Divided by Unity, or, Dialectics of the Universal

Alberto Toscano

Review of On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Community by Étienne Balibar. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020.

Speaking at a gathering on Violence in America in Ferguson, Missouri in 2015, Angela Davis addressed the emergence of the reactionary slogan “All Lives Matter”, observing that “more often than not, universal categories reveal hidden racial assumptions; you might say that they have been clandestinely racialized.”1 What Davis termed “the tyranny of the universal” is among the stakes of Balibar’s compact if conceptually dense collection of recent writings on the philosophical contradictions and political valences of our concepts of the universal, universality and universalism, as well as of the institutions that serve as their vehicles or embodiments—not least the university. Yet we could also see in the contrast between the expansive universalism of Black Lives Matter and the disavowed racism of All Lives Matter a poignant illustration of the irreducibly dialectical character of universality, which transpires both from efforts to construct it and from the critical imperative to deconstruct it—thus underscoring “the importance of a construction—and especially of a dialectical construction—of universality [which] lies in the moments of internal deconstruction that construction entails” (41). This question defines the task of philosophy, understood as the effort to address, at the intersection of discourse and politics, theory and practice, the fact that “universalism never does exactly what it says, nor says exactly what it does” (85).2

While On Universals references several interlocutors and intercessors who have spurred Balibar’s work on the antitheses and aporias of the universal—most prominently Joan Wallach Scott, Judith Butler, and Alain Badiou, but also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Michael Walzer—these essays pivot around an intuition drawn from the Phenomenology of Spirit. Balibar dubs it “Hegel’s theorem of the universal.” It states that the “enunciation of the universal (and, as a consequence, its inscription, its institution, its historical realization) immediately entails its transformation into its opposite (the particular, the contingent) or the production of its negation” (22). Balibar’s is a post-Derridean Hegel, whose construction of the universal qua absolute is always accompanied by its deconstruction, in a manner that resonates with the radical revision of the received understanding of the Science of Logic in Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda’s recent work (Comay and Ruda 2018). As Balibar argues, this Hegelian deconstruction of the universal is twofold, or rather, it takes place in (at least) two moments:

at the “beginning,” as the moment of a preliminary critique or “erasure” (of being, of the subject, of the immediate—the traditional foundations of philosophical universalism), and especially at the “end,” when [Hegel] discovers (and has us discover) that the infinite, the absolute, designates a subversion of representation, names the nonrepresentable element of experience or history, which prevents the world from closing up on itself or “totalizing” itself in the figure of something complete or accomplished. (21)

In other words, the absolute is the very site of the aporia, a figure or operation that is not only at the heart of these essays and talks but also of the last three decades of Balibar’s work, as delineated in his programmatically anti-programmatic essay ‘The Infinite Contradiction’ (1995, 146). This is not so much a negative dialectic as a dialectic of incompletion, which is to say also a dialectic marked by an abiding skepticism (this too, markedly Derridean) with regard to any speculative or political overcoming, transcendence or abolition of disunity (difference, contradiction, antagonism, conflict, heterogeneity) in all its (irreducible) forms and modalities—where differences, borrowing from Jean-François Lyotard’s formulation, turn into unresolvable if perhaps negotiable differends. As Balibar contends, in a sketch of his own deconstructive politics, “the most effective deconstruction of domination is precisely the one that intensifies the paradox, that never ceases to return discourse to the differend, demonstrating, in this way, that every unity imposed by authority is a fiction and every consensus another name for contradiction” (38). As this formulation suggests, the dialectic of the universal on which the chapters of On Universals constitute so many variations and ramifications is profoundly discursive, linguistic, or indeed dialogical—if by the latter we understand “dialectical in the element of speech” (115).

Hegel allows us to move beyond mere historicism (universals as projections of their time and place) and to “place universality at a deeper ontological level by describing it as a consequence of the structure of consciousness . . . by thinking universality as a category of conscious representation as such” (71). But this ontology of consciousness is also constituted as a theory of enunciation—of utterances that strive to speak from a universal or universalizable position and of universal or universalizable truth-contents. Here and elsewhere, Balibar is rightly captivated by the Hegelian formula “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’,”3 an enunciative matrix of subjectivity that allows individual and collective enunciations to trade places, but which also subtends the internal contradiction of the universal, namely that “it is impossible to speak the universal without immediately transforming it into a particular discourse (or a particular representation)” (70), or indeed fully and finally to shed those “clandestine” particularities—to echo Davis—that always cling to universal subject positions. Conversely, “in the field of politics and ideology the particular does not exist or cannot be stated as such without immediately transforming into its opposite” (42).

