Etienne Balibar lectures in West Hollywood for WHAP! series.
In polite conversation, there are two topics that are usually taboo: politics and religion.
On Friday (March 9) in West Hollywood, the WHAP! Lecture Series brings both subjects to the forefront in Etienne Balibar’s lecture Can or Ought the Political and the Religious be Separated?
Balibar, a Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, is considered a thought-leader in political philosophy, particularly Marxist. His many works include Lire le Capital (1965); Spinoza et la politique (1985); Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les frontières, l’État, le peuple (2001); Europe, Constitution, Frontière (2005).
Balibar discussed the relationship of religion and politics in a 2010 lecture, Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Working Hypotheses, delivered at the University of London’s Birkbeck Institute. An excerpt from Monthly Review:
There is no such thing as a purely religious conflict, but in today’s world a conflict that pits religious representations and allegiances against one another, or against their secular antithesis, is always already entirely political. Perhaps that was always the case, but modernity has changed, especially since the relativization of national boundaries and sovereignties and the increasing importance of migrations made it impossible to assign religious discourse to the place of the particular, or particularism, whereas secular discourse of public reason would quite naturally occupy the place of the universal.
The WHAP! Lecture series is co-hosted by the City of West Hollywood and the CalArts Aesthetics and Politics MA program. All series lectures are free and open to the public.
Etienne Balibar Lecture: Can or Ought the Political and the Religious be Separated?
WHAP! Lecture Series
West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers
625 N. San Vicente Blvd., West Hollywood
Friday, March 9 at 7 pm
Free