Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political

Chapter Two. Universality

CHAPTER Two Universality The question of the existence of universals has haunted Western philosophy throughout its history. While almost no one doubts the existence of particular beings, the idea of the universal-an identity or quality shared by multiple particular beings-sparks widely divergent views. Plato argues for the existence of universal forms both of values (like justice) and of objects (like tables), whereas Locke believes that there are no universals at all but only particular entities and instances. The benefit of universals is that they allow us to make a deeper sense of the world by seeing the connections between phenomena. Universals allow us to categorize what would otherwise be an overwhelming flood of sensory data. In fact, Aristotle contends that without some conception of universality there would be no knowledge at all. In the Metaphysics, he notes, "All things that we know, we know in so far as they have some unity and identity, and in so far as some attribute belongs to them universally."l Universals enable us to gain some minimal purchase on our experience by pointing to what repeats or remains constant within it. Thanks to universals, we can find something that is the same in the many discrete particulars we encounter. Human efficiency and our very capacity for judgment owe a debt to the emergence or specification of this source of likeness: it would take longer to ask a carpenter to build a table if we did not have some shared idea of the qualities all tables share; and it would be difficult to determine and adjudicate wrongs if we did not have some common categories and protocols that constitute the administering of justice. No one questions that universals come in handy for practical living in the world, but descriptions of their utility leave entirely to the side their political and ethical valences. That is to say, Aristotle's statement in the Metaphysics has an inarguable descriptive truth: we use universals in order to know the world rather than remaining simply the victims of its whims. But is this knowledge always benign or innocent? The most elementary form of the universal is the word, and language provides us 63 64 Chapter Two with a network of universals-a way to cognize the phenomena we encounter . For Maurice Blanchot, this manner of universalizing, when it comes to horror, reveals the squalid underside of our knowing, "the discrete complicity which maintains it in a relation with the most insupportable aspects of power." Blanchot invokes in this context the impossibly poignant attempt of the prisoner at Auschwitz who, forced to hold the heads of fellow prisoners as each was being executed with a shot to the neck, maintained a desperate sliver of command over transpiring events by claiming to have "observed the comportment of men before death."2 Whether to greater or lesser extents, through the universal we liberate ourselves from a complete and mute subjugation to the world in which we live. But this liberation comes with a price.3 The danger of universality comes into clear view when one examines the history of the twentieth century-a century in which notions of universality underwrote the commission of unspeakable violence. In the twentieth century, universals did not just innocently liberate subjects from their extant lifeworlds, they promised the wholesale redemption of those lifeworlds . The appeal of Nazism is apposite here: Nazism did not simply perceive and promulgate a shared source of racial likeness, it offered up a vision wherein the realization of the racial universal would be redemptive , liberating the Aryan race and the German Reich from a dissolute modernity. This liberation promised nothing short of the chance to experience (that which is alike in) being as a whole and thus to coincide with what is universal in history itself. But as the case of Nazism makes plain, to specify and seek to ensure the shared qualities and values of a racially endogamous German Yolk necessarily entailed the identification and degradation of those who did not belong to the Nazi narrative of universal history's fulfillment and were thus its disease-bearing contaminants, or who had a rival narrative of universal history with themselves in a central role. This explains why, even as Hitler went to great lengths to define Jews in micro-organic terms (e.g., as parasite, maggot, vermin, and cancerous abscess), he also acknowledged the Jews' claim of historical election, declaring in 1934 to Hermann Rauschning that "there cannot be two Chosen People...