Cosmopolitan conviviality and negative theology: Europe’s vocation to universalism

Abstract

Recent revolutions in literary and cultural theory have come full circle – or perhaps spiralled back around – to a quest for universal values and perspectives and beliefs. After several decades of accentuated splintering into national, regional, sexual, racial, and religious particularisms, the cry has gone up for attempting to recover some sense of a common bond of universal democratic enfranchisement. Of course, the notion of the universal ‘returns’ metamorphosed. It is no longer the universality of a closed system or of a delimited concept, but rather an open universal that is in question. The crucial breakthrough in the rethinking of universality can best be understood as construing it not as conceptual but rather as what defies conceptualization. This is a non-predicative universality and must be thought of as that which resists or exceeds the closure of identity. It opens a radically alternative vision to that of the Enlightenment philosophies that have typically paraded under the banner of universality, although it also undermines the traditional opposition between rational enlightenment and religious or mystical obscurantism. The universal in this new sense opens up a mysterious region of incommensurability as, paradoxically, our only common measure.