Revealing the explicit relationships among globalization, capitalism, and barbarism to rid our world of violence once and for all.

Étienne Balibar is emeritus professor of philosophy at Paris X Nanterre and emeritus professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently professor of modern European philosophy at Kingston University, London, and visiting professor at Columbia University. His books include The Philosophy of Marx (1995); Spinoza and Politics (1997); and Equaliberty: Political Essays (2010).

G. M. Goshgarian has taught at universities in the United States, Armenia, Germany, and France, and he is the author of To Kiss the Chastening Rod. He has edited and introduced Être marxiste en philosophie by Louis Althusser and has translated four other books by Althusser into English. His recent translations from Armenian and German include Zabel Yessayan's In the Ruins, Hagop Oshagan's novel Remnants: The Way of the Womb, and Boris Groys's On the New.

Balibar is one of the most rigorous thinkers of contemporary politics... Balibar's reflections in Violence and Civility, as elsewhere in his work, are subtle and at times profound.

Homi Bhabha, Harvard University:
There is no better diagnostician of the enigmas and aporiae of our political condition than Étienne Balibar. His great strengths lie in confronting paradoxes and contradictions that shape contemporary forms of governance and states of subjection. Violence and Civility is an exploration of the extremities of historical experience, reconfiguring the place of politics and proposing new forms of representation. This fine work extends his remarkable engagement with 'Equaliberty' and reveals the drama of dialectical practices that drive the lifeworlds of global transition.

Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley and author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution:
Violence and Civility offers both a probing philosophical exploration of the relationship of violence to politics and a political philosophy of 'anti-violence' responding to the structural and overt violences of capitalist modernity. Balibar's philosophical archive is extensive and deep—he thinks with Hobbes, Spinoza, Hegel, Weber, Luxemburg, Lacan, Derrida, and, of course, his beloved and inexhaustible Marx. Braided together by his singular philosophical imagination and passion for justice, Balibar's subtle readings result in nothing less than revolutionary political theory for the twenty-first century.

Bruce Robbins, author of Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence:
Nothing could be more of our moment than violence, which is to say that nothing is more in need of a proper and strenuous philosophical treatment. That's what you have in this erudite and brilliantly unpredictable book.

Donald M. Reid, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:
Contemporary political thought has had little success moving from the empirical to the theoretical. This is what Balibar does so well in Violence and Civility by working with the concept of Gewalt, the conflation of power and violence.