On Universalism

In Debate With Alain Badiou

Étienne Balibar
I welcome this opportunity to publicly exchange words, ideas and perhaps arguments with
Alain Badiou on the topic of “universalism” and “universality”. [1] This is not the first time
we have done so throughout our long association as intellectual companions, and perhaps,
in a sense, it was always our common object, therefore also our point of heresy. But each of
us keeps working, and the circumstances lead to new aspects being highlighted.
I am firmly convinced that a philosophical discourse on the categories of the universal,
universality, universalism – their meaning and their use – has to be a critical one. It cannot
simply be a historical one, listing discourses on the universal, some of which claim to be
themselves universalistic, and situating them; nor can it be simply a discourse endorsing
any of them, or trying to add to an already very long list. In this matter, we (some of us…)
have become cautious, even sceptical, because we have learnt that the gap between theory
and practice, between principles and consequences, between cognitive and performative
phrases, is intrinsic to the language of universalism, or as I prefer to say in more general
terms, to any language that endeavours to “speak the universal”, as indeed do our own
discourses this evening.[2] This equivocity takes multiple forms, but particularly the form
of identical universalistic enunciations receiving opposite meanings and producing opposite
effects, depending on when, where, by whom and to whom they are spoken, the form of
universalistic discourses legitimizing or instituting exclusions, and more disturbing still, the
form of universalistic discourses whose categories are built on exclusion – i.e. on the denial
of otherness or alterity -, but sometimes also the inverted form of particularistic or
differentialist discourses becoming the paradoxical premises for the invention of new,
enlarged forms of universalism and determining its content. It would seem, and I am still
waiting for a counterfactual, that universalism is never simply doing what it says, or saying
what it does. Consequently, what I believe is a task for a philosopher (or a philosopher
today, at the present moment) with respect to universality is precisely to understand the
logic of these contradictions and, in a dialectical way, to investigate their dominant and
subordinated aspects, to reveal how they work and how they can be shifted or twisted
through the interaction of theory and practice or, if you prefer, discourse and politics. What
I exclude therefore – already a gesture of exclusion, or perhaps excluding the exclusive – is
a plea for or against universalism as such, or any of its historical names.
I hope, however, that this kind of critical attitude, which I would very much like to push to a
form of “negative dialectics” (notwithstanding previous uses of this expression), and whose
effects I certainly could not fully anticipate myself, will not be misunderstood here. It does
not arise from the fact that I would have wavered or become ambiguous in my commitment
to certain determinate forms of secularism. Let me recall here some of their names or key
notions: secularism, human rights, democracy, egalitarianism, internationalism, social
justice, etc. But I would certainly not find it sufficient or even secure to walk out in the
streets or enter a conference room making statements such as “I am for secularism”
(therefore against religious or cultural communitarianism), “I am for internationalism”
(therefore against national allegiance, which I describe somewhere as not really discernible
from nationalism, itself not deprived of universalistic aspects), etc. Or at least I would not
do so without immediately asking such questions as Which secularism? Which
democracy?, Which internationalism and nationalism?, etc., and also: What for? Under
which conditions? “Tout tient aux conditions”: conditions are always determinant, as my
master Althusser, certainly no relativist, used to say. And it is because I want to incorporate
some of its conditions (including the negative conditions, or the “conditions of
impossibility”) within the discourse of universalism, or to put it more philosophically,
because I want to outline a discourse of universalism that opens up the possibility of
incorporating within itself its contradictory conditions, the contradictions that already
always affect its conditions, that I adopt a critical and dialectical point of view.
And now, after these preliminaries, at the same time too long given the short time we have
been allowed, and yet too rapid not to remain superficial, let me indicate the three directions
that seem to me particularly significant from this point of view. One direction deals with
the dilemmas or dichotomized enunciations of universalism in philosophy; a second deals
with the intrinsic ambivalence of the institution of the universal, or the universal as “truth”;
finally, a third one deals with what, in a quasi-Weberian manner, I would like to call
the responsibility (or responsibilities) involved in a “politics of the universal”, to which
many of us are committed.
