Introduction: Revisiting the Citizen-Subject

In 1989, Étienne Balibar responded in Cahiers Confrontations to the question Jean-Luc Nancy had posed to a number of well-known French philosophers earlier that year: "who comes after the subject?" The apparent simplicity of the question belies Balibar's apparently simple answer, which is in fact as difficult as it is unequivocal. Beginning by articulating a reading of Descartes that calls into question Heidegger's interpretation of the cogito as the inaugural moment of the sovereignty of the subjectum and the birth of modernity, Balibar defines what, for him, lies beyond the age or epoch of the subject in starkly simple terms: "After the subject comes the citizen" (38). This response shifts the chronology implied by the question, which seems to gesture at something that awaits a future unfolding, something that will come after the age of the subject. Balibar instead directs our attention towards an event that has already taken place and gives the moment of the shift from the subject to the citizen a particular date: 1789. Though, as Balibar himself acknowledges, it is too straightforward to treat this date as if it were the culminating moment at which the subject became the citizen, the date of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen at least in principle marks a rupture with a particular understanding of the subject as subditus, the individual "submitted to the ditio, to the sovereign authority of a prince, an authority expressed in his orders and itself legitimated by the Word of another Sovereign (the Lord God)" (36). What comes after the subject is—in principle—the end of the subjection of the subject, and the replacement of the prince with the self-subjected autonomy of the citizen.

Of course, a rupture in principle is hardly a rupture in fact, as Balibar several times notes throughout the essay. However, the shift from the subject to the citizen in fact fundamentally disrupts the ground on which the problem of subjection can be thought. As Balibar insists, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen produces a "truth-effect that marks a rupture" with previous conceptions of the subject (44), introducing a whole new set of aporias into the newfound autonomy of the citizen. Once sovereignty has devolved to the citizen, for example, what must be accounted for is how modern sovereignty, previously modeled on an absolute hierarchy involving subjection to the prince in the name of obedience to God, becomes the shared sovereignty of equals. Since sovereignty implies a transcendent hierarchical relation between subject and subjected, what must be accounted for is how the new principle of free equality that arrives co-extensively with the citizen is capable of making him or her sovereign without collapsing into paradox. As Balibar argues, in the absence of the hierarchy of obedience, what emerges is a form of autonomy that involves the (self)-limitation of the citizen's own radical freedom. The figure of the citizen, endowed with natural rights, free and equal with every other human, becomes the subject to which he is subjected. Subjection, in other words, no longer passes by way of an exterior transcendence such as God, but is now a problem internal to the citizen itself.

What Balibar goes on to call the citizen's "becoming-subject" (devenir-sujet) certainly entails the invention of new regimes of subjection, ones that are, as Foucault shows, predicated on the transition from subjection to the world of rights and discipline. But it is also a point of acute tension that threatens to continuously reconstitute the relationship between the citizen and his or her subjection. The principle of equality, for example, begins as the cornerstone of natural right. But this alleged universalism is quickly undermined by new forms of subjection that come to be reiterated at the very heart of its universal claim, emerging directly out of the principle's presumption of a correspondence between the capacities of the human and the capacities of the citizen. On the one hand, once this correspondence is established, it becomes possible to deny some citizens their full humanity, and...