Table of Contents

Preface: Equivocity of the Universal | vii
1 Racism, Sexism, Universalism: A Reply to Joan Scott and Judith Butler | 1
Racism and sexism: a single “community”? | 5
The institution and discriminatory function of the universal | 8
“Human essence,” “normality,” and “anthropological differences” | 14
2 Constructions and Deconstructions of the Universal | 19
First Lecture | 19
Second Lecture | 39
3 Sub Specie Universitatis: Speaking the Universal in Philosophy | 59
Strategies of disjunction | 65
Strategies of subsumption | 69
Strategies of translation | 75
4 On Universalism: In Dialogue with Alain Badiou | 84
5 A New Quarrel | 96
Anthropological differences and “human” subjectivity | 97
The desire to know | 103
Three aporias of universality | 105
“Les langues se parlent” | 115
Notes | 121

About the Author

Étienne Balibar (Author)
Étienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus of Moral and Political Philosophy at Université de Paris X–Nanterre; Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine; and Visiting Professor of French at Columbia University. His many books include Citizen Subject (Fordham, 2016); Equaliberty (Duke, 2014); We, the People of Europe? (Princeton, 2003); The Philosophy of Marx (Verso, new ed. 2017); and two important coauthored books, Race, Nation, Class (with Immanuel Wallerstein, Verso, 1988) and Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser and others, Verso, new ed. 2016).
Joshua David Jordan (Translator)
Joshua David Jordan translates twentieth- and twenty-first-century French prose and poetry. A specialist in the work of Henri Michaux, he teaches French literature and language at Fordham University. In 2015, he received a French Voices Award for his translation of David Lapoujade’s Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Reviews

In this penetrating book, �tienne 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

Balibar's book is a truly illuminating demonstration of social and political philosophy...-- "Philosophy Today"