Post-structuralist philosophical thought, which developed in France in the second half of the twentieth century, constitutes a stage of forced confrontation, as much for the conceptual innovations made to the multiple fields of 'critical theory', as much as for the political positiong of many members in the Marxist and post-Marxist cultural milieu. In spite of its militant lineage, this theoretical field suffers from some limits linked to what R.J.C. Young, on the basis of J. Derrida's

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... called 'white masks', the Eurocentric structure of thought production. Although, and undeniably, this same structure has been the object of attacks and deconstructions. The current anti-racist conflicts (and the cultural work related to them), in fact, try to speak to the unconscious symptoms of the post-structural canon, to test the theoretical statements, and to stress the same limits, in the context of a renewed political appropriation. Elizabeth Paquette's recent work 'Universal Emancipation' co-faces the philosophy of Alain Badiou, who, famously, on the basis of Althusserian philosophy, has developed a relevant machine of thought on the forms of political emancipation from a Marxist perspective. The author interrogates this significant theoretical corpus through the concept of race, highlighting both the absence of a problematization of it, and the contradictions that these vulnus bring to the heart of the theoretical framework. To introduce the content of the book, Paquette's precise comparison with Badiousian conceptual catalogue mainly highlights the 'race-blind' foundation, and the impossible self-sufficiency of the universal dimension of emancipation, which leads Badiou himself to subsume contingencies and differences within a monolithic totality. The first chapter introduces the key-words that underpin Badiousian emancipation theory. The meta-political form taken by the subjective decision, and the universal dimension of the event as the very manifestation of truth are symptomatic of what the author calls 'indifference to difference'. According to this reading, race, like other claims concerning minorities and differences, implies the extension of state powers, and therefore invalidates political struggles. Revolutionary political struggles, as a real expression of the will for emancipation, are struggles that operate by subtraction from particular claims and move towards the universal, the political truth (p. 35). Identity, which for Badiou represents a socially mediated construction, is reduced to a particular enunciation, that contradicts the enunciation of a universal singularity, and is perceived as a political limit, a corollary that does not reach the effectiveness of the people as a designated conflictual subjectivity. If the people represents the manifest form of revolutionary subjectivation that exceeds the logic of the state, then race and other claims based on identity remain anchored to non-existence.