Rather than crowning philosophical reason with the dubious powers of deterritorialized and trans-historical vision, Balibar’s Hegel anticipates the Lacanian dictum that “there is no metalanguage”, rigorously rejecting “the illusion of being able to position oneself beyond the discourses of the universal in order to evaluate and relativize them on the basis of an absolute criterion. He positioned himself, as a consequence, in the finitude of historical universality and the infinite succession of the figures of that finitude” (47). Because claims on the universal are incapable of securing any stable, settled primacy over the particular—and because modernity itself may be understood as a ceaseless proliferation of universalisms and abstractions—it is not just the quarrel of but the one between universals that defines our political and philosophical conjuncture. Notwithstanding the current surge in isolationist and know-nothing chauvinisms, it is difficult not to concur with Balibar when he observes that “oppositions of the type universal-particular are much less significant and intense than oppositions within the universal” (42). The recent state-supported moral and intellectual panic over Islamo-gauchisme in France is a perfect if depressing instance of a clash of universals being misrepresented as a castigation of divisive particularism, or, in the official language of the republican State, “separatism” (Fassin 2021). It is as if the arrant amalgam between two ideological complexes that had long been abhorred for their excessive universalism (leading to the chiasmic relay between the contention that “Communism is the Islam of the twentieth century” and the warning that “Islam is the Communism of the twenty-first century”)4 can be passed off as the clear and present danger of a kind of super-particularism, threatening the unity of the state, the citizenry and its “values” (Amnesty International 2020).

A dialectical construction and deconstruction of the universal mediated by Hegelian phenomenology also reveals the intimate bonds between dialectics and the tragic. This is evident in two figures of conflict that mark the Phenomenology and which are briefly rehearsed by Balibar, namely the conflict between Law and Power staged by Sophocles’ Antigone, and the modern dissensus between the “intensive universality” of faith (Glaube) and the extensive universality of reason (Vernunft) associated with enlightenment, cosmopolitanism, and encyclopedic knowledge. Across these figures of insistent and irresolvable antagonism, we recognize “the fate of the universal to be particularized whenever it is expressed and the necessary tendency of the universal to be realized in the conflict between systems of thought that are opposed in each of their terms” (48). The dialectic of the universal is also the tragedy of opposing universalities or universalisms, the divisive, even bloody, unfolding of potentially interminable, irresolvable, unreconciled differences. Such a tragic inflection of the dialectic fissures any horizon of reconciliation. While not necessarily “negative” in the Adornian sense, a dialectic of the universal that attends to political conflict must learn to live with negativity and to draw on the latter’s powers. The critical task then becomes “to analyze the differend of universalisms as the very modality in which the historicity of the universal, or its constitutive equivocity, is given” (46), in light of the crucial Hegelian insight that “the typical form of particularization or determination of the universal is conflict and, ultimately, the struggle to the death of competing enunciations of the universal, of symmetrical and incompatible universalisms. Conflicting universalities in the strongest sense of the term” (47). Speaking the universal thus entails endowing it with an inescapably particular form—one marked by its time and its space, by its subjective bearer(s), by the sediments of history and the marks of contingency—and so it is always a speaking “against another” universal (72).5 If there is a tragedy of the universal (and for a good Hegelian, there is indeed no other, a tragedy of the particular being a contradictio in adjecto) it stems from the historically and logically verifiable fact that “the enunciation of the universal serves less to unify human beings than to promote conflict between and within them”, “it unites only by dividing” (1).

