BORDER-CONCEPT (OF THE POLITICAL)

Examines the concept “border” bearing in mind Etienne Balibar’s extensive work on the matter of geopolitical borders, animated by analysis of the problem of “Europe” which ranges from a historical demand to account for the trajectory of European thought and its political implications to a philosophical demand to account for the present as it unfolds, often unpredictably, in real time of thinking and acting. To the first belongs a huge corpus addressing almost the entirety of modern European thought, from Balibar’s early work on Marx and Spinoza onward, and to the latter the work that encounters key landmarks of European reality (from those texts on capital, class, nation, and race to their eventual implication with questions of universality, secularity, citizenship, anthropology, and subjectivity). In a more pointed sense, this meditation on the concept of border in this European trajectory spans the range from the early analysis of the “interior frontier” in Fichte to multiple interventions regarding the institutional project of the European Union in its various manifestations in the last 35 years.