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Universality and Identity Politics
The great political ideas and movements of the modern world were founded on a promise of universal emancipation. But in recent decades, much of the Left has grown suspicious of such aspirations. Critics see the invocation of universality as a form of domination or a way of speaking for others, and have come to favor a politics of particularism--often derided as "identity politics." Others, both centrists and conservatives, associate universalism with twentieth-century totalitarianism and hold that it is bound to lead to catastrophe.
This book develops a new conception of universality that helps us rethink political thought and action. Todd McGowan argues that universals such as equality and freedom are not imposed on us. They emerge from our shared experience of their absence and our struggle to attain them. McGowan reconsiders the history of Nazism and Stalinism and reclaims the universalism of movements fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia. He demonstrates that the divide between Right and Left comes down to particularity versus universality. Despite the accusation of identity politics directed against leftists, every emancipatory political project is fundamentally a universal one--and the real proponents of identity politics are the right wing. Through a wide range of examples in contemporary politics, film, and history, Universality and Identity Politics offers an antidote to the impasses of identity and an inspiring vision of twenty-first-century collective struggle.
This book develops a new conception of universality that helps us rethink political thought and action. Todd McGowan argues that universals such as equality and freedom are not imposed on us. They emerge from our shared experience of their absence and our struggle to attain them. McGowan reconsiders the history of Nazism and Stalinism and reclaims the universalism of movements fighting racism, sexism, and homophobia. He demonstrates that the divide between Right and Left comes down to particularity versus universality. Despite the accusation of identity politics directed against leftists, every emancipatory political project is fundamentally a universal one--and the real proponents of identity politics are the right wing. Through a wide range of examples in contemporary politics, film, and history, Universality and Identity Politics offers an antidote to the impasses of identity and an inspiring vision of twenty-first-century collective struggle.
254 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2020
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About the author
Todd McGowan
50 books218 followersTodd McGowan is Associate Professor of Film at the University of Vermont, US. He is the author of The Fictional Christopher Nolan (2012), Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (2011), The Impossible David Lynch (2007), The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2007), and other books.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 23, 2020
McGowan's Universality and Identity Politics offers a novel definition of universality. Early in the book, McGowan sketches what he believes is the predominant understanding of universality in today's political climate. He writes, "Both [convervatives and liberals] see universality not as a starting point but as something that derives from individuals coming together. We arrive at the universal, if we do, through the assembly of particulars" (39). For many, universality is a sentiment akin to either securing national borders and celebrating what citizens of a particular country or members of a particular race, sex, group, or creed share, or universality is institutional policies that celebrate and foster the importance of diversity and inclusivity. This is not to suggest that McGowan believes diversity and inclusivity are necessarily wrong (although he categorically rejects nationalism on the right, for example). Instead, his larger point highlights how flawed it is to imagine we can achieve universal emancipation by bundling or collecting a series of particulars. By elevating particulars and enshrining them as the starting point for universal emancipation, someone or something always remains excluded. Slavoj Zizek makes this point when discussing the LGBT signifier. Activists began using LGBT in the late 1980s as a more precise alternative to words such as "gay" or "homosexual." But from here, we see McGowan's point about "the assembly of particulars." LGBT became LGBTQ, then LGBTQ+ and so on. Today, whether one uses LGBTTQQIAAP or QUILTBAG, there are so many variations, it is a little hard to keep track. Again, this is not to suggest that the project of creating more inclusive language, terms, spaces, and communities is wrong. Instead, McGowan wants to orient his reader to an understanding of universality that begins not with the particular but with the universal. He writes, "But the recognition of the universal is the recognition of something absent in the social field. It is an absence that goes beyond any social authorization. Universality cannot have a direct manifestation because it is constitutively absent and emerges in the form of lack" (10). By using a word such as "lack," McGowan makes an unmistakable reference to psychoanalytic theorist Jacque Lacan, a move anyone familiar with McGowan's word should anticipate. Universal emancipation, therefore, is better understood not as a plus but as a minus. For McGowan, this is what a genuine leftist project focused on universal emancipation must look like.
