Étienne Balibar

Previously, he was professor of philosophy at Marlboro College in Vermont.

As a scholar, he has written extensively about the Dalit thinker and activist B.R. Ambedkar, who founded Ambedkarite Buddhism and served as the chief architect of the Indian Constitution.

This October fourteenth marks the seventieth anniversary of Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism, so I want to sit down with William to discuss Ambedkar's remarkable life and legacy, as well as the state of Ambedkarite Buddhism today.

In my conversation with William, we talk about how Ambedkar argued for a revolutionary reconstruction of Indian society grounded in religious transformation, and how he understood Buddhism as a path of collective freedom from violence and social inequality.

[instrumental music] You know, you say that Ambedkar's retelling is about finding an alternative to violence, or what you call anti-violence.

Uh, so can you tell us about this idea of anti-violence and how it differs from non-violence?

Anti-violence is a term from the French political thinker Étienne Balibar.

And there is a wonderful scholar of Ambedkar, Ashwari Kumar, who in a footnote brought my attention to the ways in which Balibar's term anti-violence was appropriate for Ambedkar.

One of the things that I found really interesting was, um, just to think about some of the things that, that French theorists do with Marxism and with the work of Marx in particular.

Um, and this ranges, you know, you're looking at different figures, right? So you have people like Althusser and Balibar, right, who were both in the French Communist Party, Althusser for, for a longer period, but both for many years.

And, um, then you have-- And, and they were, you know, they obviously wrote about both the work of Marx and Lenin.

Um, and then you have people like Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, who were much more openly antagonistic to Marxism.

Derrida does the same, you know, where Marx becomes a specter and all of this.

And so what you have is a kind of recuperation of Marx in a very opportunist manner in order to give their discourse a kind of flavor of radicality while they pervert Marx to the extreme and actually just shoehorn Marxism within their particular philosophic framework, if they're not just completely anti-Marx, uh, like, you know, someone like Foucault was, except for a few years in the kind of post '68 radical wave of consumerism, which he had tried to, uh, ride as, as well as he could.

Concerning the others, Althusser, Poulantzas, Balibar, and some of those influenced by Marxism, I think that we need a kind of balanced account, where on the one side, I'll just focus on Althusser because he's probably the most well-known.

He was a close reader of Marx.