Secondary literature 2020

Universality and Identity Politics

Todd McGowan

by Todd McGowan

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Synopsis

Todd McGowan's Universality and Identity Politics (Columbia University Press, 2020) mounts a systematic philosophical and political argument that the contemporary Left has catastrophically abandoned universality in favor of particularist identity politics, and that this abandonment — rather than the dangers of universalism itself — is the true cause of the Left's political failures and the Right's ascendance. McGowan's central claim is that universality is not an oppressive imposition of homogeneity but rather a constitutive absence or structural lack — the point at which every particular fails to be self-sufficient — and that this absent universality is the only genuine ground for emancipatory politics. Working through Kant, Marx, Beauvoir, and Fanon as avatars of the universalist tradition, and against Derrida, Foucault, Laclau, and Butler as representatives of the particularist turn, McGowan argues that the Left's epistemological embrace of the particular as prior to the universal is not just a theoretical error but a political capitulation to conservative and capitalist logic. The book reinterprets the twentieth century's great catastrophes — Nazism and Stalinism — not as crimes of universality but as a crime of reactionary particularism (Nazism) and a misconceived, possessable universality (Stalinism), thereby dismantling the post-war theoretical consensus that made particularity seem emancipatory. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis — especially the structural role of lack, jouissance, and alienation — McGowan reframes singularity as what emerges from alienation from particularity rather than from investment in it, and capitalism as the system that structurally enforces bare particularity while obscuring its own organizing principle (the commodity form). The book concludes by distinguishing genuine universalist struggles (Black Lives Matter, marriage equality, anti-racism) from identity politics proper, and insisting that without reclaiming universality as constitutive absence, politics devolves into endless competition between particular camps — the very condition that makes right-wing populism inevitable.

Distinctive contribution

McGowan's book makes a contribution that is rare in the Lacanian secondary literature: it applies the structural logic of lack — typically deployed in film theory, ethics, or clinical theory — directly and systematically to the political question of universality versus particularity, and does so as a polemic intervention into live debates about identity politics, the Left-Right divide, and capitalism. Where most Lacanian political theory (e.g., Žižek) tends to operate at the level of ideological critique or event-logic, McGowan builds a sustained epistemological and ontological argument that universality as constitutive absence is the only coherent foundation for emancipatory politics — not merely one option among others. The book is thus simultaneously a work of Lacanian ontology, political philosophy, and engaged political critique.

Equally distinctive is McGowan's inversion of the received post-war theoretical consensus. Against the widely shared view — running from Adorno through Foucault to Laclau and Butler — that Nazism and Stalinism demonstrate the lethal danger of universality, McGowan argues with care and historical detail that Nazism was paradigmatically identitarian (targeting Jews and communists as representatives of universality) and that Stalinism erred not by being too universal but by treating universality as a realizable possession rather than a structural absence. This double reinterpretation clears the ground for recovering universality as a Left concept, and it does so by engaging the actual archive of Nazi ideology (Mein Kampf, Goebbels) and historiography (Snyder, Hilberg, Lanzmann) rather than by purely abstract argument.

Finally, the book offers something the corpus lacks: a sustained, chapter-length account of how capitalism's commodity form structurally produces the empty particular subject for whom identity politics becomes the compensatory supplement. By linking the Marxian analysis of the commodity form to the Lacanian logic of the subject's constitutive lack, McGowan argues that identity politics and capitalism are not accidental allies but structurally interdependent — a claim developed with analytic rigor and illustrated through concrete socioeconomic examples (unemployment, capital accumulation, the reserve army of labor) that are unusual in Lacanian secondary scholarship.

Main themes

Universality as constitutive absence rather than positive content
The epistemological stakes of Left vs. Right politics (Plato vs. Aristotle)
Identity politics as structurally reactionary and self-defeating
Capitalism's commodity form as producer of empty particular subjectivity
Reinterpretation of Nazism as identity politics rather than universalism
Reinterpretation of Stalinism as misconceived universality rather than excess of it
Alienation from particularity as the path to singularity and emancipation
The jouissance of exclusion as the libidinal motor of identitarian politics
Distinguishing genuine universalist struggles (BLM, marriage equality) from recognition politics
Climate change and the necessity of universalist epistemology

Chapter outline

Introduction: Finding Universality — p.1-27
Chapter 1: Our Particular Age — p.29-57
Chapter 2: The Importance of Being Absent — p.59-87
Chapter 3: Universal Villains — p.89-117
Chapter 4: Capitalism's Lack and Its Discontents — p.119-148
Chapter 5: This Is Identity Politics — p.149-175
Chapter 6: This Is Not Identity Politics — p.177-205
Conclusion: Avoiding the Worst — p.207-212

Chapter summaries

Introduction: Finding Universality (p.1-27)

The introduction opens by documenting the gap between modernity's promise of universal emancipation — freedom, equality, and solidarity as proclaimed in the French Revolution — and the rampant inequality that persists in the contemporary world. McGowan's diagnostic observation is that what distinguishes the present epoch is not simply this inequality but the collapse of universality as a live political project: rather than fighting inequality with a program of universal equality, contemporary politics has fragmented into struggles for recognition by particular groups, without ever naming the equality that would constitute justice.