By framing universality as a collective lack, McGowan highlights the one thing we all share as subjects. While it may seem negative, morose, or defeatist to claim that universality is best understood as a minus rather than a plus, McGowan claims it is not. As he sees it, contemporary particularist identity ideology "hides the alienating quality of all identity," thus revealing its "ideological function" (26). Moreover, for McGowan, this "ideological function" is intensely right-wing. In the conclusion to Universality and Identity Politics, he argues, "For too long, politics around the world has been staged on right-wing terrain. We envision a particular world with particular causes...In a world of competing particulars, there is no possibility for an emancipatory breakthrough" (211). This way of conceptualizing identity is beneficial to a capitalist system that profits from our inability to see what we all, in fact, share. Capitalism mobilizes particularity and eschews universality because it is profitable to do so. Capitalism cannot profit from universality in the way it profits from particularity because universality exists in lack or absence.
None of this is to suggest that McGowan sees particularity for conservatives and liberals as equally misguided. Conservatives deploy particularity for exclusionary purposes (e.g., Trump's Mexico border wall and Muslim ban), while liberals deploy particularity for inclusionary purposes. While McGowan argues both are illustrations of right-wing politics, the liberal expression is far-less damaging. What McGowan wants his reader to entertain is how best to engage politically. He writes, "The great leap forward consists in recognizing politics as the struggle between universality and particularity" (211-212). McGowan's proposition is engaging because it attempts to reconfigure the place of particularity. As McGowan has argued elsewhere, we only truly understand our particular identity by traveling through the universal, not circumventing it.
By framing universality as a collective lack, McGowan highlights the one thing we all share as subjects. While it may seem negative, morose, or defeatist to claim that universality is best understood as a minus rather than a plus, McGowan claims it is not. As he sees it, contemporary particularist identity ideology "hides the alienating quality of all identity," thus revealing its "ideological function" (26). Moreover, for McGowan, this "ideological function" is intensely right-wing. In the conclusion to Universality and Identity Politics, he argues, "For too long, politics around the world has been staged on right-wing terrain. We envision a particular world with particular causes...In a world of competing particulars, there is no possibility for an emancipatory breakthrough" (211). This way of conceptualizing identity is beneficial to a capitalist system that profits from our inability to see what we all, in fact, share. Capitalism mobilizes particularity and eschews universality because it is profitable to do so. Capitalism cannot profit from universality in the way it profits from particularity because universality exists in lack or absence.
None of this is to suggest that McGowan sees particularity for conservatives and liberals as equally misguided. Conservatives deploy particularity for exclusionary purposes (e.g., Trump's Mexico border wall and Muslim ban), while liberals deploy particularity for inclusionary purposes. While McGowan argues both are illustrations of right-wing politics, the liberal expression is far-less damaging. What McGowan wants his reader to entertain is how best to engage politically. He writes, "The great leap forward consists in recognizing politics as the struggle between universality and particularity" (211-212). McGowan's proposition is engaging because it attempts to reconfigure the place of particularity. As McGowan has argued elsewhere, we only truly understand our particular identity by traveling through the universal, not circumventing it.
March 22, 2021
McGowan’s final chapter here is really fantastic and convincing, but the book stumbled to deliver me there with much confidence. McGowan convincingly argues that critics of universalism do not really take issue with the concept of universality, so much as its failure, or perversions of universality that are really a defence of particular identities (e.x. Nazism). This makes sense, but ultimately his arguments regarding why all identity politics are inherently dangerous and divisive feel weak and unreasoned (the old ‘slippery slope’ approach); it works much better when he focuses on why identity politics are ineffectual at making meaningful change, such as the false equivalence commonly made between diversity and anti-racism that allows racism to be covered up but not conquered. Again, the last chapter is really strong on this front and ultimately saves the project, for me, but I found myself vacillating between disagreement and agreement — almost by the paragraph — throughout much of the rest.
July 17, 2023
How are the right and left wing different from each other and what is the key characteristic that defines this difference? For the author, that difference is best summed up by their relationship to the particular and the universal – with the right always focused upon the particular, and where the left ought to be focused on the universal. The author sees the rise of identity politics as a kind of infiltration of right wing ideology into left wing consciousness. As such, this book is a call for the left to readopt its roots in universality.