Let me begin with a few words on the dilemmas and dichotomies that, right from the
beginning, characterize our disputes over universalism. It is indeed intriguing, but also
revealing, that most arguments about universalism, combining logical distinctions with
ethical or political choices, take the form of building symmetries, pairings or dilemmas
of opposite notions, or conceptions, or realizations of universalism. One could in fact
suggest that the content of the opposition is always the same, at least in modern times, only
rephrased to adapt to different contexts, but this is not completely satisfactory for the very
reason that it leaves the “conditions” outside. A dialectical approach, following the example
of Hegel in his phenomenology of conflicting universalities[3], will try to describe these
dilemmas in their own terms, taking them seriously in order to discover what is at stake,
each time, in their opposition. Such an approach will also, following their example, explain
why debates about the opposition of the universal and the particular, or a
fortiori universalism versus particularism, are far less interesting and determinant than
debates opposing different conceptions of the universal, or different universalities, or why
in fact they only cover a strategic defence of one conception of the universal as a “negation”
of its opposite, which it presents as the particular.
I am particularly sensitive to this first dialectical issue, because some years ago, I myself
established a distinction between intensive and extensive universalism.[4] I was particularly
interested in the figure of the citizen and the history of the institution of citizenship, with its
exclusionary and inclusionary effects. In the modern era citizenship had been closely
associated, almost identified, with nationality. I would explain that nationalism, but also
other forms of universalism in the sense of the suppression or the neutralization of natural
and social differences, such as the great religious discourses of redemption, had a dual
orientation. One involved establishing equality or suppressing distinctions, whether in
reality or purely symbolically, within a certain community based precisely on that
suppression, which could be either small or large, depending on the circumstances. The
other orientation involved removing every pre-established limit or borderline for the
recognition and the implementation of its principles, ultimately aiming at the creation of a
cosmopolitical order, which could be implemented either in a revolutionary manner, from
below, so to speak, or in an imperialistic manner, from above. And I argued that, albeit
radically opposed and in fact incompatible, they could both claim to illustrate the logic of
universality, perhaps better expressed as “universalization”. Around the same period,
Michael Walzer gave his 1989 Tanner Lectures on Nation and Universe, the first part of
which was entitled “Two Kinds of Universalism”, in which he confronted – with a clear
preference for the second – a “covering-law universalism”, which includes all claims of
rights within the same justice, all experiences of emancipation within the same narrative,
and what he termed a “reiterative universalism”, whose immanent principle would be
differentiation, or rather the virtual capacity of moral values and definitions of right to
emulate and communicate, in a process of mutual recognition.[5] Between these two
dichotomies, my own intensive vs. extensive and Walzer’s covering vs. reiterative dilemma,
there were both obvious affinities and striking discrepancies, which would become more
interesting were I to try here to set up a debate and, in particular, to fuel it with concrete
issues, such as the issue of nationalism. But we have no time for that now, so let me simply
show , in a rather formal manner that, as soon as one really enters into the debates on
universalism, such dichotomies, both symmetric and dissymmetric, or if you prefer both
descriptive and normative, become inescapable. They are a good sign of the fact that every
speaker (and every discourse) of the universal is located within, not outside the field of
discourses and ideologies that he/she/it wants to map.
It cannot be by chance that many, perhaps most, discourses on universalism and the
universal itself take a refutative form, what the Greeks called an elenchus, saying not so
much what the universal is, but rather what it is not, or not only. Indeed there is no
metalanguage of universality, or the surest way to destroy the universality of a universalistic
discourse is to claim that it provides the metalanguage of universality, as Hegel already
knew. But there are possibilities of shift, and strategic choice, among the categories that
grant a specific explanatory or injunctive value to the distinction of antithetic forms of
universalism. To classify these categories, and also to show how they can be at the same
time very old and periodically renewed, would be to sketch a speculative history of
universality and universalities, upon which it is tempting to embark because it could shed
more light on some contemporary controversies.