The introduction then traces the tradition of universalist emancipatory thought through Kant, Marx, Beauvoir, and Fanon, arguing that what unites these otherwise diverse thinkers is their shared conviction that universality is liberating while particular identity represents an ideological trap. Kant's critique of heteronomy — identity as externally imposed and therefore the site of unfreedom — is paired with Marx's argument that particular identity strengthens capitalism, and with Beauvoir and Fanon's extensions of the universalist framework to women and colonized peoples. McGowan argues that these thinkers' personal failures (racial and gender prejudices) represent particular failings that can only be criticized from the vantage point of the universalist principles they themselves articulated.

The introduction also identifies the historical turning point: the post-WWII theoretical reversal in which universality came to seem oppressive and particularity came to seem liberatory. Derrida's deconstruction is offered as the paradigmatic instance of this reversal — the attempt to reveal universality as disguised particularity, and to liberate through the highlighting of difference. McGowan insists this reversal is a catastrophic political error: to affirm particular identity as the site of emancipation is to place an unnecessary barrier in the way of collective political struggle and to give up on the possibility that emancipation must occur for everyone to be genuine emancipation at all.

Key concepts: Universality, Particularity, Emancipatory Politics, Ideology, Identity, Alienation Notable examples: French Revolution; Derrida's 'White Mythology'; Congo child labor / Vietnam wages (opening inventory of inequality)

Chapter 1: Our Particular Age (p.29-57)

Chapter 1 opens with a critique of the dominant image of politics as tribal warfare between competing particular groups. McGowan argues that this image is itself thoroughly ideological — it is the conservative picture of things, because it frames struggle as between rival particulars and leaves no place for universality as a genuine starting point. The chapter's central move is to establish that the distinction between Left and Right is fundamentally epistemological: leftists start from universality and derive the particular from it, while conservatives (and, McGowan argues, liberals) start from particulars and construct universals derivatively. This epistemological claim is also a political one — any epistemology that takes the particular as prior necessarily tends toward authoritarian protection of the particular or Hobbesian anarchism.

McGowan reads Plato and Aristotle as the paradigmatic philosophical expressions of Left and Right respectively. Plato's universals — absent, non-instantiable ideals — represent an epistemology that is genuinely leftist because it preserves universality as something that cannot be captured in any particular. Aristotle's instantiation of the universal in the particular strips universality of its transformative power by reducing it to the present. The chapter then argues that the contemporary Left has betrayed its natural epistemological home by following Laclau and Butler into a nominalist or constructivist relationship to the universal, treating universals as names or constructs derived from the negotiation of particulars.

The Haitian Revolution is adduced as the strongest historical demonstration of genuine universality in politics: when Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian slaves revolted singing the anthems of the French Revolution, they showed that freedom, equality, and solidarity are not particular to Europe but were discovered there — and that they are genuinely universal because they can be discovered anywhere and are present nowhere as a positivity. The chapter culminates in the formal argument that universality cannot be reached by aggregating particulars — no inclusion can ever be total, as the failures of the US Census and pronoun inclusivity demonstrate — and that genuine universality must be posited as an absent starting point, not constructed by addition.

Key concepts: Universality, Particularity, Ideology, Dialectics, Lack, Emancipatory Politics Notable examples: Haitian Revolution / Toussaint Louverture; Plato vs. Aristotle; US Census racial categories; Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation (2016); Laclau and Butler in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality

Chapter 2: The Importance of Being Absent (p.59-87)

This chapter provides the ontological core of McGowan's argument. Against the common understanding that universality is what dominates and imposes its stamp on particulars, McGowan argues that universality is located precisely in the failure of social determination — in the point that doesn't fit within a structure, which is the structure's necessary stumbling block. The universal is not the successful whole but the barrier that drives the structure to reproduce itself; it is the internal limit that expresses itself through apparently external obstacles. The universal is, in the precise Lacanian sense, what is constitutively absent from every social order.

McGowan works through this ontological claim via the concept of nonbelonging: the universal is the shared lack, the equal nonbelonging that social hierarchies and wealth obscure. Solidarity is not a positive bond of common identity but the universal value that becomes visible precisely when apparent belonging collapses (as in economic crashes or social crises). Freedom, when properly understood, is not the successful imposition of a particular form of life (as in Bush's Iraq War, which McGowan reads as the imposition of American capitalist particularity in universal disguise) but what emerges from the failure of mastery — universal freedom as what no one can possess.

The chapter turns to the French Revolution as a case study in the betrayal of authentic universality. The Terror arose when the universality of nonbelonging was transformed into the dream of complete belonging — total inclusion — which inevitably required identifying those who betrayed the universal, and since everyone has an unconscious and therefore a point of non-belonging, everyone became guilty. This argument — that the attempt to fully realize universality as a structure of universal belonging generates despotism — is McGowan's key response to the charge that universalism leads to totalitarianism: it is not universalism per se but the attempt to possess or instantiate universality that becomes murderous. The chapter closes with a reading of Murakami's novels as literary figures of universality as shared internal blankness, and of love as grounded in the unknown blank spot within the other.