Plato is obsessed with universals – he calls them forms, but they are universal in the true sense of being beyond our ability to fully grasp them, even though they exist so as to allow everything else to make sense. Aristotle, on the other hand, is obsessed with particulars. We generally think of Plato as being more conservative than Aristotle. And in many ways he was. For many, if universals exist at all, they exist as a kind of summation of particulars. The author challenges this view, stressing that universals are often more than this sort of ‘averaging’ of particulars – but something that stands as a kind of principle that allows us to understand the nature of the particulars themselves.
For Plato, and the author, the universal is always ultimately absent because, as with Plato’s forms, universals can never be fully obtainable or realisable. The author says this is because the real universal is in conflict with the particular and so even when we feel we most fully possess the universal, we find outsides inevitably undermining our identity with it. Since the universal is not fully obtainable, it remains for all of us outside our grasp. That is, the universal is best understood as absence, not least because it disappears as soon as we believe we possess it. But it is also something we constantly strive to possess.
The right is defined by its fixation upon particulars. As such, it rejects the universal. And this is the case because the right always excludes, and must exclude to assert the worth of its own particularity. The harsh example provided here is of Nazi Germany. The Jews and the Communists were murdered in untold millions, and this was necessary for Nazism for it to assert the intrinsic value of the chosen national identity it espoused. It would have been impossible for Germans to consider themselves the super-race if there were not other races seen as being lesser to them. But the lesser races were not the true enemies of Nazi particularity – groups understood to be ‘universal’ by them were the true enemies. The Jews, as a people without a nation, and the communists, who saw nations as standing in the way of proletarian internationalism, necessarily became the defining enemies of Nazism. These groups had an asserted universality in the case of the communists, and a being without a homeland in the case of the Jews that made both versions of a kind of universal people, and this put them in direct conflict with the nationalist ideology of Nazism. For the author, this is the defining feature of the all of right, if an extreme case in point, that they place the interests of the particular over that of the universal.
And this becomes the problem with identity politics. Identity politics has become increasingly associated with the left.
Before you think that this book is merely saying that the left is only really the left if it understands the central focus of all struggles as being the class struggle and that struggles over ‘identity’ are a distraction, that’s really not what is being said here. At least, not in the standard way of saying such things. He is also not saying that the left should not be interested in the mistreatment of people who hold various identities. One of the examples used to explain this is the Black Lives Matter movement. This looks, at first blush, like a particular struggle over identity. Which is why the right attacks this movement with what the author refers to as a false universal – contained in the slogan All Lives Matter. All lives matter is a false universal because it actively undermines those who are facing a lack of freedom, that is, who represent the clearest example of the absence of the universal, the universal being that all people should be free from arbitrary execution at the hands of the police. Since one group of people are particularly exposed to the negation of this universal human relation, focusing upon their oppression is not about them as particulars, but rather as an assertion of the need for the universal principle to be applied universally.
The true universal is that no one should face murder at the hands of the police simply due to the colour of their skin. Those most clearly faced with the absence of that universal freedom are identified in saying Black Lives Matter, not as a particular case, but rather in that the only way the universal can be truly universal is if it applies to Black Lives in the same way that it currently applies to White Lives. The universal is only truly universal if it applies universally – and currently, in the US, this universal is most clearly absent in relation to Black Americans. As such, the site for the assertion of the universal is among Black Lives. As the author repeatedly says, the universal is most clearly defined at the site of its absence.
Similarly, with marriage equity, to make marriage universal it needed to apply to all those who shared love, not merely heterosexual couples. The universal becomes universal only upon being able to be applied universally. As such, the demand for homosexual couples to be entitled to get married is not a case of a particular identity gaining access to marriage, as much as it is an application of the universal right being applied universally.
The author also says that since capitalism is based upon the commodity and the commodity is devoid of all real identity, capitalism tends to highlight the differences between particular groups – and therefore is the true basis of ‘identity politics’, despite the right seeing identity politics as its enemy. The author sees the particularity of identity politics as the problem here – rather than necessarily the struggles for equality that often underlie this politics. This means that the author is mostly concerned when identity politics seeks special treatment for groups based on identity with a particular subgroup – rather than equal access to a universal ideal of equity. This can perhaps seems like nit-picking, but I think there is something in this. The danger here is perhaps this desire for universality could be confused with a call for assimilation, which I don’t think is quite what the author is really asking for either.
I do worry that the current focus upon difference ignores those things we have in common and therefore what enables our common struggle. It is clearly in the interests of capitalism to atomise us – it could even be defined as its most persistent characteristic – and as such, any act that brings us together is an act of resistance.
