Universality and Identity Politics Quotes

“Freedom emerges out of an unconscious desire that doesn’t jibe with social demands, not in our free will. Acts of freedom do not occur when I consciously weigh the options and make a decision to revolt but when I feel that I cannot do otherwise and act in accordance with my unconscious drive. This is the paradox of freedom and the result of its origin in what we lack rather than what we have (our conscious will).

The universality of this internal distance in all subjects marks their freedom from total coercion. If the demands of the social order and the responses of the individual subject lined up perfectly, there would be no space for universal freedom.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“The appeal to identity is capitalism’s secret sauce.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Capitalism depends on individuals immersing themselves entirely in their own particular concerns. When they do so, they unknowingly betray their investment in the capitalist structuring principle. Individuals display their devotion to capitalism not by openly proclaiming it but by retreating into their isolated particularity. This paradoxical structure gives capitalism its uniqueness as a socioeconomic system. It perpetuates itself in a way no other previous socioeconomic system could. In the capitalist epoch, the more disconnected you feel, the more involved you are. This is why the supposedly radical position of “Turn on, tune in, drop out” did nothing to upset the development of capitalism. The more one drops out, the more one plays the part of the capitalist subject. Dropping out is simply turning a blind eye to the commodity form without challenging its dominance. Blindness to the structuring principle that capitalism produces also leads to its proclivity for provoking unprecedented historical catastrophes.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“The capitalist epoch is the first in human history that permits individuals to view themselves as isolated entities with no inherent connection to their fellow beings.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Nazism is not dangerous because it proffers a universal system that threatens to engulf the whole world but because it refuses to think universally. Its efforts at world conquest stem from its lack of universality, not an abundance of it.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“When we proffer the narrative that Nazism was an apolitical evil and that it exterminated on the basis of race rather than politics, we cede too much ground to Nazism. The fundamental aim of Nazism was the elimination of any reference to the universal and the creation of a terrain on which particular identities struggle against each other for domination (which, they believed, would allow for Aryan identity to triumph due to its superior strength). To accept that the Nazi war on the Jews was a purely a racial one is to accept how the Nazis understood themselves. Though Nazis portrayed their fight against the Jews as a racial one, we shouldn’t believe them.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“The genocide of the Jews was a central Nazi project. But this project emerged not out of Nazism’s pure evil but out of its specific identitiarian political philosophy.14 It was the result of identity politics. The attempt to assert the privilege of Aryan identity requires the Nazis to have an enemy, but not just any enemy. Nazism doesn’t target the Jews because of Hitler’s personal proclivity or Germany’s long history of anti-Semitism (though this history undoubtedly makes it easier to convince everyday Germans to participate). It targets the Jews because, in the Nazi fantasy, they represent political universality, the contrary of Nazi particular identity. In the Nazi account, the fact that Marx was a Jew is not a coincidence.15 It is absolutely crucial. The universal struggle of the communists is a Jewish struggle because Jews have no race of their own and thus are inherently universalist.16 The fact that there were Jews among the ruling elites in the Soviet Union is a handy contingency that provides, for the Nazis, confirmation of their fantasy. Exiling, detaining, and killing Jews is thus a thoroughgoing political action for the Nazis.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Universals bring us together not by imposing a common structure on us but by revealing that we share what we don’t have and can never have. The fact that no one can have a universal—no one possesses freedom or equality—is the source of their emancipatory quality. Universals are not possessions to have or lose or give away. We don’t have to be suspicious of the universals because no one can ever impose them on us, even if someone wanted to.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“All social hierarchies depend on our collective belief in them. Simply by collectively disbelieving in someone’s importance, we can cause this importance to vanish, which reveals the universal equality that becomes evident through the lack of belonging.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Nonbelonging manifests itself in each subject as the unconscious. To have an unconscious means that I can’t belong to myself, that I can never be completely identical with what I am. The gap that prevents the social order from completing itself intrudes in me by installing a gap between what I will and how I desire, a gap that psychoanalysis calls the unconscious. As speaking beings with an unconscious, our unconscious desire is at odds with our conscious will. I will to limit my caloric intake every day in order to keep fit, but my unconscious desire leads me to eat a Twinkie after dinner and sabotage my diet. Unfortunately, my will to diet is not an act of freedom, but the sabotage is.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“We universally fail to fit in, and this universal failure is the basis of our freedom from social determination. Even the most authoritarian society cannot eviscerate the freedom that exists as a result of its inability to integrate individuals into its order with complete success. No matter how strongly social forces act on us, we cannot simply obey without an unconscious supplement to this obedience that undermines it in some way, which is why the Stalinist Soviet Union required special sites for those who didn’t go along. The gulag exists because universal freedom pervades mass indoctrination as a structuring absence. This absence owes its existence to the unconscious that throws the individual out of joint with itself. If there were no unconscious, there would be no freedom, even though we assume that the unconscious, because it involves what we don’t consciously will, is the site of our unfreedom.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“No society can include us without simultaneously alienating us from it. My belonging in a society always breaks down, which enables me to turn against this society when it takes a direction that I cannot accept. This is why I am free. Freedom is not a value of belonging, of being a member of a free society. Freedom becomes apparent as a value when we experience our nonbelonging, a nonbelonging that is universal because it applies to everyone, even those who most feel like they fit in.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Universality is the nonbelonging that becomes evident when a structure runs up against an external barrier as it strives to reproduce itself.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“For the conservative or the liberal, the collective is always on the verge of collapsing. This is because the universal that holds it together—a collective link always requires a universal—is constructed rather than constitutive. As a result, conservatives constantly try to secure it through appeals to national or ethnic identity that would create collectivity through exclusion. Conservative politics has its basis in the opposition between friend and enemy because this is the only way for the conservative to secure a collective bond. Liberals suffer from the same tenuousness but avoid the divisiveness that conservatives use. Instead, liberals advocate forging the connection through difference. For them, the negotiation of differences can be the source of our bond.

