Svenja Bromberg

I feel as if this text [Balibar's 'Ontological difference, anthropological difference, and equal liberty'] allowed me to appreciate more properly why the notion of 'anthropological differences' is so important for your philosophical inquiry. As someone who teaches sociology rather than philosophy, it was previously not entirely clear to me why we needed the notion of 'anthropology' rather than speaking of, for example the (more or less violent, more or less exclusionary) social, ideological and material construction of identities, and indeed about issues of intersectionality as you mention in the text.

This entry provides a critical overview of main theoretical issues and debates surrounding the Marxist concept of subsumption. It initially sets the context for Marx’s adoption of the term by outlining the significance of subsumption in German philosophy, in particular for Kant and Hegel. It goes on to explore Marx’s use of the term and engagement with the broader problematic of subsumption in two distinct contexts: 1) his early critique of philosophy and the development of a historically critical, ‘materialist’ perspective (where subsumption under concepts is developed into subsumption under social, political and economic relations); 2) his critique of political economy, where, specified as ‘the subsumption of labour under capital’, the concept takes on a far more technical and specific sense as a function of capitalist domination in the production process (in the distinction between ‘formal’, ‘real’ and ‘hybrid’ subsumption). The varied interpretations and debates around subsumption in the Marxist tradition are then explored. Firstly, considering the use of subsumption as a category of historical periodisation and the thesis of a ‘total’ subsumption in the work of Adorno and Negri. Secondly, assessing theorisations of subsumption within labour process theory, Marxological debates and Latin American Marxism.

In this review, I discuss Balibar’s ‘proposition of equaliberty’ with regard to its theoretical status and contribution, its relationship to other contemporary theories of radical democracy as well as to the problematic of bourgeois versus communist emancipation in Marx. The primary interest of this essay is to develop a detailed understanding of Balibar’s analytical schema, which draws a complex picture of our contemporary ‘human condition’, and to place it within his own theoretical development since his contribution toReading Capitalin the 60s. On that basis, it will be possible to assess his contribution to thinking politics with and after Marx and place it more concretely within the generalised radical-democratic turn in post-Marxist theory.