For instance there is the opposition of true and false universality. A good recent example is
provided by Alain Badiou who, at the outset of his essay on Saint Paul (1997), opposes
a true universalism of equality, removing or deposing genealogical, anthropological or
social differences such as Jew and Greek, Man and Woman, Master and Slave, whose
principle was transmitted by Christianity and later secularized by modern republicanism,
and a false universalism, or a “simulacrum” of universalism (but problems could arise from
the fact that this simulacrum is in a sense much more real, or effective, than the “true”
version), namely the universalism of the liberal world-market (or perhaps the liberal
representation of the world market), which relies not on equality but equivalence and
therefore allows for a permanent reproduction of rival identities within its formal
homogeneity. This second term pushes the notion of “extensive universalism” towards the
extreme: the idea that extensive universalism is an ontological product of extension as such,
or territorialization and deterritorialization as such. It has many philosophical antecedents,
among which I would emphasize the Rousseauist distinction of the “General Will” and the
“Will of All”. It would certainly have been strongly objected to by Marx, who spent a good
deal of his intellectual life showing not only that the universality of the market is “real”, but
also that it is “true”, i.e. it provides an ontological basis for the juridical, moral and political
representation of equality. Interestingly, another influential contribution to current
debates on universalism – I am thinking here of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing
Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000) – also describes what he
calls “equivalence” or “commensurability”, associated with the “meta-narratives” of value
(or labor-value) and progress, as a dominant form of universalism whose results, in fact,
contradict its egalitarian claims. But from this he draws opposite consequences. In
Chakrabarty’s terminology, “translation” is a generic name for universality, so he would
confront “Two Models of Translation”. Relying heavily on a certain romantic
representation of the singularity of languages and cultures, he would picture the antithesis
of equivalence- – also a form of universalism or translation though based on the recognition
of the “untranslatable” – as heterogeneous, “non-modern” (rather than postmodern) and
“antisociological”.
Rather than the antithesis of true and false, what becomes relevant here are the old
categories of the One and the Multiple, so that we could speak of a universalism of the One
(or unity), and a universalism of the Multiple (or multiplicity), where the essential
characteristic of multiplicity is to exceed every possibility of subsumption, therefore of
common denomination, or only in the form of “negative denomination”. This is a long story
that goes back to the conflicts between monotheistic and polytheistic religions in the ancient
Helleno-Semitic world, but also entirely dominates the oppositions of modern
Enlightenment, as illustrated by the “war of universals” between followers of Kant’s
strongly univocal and indeed monotheistic concept of the universality of the categorical
imperative, and Herder’s not alone historicist but polytheistic concept of world history, in
which unity only exists as the absent cause of the harmonic multiplicity of cultures. Now
such antitheses can be shifted theoretically and practically, as I said before, and it is
possible to show it here, if only very schematically. Both Kant and Herder were indeed
typical cosmopolitans; they embodied the two models of cosmopolitanism that, until today,
have dominated uses of this notion. But take a discussion like the one between Derrida and
Habermas, for example.[6] In a profound sense, they are both Kantians, and they both refer
to the Kantian definition of the “Weltbürgerrecht”, although we could say that their dispute
retrospectively emphasizes a rift within Kant’s discourse itself, as illustrated by the distance
between his Religion within the Bounds of Reason alone, and his Doctrine of Law.
Habermas would define cosmopolitanism as the limit or the horizon of a line of progress
(not without its obstacles or resistances) that tends to substitute international relations with a
“world domestic policy” (Weltinnenpolitik), i.e. not so much a global institutional
integration as an institutional exclusion of exclusion. And Derrida would condone the
cosmopolitan motto on condition that it became associated, through such names as
“hospitality” or “justice” (or rather “unconditional” hospitality and justice), with a radical
critique of the legal foundations of politics. But this did not prevent them from joining
forces after 9/11, not only against a certain form of sovereign unilateralism and
generalization of the warlike model of politics, but for a certain construction of the global,
transnational and transcultural public sphere, in what I would dare to call a certain “politics
of the universal”. Old Spinoza would perhaps have seen there an illustration of his idea, as
expounded in the Theologico-Political Treatise, that in certain circumstances, or within
certain conditions, opposite theoretical premises, or conflicting concepts of the universal,
can in practice lead to the same consequences. Indeed the reverse is true.
