Identitarian Struggle

Identitarian struggle, as McGowan theorizes it in todd-mcgowan-universality-and-identity-politics-columbia-university-press, names the specific political form produced when a particular group's emancipatory effort is structurally organized around the figure of an enemy — an opposing particularity whose existence is not merely opposed but is constitutively required. Unlike universalist emancipatory struggle, which has no fixed enemy (its opponents are always potential converts, never necessary antagonists), identitarian struggle depends on the persistence of its enemy as a structural support: the enemy functions not merely as an obstacle to be overcome but as the very prop that gives the identitarian movement its coherence, its boundaries, and its reason for being. This is not a contingent tactical choice but a structural necessity — without the enemy, the identitarian formation would lose its defining coordinates.

The psychoanalytic ground for this critique is Freud's theory of the drive and desire, properly read against Freud's own ideological blind spots. Identitarian struggle, in McGowan's account, reproduces at the political level the logic of the imaginary dyad: the group's identity is constituted through its mirrored opposition to an enemy other, making the antagonism something closer to a libidinal attachment than a genuine political opposition. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that the ego's unity is always borrowed from an external, inverted image (alienation in the imaginary register) — the enemy-other provides the negative image against which the identitarian subject coheres. Emancipatory universality, by contrast, would require working through lack rather than projecting it onto an enemy, grounding political struggle in the structural incompleteness shared by all subjects rather than in the particular difference of a targeted antagonist.

Within todd-mcgowan-universality-and-identity-politics-columbia-university-press, the concept of identitarian struggle operates as the foil against which McGowan defines genuine, universalist emancipatory politics. The argument pivots on the distinction between a politics grounded in particularity — one that requires an enemy as its structural support — and a politics grounded in the universality of lack, desire, and the drive. Identitarian struggle is thus a specification of Particularism (cross-referenced but not fully synthesized here) and a symptom of the failure to reckon with Lack at the political level: because the identitarian formation cannot tolerate the constitutive gap in its own identity, it externalizes that gap onto an enemy-other, making lack appear as a property of the antagonist rather than as a structural feature of all subjects. This connects directly to the Lacanian account of Alienation: identitarian politics re-enacts the imaginary register of alienation, where the subject's unity depends on an external, inverted image — here, the enemy's image functions as the negative pole that holds the group together.

The concept also bears on Ideology and Desire. Ideologically, identitarian struggle operates through a fantasmatic supplement — the enemy — that papers over the constitutive antagonism within the group's own identity, producing a false wholeness. This maps onto the Žižekian diagnosis that fantasy covers over constitutive social antagonism. In terms of Desire, the enemy functions structurally like the objet petit a: it is never simply a real opponent but a placeholder for the lack that desire endlessly circles without reaching. The Drive is implicitly at stake too: the struggle loops around its enemy in a way that generates its own satisfaction not in defeating the enemy but in the circularity of the struggle itself. McGowan's theoretical move is to show that Freud's own concepts — properly freed from Freud's naturalist ideology — supply the resources to diagnose and surpass this identitarian logic, pointing toward a politics that affirms rather than disavows the Unconscious truth of shared structural incompleteness.

Universality and Identity PoliticsTodd McGowan · 2020 (page unknown)

These identitarian struggles would be impossible without the enemy to prop them up.

The phrase "to prop them up" is theoretically decisive: it frames the enemy not as an external obstacle but as a structural support — a prop — without which the identitarian formation would collapse, revealing that the enemy is not merely opposed but libidinally required, making the struggle's apparent antagonism a form of dependency. The verb "prop" also resonates with the Lacanian concept of Anlehnung (anaclisis/propping), the way that the drive leans on biological need — here, identitarian struggle "leans on" its enemy in an analogous structural fashion.