What did Beretta and Fritzl cut out? The line before the quoted text reads: But the cuts are often more telling than the quoted parts. 3 As is often the case when quoting a long passage, some parts are cut out. 2Īccording to Beretta and Fritzl, to avoid the risk of a relativist mosaic of particularities, greater emphasis must be given to the one world where many worlds fit, that is, to a structure of unity that ‘needs to be theoretically reconsidered’ in the direction of the Hegelian concrete universal. This is the meaning of the beautiful image given to us by the Zapatistas in their 1996 Fourth Declaration: ‘The world we want is one where many worlds fit.’ Insurgent universality begins with this plurality of worlds. In an era where universalism risks becoming an empty shell the alternative legacy of insurgent universality shows us another possibility. Beretta and Fritzl quote a passage from my book: In other words, if for Seth, my work on the pluralisation of temporalities would stop for fear of the ‘anarchy of relativism’, Beretta and Fritzl see in my approach the risk of a ‘relativist shortcoming’.Īll I can do is respond to their opposing critical remarks. This is an interesting criticism, because it is the opposite of a critical remark made by Vanita Seth, who instead reproaches me with a sort of fear that would block my reasoning on the pluralisation of temporalities. According to them, my notion of universality would risk falling into ‘a relativist interaction between different lifeworld-rooted constellations of experience and expectations, without any mediation that links them together.’ 1 Beretta and Fritzl propose some critical remarks. This means that universality is defined neither against a common enemy nor as a dimension that is present in potentia but yet to be implemented. Beretta and Fritzl correctly point out the distance between my notion of universality and a ‘potential’ and ‘polemical’ meaning of universalism. At times, perhaps, they are in tune with the spirit of Insurgent Universality as a legacy articulated by a multiplicity of partial and complementary experiments.īut now, three years after the book’s publication, the term requires greater clarification. Or the term has been used to denote mobilisations made possible by the real universality created by capitalist social relations. Or to prioritise not passive victims, but active agents of political practices of freedom and equality. The term has been used to denote a politics that is able to unite the proletariat or the oppressed classes in all their diversity. The observation is correct when one considers the political use that has been made of the term ‘insurgent universality’ in some publications that appeared soon after the book’s release. My immediate response is that the observation is both correct and off the mark at the same time. The observation should be taken seriously since these terms constitute the theoretical plot of my book. One observation present in some of the reviews concerns the lack, in my text, of an unambiguous definition of terms such as insurgent, universality, and temporality. In sincerely thanking my reviewers for their generous critical remarks, I will try, where possible, to generate a kind of imaginary round table in which, in addition to making my voice heard, individual contributions are also in dialogue with each other. Keywords: insurgent universality radical democracy temporality ontology
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