I would like now to allude – and this will have to be telegraphic – to another aspect of the
dialectics of universality to which I have devoted some attention in the past and also more
recently. This concerns the institution of the universal, or even the institution of the
universal as truth, involving therefore the additional difficulty that it cannot be
contradicted from inside, i.e. on the basis of its own logic or premises. Not because it would
be imposed by some external authority or power that would prohibit the contradiction or the
refutation, but because the contradiction is already included in the definition of the
universal itself. As we will see, this is closely related to the fact that certain forms of
universality at least derive their institutional strength not from the fact that the institutions
in which they are embodied are absolute themselves, but rather from the fact that they are
the site of endless contestations on the basis of their own principles, or discourse.
Such discussions are meaningless and incomprehensible unless one refers – at least
allusively – to some case, and I would not deny that the case I have in mind is both
ideologically determined and politically oriented, and perhaps what I say on this basis is
only valid for this case. This would mean that the history of universality is in fact only
composed of singularities. The singular universality I am thinking of is not the Pauline
enunciation of the equality of the faithful, later transferred upon the Humans, but rather the
somewhat different civic principle, or proposition of “equal liberty” (which I suggested to
read as a single term : equaliberty). In English the formula occurs in some “tracts” from the
seventeenth-century English Levellers, which is an indication of its close relationship to the
ideals of the so-called “bourgeois revolutions”. But it has roots in a much older tradition, in
Roman Law and moral philosophy, and also, perhaps more significantly (although this
involves problems of translation), in the democratic ideals and discourses of the
Greek polis. And it generates continuous effects, it
becomes reiterated (therefore iterated) up to our times within democratic institutions and
social movements, both on the liberal and the socialist side. I leave this aside because it
would be indeed a very long story. Suffice it to recall the twin formulations of the American
and French declarations from 1776 and 1789, which already represent an interesting
iteration within the “originary” event, or which inscribe the constitutive reciprocity
of equality and liberty (or freedom, or independence) within partially converging, partially
diverging contexts. Although I derive much of my understanding of the action of this
proposition from Arendt’s discussion of its meaning for the institution of the political, I
would not share her view that we have on the one hand a “revolution (or constitution) of
liberty” and on the other a revolution of equality (and “happiness”). I would say, on the
contrary, that we have in both cases a strong, and absolute, enunciation of the necessary link
between the two concepts, albeit with a permanent tension revealing something like an
“impossible” equilibrium.
From the discussion that I have devoted to this enunciation[7], I would like to recall three
ideas:
1) The first is the idea of the refutative structure of the proposition or, if you prefer, its
embodiment of an elenchus, a “negation of the negation”. In constitutional texts the
proposition appears as a positive one, asserting that “Men were born free and equal”, or
were such by nature, birthright, etc. Its meaning: only institutional violence can deprive
them of these rights. But these formulations arise from revolutions or “insurrections”, in the
broad sense, and summarize the effect of the insurrection. They are based on the theoretical
critique and the practical rejection of vested inequalities or privileges, and relationships of
subjection. More precisely they are based on the conviction – in my opinion completely
vindicated by history – that you cannot have discrimination without also having subjection
(or, in the language of tradition, “tyranny”); conversely you cannot have subjection or
tyranny without also having discrimination and inequalities. As a consequence, the political
institutions, citizenship, if you like, must be grounded on a double rejection, not a single
one. More profoundly, it embodies the negative link between the two “core values” of
citizenship. This has been reiterated many times in the history of emancipatory movements,
particularly the labour movement, the feminist movement, and the anticolonialist struggles.
