The difficulty in understanding the complete portrait of contemporary French philosopher Etienne Balibar comes from his political and theoretical point of transition, which occurred at the beginning of 1980s: the exclusion from the French Communist Party in 1981 and the dawning of his research interest in the field of political philosophy. As a consequence, some focus on his earlier Marxian aspect by characterizing him as a Marxian philosopher, whereas others who evaluate his evolution after 1981 present him as a political philosopher. Considering this difficulty, we deal with the totality of his thinking without distinguishing these two aspects. For this purpose, we analyse the transformation of his central notion of contradiction, which covers his entire philosophical trajectory. In this way, this study aims to finally introduce his political philosophy.

  First, we analyse Althusser’s notion of overdetermination of contradictions as a precursor to Balibar’s notion of contradiction. The former’s notion seems to conceptualize the politics whose importance is diminished by some Marxist economical perspective. In the second chapter, we examine Balibar’s notion of contradiction. He divides Marxian contradiction into two aspects, economism and class struggles, to present the latter as the essence of Marx’s definition of contradiction. This notion resides in the contradiction between the socialization of production by the Capital and the gradual destabilization of working class because of this socialization. In this case, Marx’s contradiction is limited to contemporary temporality and has no relation with so-called teleological temporality. However, if we introduce another element, i.e. the question of violence, in Marx’s theory of contradiction, the system of explication of this theory faces the risk of being dislocated. As we show in the third chapter, it becomes evident when Marx’s contradiction theory confronts with the question of racism as a form of violence. The example of French working class’ racism against immigrant workers makes Balibar understand that the division of the Capital and labour (the first contradiction) is not necessarily identical with the internal division in the latter (the second contradiction), and that this discordance sometimes results in violence. This point led Balibar to take some critical distance from Marxism.

  Balibar’s successive conceptual elaboration of the notion of contradiction and his confrontation with the question of violence as its real form takes him to his current political philosophy. His political philosophy has two particular objects—inconvertible violence and plurality of political subjects. We can, therefore, conclude that the notion of contradiction constitutes the theoretical path to Balibar’s political philosophy.