UNIVERSALITY IN ALAIN BADIOU'S PHILOSOPHY AND THE ACCOUNT OF IDENTITY POLITICS

Date

2025-8

Author

Gülcan, Umut

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This study investigates the compatibility of Alain Badiou’s radical theory of politics with the possible instances of identity politics through the principle of universality that he posits. By conceptualizing identity politics as a political instance that takes its departure point as a particularistic interest, we asked the question, which is not answered in the literature on Badiou, whether an instance of politics saturated by a particularity (or seems to be saturated by it) can still have a universal emancipatory maxim in Badiouean perspective. After a detailed analysis of his ontology and logic in order to be able to answer our question axiomatically, which is compatible with Badiou’s philosophy, we investigated his politics. We focused on the distance that a genuine politics must keep from the state and representation; the relation between existing identities and the state; and the locality of politics, which brings that each political instance must be elaborated in its locality. We proposed that the condition of a genuine politics is the generic formation of subjectivities with the maxim of equality that seeks emancipation universally, which makes the inexistents maximally exist through breaking the laws of the world that designate the identities and differences themselves; however, with the consideration that the appearance of a singular under the name of a particular (which we entitled as the problem of naming the singular) or the positive aspect of identity should not misguide us to conclude that it is a politics that reproduces the identities already indexed in the situation.

Subject Keywords

Badiou, universality, politics, identity, particularity

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115473

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis