Citizenship

If fundamental political categories were represented asgeometric shapes, citizenship would be one of those rotatingpolyhedrons with reflective surfaces that together create effectsof light and shade. With extraordinarily acute discernment, theleading philosopher Etienne Balibar examines one by one thevarious faces of this object, more numerous - and far more fissured- than one would imagine. The question of what it means to be acitizen has, from the dawn of Western politics, been anything butclear and straightforward; and modernity has shown it to be evenmore enigmatic and contested. Inseparable from democracy, and the demands for equality andliberty from which democracy draws its origins, citizenship isconstantly being redefined within the unresolved contradictionbetween universal principles and the discriminatory mechanisms thatregulate membership of a political community. Not everyone is a citizen, even within one nation-state. It hasbeen said that ?certain persons are in society without being ofsociety?. The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion continue togenerate dramatic asymmetries and create openings and closures,especially today in a time of particular fragility and whennational sovereignty is in flux. So are there too many antinomieswithin citizenship? Balibar does not shy away from theseantimonies, but he knows that to renounce citizenship would be toabandon the chance to create new modes of collective autonomy, inshort, to democratize democracy.