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I The universal, the uniform, the common

We should specify our terms on entering this debate, lest we flounder about. There are three rivals: the universal, the uniform, and the common. These are easily conflated, but we must also strip each of its attendant equivocality. Sitting atop our triangle is the universal, for which we must distinguish two meanings, or else fail to understand both the reasons for its trenchancy and its societal import. One meaning of the universal we will call weak, a matter of observation, limited to experience. Such-and-such, as we have been able observe until now, has always been as it seems. This is the general sense. It poses no problem and is in no way striking. But the universal has a strong meaning as well: that of strict or rigorous universality. We in Europe have made this sort of universality into a requirement of thought. We presume from the start, before seeking any confirmation from experience, or even dispensing with confirmation altogether, that such-and-such must be so. Not only has it always seemed so, but it cannot be otherwise. This sort of “universal” is not general; it is necessary. It is universal not in fact but ineluctably (a priori). It is not comparative but absolute, not so much extensive as imperative. It was on this strong, rigorous universality that the Greeks founded the possibility of science, and that seventeenth-century Europe, effecting a transference from mathematics to physics (Newton), conceived “universal laws of nature” – to spectacular and well-known effect.

Hence the question that has divided modernity: is the rigorous sort of universality – to which science owes its power, which imposes logical necessity on natural phenomena, and mathematics on physics – applicable to behavior as well? Is it equally pertinent in the domain of ethics? Is our behavior subject to the absolute necessity of moral, “categorical” (Kantian) imperatives, like the a priori necessity that has rewarded physics with its inarguable success? Or must we follow Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in the separate domain of morality, in the (secret) recess of our inner experience, and claim for ourselves the opposite of the universal: the individual or the singular? In the sphere of subjects, and of society more generally, the universal as a term remains equivocal. The question is therefore all the more pressing. When we speak of “universal history”¹ (or of a “universal exposition”²) we mean universal in the sense of a totality or generality, not of necessity. But does the same apply when we speak of the universal rights of man? Is the necessity we accord to the rights of man not ascribed in principle? What legitimacy does this necessity have? Is it not improperly imposed?

A pressing question, as we have since undergone a significant experience – indeed, one of the decisive experiences of our time. As we have now discovered in our encounters with other cultures, the requirement of universality that has carried science along, and that classical morality has demanded, is anything but universal. It is in fact quite singular – that is, the opposite of universal – because, at least when taken to the European extreme of necessity, peculiar to the cultural history of Europe. To begin with, how should we translate “universal” outside of Europe? With this question the requirement of universality, which we had comfortably stowed within the credo of our certainties, among the most obvious of our precepts, once again becomes salient. It emerges before our eyes from its banality. It reappears as an inventive, audacious, even adventurous thing. And, we find, it takes on outside Europe a fascinating strangeness.

The notion of the uniform is itself equivocal. One might believe it the accomplishment and realization of the universal. But it is in fact the universal’s reverse – or, I would say, its perversion. For the uniform derives not from reason, like the universal, but from production: it is merely standard and stereotype. It proceeds not from necessity but from convenience. The uniform is, after all, cheaper to produce. Whereas the universal is “turned toward the One,” toward its ideal end, the uniform is but a repetition of the one, identically “formed” and no longer inventive. Today the perils of confusing the uniform with the universal are increasing, because with globalization we see the same things reproduced and distributed throughout the world. Because we see only them, because they have come to saturate the landscape, we are tempted to ascribe to these uniform things the legitimacy of the universal – a necessity of principle – when in fact they result from a mere extension of the market, and their reason for being is purely economic. Ways of life, objects and goods, discourse and opinion are becoming uniform all around the planet, through the explosion in technology and media, but this does not make them universal. Even if ubiquitous they would lack a need to be [devoir être].

Whereas the universal relates to logic, and the uniform to economics, the common is of political dimension. The common is what is shared. On its foundations the Greeks erected their concept of the Polis. Unlike the uniform, the common is not the similar. This is a crucial distinction today. Under globalization’s imposed regime of uniformity we are tempted to reduce the common to the similar: that is, to engage in assimilation. We must instead promote the common that is not the similar. Only this manner of common is productive. This is the common that I will be calling for, because only a common that is not the similar is effective. Or, as Braque said, “the common is true, the similar false. Trouillebert,” as he went on to illustrate, “resembles Corot, but they have nothing in common.” This is indeed the crux of the matter today, whatever the scale at which we consider the common: whether Polis, nation, or humanity. The common of a community can be active only if we promote a common that does not reduce to the uniform. Only then can it effectively provide something to share.

On the other side of our theoretical triangle, and unlike the universal, the common will not be established by fiat. But it is, in part, given. Such is the common of my family or of my “nation,” which devolves to me by birth. In addition, the common is decided and is the proper object of a choice. This is the common of a political movement, an association, a party, or any collective engagement. This shared common is, as such, distributed bit by bit. I hold something in common with my loved ones, with my countrymen, and with those who speak my language, but also with all men, even with the entire animal kingdom, and, still more broadly, with all life – this last and vastest common being the purview of ecology. All sharing of the common is in effect, and in principle, extensive. But this “common” remains as such equivocal, because the limit that defines the interior of the sharing can flip into its opposite. It can flip into a border that excludes all others from the common. By the same token, then, the inclusive reveals itself to be, in reverse, exclusive. Shutting itself in, it expels to the outside. This is the common that verges on intolerance, the self-segregation of communities known as communautarisme.³

Translator’s Notes

1 1. English speakers call this general history.

2 2. A world’s fair.

3 3. See note 2, in the preface.