ABSTRACT

Édouard Glissant wrote: “I believe that we should abandon the idea of the universal. The universal is an illusion, a deceptive dream. We ought to conceive of the world as wholeness, that’s to say as a known quantity and not a value sublimated from particular values” (1996: 136). The notion of the universal is thus problematic as it denies both differences and singularities: under the pretext of universality, the West speaks in the place of the Other. Controversies that cut across the political sphere in France are still typical of this denial of history, and there are numerous examples: in 2005, the preposterous debate on the benefits of colonization and the remarks made by politicians during the riots in the banlieues [deprived urban peripheries of many large French cities]; 2 in July 2007, the speech by President Sarkozy in Dakar [Senegal]; 3 and in 2009–2010, the debate on French national identity. 4