Balibar on antagonism

“I am tempted to say that we must at present reconceive antagonism, in all its inescapable reality, as a social relationship, but as a social relationship that harbors within itself, as one of its modalities of realization and development, the fact that social relationships produce different kinds of men or differentiations within human nature or the human condition. Philosophy provides all the resources you need to think about this kind of thing. What prevents Marx from consciously and deliberately going in this direction? We come back to the problem of universalism. I think it’s because Marx never abandoned the idea that the proletariat is a universal class—the proletariat, in other words, not as it really is, not as part of the human race, but as, in a sense, its own future. In this respect, there is a kind of tension in Marx’s thought between the anthropology of differences (and these differences, like those I mentioned earlier, cannot be situated, they are not fixed) and an eschatology of the future of humanity. Yet we again encounter the problem that I discuss somewhat hastily at the end of my book, which results from the fact that there is a certain way of realizing difference that makes the individual simultaneously the whole and the part.”

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