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Paradoxical as it may seem, giving up on politics has probably been part of Marxism’s seductiveness for a long time. No one in Balibar’s cohort (Balibar was born in 1942, Badiou in 1937, Rancière in 1940, Žižek in 1949) could have felt confident that as Marxists they came of age at a propitious tim…

I suspect the problem here for American readers may not be the concepts of democracy and human rights as such, or even the word liberal (which is not yet so firmly established in the US as to be obligatorily shunned by the pure of heart). Skepticism will more likely come from a natural repugnance f…

As with any crossover success, Balibar’s offered grounds on which purists might complain of betrayal. Civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights activists all spoke the language of rights. (This has also been true, though more obliquely, of the antiwar and environmental movements.) By demanding l…

When I was a child, my mother told me that by the time I was old enough to die, a machine would have been developed to prevent it. Like the child in “The Eye,” I believed in this consolation until an inappropriate age, when its impossibility arrived all at once, with a similar hollowing force. The …

Haas wore leather pants when he performed. He was tall and rail-thin with large hands and an obsession with bebop and hard bop music of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s — Charlie Parker especially. When we arrived for that first class he handed out a transcription of the solo from Parker’s tune “Koko” and …