The Sartrean model of dialectical relation as the immanent totalization of any system is among the most basic antecedents and conceptual materials for the most comprehensive critique of postcolonial theory in general, and Glissantian Relation in particular, to date: Peter Hallward's first book, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. A general critique of postcolonial theory, followed by a series of specific critiques of postcolonial thinkers makes up the greater part of that volume. I want to draw attention here to Hallward's two very brief, yet absolutely central, theoretical ‘excurses’ at the heart of the book. These texts can serve, I believe, as indications of the contemporary theoretical horizon of a critique of postcolonial relation responsive to what Badiou has called the ‘obscure’ disasters of the late twentieth century: the conjoined and ongoing crises of neo-colonialism, postcommunism, and general depoliticization.

The primary operative distinction Hallward's study draws lies between what he calls ‘singular’ and ‘specific’ modes of relation. Hallward defines the former as ‘what creat[es] the medium of its own universe’ (2001: 177). Speaking of Deleuze in particular, he specifies that ‘all existent individuals […] are immediately produced, direct actualizations of one and the same Creative force’ in which all differences are ‘singular’ insofar as they remain ‘free from the limits of constituent relations between the differed’ (ibid.: 12). While this absolute absence of mediation, of what Hallward calls (and will repeatedly call for) ‘constituent relations’ is emphatically not what key theorists of the singular such as Spinoza or Hegel, both grand thinkers of mediation if ever they existed, understand by the singular, what is essential to grasp is how such a focus on the absolute is in fact essential to Hallward's most fundamental claims.

In the theoretical excurses to Absolutely Postcolonial, Hallward seeks to ground the two central concepts of his philosophico-political project. The first of these, which he circumscribes in Excursus III, is the universal, while the second, the particular, he addresses in Excursus IV.