Duration
45h SEM
Number of credits
Lecturer
Language(s) of instruction
French language
Organisation and examination
Teaching in the first semester, review in January
Schedule
Units courses prerequisite and corequisite
Prerequisite or corequisite units are presented within each program
Learning unit contents
Citizens or subjects ?
"Citizen", 'citizenship', 'city' are founding concepts of politics in the West, massively invested both by political philosophy (since Plato, Aristotle and Cicero) and by Christian theology (from Saint Augustine's Civitas dei to Dante's Monarchia).
But in the premodern mental universe, citizenship is still indissociable from an original subjection to some first principle (Nature, God, the Prince, etc.) that ensnares it in a network of irreducible anthropological hierarchies. The practice of citizenship, however intense it may be, remains that of a subjectus, a subject subjected to the Law or laws that override it.
With modernity, citizenship asserts itself as autonomy, the power to make one's own laws. Kant's "Copernican revolution", which established subjectivity as the "fixed point" of all relationships with the world and with others, responded to the French Revolution, which established man and the citizen as the holders of all sovereignty. The citizen is elevated to subjectum, a subjectivity endowed with an instituting consciousness and will that, even when empirically subject to some form of tutelage, is always praised for its ability to free itself from it. To be a citizen is no longer to be in a situation of subjection, but to assert one's subjectivity as self-foundation and universality. Emancipation (whether institutional or insurrectionary) becomes the horizon of all true citizenship. Subjectum (being-foundation) takes precedence over subjectus (being-subject).
Mobilizing the resources of Étienne Balibar's Citoyen-sujet and other essays in philosophical anthropology, the seminar will trouble and complicate this presupposed self-identity of modern citizenship and subjectivity, by revealing at least one double division of any "citizen-subject":
1) How can we not suspect, behind the universal and self-founded citizen, the in fact particular and self-centered figures of the owner, male, national (and/or European)? What kind of torsion, what kind of decentering do "subaltern" (non)-citizens - workers, women, foreigners, racialized people, etc. - operate in relation to the presuppositions of the "citizen-subject"? - do they operate in relation to the proprietary, phallocentric or ethnocentric presuppositions of modern citizenship? More fundamentally, aren't all citizenship and all humanity always-already divided by anthropological differences (male/female, national/foreign, normal/pathological, etc.) that are both irreducible (in the sense that humanity cannot be thought outside of them) and indeterminate (in the sense that it is impossible to define their contours definitively)?
2) How can we not also suspect, behind the subject this time, an irreducible internal tension between his claim to pose as "I", and his original submission to "Ça", to that unknown and intimate Other that secretly inhabits him?
As the subject of political emancipation becomes ever more self-conscious, does he not paradoxically discover his irreducible dependence on his own unconscious? Far from being identical to himself, isn't the subject always-already divided between the gesture of self-foundation that makes him a Subjectum, and his ineliminable, interminable heteronomy, which brings him back to his condition of subjectus? The seminar will explore the richness and aporias of this painful yet fruitful division between subjectivation and subjection, subjectivity and subjection.
Learning outcomes of the learning unit
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Prerequisite knowledge and skills
Formation de premier cycle en philosophie et/ou en sciences humaines, sociales et juridiques.
Planned learning activities and teaching methods
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Mode of delivery (face to face, distance learning, hybrid learning)
Face-to-face course
Further information:
Face-to-face course
Additional information:
3th Floor Philosophy. Thursday 4-7 PM
Course materials and recommended or required readings
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Exam(s) in session
Any session
- In-person
oral exam
Written work / report
Further information:
Exam(s) in session
Any session
- In-person
written exam AND oral exam
Written work / report
Additional information:
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Work placement(s)
Organisational remarks and main changes to the course
Contacts
e.delruelle@uliege.be
chiara.collamati@uliege.be