Constructions and Deconstructions of the Universal

This chapter studies the lectures which the author gave in the United States in 2005. It develops, guided mainly by Hegel and his legacy, the notion of conflictual universality, moving from enunciation to domination and from the latter to the subjectivation of the bearers of the universal, who measure the existing community against the ideal of universality. The chapter considers two types of approaches favored by philosophers who share the belief that the universal is decidedly not a given, but rather a process. A process, furthermore, in which the “opposites” of the universal are continuously affecting or contesting the universal in return. For certain philosophers, the process at issue is a progressive construction of the universal that proceeds by the internalization of its opposites within the concept itself, opposites that are thereby transformed into mediations of its own development until, from the dialectic, a concrete figure of the universal emerges. For other philosophers, however, the process is doomed to lose control of its own idea or question in a dissemination without end. Whether or not Derrida invented the term deconstruction, he remains the key reference here, because he subjected to critical interpretation all the antitheses of the universal.

A New Quarrel

This chapter assesses the new “quarrel of universals” that now occupies philosophy and other overlapping disciplines. In this new quarrel, the question today is not only whether one is for or against the universal; the question is also how one defines the universal—a term whose surprising equivocity has become increasingly clear. Still more fundamentally, the question is how one should articulate the relationship between three related but heterogeneous terms whose widespread use has prompted conflicting claims: the universal, universality, and universalisms. The chapter begins by situating the question of the universal and its variations within the field that seems to constitute the strategic site of intersecting domains: philosophical anthropology, understood as the analysis of the historical differences of the human and of the problem that those differences pose to their bearers. It then outlines the difficulties which can be identified in every philosophical and political usage of the universal and its “doubles” according to three aporias. The first is the aporia of the multiplicity of the “world,” or of the universe as multiversum; the second is that of Allgemeinheit or All(en)gemeinheit, in other words, the irreducible gap between the universal and the common (or community); and, finally, that of co-citizenship, the form of belonging to a political unity to come, a unity whose law of belonging (membership) would be the heterogeneity within equality or the political participation of those foreign to the community.

On Universalism

This chapter explores ideas and arguments with Alain Badiou on the theme of universalism and universality. It argues that a philosophical discourse on the categories of the universal, universality, and universalism—their meaning and use—must be a critical discourse. The chapter then adopts a critical and dialectic point of view in order to elucidate a discourse of universalism that allows one to incorporate its contradictory conditions, the contradictions that always already affect its conditions. It indicates three orientations which are particularly significant from this point of view. The first has to do with the dilemmas or dichotomized utterances of universalism in philosophy; the second concerns the intrinsic ambivalence of the institution of the universal, or the universal as “truth”; and the third deals with what can be called, in quasi-Weberian terms, the responsibility (or responsibilities) involved in a politics of the universal that many support.

Sub Specie Universitatis

This chapter examines the articulation of the problem of universality with that of university. The French–Latin wordplay that makes the term universitas into the origin of both university and universality is obviously anything but accidental. Philosophers, or certain of them, have been eager to use it whether in a spirit of critique or self-promotion to think about the status of their discipline. Since philosophy became an essentially academic specialization, not only has it never stopped thinking of itself as the field in which one seeks to elucidate the conditions and effects of a discourse of the universal, but universality has become the objective value from which it derives its legitimacy. Understood as “university” and as “universality,” the category of universitas always contains the idea of a totality. The chapter then describes the three major strategies that modern philosophers have deployed to think sub specie universitatis: disjunction, subsumption, and translation. Although their roots lie in the history of philosophy itself, these strategies also represent “critical” attitudes within philosophy.

Racism, Sexism, Universalism

This chapter discusses a hypothesis advanced several years ago by the author and that seems particularly imperiled by the interpretive ambiguities surrounding the idea of universality. This hypothesis concerned the paradoxical relationship between racism and universalism in the modern era. The chapter explains why one should assign central importance to the institution when examining the paradoxical relationship between racist or sexist discrimination and universalist discourse. It then posits a concept of “anthropological difference” that should help to distinguish between several uses of the—inextricably metaphysical and political—notions of identity, human essence or nature, norms, and normativity. Finally, the chapter considers what constitutes the apparently ineluctable paradox underlying the relationship between the politics of emancipation and the political community.