The philosopher (and former protégé of the French structuralist Louis Althusser) Étienne Balibar, gave the sixth lecture in the ‘Adieu Derrida’ series, launched to commemorate the eponymous late philosopher’s work, and to inaugurate Birkbeck’s new ‘Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities’.

In his paper, Balibar sought to elide the dichotomy between the particular and universal, the elucidation of which Balibar dismissed as ‘child’s play’. Balibar set about his task in suitably Derridean fashion, by a close textual analysis of excerpts from three thinkers’ works: Derrida himself, the French linguist Étienne Benveniste, and the German philosopher Hegel. The paper began with a re-interpretation of Hegel’s notion of ‘sense certainty’, that constitutes a preliminary stage in the evolution of consciousness expounded by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit.

The conventional interpretation of this section of the Phenomenology is that Hegel is describing a form of proto-, or pre-consciousness, that is moulded simply by being imprinted by the external world through the physical senses. But the inability of consciousness to reconcile truth with this ‘sense certainty’ is the contradiction that forms the motor of the evolution of consciousness, and the unfolding of the ‘Hegelian system’ mapped out in the Phenomenology.

Contra the conventional interpretation, Balibar argued that Hegel’s presentation of sense certainty had little to with any biological or physiological referents, and was rather a ‘pure linguistic experiment’, concerned with the paradoxes inherent in the generic (or universal) linguistic structures offered by Hegel in the text - ‘I’, ‘this’ and ‘that’ (as ‘I’ could be anybody). Balibar argued that Hegel’s linguistic construction here amounts to an ‘arch-language’ - what Derrida considered to be ‘writing’, thereby allowing Balibar to make the leap into invoking Derrida and Benveniste.

Without doing justice to the nuances and erudition of Balibar’s argument, his basic proposition was to suggest that the universal linguistic categories proposed by Hegel ‘self-deconstruct’. That is, their supposed universalism crumples upon close observation, as the difference that is inherent both between and within the categories of ‘you’ and ‘I’ , emerges immanently in the form of the third person. There is no bounded coherence to the I - the true personal pronoun, Balibar argued, is a ‘dialogic’ one. So far, so Derrida. What was most interesting, however, was Balibar’s proposition that rather than focusing on the dialectic of the universal and the particular, we should focus on how universalism is produced through its internal contradictions.

But in the end it was very difficult to assess the merits and limitations of Balibar’s argument. Unfortunately, Balibar’s lecture once again exposed some of the lack of foresight that went in to what was otherwise a well intentioned and well conceived lecture series (see Jean Luc Nancy on Mad Derrida). It was no easy task to follow a highly abstract and complex paper that was premised on a close re-reading of particular texts, and that deliberately eschewed reliance on established modes of exegesis. Helping the public to connect with this intellectual (the avowed aim of both the lecture series and the new Birkbeck centre) would have been helped here by making the paper accessible to members of the audience well in advance. As it was, discussion of Balibar’s paper was limited and meandering.