Towards a Materialism of the Real: The One of the Same

Abstract

Confronted by the hegemonic nominalist discourse characterised by its privileging of the multiple over the One and difference and/or otherness over the same, the paper sets out from the assumption that the subversive gesture today consists in rehabilitating these two discredited philosophical notions: the One and the Same. This essay aims at contributing towards an understanding of this thorny issue, and in particular at looking at the political and theoretical impasses associated with the production of the universal in an infinite universe, a universe without a beyond. By teasing out the gist of the conceptualisations of the One and the Same, provided respectively by Lacan and Badiou, the paper argues that the contemporary politics of emancipation can fully deploy itself in the domain of the inconsistent, non-totalisable real of the social only by starting with an axiom that equates the One and the “for all”. By developing what the author propose to call the aleph of emancipation, contemporary theorisation 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 theorist, such as J.-C. Milner, F. Regnault, and G. Agamben.