It would not be mistaken, in this regard, to discern in On Universals the abiding presence of the problem of ideological struggle and of an Althusserian problematic of ideology that Balibar himself has contributed to constructing and deconstructing over the decades. It comes through in the conviction that “the subjects of the universal are institutional subjects” (35)—where institutions also manifest as (state) apparatuses—but especially in the manner that ideology is defined here as “truly the language of universality, the universal as language—if truth be told, the only one accessible to us” (30–1). Althusser’s refusal of a merely pejorative use of the notion of ideology, his conviction—bolstered by Spinozist epistemology and Lacanian psychoanalysis—of ideology’s ‘eternity’, has informed Balibar’s own skepticism about the possibility of transcending or abolishing ideology. True to these essays’ preoccupation with the conflicts that mark the enunciation and institution of the universal as dialectical, Balibar’s most fruitful contribution here lies in exploring the nexus of ideology and domination.

In brief if compelling analyses of the Marxian syntagms ‘universal class’ and ‘dominant class’, he elucidates the specific inflection that class domination (or exploitation) gives to “the universal as language,” namely by framing ideological struggle not as the frontal or dichotomic antagonism between separate ideologies (proletarian versus bourgeois) but as a process of reciprocal and asymmetrical implication. When we are dealing with hegemony (70) rather than crude dominance, “the dominant ideology must speak the universal and not the particular, express the law in the modality of the universal or in the modality of the general interest and not that of privilege” (55). Identifying what he pointedly calls a “structural constraint that makes these values part of the inescapable language of domination,” Balibar upends the Marxist common sense according to which the dominant ideology is the ideology forged and communicated by the dominant class, arguing instead that “historically and logically, the dominant ideology arises not from the ideas or values of the dominant but from the dominated themselves, the bearers of claims to justice, equality, freedom, emancipation, education, and so on” (55).6 The dominated thus experience their own subjection as legitimated by the appropriation and refraction of their own strivings for liberation; this is because, as Balibar puts it in a Lacanian détournement: “The dominant receive their language/consciousness from the dominated in an inverted form” (75). Accordingly, the dominant discourse is defined by how it “reflects in itself the contradiction with its ‘other’ and makes this reflection the intrinsic impetus of its own development” (73). Rather than repeating the Marxian oscillation whereby “universal class” is alternatively ascribed to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, Balibar’s solution is to reframe class struggle as a scission in the universal, a kind of intimate or internecine conflict in which the dominant try to inoculate themselves with subaltern universalities while the dominated labor under the “inverted form” of their own desire for emancipation. The historical and theoretical dynamics whereby freedom has been and continues to be captured and reconfigured from an insurrectionary practice into a principle of regulation, neutralization, domination and/or exclusion—whether in classical liberalism, progressive neoliberalism, or contemporary neo-authoritarianism—testifies to the pertinence of Balibar’s insight.

Whereas the ideological class struggle in element of the universal is explored in its dialectical nuance, On Universals largely evades the question of how the real abstractions of capital have logically and historically conditioned the enunciation and institution of competing universalities.7 It is not that capitalism is simply bracketed off from the dialectic of the universal but when it appears in does so in two figures that ultimately inhibit our ability to contend with the shaping pressure that a society organized around the imperatives of valorization and accumulation exercises on the universal (and a fortiori on our very conception of philosophy). These two figures are the market (or equivalence) and globalization. Balibar avers early in the book that in focusing on the enunciations, ideologies, and subjects of the universal—culminating in the notion of the universal as an ideal of a community—he has bypassed “the structure of equivalence, which is intimately linked to institutions such as the market and the judiciary”, and which has been analyzed by a range of thinkers (among whom he lists Spinoza, Hume, Marx and Deleuze) as “an autonomous form of the subjectivation of the universal” (23). Given the centrality of juridical ideology to the Althusserian conception of the dominant ideology, one may wonder whether the form and historicity of the constructions (and deconstructions) of the universal can be adequately dealt with if we don’t treat the juridical dimension of equivalence as intrinsic to and constitutive of modern discourses of the universal (as manifest in the correlation between the commodity form of exchange and the legal form of the propertied subject, inter alia—something that Balibar himself has explored at length elsewhere [2002]). Acknowledging this might also allow us further to specify the “inverted form” that the thought of the dominated takes in the discourse of the dominant—with the subsumption of equality by equivalence, and of justice by law, playing prominent roles in this dialectic. Now, Balibar himself notes this very lacuna in Althusser’s own account of ideological interpellation, which he perceives as stressing juridical authority in lieu of what he nicely terms “the type of material universality that capitalism has historically imposed: the model of equivalence” (37). What happens when we thus conceive the subjects of the universal as subjects of capital? In a manner that chimes with thinkers who, unlike Althusser, do accord primacy to commodity fetishism and its mediations (from Pashukanis to Debord, Lukács to Jameson), it allows us to see that “subjects who are inscribed in the language of the universal (a ‘rational’ ‘objective’ language, a language of ‘utility,’ which is also a legal and moral value) do not appear as singular but as interchangeable—that is, they take their place within an indeterminate chain of exchanges and substitutions, just as commodities themselves are exchanged and substituted as equivalents” (37).

