Generic universalism in world politics: beyond international anarchy and the world state

Abstract

Even though the notion of ‘world politics’ has become increasingly widespread in the discipline of International Relations, its deployment in the disciplinary discourse has been highly problematic. This article argues that the impasse of the discourse on world politics is owing to its commitment to a political ontology of identitarian pluralism, most forcefully articulated in the work of Carl Schmitt, which limits the political imagination to the binary opposition of the preservation of international anarchy and its hierarchical domestication in the world state. As long as politics is cast in identitarian terms, it is impossible to conceive of the universal dimension of political praxis other than in terms of the universalization of some particular content, i.e. as a hegemonic project. We shall then outline the pathway towards a non-identitarian understanding of world politics through an engagement with the universalist themes in the philosophy of Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. We shall reconstitute the authors’ alternative to identity politics that rehabilitates the notion of universalism from ‘postmodern’ criticism and reconstructs the category of the universal in non-identitarian or generic terms of indiscernibility and ‘whatever being’. The paper concludes with a discussion of the practical dimension of generic world politics as a radically egalitarian process of the emergence of the world community of ‘whatever singularities’.