ABSTRACT
As the obverse to universality, particularity is an inevitable component of the politics of emancipation. In his “Eight Theses on the Universal,” Alain Badiou provides a concise summary of his philosophy as it relates to the concept of universalism. Associated with militant practice, the universal is defined in relation to Badiou’s four truth procedures: art, politics, science and love. Making a distinction between the particular and the singular, Badiou rejects the self-sufficient notion of identity and relates the “universal singular” to the event rather than ontology. On this view, political and cultural emergence have nothing to do with being or even the finitude of rights discourse. Rights for Badiou are infinite and cannot be limited to law. The generic multiplicity of the universal singular of an event and its verification is defined as de facto non-identitarian.
