We have the tragic illustration of this in France even today, with a certain usage of laïcité. It is a dark face of the republican nation, and one which incessantly returns, thanks to the conflicts over globalisation. Only recently have there been women electricians, and workers are still not really electable… But the question of racism brings an extra degree of conflict.Įlsewhere I have maintained that modern racism is like the colonial repressed being inscribed at the heart of citizenship. Of course, all this is the object of a dispute, which does shift the boundaries. If you take Christianity’s idea of community, there are the elect and the damned.Īnd if you take a modern political community like the one based on the rights of man, constructed around the idea of the nation, it is not only foreigners, properly speaking, who are excluded, but so, too, those who are not 'real nationals' or who are considered ill-suited for active citizenship. When we establish communities whose raison d’être is to promote universalism in certain forms (empires, churches, nations, markets) we also formulate norms of belonging to which individuals must conform. My thesis is that exclusion penetrates into the universal both by means of community and by means of normality. The problem is one of understanding how these opposites become two sides of one same coin. Of course, in theory there is a contradiction between the universalist ideal and exclusion.

Yet you say that at the heart of universalism there is also exclusion. This, among other things, explains the violence of their confrontation.įor most people, ' universalism' is synonymous with bringing people together and fraternisation.

A universalism with an unfinished crisis thus faces a universalism whose crisis is only just beginning. That is also the reason why I find Hegel so interesting, so long as we read him upside down: he constantly worked on the conflicts between universalism, in particular between Christianity and the Enlightenment, hoping to 'transcend' their contradictions.īut what we see today is that religious universalisms are immersed in an interminable crisis, while the universalism founded on the rights of man has itself also entered into a profound crisis. This is almost a law of history: in constituting itself, a universalism does not entirely replace another one, because there are still conflicts liable to being reactivated. So I uphold the idea that universalisms are in competition, which means that it does not make sense to speak of an absolute universalism. It draws a legacy from great intellectual inventions: for example, the Abrahamic monotheisms, the revolutionary notion of the rights of man and the citizen, which are the foundation of our democratic culture, multiculturalism as the generalisation of a certain cosmopolitanism, etc. It has a site, conditions of existence and a place of enunciation. The first is that universalism is always inscribed in a civilisation, even if it does seek timeless formulations for itself. But I first of all seek to describe internal conflicts. The universal does not bring people together, it divides them. Of course, I am on the Left, but the Left itself is is traversed by all the conflicts inherent to the question of the universal. Indeed, in our era universalism is often associated with consensus, and first of all with a bien pensant Left, presumed to be weak and naïve… Yet in your view universalism is anything but an idealism.įirst of all, my objective is not to uphold a 'left-wing position,' but to debate universalism as a philosophical question. I would say that it is a value that designates the possibility of being equal without necessarily being the same, and thus of being citizens without having to be culturally identical. If you had to give a definition to a class of 17 year olds, what would you say? This notion, which seems so familiar, however often remains rather unclear. You recently published a book on the question of the universal ( Des Universals, Paris: Galilée, 2016). Jean Birnbaum's interview with Étienne Balibar about his new book Des Universals was first published in Le Monde.

Etienne trainslation