ABSTRACT
This chapter consists in an examination of different appearances of the universals, thus stressing their plural, equivocal, and conflictual character, their enunciative dependence of the specific geo-historical and socio-linguistic contexts, as well as their concreteness - rather than the presumed abstract character of the Universal, that the philosophical tradition imposes. In order to see what universals are – and what they could possibly become – the following pages will propose two paradigms of universality: the balkanized universals and the archipelagic multiverse. The former will show how the concept of Universal was first balkanized in theory by the contemporary Western philosophy, just to reemerge as the concrete violent equivocity of identitarian balkanized universals in the social reality. The latter will show what could be the subversive, emancipatory potential of the universals, and how could look an archipelagic multiverse consisting in an opacity of differences and the poetics of Relation.
