Many 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. In rejecting
universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around
particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple
modernities. In this book, one of our most important political
philosophers builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of
Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and
reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary
politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of
universals, Balibar shows, the stakes are no less than the future
of our democracies. In dialogue with such philosophers as Alain
Badiou, Judith Butler, and Jacques Ranciere, he meticulously
investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is
constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern
society. With critical rigor and keen historical insight, Balibar
shows that every statement and institution of the universal-such as
declarations of human rights-carry an exclusionary, particularizing
principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately
falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and
plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within
societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, Balibar
suggests, the very conflict of the universal-constituted as an
ever-unfolding performative contradiction-also provides the
emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine
contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range
of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault,
Derrida, and Scott, Balibar shows the power that resides not in the
adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies
made available by claims to universality in order to establish a
common answerable to difference.
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