In On the Jewish question, Karl Marx (1844) reminds us that whereas citizenship as a language of rights and political participation acts as a political ferment, it remains too narrow and egoistic in its bourgeois definition to cover the wider range of popular praxis and collective aspirations necessary for human emancipation in a larger sense. Balibar 2011: 477, my translation from FrenchĪs a normative framework, citizenship is often superimposed by citizenship studies onto people’s movements that most of the time do not refer to this concept. That is why such voices sketch what will appear to us, in fine, as the differential of subjectivity thanks to which the universal becomes (or rather re-becomes), a political figure, enabling a citizenship that is constitutive and not ruled or imposed from above. All anthropological difference represents the universal in front of an enunciation that, by trying to “neutralize” it, “communitarizes” it, because it institutes citizenship as the community of the “normals,” the “civilized men,” the “responsible subjects,” and so on.
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