Such translation, at least in the sense of Walter Benjamin—translation is the “afterlife"of the original—necessarily does away with any notion of originality. In the case of universalism, “what is irretrievably lost in the translation, what died with the original and can therefore no longer be grasped in the translation, is the revolutionary meaning of the old concept of universalism, its practical aspiration to change the world."1º Here, Buden adopts Paul Gilroy's notion of a strategic universalism, which “was developed to close the non-reducible gap between two languages of our historical experience, between the language of reflexive critique and the language of political practice." For Buden, thisis an eminently practical question:
Is it not time now, after all the attempts to articulate a leftist political engagement in the sense of strategic essentialism, to try out the other, universalist strategy? The best that one can do in this dilemma is probably to make a decision for the dilemma itself. That means lingering in the gap that neither of the concepts can close. It would not mean evading all the extorted decisions and foul compromises once and for all, but rather recognizing them as such.
Lingering in the gap of a new politics of the universal is, then, our point of departure for reflections on alternative articulations of the global—understood as the “afterlife"of the universal, over and against which new visions of the political have to be created.
A politics of the universal is not, of course, always-already a politics beyond liberalism. Quite the contrary:
Universalization is conventionally understood as a proto-democratic and thus also a proto-political event. An inherently particular position suddenly raises a universalist claim, thus evoking a new antagonism, which divides and newly articulates the given political field. ...Strategic universalism... always remains bound to the hegemonic liberal-democratic order— and not its critique.
What strategic essentialism and strategic universalism “have in common is the vision of a gradual progress of emancipation that takes place as a clever balancing between the two poles of the existing political world order, the particular essentialist and the universal constructivist world order." The task of critique, however, is different:
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