Description
Book SynopsisMany on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism’s failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. Balibar builds on these critiques, yet works to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common.
Table of ContentsPreface: Equivocity of the Universal | vii
1 Racism, Sexism, Universalism: A Reply to Joan Scott and Judith Butler | 1
Racism and sexism: a single “community”? | 5
The institution and discriminatory function of the universal | 8
“Human essence,” “normality,” and “anthropological differences” | 14
2 Constructions and Deconstructions of the Universal | 19
First Lecture | 19
Second Lecture | 39
3 Sub Specie Universitatis: Speaking the Universal in Philosophy | 59
Strategies of disjunction | 65
Strategies of subsumption | 69
Strategies of translation | 75
4 On Universalism: In Dialogue with Alain Badiou | 84
5 A New Quarrel | 96
Anthropological differences and “human” subjectivity | 97
The desire to know | 103
Three aporias of universality | 105
“Les langues se parlent” | 115
Notes | 121
