Anti-public: Dada, negation and universality

This article argues that Dada induced an ‘anti-public’ against the bourgeois public sphere. Against the idea of ‘the public’ as a collective noun for extant individuals, the idea of anti-public entails the belief that a truly universal public can only emerge from the partisan position of the excluded. A truly universal public emerges out of the negation of the current coordinates of culture. Dada embodies such a position of universality by occupying the position of the excrementally excluded of culture: the position of ‘the philistine’, as theorized by Beech and Roberts. This reasoning on negation and universality draws on the contemporary Marxist philosophy of Badiou, Lecercle and Žižek.