Balibar acknowledges that the equivocity of the universal must accommodate the equivalential universality of capitalism. He persuasively argues against Alain Badiou’s treatment of the latter as a false universalism or simulacrum of the universal, recalling the Marxian contention that “the universality of the market is not only ‘real’ but also ‘true’—that is, it provides an ontological basis for the legal, moral, and political representations of equality” (88), but it is hard to say that this insight is integrated into his own argument, his own dialectic. Or if it is, it is only under the generic aegis of “globalization,” conceived as a process of “real universalization” that signals the emergence of “a world in which the universal is not something to be realized but is always already realized and already present practically and institutionally” (43), as well as one “whose main unsettling effect has been to undermine the representation of the universal dominant in Western history and internalized by philosophers regardless of the tradition or school to which they belong” (62).

Two critical queries suggest themselves here. First, it could be argued that however one may define or periodize globalization, real universalization, both “material” (in the spread of the commodity form as an organizing principle for social life) and “ideological” (in terms of the religious universalisms that Balibar himself has studied elsewhere), long predates it. Second, what Balibar calls a “dialectic of the retreat of the universal and the conflict of universalisms” (45) is better understood not in terms of the over-stretched and under-determined notion of globalization but as an effect of insurgent challenges to the tyranny of a Western universal (whether clandestinely or openly racialized) by anti-colonial movements and perspectives. It is they, along with other collective and practical critiques of dominant universalisms (springing from feminist, anti-racist, anti-psychiatric, and queer movements) that have also made it possible to pose the very question that for Balibar lies at the heart of any de/construction of the universal, namely that of “anthropological differences.”

This theme, a central preoccupation of Balibar’s recent work (2017, 275–302), building on his analyses of racism and his more recent engagements with feminism, is here articulated in terms of the constitutive ambivalence of universalism. Even in its insurrectionary or emancipatory modalities, universalism “shares the same source as racist and sexist discrimination”, since, like discrimination, it “constitute[s] an attempt to think the unthinkable or ungraspable of anthropological difference or, better put, of anthropological differences, which are mutually heterogeneous even if they always overlap, and above all to represent the application of these differences to the human species, social life, and individual experience” (17).8 The differences that Balibar singles out as of particular philosophical and political moment, and deems critical to the interminable dialectics of the universal, are “the difference between the normal and the pathological, the division of humanity into ‘races’ and ‘cultures,’ and the difference between the sexes, a difference overdetermined by that of sexualities” (98). Mediated by the “social institutions of difference,” these divisions can neither be abolished nor stabilized. In Balibar’s view, they are both “indissoluble and unassignable,” (98). Moreover, they are fundamentally politicized by the “double violence” that comes to be enacted around them, namely “on the one hand, that of negating differences and, on the other, that of erecting them into a principle for the confinement of individuals to mutually exclusive identities” (100). If philosophy is indistinguishable for Balibar from political philosophy (5), then philosophical anthropology is the “strategic site” where the constitutive limits and aporias, the quasi-transcendental conditions of the political, come to be explored and deconstructed. In the last instance, taken as “the analysis of the historical differences of the human and of the problem that those differences pose to their bearers” (97), philosophical anthropology in Balibar’s acceptation discloses Dasein as difference. In this perspective, “the human is the being for whom the different ways or possibilities of being human are a problem”; what’s more, “in the idea of the human as such, there is essentially nothing else except for this insistent question regarding differences” (104). In the concluding pages of On Universals, Balibar will seek a political model—or perhaps more of an allegory for a politics of difference—in a theory of generalized translation able to think or practice a kind of “universality beyond any unity,” tarrying constructively with the aporias of the universal.

To use a formula to which Balibar has accorded programmatic significance, On Universals is a wide-ranging and at times inspiring effort to “incomplete” our conceptions of universality, showing the vitality of “Hegel’s theorem” for breaking open some of the thorniest problems of contemporary political thought. Yet its choice not to philosophically confront or truly conceptualize capitalist dynamics of real universalization limits its capacity to elucidate the politics of difference (and of tragic differends). In his concluding essay on the “new quarrel of universals,” Balibar asserts that “bourgeois society exploits the fact that major anthropological differences are undeniable or indelible” (100). This seems an overly euphemistic and insufficiently dialectical way of thinking a critical problem for any elucidation of the discourse of universalism that would aim to integrate the contradictions of the universal within its purview. As Balibar’s own reflections on the historicity of racial regimes have contributed to clarifying (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991), anthropological differences, in their “fatal coupling” with capitalist and state power, are not an external variable for “bourgeois society,” they are constitutive of it. In the context of racial capitalism, “the process of abstraction that signifies racism produces effects at the most intimately ‘sovereign’ scale, insofar as particular kinds of bodies, one by one, are materially (if not always visibly) configured by racism into a hierarchy of human and inhuman persons that in sum form the category ‘human being’” (Gilmore 2022, 137).9 In other words, the insight that racist and sexist discrimination share “the same source” as universalism needs to be introduced into the very heart of capitalism, historically and logically understood—which perforce involves thinking through and beyond equivalence, the market or the juridical to the racial and sexual formations of (abstract) labor, and the latter’s shaping role on political universalisms, not least in the dominant and insurgent forms of citizenship.10 A more sustained theoretical engagement with those strands of Black radical and feminist thought and anti-colonial critique that have interrogated the nexus between the politics of universality and capitalist racecraft could only sharpen the dialectic explored by Balibar in these pages.

That failing to think the dialectic within the universal between the ideal of community and the materiality of capitalist abstraction has political consequences (ones not avoided by the hypothesis of translation as a model of universality without unity) is evident in Balibar’s perplexingly undialectical remarks on the relation between feminism and antiracism in the reply to Joan Wallach Scott and Judith Butler which opens On Universals. While perspicuously underscoring the reciprocal implication of racism and sexism, or better “the persistent sexual connotations of the racist imaginary and the persistent racist connotations of the sexist imaginary” (7)—together with the racist enlistments of feminism and sexist deployments of antiracism stemming from this original entanglement—Balibar draws from this important premise the dismaying conclusion that it is “impossible to imagine—except in a kind of utopian communism of emancipatory struggles that is regularly contradicted in practice—any kind of convergence or fusion of anti-racist and antisexist resistance movements, even if one assumes (as many do) that to a certain extent they share the ‘same’ enemy” (7). Perhaps we should ask instead why it is possible to neglect the long history and global reality of movements that articulated anti-racism and anti-sexism (or feminism) in practice. It is a very truncated universalism that imagines, as the saying went, that “all the men are black and all the women are white,” and thus passes over the lived experiences of exploitation, experiments in collective organization and political strategies of those for whom anti-racism could not but take the form of anti-sexism, and vice versa.11 This is not to gainsay the shearing pressures that the distinct if interlocking logics of racialized and gendered discrimination enact, or their divisive intents and effects—nor, to echo Balibar, the pitfalls of imagining that a monolithic enemy will spare one the work of deconstructing and constructing communities of liberation. But merely to condemn a “utopian communism” and reiterate the virtues of dialectical skepticism foregoes the opportunity to learn from efforts, historical and ongoing, to forge a constructive and political dialectic to supplement and relay a deconstructive and philosophical one, and thus to invent—in the blessed absence of any emancipatory metalanguage—forms of what we might call generalized translation but could also name with the much-maligned term solidarity.

Alberto Toscano teaches at the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, and co-directs the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea and co-editor of The SAGE Handbook of Marxism.