On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Community (Commonalities) - Softcover

Balibar, Étienne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823288552 ISBN 13: 9780823288557

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2020

Synopsis

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 Rancière, 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.

About this title

About the Authors

Étienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of Moral and Political Philosophy at the Université de Paris X Nanterre; Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine; and Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. His research in the fields of political, moral, and Marxist philosophy focuses on emancipation, citizenship, and on what he terms “equaliberty.” The breadth of his thought can be gauged from his published works, from Reading Capital, released in 1965 and coauthored with his mentor Louis Althusser, to the more recent We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (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).

Joshua David Jordan is Senior Lecturer in French at Fordham University. He has translated works by Etienne Balibar, Jean Hatzfeld, and David Lapoujade and is a two-time winner of the French Voices Award.

From the Back Cover

"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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0823288552
• ISBN 13: 9780823288557
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160