On the War

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How to understand and respond to the specter of war haunting our present moment? How to think strategically in the moment of crisis? How to redefine the relationship between war and politics in our contemporary situation? Philosophers Étienne Balibar, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, and Jana Ndiaye Berankova, former Fellow of the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, will discuss these questions.

This event is organized to celebrate the publication of Étienne Balibar’s Sur la guerre, the first volume of the new series of small theory books (in English, and in French) published by Suture Press in a hard-bound edition with illustrations by Nela Klímová. The volume brings together three essays in which the philosopher Étienne Balibar analyzes the notion of war, from Simone Weil’s writings of Homer’s Illiad to the links between the thinking of Carl von Clausewitz and of Karl Marx, as well as the current geopolitical situation and the war in Ukraine.

Etienne Balibar is a philosopher and former student of Louis Althusser. He is a professor emeritus at University Paris X – Nanterre and the University of California, Irvine. His works include Lire le Capital (with Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, and Roger Establet) (1965), The Philosophy of Marx (1995), Spinoza and Politics (1998), Politics and the Other Scene (2002), We, the People of Europe? (2003), Equaliberty (2014), Violence and Civility:. On the Limits of Political Philosophy (2015), Citizen Subject:. Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (2017), and Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (2018).

Jana Ndiaye Berankova is an art and architecture theorist, philosopher, writer, publisher, and currently a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. A former Fellow of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, she studied at the École normale supérieure, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and Columbia University, where she completed her PhD dissertation on the links between architecture theory and French philosophy from 1965 to 1990. She runs , a non-profit publishing house focusing on carefully designed hardback books on continental philosophy, contemporary art, and architectural theory, where she co-edited books such as Revolutions for the Future: May ’68 and the Prague Spring (2020). Her book of interviews with Alain Badiou L’Éclat de l’absolu (2025) questions the intersections between his philosophical system and the thinking of Plato, Hegel, Sartre, Althusser, Lacan, and Deleuze.

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, where he directs both the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies and the Global Centre for Technology in Humanities. He is also a Research Fellow at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University. Previously, he was a Guest Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton. He co-edited The Idea of Communism 3 (2016) and has co-authored numerous books in English. His English-language monographs include Communism After Deleuze (2025), Made in Nowhere: Essays on the Asiatic Modes of Existence (2025), and Colours of the Concepts (2025).

This event is organized by the Columbia Institute for ideas and imagination, with the support of the Czech Academy of Sciences (by the Strategie 21 grant) and The Culture Moves Europe.

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