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Comparing the 1789 and 1793 declarations in their respective contexts, the second chapter clarifies the limits of rights declarations as juridical texts and presents a critique of their universal aspirations. In contrast to the juridical universalism of 1789, the insurgent universality of 1793 finds its own background in the insurgencies of women, the poor, and slaves, which questioned the presumed abstract character of the citizen. This chapter outlines an alternative conception of universality that the 1793 Declaration brings into view by examining the insurgencies that directly and indirectly took part in its drafting. These insurgencies, rather than asking for pure inclusion, challenged the social and political order and opened up the political form of the state, thus introducing possibilities for radical social and political change. The 1793 Declaration articulates a new form of agency, while also making a claim to universality that is not rooted in the idea of abstract humanity but, rather, in the particular and concrete struggles of women, slaves, and the poor. Likewise, a different, expansive conception of sovereignty can be found in the insurrectional practices of these diverse sets of actors.

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This article analyzes the current crisis in terms of a conflict of temporalities, arguing that the pace of the economic temporality and its speed in decision making clashes with the temporality of the state and the slowness of the democratic process of decision making. The synchronization of these different tempos configures the present crisis of democracy and its different reactions, such as the recent Occupy and anti-austerity movements, which have expressed their disenchantment with formal democracy. The article examines these disjointed temporalities of capital, state, and popular insurgencies, to explore the possibilities of radical change.

Marx's rethinking of the combination between absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value during the 1860s is very important in order to reconsider the co-presence of diff erent forms of historical temporality and exploitation. Postmodernism presents a picture of a plurality of historical times in which the old lies beside the modern and the sweatshop beside the high-tech factory. Because it fails to provide an explanation of the relation between these forms, postmodernism produces a false image of an 'ahistorical' present. In this article I want to show how the combination of diff erentials of surplus-value works and why a representation of a plurality of historical temporalities synchronised by the temporality of socially-necessary labour is the most adequate image to comprehend it. Th e theoretical task is to show how the mature categorial structure of Capital not only does not need an historicist philosophy of history, but is in fact incompatible with it.