About the vicissitudes of contemporary politics in the light of Balibar’s thought: Citizen’s right before the current urban political form

Abstract

This work approaches the question about the politic in what we call present times. As heuristic way is convened certain aspects of Etienne Balibar’s theoretical approaches, in particular, is focused in citizenship’s category that these French philosophy asserts, mismatching this of the liberal capitalist tradition -that limits it at a legal-moral conception- and reinstating its instituting power without ceasing to consider the relationships -ever aporetic- that these maintains with the figures of the state. Is particularly focused on the relation between citizenship and city (the polis) meanwhile the ways of inhabiting the cities -and the disputes that are generated around them- constitute a political problem that implies the discussion about the «citizenship rights», about the ways of citizen´s intervention and exclusion. This concern rests on the premise that, even though historically the city has been the locus par excellence for the exercise of politics, the urban space embodies in paradigmatic way the social unrest of the contemporary world. A hypothesis is proposed that this conceptual shift requires in addition to consider citizenship in its sensible dimension since the ways in which the citizens inhabit a city refers to a configuration that links ways of seeing, feeling and thinking. The aesthetic and political forms (Rancière) that presents the space of the city are incardinated to the political subjectivation process and to the possibilities and difficulties of the being-in-common construction. In this sense, although the present scenes of neoliberal predominance evidence one de-democratizing and anti-egalitarian direction, the politicized condition of the urban form includes the possibility of emergency of insurgent intervention that disputes the unequal distribution of the times and spaces.