Abstract

The article discusses a recent book by Etienne Balibar, Violence et civilté. Focusing on the relationship between violence and politics, Balibar shows how the traditional modalities for the neutralization or conversion of violence (from Hobbes to Schmitt) fail in front of what he defines the objective and subjective «ultraviolence». The problem is to identify the categories of a politics that faces violence without the hope of converting, neutralizing or definitively stopping its recurrence.