On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Community

In this penetrating book, Étienne Balibar reopens afresh the quarrel of universals from a philosophical anthropology perspective, but rather than answers, he offers the aporias of the universe as a multiversum and of recognition of multiplicity as a condition for political unity. Delving eclectically into Western philosophy, his reflection illuminates contemporary debates about racism, xenophobia and even speciesism.-Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 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. On Universals 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, providing the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. Étienne Balibar is the author of many books, including Citizen Subject; Equaliberty; The Philosophy of Marx, and, with Louis Althusser and others, Reading Capital.Joshua David Jordan is the winner of a French Voices Prize for his translation if David Lapoujade's Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.