For the leftist or the proponent of emancipation, the situation is altogether different. Universality is the condition of possibility for particulars. It plays a constitutive role relative to its particulars. As a result, the collective link established through the universal forms an indissoluble connection. The universal is not a foreign outsider but an intimate point at which each particular finds itself lacking. Through this lack, the universal holds the series of particulars together even when they themselves do not register the connection.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Plato's distinction between lovers of opinion and philosophers is a distinction between those who embrace present particulars just as they self-evidently are and those who instead recognize absent universals as what makes particulars into what they are. The implicit link between philosophy and emancipation is clear here. Emancipation is nothing if not the refusal to rest content with what is merely present.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Given the individual point of departure, conservatism necessarily has an inherent suspicion of the collective. Since the individual comes first the collective necessarily performs some violence on the individual when it subsumes the individual, unless that collective has its basis in a particular identity, like that of the nation or the religious group. Conservatives have no problems at all with nationalist collectivity because it ensures their particularity through the exclusion of everyone who does not have the proper national identity. Religious collectivity functions similarly. Collectivity exists for the conservative, but always with clear borders. It is not universal.
For the Left, in contrast, one starts with universals and recognizes that particulars have their existence through the universal. There is a fundamental bond that provides the basis for commitment to the collective deriving from the very structure of signification itself. Signification is a universalizing structure that does not rely on exclusions. In this conception, universality precedes particularity. And if universality comes first, the bond between subjects is intrinsic rather than extrinsic: it doesn't require a particular identity held in common. We are connected through how e relate to the universality of the signifying structure.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Conservatism depends on beginning with a series of particulars and then forming universals from the intersections of those particulars. The same holds for liberalism, which is why liberalism is not epistemologically different from conservatism. Both see universality not as a starting point, but as something that derives from individuals coming together. The Leftist proponent of emancipatory politics, in contrast, sees universality as the starting point and derives the particular from the universal.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“If we completely divorce epistemology from politics, we lose sight of the nature of the political opposition. If we think about the opposition between Right and Left as the opposition between particular and universal, it is clear that the struggle is epistemological as much as it is political.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“An actual turn to universality requires a break from conservatism and even from liberalism.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Identity, no matter if it seems intrinsic (like race and seuxality) or the result of a conscious choice (like club membership and religious affiliation), is always rooted in the social recognition that sustains it. The most private form of identity has its origin in the given social possibilities. Identity politics hides the alienating quality of all identity and thus has an ideological function.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Capitalism engenders identity politics. It does so by stripping away the content of all particular identity by imposing the commodity form on every particularity. This commodity form is not a universal but an empty form that necessitates total conformity.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“The universal is what particulars share not having.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“The theoretical attempt to avoid colluding with totalitarianism has created a situation in which we have lost the thread of universal emancipation.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“The universal is what the ruling order doesn't have, not what it does have. In this way, it is always on the side of those fighting on behalf of freedom and equality because they are what is missing, not what is manifested.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“The fight against colonialism is a fight to recognize the universal equality and freedom that colonialism renders invisible. It is not a fight to preserve the particularity of a local culture that European colonialism wiped out.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“By giving up the feminine as an identity, the feminist simultaneously undermines the masculine as well. Masculine identity depends on its feminine counterpart that affirms it as its complementary other. Without this support, masculine identity collapses. This is why the feminist struggle against feminine identity Beauvoir advocates is a battle against patriarchy.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Rather than asserting an essence of femininity that society must value and protect, Beauvoir's move here is the opposite: she wants to demolish feminine identity in order to assert women's participation in universality. Identity is an obstacle to overcome rather than a foundation from which to base one's politics. Clinging to a particular identity cannot possibly be the source of emancipation since it clearly functions as the driving force for female subjugation.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“The clear argument of Capital and Marx's other major works is that particularity or the celebration of particular identity actually strengthens capitalism and its control over one's existence. Freedom, if it is seen and pursued as a purely particular struggle, nourishes capitalism. The more we imagine ourselves as identical to our particular identity, the more we see ourselves as isolated subjects, which is what capitalism requires. Capitalist subjects see themselves as isolated monads, and identification with one's particularity produces this sense of isolation. It is only when freedom becomes a struggle for universal freedom that is challenges the capitalist behemoth.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“Identity is how I want others to see me and thus always involves a capitulation to one form of social authority or another. Despite the feeling that we really are this identity, it is not the product of our freedom. It is a capitulation to the dictates of the social order. We do not make ourselves who we are, but social and natural determinations structure our identity.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics

“We do not spontaneously produce our identity from our own free act. Identity has an external origin.”
― Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics