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Étienne Balibar explores the tensions between cosmopolitanism and secularism in order to advance a truly democratic and emancipatory cosmopolitanism, which requires a secularization of secularism. Going beyond circumscribed notions of religion and the public sphere, Secularism and Cosmopolitanism is a profound rethinking of identity and difference.
William Egginton, Johns Hopkins University:Étienne Balibar has been one of the world's leading political philosophers for the last several decades and has had an enormous impact around questions concerning the relation among notions of individuality, selfhood, and state sovereignty in the modern era. Secularism and Cosmopolitanism is a short but trenchant book by an important thinker on a vital topic.
Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University:Over the years Étienne Balibar has perfected a style of polemic both so ruthless and so sweet that his antagonists—whether postsecularism or "official" secularism, whether the champions of biopolitics or of euroskepticism—are still smiling even as their heads are separated from their bodies, and will often keep smiling as they lie lifeless on the ground. A revolutionary for our times, a revolutionary without slogans, Balibar brings all of philosophy's resources to bear on the conceptual challenges buried in today's news, and tomorrow's. The concepts he has inspected and re-thought with his signature rigor are fresh and ready for action.
Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley:Secularism and Cosmopolitanism is the textual equivalent of a rich ongoing seminar with one of our most erudite, astute living philosophers. In writings spanning more than a decade, Balibar opens rather than stipulates the meanings of religion, secularism, and laïcité as well as those of universalism and multiculturalism. From the veil controversy to the Charlie Hebdo bombing, from reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau to reading Joan Scott, Balibar teaches us not what to think about contemporary religious-secular conflicts in Europe, but how.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of Death of a Discipline and Other Asias:One of our best European activist philosophers here considers the question of secularism, religion, and cosmopolitanism in a broad range: Islam, the historical contradictions of secularism in the Israeli state, the implications of French laïcité, the history of the term 'monotheism' from European antiquity, and serious considerations of gender at every step. 'Generalized heresy as philosophical fiction' is, for Balibar, our persistent, repeated, heterogeneous, and collective political task of invention. Those of us trying to work away from the Abrahamic and toward the rural subaltern electorate find in Balibar a powerful ally.
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