In Universal. Feminism, deconstruction, translation, Étienne Balibar problematizes the notion of universal, clarifying debates about the meaning and value of universalism. This notion, hotly discussed today (we could speak of a “complaint of universalism” as before, regarding humanism) could not be univocal, it must be pluralized, or rather differentiated, for two reasons whose combination produces an endless dialectic. established: on the one hand, every enunciation of the universal (for example, the “rights of man”) is located in a geographical and historical framework (which we can call: a civilization) that affects it in its form and content; On the other hand, the enunciation of the universal is not so much a factor of unification of human beings, as of conflict between them and with themselves. Let's say this only unites by dividing. It is still necessary to try to put some order in this equivocality of the universal, which at the same time engenders the loss of universalist discourses and helps to formulate the demand that runs through them.

At the end of a “constructive” and “deconstructive” journey, three aporias are enumerated, relative to the “world”, the collective subject (the “us” and its “others”) and the political community (the “city” or “citizenship”). "), the whole of which gives the new quarrel of universals - in which we are participants - its inseparably philosophical and political character. The author proposes articulating them with other themes that have come to the forefront of his philosophical work in recent years: anthropological differences and the unequal translation of languages that “speak” to each other. To the notion of a multiversum that would be situated, not here but beyond the unity, one can correspond at the level of individuals to the figure of a quasi-transcendental subject, for whom the ontological question that constitutes it, at the same time as condemnation to err, is precisely that of the multiplicity of human differences.