ABSTRACT
In recent years, particularly among readers of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, there has been a strong push to reassert a programme of political universalism. Once looked upon with great suspicion for concealing particular interests, universalism seems to have regained its emancipatory edge. In “Universality and Its Discontents,” Bruno Bosteels questions this new universalism on the basis of two fundamental questions, the first, having to do with the relation between universality and singularity, and the second, concerning the relation between universalization and the history of capitalism – a relation for which the translation and subsumption of particulars under the law of value as real abstraction becomes a useful model for further elaboration. Revisiting the continuing relevance of the discussions between Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Žižek in the 2000 book Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, Bosteels addresses the unresolved contradictions of post-transcendental social theory and the dangers of what Étienne Balibar refers to a real universalization.