I want to immediately link this logical negation with a crucial political fact concerning the
power and effectiveness of this form of universalism. Far from its many failures and
practical limitations, i.e. the fact that in practice states or societies, including so-called
“democratic” states and societies, are full of inequalities and authoritarian relationships,
destroying the principle itself, it is this very practical contradiction that accounts for its
immortality. Individuals and groups who are discriminated against and subjected rebel in
the name of and for the sake of the principles that are officially valid and denied in practice.
It is the possibility of rebellion inherent in the principle, provided it “seizes the masses”, as
Marx would say, that accounts for the capacity of democracies to survive, at the risk of
conflicts or civil wars.
2) The second idea I want to recall is this: although it has to be instituted (again and again),
“Equaliberty” is not an institution like any other. We might say that it is, in modern
democracies, the arch-institution, or the institution that precedes and conditions every other
institution. It is in this context that Arendt’s profound reflections on the “right to have
rights”, developed – and not by chance – within the context of an analysis of the most
extreme forms of destruction of human life and of their roots in the concept of individual
rights instituted by the universalistic nation-states, acquire their full meaning.[8]
“Equaliberty” is a name for the “right to have rights”, emphasizing as it does the active
side of this notion. In practice it means that there can be a right to have rights only where
individuals and groups do not receive them from an external sovereign power or from a
transcendent revelation, but rather confer this right upon themselves, or grant themselves
rights reciprocally. It would be important to develop this idea of a limit-institution or an
institution of the institution itself, to discuss its progressive transfer from a “naturalistic”
form of the discourse on human rights (men, or humans, are free and equal by nature) to a
historical form, in which the universality appears to be grounded in the contingency of the
insurrection itself or, if you prefer, the struggle rather than in its essence. And it would be
important too to relate this limit-situation, essentially manifested in the form and the
circumstances of the negation, to the subsequent contradictions affecting a positive
institution of equaliberty or, if you prefer, of democracy. The entire modern history of
democratic regimes and struggles attests to the difficulty, in fact the internal obstacle, that
prevents actual institutions, or political regimes, from equally or evenly progressing
towards equality and liberty, or evenly protecting them. The simultaneous destruction is all
too frequent. Their simultaneous realization is rarely seen or only visible as a tendency, as
exigency. From this I conclude, not that civic universality is an absurd myth, but precisely
that it exists as a tendency, or an effort, a conatus. The driving force within this tendency
remains the force of the negative, beautifully expressed in some philosophical formulas: la
part des sans-part (the share of the shareless), in Jacques Rancière, and also in what is
perhaps his model: le pouvoir des sans-pouvoir in Merleau-Ponty (“Note sur Machiavel”).
[9]
3) Finally, I want to recall a third idea, perhaps the most embarrassing of all, but one
without which any discourse on universalism is futile in my opinion: this is the violent
side inherent in the institution of the universal. Once again, I insist on the fact that this
violence is intrinsic, not additional, not something that we could blame on the bad will or
the weaknesses or the constraints weighing upon the bearers of the universalistic institution,
because it is the institution itself, or its historical movement, that makes them its bearers. I
said in the beginning that we had learned that the gaps between theory and practice, all the
more unstable when a realization of theory in history and politics is at stake, and above all
the perverse effects of exclusion arising from the principle of inclusion themselves, were
not accidental. Not something that could lead us to say “Try again, and this time we will
avoid this dark side of universality”. But the intrinsic violence of the universal which
belongs to its conditions of possibility also belongs to its conditions of impossibility, or self-
destruction; it is a “quasi-transcendental”, as Derrida would say. The dark side therefore
belongs to the dialectic itself; it belongs therefore to the politics of the universal (an
expression that, distancing myself from some contemporary authors like Charles Taylor, I
do not identify with a politics of universality as opposed to the idea of a “politics of
difference”, because a “politics of difference is also a politics of the universal). Now the
violent exclusion inherent in the institution or realization of the universal can take many
different forms, which are not equivalent and do not call for the same politics. A
sociological and anthropological point of view will insist on the fact that setting up civic
universality against discrimination and modes of subjection in legal, educational, moral
forms involves the definition of models of the human, or norms of the social. Foucault and
others have drawn our attention to the fact that the Human excludes the “non-Human”, the
Social excludes the “a-social”. These are forms of internal exclusion, which affect what I
would call “intensive universalism” even more than “extensive universalism”. They are not
linked with the territory, the imperium; they are linked with the fact that the universality of
the citizen, or the human citizen, is referred to a community. But a political and ethical
point of view, which we can associate with the idea or formula of a “community without a
community”, or without an already existing community, has to face yet another form of
violence intrinsically linked with universality. This is the violence waged by its bearers and
activists against its adversaries, and above all against its internal adversaries, i.e.
