Solidarity Through Nonbelonging

Solidarity Through Nonbelonging names McGowan's concept of a universalist political solidarity grounded not in shared identity, positive community, or collective belonging, but in the structural lack that every particular position shares. The key move is ontological: universality is not the sum or the accommodation of all particular identities but rather what all particulars lack — the void at the center of every subject position. Because no subject fully belongs to any symbolic category, the only genuinely universal solidarity is one organized around this shared absence. To fight for the particular — as Black Lives Matter does when it names a specific site of inequality — is therefore paradoxically more universal than the colorblind "All Lives Matter" formulation, which pretends that particularity has already been overcome and thereby forecloses the Real antagonism that makes solidarity necessary in the first place.

This concept is structurally anti-additive. It refuses the liberal fantasy that universality is achieved by expanding the circle of belonging until everyone is included. Instead, it insists that the condition of possibility for any genuine solidarity is the acknowledgment that belonging itself is always incomplete, always marked by lack. In Lacanian terms, this is the difference between an imaginary universality (which merely aggregates particulars and papers over their constitutive gaps) and a symbolic or Real universality (which passes through the negation of imaginary fullness). The political consequence is that solidarity built on claimed belonging is fragile and exclusionary — it requires the nonbelonging of some as its constitutive outside — whereas solidarity built on the recognition of universal nonbelonging has no remainder to expel.

This concept appears in todd-mcgowan-universality-and-identity-politics-columbia-university-press (p.187) and functions as the political payoff of McGowan's entire argument about universality and lack. It is directly anchored in the cross-referenced concept of Lack: because every subject position is constitutively incomplete, solidarity can only be genuine when it is organized around that shared incompleteness rather than around positive, imaginary identity. It extends and specifies the canonical concept of Ideology by diagnosing "All Lives Matter" as an ideological operation — specifically a fetishistic disavowal (Fetishistic Disavowal) that claims to know the universal while refusing to acknowledge the concrete antagonism that makes universality impossible to simply declare. The "colorblind" gesture enacts what the cross-referenced Colorblind Racism names: the pretense that particularity has been transcended, which functions to protect existing hierarchies.

The concept also carries the trace of Singularity and Particularism: McGowan's argument is that the singular, particular site of struggle (anti-Black violence) is the only access point to genuine universality, not a retreat into particularism. This mirrors the Lacanian principle — legible across the Fantasy and Hysteria entries — that the subject reaches the universal only by passing through, not bypassing, its constitutive division and lack. Whereas Fantasy covers the void of the subject's nonbelonging with a structured fiction of coherent identity, Solidarity Through Nonbelonging demands the traversal of that fantasy: acknowledging the void rather than papering over it. In this sense the concept is a political-theoretical application of the logic of traversing the fantasy, translated from clinical into collective terrain.

Universality and Identity PoliticsTodd McGowan · 2020 (p.187)

the solidarity organized around a shared absence does not necessitate the nonbelonging of some because it accepts that no one really belongs. We can discover universal solidarity only through what doesn't belong, not through the act of belonging.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it pivots on two opposing structures: "shared absence" versus "the act of belonging." "Shared absence" names the Lacanian lack as the only authentic universal — a negative universal rather than a positive one — while "the act of belonging" names the imaginary operation that ideology uses to produce false universality. The phrase "no one really belongs" radicalizes the argument by making nonbelonging ontologically total, removing any residue of imaginary wholeness and grounding solidarity entirely in the Real of the void.