Universality and Freedom

McGowan's concept of "Universality and Freedom" reframes what universality means by locating it not in any shared positive content, norm, or identity, but in the structural inability of any social order to fully assimilate all of its members. Every form of social organization produces an internal limit — a constitutive non-belonging — that cannot be absorbed or eliminated. This failure is not a defect of particular regimes but a structural feature of all social organization as such; it is what Lacan's framework would recognize as the gap inherent in the symbolic order, the S(Ø), the incompleteness that no master signifier can suture. Freedom, on this account, is not a positive attribute granted by a particular social arrangement but the universal condition of every subject insofar as every subject is constituted through this same structural non-belonging.

The subjective correlate of this universal non-belonging is the unconscious. Because no subject is fully interpellated — because alienation, as the entry into the signifying chain, always leaves a remainder that the chain cannot represent — every subject retains an unassimilable kernel. This is not a romantic reserve of inner freedom but a structural effect: the "inability of any form of mastery, no matter how despotic, to be complete" is simply another name for the gap that Lacanian theory identifies as the condition of both desire and the subject itself. Freedom, then, is universal in a strictly formal sense: it is the shared way of relating to that internal limit, the constitutive failure of total domination. McGowan thus inverts the standard liberal critique of universality — rather than universality being a mask for a dominant particular, it is grounded in the very failure that every particular social order shares.

This concept appears in todd-mcgowan-universality-and-identity-politics-columbia-university-press (p.62) and is central to McGowan's broader argument that universality can be rehabilitated for emancipatory politics. It directly extends and applies the canonical concept of the Gap: as the Gap synthesis notes, post-Lacanian commentators including McGowan argue that the gap is "the locus of emancipatory universality (what interrupts any social order from within)." Here McGowan specifies that thesis — the gap's political valence is precisely freedom, understood not as a liberal possession but as the structural condition of incompleteness that all subjects share. The concept is equally anchored in Alienation: because alienation is permanent and irremediable (the subject can never be fully represented in the signifying chain), no social order can achieve total mastery, and this irremediability is the foundation of freedom. Ideology and Fantasy are implicitly in play as well: if ideology and fantasy function by papering over the constitutive gap, then freedom names the persistence of that gap despite ideological suturing. Desire is the subjective motor that keeps circling the gap, while Identity is precisely what the concept critiques — freedom cannot be grounded in any particular identity without becoming exclusionary.

The concept functions as a specification and political application of the Internal Limit: it takes the Lacanian observation that no symbolic order can close over itself and draws from it a positive political consequence — that this inclosability is the universal ground of equality and freedom. It is therefore an extension rather than a critique of the canonical concepts, mobilizing their structural logic for a theory of emancipation that does not depend on any shared positive content.

Universality and Identity PoliticsTodd McGowan · 2020 (p.62)

This shared way of relating to the universal can be seen as the basis of freedom... freedom is universal across every type of social order. The basis for this universal freedom is the inability of any form of mastery, no matter how despotic, to be complete.

The phrase "inability of any form of mastery, no matter how despotic, to be complete" is theoretically loaded because it redefines freedom negatively and structurally — not as a positive right or capacity, but as the constitutive incompleteness of mastery itself; and the word "universal" is doing double work, naming both the scope (every social order) and the Lacanian structural logic (the universal as grounded in its own exception or failure, the internal limit).