Maxime Cervulle

The uses of universalism. ‘Diversity Statistics’ and the race issue in contemporary France

In France, the emergence of the issue of ‘diversity’ since the 2000s has deeply renewed public debates around racial and ethnic discriminations. Tracing the debates that appeared in this context around ‘diversity statistics’ and the possibility of integrating racial and/or ethnic data in the national census, this essay aims at delineating the conflicting universalisms that shape different positions around a ‘race issue’ that France alternatively engages with and blissfully ignores. By tracking the trends and changes in public lexicons, in the mediated public sphere as well as in institutional language, through an approach inspired by E. Laclau and C. Mouffe’s Discourse Theory and S. Hall’s theory of articulation, it describes competing notions of citizenship in the French context and presents a critical analysis of the current public redefinitions of antidiscrimination policies.

What Is to Be Done (at the University)? Stuart Hall, Critique, and the Institution

The singular position that Stuart Hall occupied in the intellectual life of the British Left can probably be explained by the nature of the scholarly project that was his, marked by the demand of the present and critical impatience. But beyond Hall’s critical stance, this singular capacity that was his to incarnate different phases and options of critique resides in his institutional practice. This essay evokes this particular aspect of Hall’s work in order to cast a decentered glance on the French university. Understanding the relation between critique and the university institution in the French context allows us to offer some clues to Hall’s difficult reception in this intellectual landscape.