The author’s other book, Enjoyment Right & Left, is perhaps an easier introduction to some of these ideas.
Plato is obsessed with universals – he calls them forms, but they are universal in the true sense of being beyond our ability to fully grasp them, even though they exist so as to allow everything else to make sense. Aristotle, on the other hand, is obsessed with particulars. We generally think of Plato as being more conservative than Aristotle. And in many ways he was. For many, if universals exist at all, they exist as a kind of summation of particulars. The author challenges this view, stressing that universals are often more than this sort of ‘averaging’ of particulars – but something that stands as a kind of principle that allows us to understand the nature of the particulars themselves.
For Plato, and the author, the universal is always ultimately absent because, as with Plato’s forms, universals can never be fully obtainable or realisable. The author says this is because the real universal is in conflict with the particular and so even when we feel we most fully possess the universal, we find outsides inevitably undermining our identity with it. Since the universal is not fully obtainable, it remains for all of us outside our grasp. That is, the universal is best understood as absence, not least because it disappears as soon as we believe we possess it. But it is also something we constantly strive to possess.
The right is defined by its fixation upon particulars. As such, it rejects the universal. And this is the case because the right always excludes, and must exclude to assert the worth of its own particularity. The harsh example provided here is of Nazi Germany. The Jews and the Communists were murdered in untold millions, and this was necessary for Nazism for it to assert the intrinsic value of the chosen national identity it espoused. It would have been impossible for Germans to consider themselves the super-race if there were not other races seen as being lesser to them. But the lesser races were not the true enemies of Nazi particularity – groups understood to be ‘universal’ by them were the true enemies. The Jews, as a people without a nation, and the communists, who saw nations as standing in the way of proletarian internationalism, necessarily became the defining enemies of Nazism. These groups had an asserted universality in the case of the communists, and a being without a homeland in the case of the Jews that made both versions of a kind of universal people, and this put them in direct conflict with the nationalist ideology of Nazism. For the author, this is the defining feature of the all of right, if an extreme case in point, that they place the interests of the particular over that of the universal.
And this becomes the problem with identity politics. Identity politics has become increasingly associated with the left.
Before you think that this book is merely saying that the left is only really the left if it understands the central focus of all struggles as being the class struggle and that struggles over ‘identity’ are a distraction, that’s really not what is being said here. At least, not in the standard way of saying such things. He is also not saying that the left should not be interested in the mistreatment of people who hold various identities. One of the examples used to explain this is the Black Lives Matter movement. This looks, at first blush, like a particular struggle over identity. Which is why the right attacks this movement with what the author refers to as a false universal – contained in the slogan All Lives Matter. All lives matter is a false universal because it actively undermines those who are facing a lack of freedom, that is, who represent the clearest example of the absence of the universal, the universal being that all people should be free from arbitrary execution at the hands of the police. Since one group of people are particularly exposed to the negation of this universal human relation, focusing upon their oppression is not about them as particulars, but rather as an assertion of the need for the universal principle to be applied universally.
The true universal is that no one should face murder at the hands of the police simply due to the colour of their skin. Those most clearly faced with the absence of that universal freedom are identified in saying Black Lives Matter, not as a particular case, but rather in that the only way the universal can be truly universal is if it applies to Black Lives in the same way that it currently applies to White Lives. The universal is only truly universal if it applies universally – and currently, in the US, this universal is most clearly absent in relation to Black Americans. As such, the site for the assertion of the universal is among Black Lives. As the author repeatedly says, the universal is most clearly defined at the site of its absence.
Similarly, with marriage equity, to make marriage universal it needed to apply to all those who shared love, not merely heterosexual couples. The universal becomes universal only upon being able to be applied universally. As such, the demand for homosexual couples to be entitled to get married is not a case of a particular identity gaining access to marriage, as much as it is an application of the universal right being applied universally.
The author also says that since capitalism is based upon the commodity and the commodity is devoid of all real identity, capitalism tends to highlight the differences between particular groups – and therefore is the true basis of ‘identity politics’, despite the right seeing identity politics as its enemy. The author sees the particularity of identity politics as the problem here – rather than necessarily the struggles for equality that often underlie this politics. This means that the author is mostly concerned when identity politics seeks special treatment for groups based on identity with a particular subgroup – rather than equal access to a universal ideal of equity. This can perhaps seems like nit-picking, but I think there is something in this. The danger here is perhaps this desire for universality could be confused with a call for assimilation, which I don’t think is quite what the author is really asking for either.
