Anti-Universalist Politics

Anti-Universalist Politics, as theorized by McGowan in Universality and Identity Politics, names the structural logic operative in Nazism whereby the political target of persecution is not a particular ethnic or cultural identity per se, but rather the figure of universality itself. The argument inverts the common historiographical framing: Nazism did not attack Jews and communists because of what they were as particular groups, but because of what they represented — namely, universalist claims that cut across and threatened to dissolve particularist, nationalist, identitarian closure. The Holocaust, on this reading, is not primarily a crime against a particular people but a crime against universality as such, and to reduce it to ethnic persecution is to misidentify the structural grammar of its violence.

This misidentification is not innocent. McGowan's theoretical move is that popular and historiographical accounts that frame the Holocaust as "an ethical horror, not an anti-universalist political one" perform a depoliticization: they strip the event of its structural logic and thereby obscure the continuity between Nazi identitarianism and contemporary forms of identity politics. Both, McGowan implies, share the same anti-universalist architecture — the elevation of particular identity over universalist solidarity. To understand Nazism only as ethnic hatred is therefore to miss the very mechanism that makes its recurrence structurally possible in new forms.

Anti-Universalist Politics appears in todd-mcgowan-universality-and-identity-politics-columbia-university-press (p.98) and is intelligible only against the backdrop of McGowan's broader project of rehabilitating universality as an emancipatory category. In relation to the cross-referenced concept of Universality, Anti-Universalist Politics names the negative political form — the systematic assault on universality — that gives universality its stakes. In relation to Particularism, it is a specification: where particularism is the general tendency to privilege the specific and bounded over the universal, Anti-Universalist Politics is its most extreme and lethal political instantiation, one that mobilizes state violence precisely against those who embody or advocate universalist claims.

The concept also engages critically with Ideology and Depoliticization. McGowan's argument is that dominant ideological accounts of Nazism are themselves ideologically operative: by framing the Holocaust as ethnic horror rather than political horror, they perform a depoliticization (stripping the event of its structural political logic) that is structurally continuous with the very identitarian ideology they ostensibly condemn. Fantasy is implicitly at work here too: the fantasy of ethnic belonging and particularist wholeness is exactly what Nazism mobilized against the threat of universality, and Identity in McGowan's framework functions as an ideological product — an "image of wholeness" — that occludes the constitutive self-division of the subject. Anti-Universalist Politics thus functions as the concept that ties together the political, ideological, and fantasmatic dimensions of the corpus's critique of identity politics, by locating their most catastrophic historical expression in the Nazi project.

Universality and Identity PoliticsTodd McGowan · 2020 (p.98)

The Holocaust was an ethical horror, not an anti-universalist political one.

The quote is theoretically loaded precisely because of what it attributes to dominant discourse: by calling the Holocaust "an ethical horror" rather than "an anti-universalist political one," it names the depoliticizing move that erases the structural logic of the persecution — the distinction between "ethical" (a register of moral condemnation of acts against persons) and "political" (a register of structural antagonism between universality and particularism) is the hinge on which McGowan's entire argument turns.