ABSTRACT
Eurocentrism is a term of ‘critical’ theory, in as much as it exposes unwarranted privileges accruing to the European. However, the kind of criticism of existing theory and/or states of affairs made possible by this term remains limited as long as the real structures of the ethical economic imaginary and its real historical context remain untheorised. To put it another way, the use of the term is limited as long as it remains within the europic problematic. In the absence of the disclosure of real and imaginary europic dialectical universalisation there can be no proper understanding of what privileging European forms of culture really means. This chapter explores the workings of the ethical economic imaginary, ima-
ginary dialectical universalisation, the mode of symbolic representation that represents the contradictions of the modern such that they can be ‘resolved’. Three aspects of this will be explored. The first section explores universalist discourse by critically examining some thoughts of Paul Ricoeur which intimate a complex of interrelated perspectival locations from which to generate symbolic representations. The second part critically explores Karl Mannheim’s account of ideology and utopia. This pair of terms can be established as the basic form of the normative and conceptual antinomies of modern universalism, mapping onto the inhuman/human dual of theoretical humanism. The third part shows how symbolic resolutions are achieved with the pro-
duction of arguments or narratives in one or many perspectives. These narratives take the form of a dialectic of ideology and utopia, in which antagonistic principles substitute for social realities, and through which their resolution is ‘worked out’. While the ethical economic form allows for various terms to act as bearers of the principles of inhumanity or humanity, this chapter shows how ‘universality’ and ‘eurocentrism’ are allotted these roles. As a consequence, ‘eurocentrism’, far from disclosing the cultural realities of dialectical universalisation, is both internal to its political and historical reproduction and functions to obscure its real contradictions. Instead of exposing the de-moralisation of culture under modern conditions, ‘eurocentrism’ belongs to the political processes of hegemony and to projects seeking to ‘ethicise’ the modern.