I do worry that the current focus upon difference ignores those things we have in common and therefore what enables our common struggle. It is clearly in the interests of capitalism to atomise us – it could even be defined as its most persistent characteristic – and as such, any act that brings us together is an act of resistance.
The author’s other book, Enjoyment Right & Left, is perhaps an easier introduction to some of these ideas.
November 23, 2024
4.5/5 Another outstanding essay by McGowan, characterized by his peculiar synthesis of Hegelianism, Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and political commitment, which aligns him with figures such as Žižek, Copjec, Boothby, or Badiou.
I will try not to repeat what I’ve already discussed in other reviews, and to do so, I can only echo some of the striking statements from this essay:
“Identity is always pathological” (Kant).
“Identity provokes a sense of self-assurance that universality delightfully destroys.”
“When we abdicate universality, we obtain a universal horror” (Badiou).
In a nutshell, McGowan explains with great clarity (besides the Žižekian-Hegelian adage that “universality is only achieved through a not-all and a partial commitment”) that the SUBJECT is always alienated, no matter what (let’s move away from the naivety of Adorno or Habermas, please). McGowan, furthermore, asserts that identity is merely a symptomatic necessity to fit into society but that the more disintegrated and bracketed it becomes, the better.
I will try not to repeat what I’ve already discussed in other reviews, and to do so, I can only echo some of the striking statements from this essay:
“Identity is always pathological” (Kant).
“Identity provokes a sense of self-assurance that universality delightfully destroys.”
“When we abdicate universality, we obtain a universal horror” (Badiou).
In a nutshell, McGowan explains with great clarity (besides the Žižekian-Hegelian adage that “universality is only achieved through a not-all and a partial commitment”) that the SUBJECT is always alienated, no matter what (let’s move away from the naivety of Adorno or Habermas, please). McGowan, furthermore, asserts that identity is merely a symptomatic necessity to fit into society but that the more disintegrated and bracketed it becomes, the better.
February 14, 2023
Ill-considered polemic disguised as academic work.
McGowan's vastly under-researched and poorly theorised attempt at presenting a critique of contemporary identity politics not only fails to fully capture the nuanced dynamics of identity discourse, but overly relies upon lazy (and conceptually confused) comparisons between identity politics and Nazism. What McGowan insists identity politics really refers to does not, it seems, actually capture how the term is used by anyone other than the very specific kind of person that McGowan wishes into existence out of a hope that he has someone to criticise.
Not really worth much, unfortunately.
Disappointing.
McGowan's vastly under-researched and poorly theorised attempt at presenting a critique of contemporary identity politics not only fails to fully capture the nuanced dynamics of identity discourse, but overly relies upon lazy (and conceptually confused) comparisons between identity politics and Nazism. What McGowan insists identity politics really refers to does not, it seems, actually capture how the term is used by anyone other than the very specific kind of person that McGowan wishes into existence out of a hope that he has someone to criticise.
Not really worth much, unfortunately.
Disappointing.
January 1, 2021
Recommended if you are confused about things in general today.provides a really good framework for thinking about social movements at a time where things may seem hopeless even if there are some minor aspects of the criticism that i do not agree with
May 14, 2023
"Identity is an obstacle to overcome rather than a foundation from which to base one's politics." McGowan makes a compelling and provocative argument that the only true/universal form of "inclusion and belonging" is universal non-belonging through the recognition that we are all lacking subjects.
February 24, 2021
"Without the universal, there is no politics. Universality provides us a politics without an enemy because it deprives us of our own illusion of belonging."
June 15, 2024
Starts off good, then it feels like its repeating itself, then picks up again. McGowan is a good writer with a good understanding of contradiction.
June 29, 2024
Lots of interesting components to this but I don't think the concept of universality here maps very well to Hegel.
August 2, 2024
like other mcgowan books, i think it is a little too loose with definitions. black lives matter becomes universal and all lives matter particular. its almost more interesting to read this book from a literary perspective, observing how concepts are stretched and redefined to fit his arguments.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews