First published in French in 2010, Equaliberty brings together essays by Étienne Balibar, one of the preeminent political theorists of our time. The book is organized around equaliberty, a term coined by Balibar to connote the tension between the two ideals of modern democracy: equality (social rights and political representation) and liberty (the freedom citizens have to contest the social contract). He finds the tension between these different kinds of rights to be ingrained in the constitution of the modern nation-state and the contemporary welfare state. At the same time, he seeks to keep rights discourse open, eschewing natural entitlements in favor of a deterritorialized citizenship that could be expanded and invented anew in the age of globalization. Deeply engaged with other thinkers, including Arendt, Rancière, and Laclau, he posits a theory of the polity based on social relations. In Equaliberty Balibar brings both the continental and analytic philosophical traditions to bear on the conflicted relations between humanity and citizenship.

Revisiting Guy Debord’s seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Eric-John Russell breathes new life into a text which directly preceded and informed the revolutionary fervour of May 1968. Deepening the analysis between Debord and Marx by revealing the centrality of Hegel’s speculative logic to both, he traces Debord’s intellectual debt to Hegel in a way that treads new ground for critical theory. Drawing extensively from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812), this book illustrates the lasting impact of Debord’s critical theory of 20th-century capitalism and reveals new possibilities for the critique of capitalism.

If fundamental political categories were represented as geometric shapes, citizenship would be one of those rotating polyhedrons with reflective surfaces that together create effects of light and shade. With extraordinarily acute discernment, the leading philosopher Étienne Balibar examines one by one the various faces of this object, more numerous - and far more fissured - than one would imagine. The question of what it means to be a citizen has, from the dawn of Western politics, been anything but clear and straightforward; and modernity has shown it to be even more enigmatic and contested. Inseparable from democracy, and the demands for equality and liberty from which democracy draws its origins, citizenship is constantly being redefined within the unresolved contradiction between universal principles and the discriminatory mechanisms that regulate membership of a political community. Not everyone is a citizen, even within one nation-state. It has been said that ?certain persons are in society without being of society?. The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion continue to generate dramatic asymmetries and create openings and closures, especially today in a time of particular fragility and when national sovereignty is in flux. So are there too many antinomies within citizenship? Balibar does not shy away from these antimonies, but he knows that to renounce citizenship would be to abandon the chance to create new modes of collective autonomy, in short, to democratize democracy.

"Giving Ground" is prompted by two phenomena whose paradoxical convergence is currently altering our experience and conception of urban relations and city planning. On the one hand, forces of globalisation push towards conditions of homogenisation and deterritorialisation, while, on the other, a surging politics of identity barricades various groups behind particular claims and ignites violent persecutions. The covert relation between these phenomena, wherby territory/ground is both disavowed or abstracted "and" jealously reclaimed, is the focus of the essays in this volume, at the heart of these investigations are the notions of propinquity and neighbourliness whose redefinitions and redeployments serve widely divergent ends: from the fortification of the 'new urbanist' fantasy about the possibility of re-creating small towns, to the validation of the exclusionary tactics of 'sanitization' that guide zoning decisions, to assisting in the reimagination of an ethical and reasonable urbanism. Directed against the contracting limits of tolerance, this volume attempts to reinvent the troubled notion of the 'right to the city'.
The individual contributions range from examinations of the crises in specific cities--Jerusalem, New York, and the network of 'global cities' throughout the world--to considerations of specific urban issues, such as the physical instrumentalities by which people a brought into physical proximity and the implementation of 'new urbanist' projects; and reworkings of physical concepts, such as Levina's notion of the face-to-face, Lacan's notion of sublimation, in urbanist terms. Several focus on the relation between cities and sexuality, which figures, for different reasons, as the 'eternal irony' of urbanity.