Brault (Stanford University Press,Stanford, CA)

Foucault M, 1998, ` Different spaces'', in Essential Works of Foucault 1954 ^ 1984 volume 2,Ed. P Rabinow (series editor) (The New Press, NewYork) pp 175 ^ 185

Habermas J, 2001The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)Habermas J, 2006 The Divided West Ed. C Cronin (Polity Press, Cambridge)Harvey D, 2005 A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, Oxford)Hegel G W F, 1991Elements of the Philosophy of Right Ed. A B Wood, translated by H B Nisbet

(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)Holston J, 2008 InsurgentCitizenship. Disjunctions ofDemocracy andModernity in Brazil (Princeton

University Press, Princeton, NJ)

12 E Balibar

Isin E, Nielsen G, 2008 Acts of Citizenship (Zed Books, London)Laclau E, 2005 On Populist Reason (Verso, London)Lefort C, 1981L'invention democratique (Fayard, Paris)Mezzadra S, 2006 [2001] Diritto di Fuga: Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (ombre corte,

Verona)Mezzadra S, dal Lago A, 2002, ` I confini impensati dell'Europa'', in Europa politica: Ragioni di

una necessita© Eds H Friese, A Negri, P Wagner (Manifestolibri, Rome) pp 143 ^ 157 [Frenchtranslation in ` Les frontie© res impensees de l'Europe'' Lignes 13 67 ^ 80]

Rancie© re J, 1995 La mesentente (Galilee, Paris); English translation by J Rose in Disagreement:Politics and Philosophy 1998 (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)

Rancie© re J, 2007 Hatred of Democracy translated by S Corcoran (Verso, London)Renault E, 2008 Souffrances sociales (La Decouverte, Paris)Riesenberg P, 1992 Citizenship in theWestern Tradition: Plato to Rousseau (University of North

Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC)Tilly C, 2003, ` Inequality, democratization, and de-democratization'' Sociological Theory 21 37 ^ 43Tilly C, 2007 Democracy (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)Wollstonecraft M, 1792 AVindication of the Rights of Woman (Joseph Johnson, London)

ß 2011 Pion Ltd and its Licensors

The `impossible' community of the citizens 13

This article is an advance online publication. It will not change in content under normalcircumstances but will be given full volume, issue, and page numbers in the final PDF version,which will be made available shortly before production of the printed version.

Conditions of use. This article may be downloaded from the E&P website for personal researchby members of subscribing organisations. This PDF may not be placed on any website (or otheronline distribution system) without permission of the publisher.