Race and Universality: Meillassoux Meets Eze and Wiredu

This essay focuses on the tension between the need for a notion of universality that would abolish all concepts of race and the need to respect the violent history of races and the narratives and discourses that have been produced to this day in their name. In order to address this issue, this paper argues that the tension cannot be resolved or negotiated without a radical change—provoked by the work of Emmanuel Eze, Kwasi Wiredu and Quentin Meillassoux—in the interpretation of universality. This radical change is brought on by a reformulation of the principle of non-contradiction, the only principle that can potentially sustain in harmony and therefore without tension both universality and race.