In this article, I reconstruct Étienne Balibar’s work against the background of the debate on modern universal citizenship. I argue that universal citizenship is neither fundamentally emancipatory nor fundamentally oppressive but is rather both. In order to defend this position, I build on Balibar’s concept of the “citizen subject.” First, I parse this concept, showing how it allows us to think about the contradictions of modern universal citizenship. In the second section, I elucidate its temporal logic and show how it (...) undermines the telos of modern universal citizenship. In sections three to five, I show how citizenship’s universalism clarifies both its oppressive and its emancipatory thrust. The dialectic of universal citizenship, I argue, unfolds as a conflict between and within political universals. In the conclusion, I will tie up these different strands and end with some reflections on the conditions of possibility of this dialectic. (shrink)

Este artículo explora la problemática del cuerpo desde una perspectiva de género. Primero, se estudia la evasión filosófica del cuerpo, así como su inadvertida asimilación a lo femenino. Segundo, se examina la negación capitalista del cuerpo y la posibilidad de entender la diferenciación entre las lógicas de explotación y de expropiación a través de una previa diferenciación entre cuerpos. Se propone finalmente hacer un análisis de la exclusión general del cuerpo como una exclusión particular de lo femenino y de lo (...) popular y se sugiere que el advenimiento de los cuerpos promulgado desde el movimiento feminista, especialmente en su vertiente latinoamericana, traen consigo un potencial democrático y emancipador. (shrink)

A unifying feature of the most prominent social movements that emerged in the 2010s is their dissatisfaction with explaining injustices on a case-by-case basis. In Canada, movements against settler colonialism express a similar orientation. This elicits a return of totality thinking, which enables one to grasp the connections between what appears as isolated or fragmented moments that in fact constitute and are constituted by a larger whole. Drawing on Marxist and Indigenous theorists, we reconstruct an approach to totality and a (...) conceptualization of settler colonialism as a totality. Through an immanent reading of John Borrows’ approach to decolonization, we justify the importance of this concept for politicizing the persistence of unfree forms of interdependence. Finally, just as individual struggles point toward the totality, totality thinking draws attention to the unity-in-separation of different struggles, enabling a politics of “immanent universalism” as an alternative to both abstract universalism and particularism. (shrink)