Universal Solidarity

Universal Solidarity names the structural bond that obtains between all subjects by virtue of their shared lack, not by virtue of any positive property, shared interest, or cultural commonality. McGowan's argument (in todd-mcgowan-universality-and-identity-politics-columbia-university-press) turns on the premise that no subject ever fully belongs — to a community, an identity, a social position — because the subject is constitutively structured by a gap, a nonbelonging that is irreducible. This ontological condition of lack is not distributed unevenly across the social field; it is, strictly speaking, universal. Social hierarchies and wealth function as masks — ideological coverings — that render this shared condition invisible by producing the appearance of differential worth and belonging. Universal Solidarity names what is revealed when those masks slip: a solidarity grounded not in what subjects share positively but in what is equally missing from all of them.

This concept is therefore not sentimental or ethical in its primary register but structural and ontological. It cannot exclude anyone precisely because it is anchored in the universal condition of the barred subject ($): to be a subject is already to be in solidarity with every other subject, because every subject is equally not-whole, equally lacking, equally dispossessed of the complete identity that ideology promises. Crisis moments — when ideological coverings are momentarily stripped away — make this pre-existing structural solidarity visible, but they do not produce it. It is always already there as the underside of social hierarchy.

Universal Solidarity sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts in todd-mcgowan-universality-and-identity-politics-columbia-university-press. It is most directly a specification of Universal Nonbelonging: if no subject belongs (the universal condition established by the canonical account of the subject as barred), then all subjects share that non-belonging — and this sharing is precisely what Universal Solidarity names. The move is to take the negative universality of lack and derive from it a positive (if paradoxical) political consequence: a bond that is all the stronger for being grounded in nothing positive.

It is equally positioned against Particularism and Identity: both of these, in McGowan's framework, are ideological formations that obscure the solidarity already in place. Identity politics, by insisting on differential particularity, reproduces the mystification that hierarchy depends upon, while Universal Solidarity cuts beneath that mystification to the structural truth of the Subject (the barred $) and Lack (manque-à-être). The concept also implicitly critiques Ideology in the Lacanian-Žižekian sense: the ideological function of social status is precisely to cover over the universal lack, and Universal Solidarity is what ideology must suppress in order to maintain the fiction that some subjects are more whole, more belonging, more complete than others. In this sense, Universal Solidarity operates as the latent content that ideology — and particularly capitalist ideology with its differential promises of fulfillment — is structurally organized to conceal.

Universality and Identity PoliticsTodd McGowan · 2020 (p.68)

The lacking subject exists in a relationship of inherent universal solidarity with all others. Although social hierarchies and cultural differences may obscure the fact of this solidarity, it nonetheless exists universally.

The phrase "inherent universal solidarity" is theoretically loaded because "inherent" marks this solidarity as structural and ontological — not achieved, chosen, or constructed — while "universal" signals that it admits of no exception, echoing the Lacanian/Hegelian stakes of a universality grounded in the subject's constitutive lack rather than in any shared positive content. The juxtaposition with "social hierarchies and cultural differences" performs the ideological critique: those differences are real but secondary, covers over the more fundamental condition named by "the lacking subject."