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Scholars commonly take the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, written during the French Revolution, as the starting point for the modern conception of human rights. According to the Declaration, the rights of man are held to be universal, at all times and all places. But as recent crises around migrants and refugees have made obvious, this idea, sacred as it might be among human rights advocates, is exhausted. This book suggests that we need to think of a different idea of universality that exceeds the juridical universialism of the Declaration.

Abstract
In my response to Harry Harootunian, Aldo Beretta, Rebecca Fritzl, Niklas Plaetzer, and Vanita Seth, I discuss some of the terms that constitute the theoretical plot of my book: insurgent, universality, temporality. I also discuss the methodology of my work and the difference between radical democracy, insurgent democracy, and what I call the democratic excess. Eventually, in my response to Seth, I show how the work method of Insurgent Universality is maximally distant from any ontological discourse.

Abstract
This article intends to summarise the content of my book Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity and expand the meaning of the term 'universality'. Universality is not defined in abstract legal terms or by juxtaposition vis-à-vis a common enemy. Instead, I clarify the meaning of a more concrete and open practice of universality through historical examples and theories that I excavate from social practices.

Revolution and restoration are usually understood as opposite terms. This article aims to disarticulate this binary. Suppose the modern concept of revolution can be defined as a project of social reorganization led by the state or by a constituent power that aims to become the state. In that case, the restoration is a defense of society, institutions, traditions, and customs from the state. However, restoration is also an expression of a different political orientation of the revolutionary trajectory. The temporality of revolution is mainly future oriented, whereas the restorative temporality implies continuity, the reactivation of institutions from the past, and their experimentation in everyday life. These two temporal dimensions are intertwined. They can either combine in new political configurations or oppose each other in progress and regress, forward and backward. This article examines the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas as an example that combines the two temporal dimensions.

What is the practice and the role of the historian? What does it mean to dig into marginalized and silenced histories? What does it mean to reactivate the contents of past insurgent moments? And who has the power to do it? These are some of the important questions that my generous interlocutors raise in their comments regarding the methodology, and the historiographical and political approach of my book. Indeed, Insurgent Universality outlines an alternative historiography capable of reactivating the histories of the struggling oppressed by putting their past attempts of liberation at the service of political and social alternatives to the present. The task of my historiography is to present the past as a battlefield, which begins from the very political assumptions that often operate behind the historian's back, and to provide a new viewpoint from which other political trajectories of modernity can be disclosed.

AbstractThe imperative mandate is a medieval institution that arose in a context in which power was not monopolized by the state, but rather distributed in a plurality of municipalities and assemblies with specific political authority. This system, based on the plurality of the authority of assemblies, is incompatible with the modern state. Indeed, it is explicitly forbidden in many modern Western constitutions. Yet the imperative mandate appears in numerous events throughout modernity that have challenged the principles of the nation-state. It emerges today in populist movements as a response to the crisis of the representative democracy. This essay locates the insurgent legacy of the imperative mandate in the Paris Commune, in the German councils, and in the Zapatistas' practice of mandar obedeciendo (rule by obeying), in order to consider possible democratic alternatives to representative democracy and the crisis of the nation-state.