Other Scenes: Balibar and Tosel on Class Struggle and the Struggle over Identity

Join CSCL as we welcome Jason Read in 216 Pillsbury Drive, room 135, at 3pm. Light refreshments will be provided.

One of the most pressing questions of contemporary Marxism is how to relate class struggle, politics organized around class, and politics of identity. For the most part this question has fallen into polemics between different factions. What I propose here is less an entry into the fray of current debates between identity politics and class struggle, but to look at the way in which two Marxist philosophers, Etienne Balibar and André Tosel, tried to think both the interrelation and irreducibly of identity struggle and class struggle. Balibar and Tosel do so by drawing from the philosophical resources of Marx and Spinoza, but in different ways, examining the anthropologies and ontologies of each to argue that class and identity are inextricably intertwined. Lastly, I show how this intersection of the two scenes can be used to engage with the thought of Stuart Hall and Sylvia Wynter.

Cosponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, and the Department of Philosophy.