Transfinitisation in Politics

Abstract

Contrary to the dominant nominalist ideology, which privileges the multiple over the one and the other over the same, the subversive gesture today consists in rehabilitating these two discredited philosophical concepts: the one and the same. My aim in this article is to contribute towards an understanding of this complex issue, and in particular to look at the political and theoretical difficulties associated with the construction of the universal in an infinite universe, a universe without a beyond. By teasing out the gist of the conceptualisation of the one of the same, provided respectively by Badiou and Lacan, I argue that the politics of emancipation can fully deploy itself in the domain of the inconsistent, non-totalizable field of the social only by starting with the axiom that equates the one and the »for all«. By developing what I propose to call the aleph of emancipation, contemporary theorizing of emancipation can reply to the persistent misunderstanding of the status of the universal in the not-all universe by some of the most perspicacious theorists, such as Giorgio Agamben.