On Universalism

Abstract

ion and the work of thought; just as the extension of law, borne by the political expansion of the roman empire, has made it the end of the community; so too the emptying of all subjects responding to the call of God made the universal the destination of the soul and the end of all humanity, etc. I ask myself whether european ideology itself was not itself birthed, more or less, from this very optical effect: from successive plans, from different and distinct pressures, which the universal aligns. not that such a universal has all along driven their collective construction, nor still that it could have organized them together—rather, the universal is that alone by which these heterogeneous plans (philosophical / political / religious) can permit to appear a perspective that is ever so slightly in common, and which furnishes them with a precious point of junction, on the horizon, for want of any other means of interlocking or penetration. For where else can we find, in an ideological context so barely as centered as that of europe, an articulation of plans otherwise so different, and which confers to them a certain cohesion, or at least a certain coherence? Whence the status of target which the universal enjoys in european thought, drawing to it every ideal (could it let them subsist anywhere else?) and always haunting the modern consciousness, such as it is, in its search for continual incarnation. an exigency that has at last become global, and by that fact above suspicion, bringing about a forgetting of its original locality, and even becoming (as it has) planetary, insofar as it is definitively hypostasized in imposing its must-be [devoir être] in the domains of value and knowledge alike: it is the universal, in particular, which has organized the necessity of reason and the becoming of History according to the same fold, and thereby made its triumph into the success of human kind itself. at the threshold of the modern era, a painting like that of the Adoration of the Mystical Lamb, by the van eyck brothers, already offers the image of this teleology