potentially any “heretic” within the revolutionary movement. Many philosophers – whether
they themselves adversaries or fervent advocates of universalistic programs and discourses,
such as Hegel in his chapter on “Terror” in the Phenomenology or Sartre in the Critique of
Dialectical Reason – have insisted on this relationship, which is clearly linked to the fact
that certain forms of universalism embody the logical characteristic of “truth”, i.e. they
suffer no exception. If we had time, or perhaps in the discussion, our task now should be to
examine the political consequences that we draw from this fact. I spoke of a quasi-Weberian
notion of “responsibility”.[10] Responsibility here would not be opposed simply to
“conviction” (Gesinnung), but more generally to the ideals themselves, or
the ideologies that involve a universalistic principle and goal. A politics of Human Rights in
this respect is typically a politics that concerns the institutionalization of a universalistic
ideology, and before that a becoming ideological of the very principle that disturbs and
challenges existing ideologies. Universalistic ideologies are not the only ideologies that can
become absolutes, but they certainly are those whose realization involves a possibility of
radical intolerance or internal violence. This is not the risk that one should avoid running,
because in fact it is inevitable, but it is the risk that has to be known, and that imposes
unlimited responsibility upon the bearers, speakers and agents of universalism.

[1] Opening statement, 2007 Koehn Endowed Event in Critical Theory. A dialogue between
Alain Badiou and Etienne Balibar on "Universalism", University of California Irvine,
February 2, 2007.
[2] See my previous essays “Racism as Universalism”, in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies
on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, New York: Routledge 1994;
“Ambiguous Universality”, in Politics and the Other Scene, London: Verso 2002; “Sub
Specie Universitatis”, in: Topoi, Vol. 25, Numbers 1-2, September 2006, special issue
“Philosophy: What is to be done?”, Springer Verlag, pp. 3-16.
[3] I am especially thinking of the successive “dialectics” of the divine Law and the civic
Law (Antigone and Creon), and the “dialectics” of Faith and Insight as modes of culture
(the Enlightenment) in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
[4] Etienne Balibar, “La proposition de l'égaliberté”, in Les Conférences du Perroquet, n°
22, Paris novembre 1989 (translated as “Rights of Man” and “Rights of the Citizen”: The
Modern Dialectic of Equality and Freedom, in E. B., Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on
Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx. New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 39-59).
[5] Michael Walzer, Nation and Universe: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values,
Delivered at Brasenose College, Oxford University, May 1 and 8, 1989.
[6] See Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jürgen
Habermas and Jacques Derrida, University of Chicago Press, 2003.
[7] See “La proposition de l’égaliberté” (quoted above).
[8] Hannah Arendt, The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man, Part
II (Imperialism), Chapter 9, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt 1951.
[9] Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, University of Minnesota
Press, 1998; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Note sur Machiavel”, in: Eloge de la philosophie et
autres essais, Gallimard 1989.
[10] See Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures: Science As a Vocation, Politics As a
Vocation, eds. David S. Owen, Tracy B. Strong, and Rodney Livingstone, Hackett Pub Co
Inc, 2004.