Call for Expressions of Interest
​
​
Dear colleagues,
​
It is our great pleasure to invite you to participate in the following workshop:
Translation, Hospitality and Equal Liberty
with
​
Étienne Balibar
​
The workshop will be held on 3 March 2020
at the NOVA School of Law, NOVA University of Lisbon
​
One of many reasons why Étienne Balibar has played such a fundamental role in academic debates and public life worldwide for 40 years is his restless struggle for radical emancipation. His debates with classical and contemporary authors overcome conceptual antagonisms like materialism/idealism, subject/structure, process or social formation, reformism/revolution and the doctrinal antagonisms of Kant/Marx, Freud/Spinoza, to reveal the aporias of these antagonisms as well as their deep and necessary implications. In his recent works, which have received much critical acclaim from several academic fields, Balibar focuses on concepts like “cosmopolitics”, “translation”, “hospitality”, and “equal liberty” to analyse issues such as human rights, democracy, citizenship, frontiers, identities, violence, struggle, as well as the great philosophical traditions. Balibar confronts the difficulties of the cosmopolitan and universal ideals, especially their dissociation from a “really existing” citizenship and their association with secularism, not to denounce the utopianism of these ideals, but to show how they can have a sense. His thinking goes far beyond the frameworks in which the debate is currently taking place and opens up surprising new avenues, which are of vital importance to those attempting to deal with and understand the complexity of these matters.
This workshop will be dedicated to discussing these issues with this outstanding philosopher, who is rightly seen as one of the most important of our time, beginning with one of his most recent manuscripts, “Ontological Difference, Anthropological Difference, and Equal Liberty” (European Journal of Philosophy, 2020:1-12). The organizing committee will distribute copies of the manuscript to all participants.
​The working languages of the workshop are French and English.
​We would like to ask those interested in discussing Balibar’s article as well as those who wish to attend the workshop to please register at the event website: https://cosmopolites.wixsite.com/balibar
Deadline (to expressions of interest to discuss Balibar’s article): 15 January 2020
Deadline (to attend the workshop): 26 February 2020
​For further enquiries, please contact: cosmopolitanism.withoutborders@gmail.com
This event is financed by public funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, IP (Foundation for Science and Technology, Public Institution, Portugal) within the project Cosmopolitanism: Justice, Democracy and Citizenship without Borders - PTDC/FER-FIL/30686/2017
​
​