Key concepts: Universality, Lack, Alienation, Sublimation, Fantasy, Jouissance Notable examples: French Revolution / Reign of Terror; George W. Bush / Operation Iraqi Freedom; Kevin Spacey / social status; Murakami's Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Chapter 3: Universal Villains (p.89-117)

Chapter 3 is the book's most historically ambitious, arguing that the contemporary theoretical suspicion of universality has its origin in a fundamental misreading of Nazism and Stalinism. McGowan's claim is that these catastrophes were interpreted through the experience of their victims — for whom the structures felt like universal forces crushing particular individuals — rather than through structural analysis, producing the inverted conclusion that they were crimes of universality rather than crimes of particularity (Nazism) or of a distorted universality (Stalinism).

The chapter's reading of Nazism is its centerpiece. McGowan argues that Nazism targeted not merely Jews as a particular identity but, crucially, Jews and communists together — and that this conjunction reveals the political logic: both were perceived within Nazi ideology as representatives of universality. Communists openly avowed universal equality; Jews, within the Nazi fantasy structure, were a non-race, a universalist parasite without particular identity of their own. The Holocaust was thus fundamentally an anti-universalist project, not the expression of a universalizing violence. Popular representations (Hollywood, Spielberg's Indiana Jones films and Schindler's List) and theoretical accounts (Adorno's use of Auschwitz as synecdoche for modernity's industrial violence, Agamben's biopolitics, Arendt's totalitarianism) are read as unwittingly ratifying Nazism's posthumous ideological victory by depoliticizing it — rendering it as pure evil or natural danger rather than as a reactionary identitarian politics.

McGowan turns then to Stalinism, arguing that its crimes stem not from excess universality but from a misconception of universality as a realizable goal. Stalin's error was to believe that universal equality could be fully instantiated, and to combine this with a fantasy of total belonging — which inevitably required eliminating all who didn't fit. The chapter critiques Furet's characterization of communism as a 'pathology of the universal' and the broader Left's silent retreat from universalism after Stalin. Foucault is identified as both symptom and cause of this retreat: his particularism — the analysis of local power relations, the hostility to universal categories — provides the theoretical model for a leftism that has lost its universalist nerve, mistaking universality for domination rather than recognizing it as always-absent and therefore always on the side of emancipation.

Key concepts: Universality, Ideology, Particularism, Fetishistic Disavowal, Identification, Fantasy Notable examples: Nazi Holocaust / Auschwitz; Stalin / Soviet gulag; Spielberg's Schindler's List and Indiana Jones films; Lanzmann's Shoah; Adorno's 'To write poetry after Auschwitz'; Foucault's particularism; Snyder on Holocaust historiography

Chapter 4: Capitalism's Lack and Its Discontents (p.119-148)

Chapter 4 provides the book's Marxist-Lacanian political economy. McGowan argues that capitalism is the first socioeconomic system that produces subjects who understand themselves as isolated particulars with no inherent connection to others — and that this structural isolation, far from threatening capitalism, is its engine of perpetuation. The commodity form, which McGowan identifies as Marx's greatest theoretical discovery in Capital, operates not through explicit mastery (God, monarch) but through a structuring principle that subjects must serve while remaining unconscious of it: to be an effective capitalist subject, one must disavow knowledge of the capitalist whole and act purely from one's own particularity.

McGowan develops this through the concept of necessary deception: capitalism does not deceive subjects with false beliefs but at the level of who they are. Citing Adam Smith's own admission in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that real satisfaction from accumulation is 'in the highest degree contemptible and trifling,' McGowan argues that the capitalist drive to accumulate functions as a structural demand that converts individual dissatisfaction into perpetual accumulation. The chapter also analyzes structural unemployment as a product of capitalist logic (the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, the reserve army of labor) that ideological individualism renders legible only as personal moral failure, generating contempt for those who structurally occupy a required position.

The chapter then turns to the relationship between capitalism and identity. Capitalism leaves subjects with an empty particularity — the imprint of the commodity form without any content — because, unlike traditional societies (where identity derives from identification with a figure of mastery), capitalism is indifferent to particular identity. This empty subjectivity is precisely what makes identity politics so appealing: it provides a content for a particularity that capitalism has hollowed out. Identity politics is thus not an alternative to capitalist subjectivity but its compensatory supplement, one that misdirects opposition and obscures the commodity form as the true target of critique. The chapter also analyzes Marx's expectation that the working class, whose particularity is emptied most thoroughly, would become the revolutionary subject — and why the availability of consumer goods (Marcuse's diagnosis) partially derailed this by providing a partial content for working-class particularity.

Key concepts: Capitalism, Ideology, Surplus-jouissance, Alienation, Fetishistic Disavowal, Master Signifier, Discourse of the Master Notable examples: Marx, Capital and Grundrisse; Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments; NAIRU / structural unemployment; Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man; Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942)

Chapter 5: This Is Identity Politics (p.149-175)

Chapter 5 provides the book's critical anatomy of identity politics as such. McGowan argues that identity politics appeals by offering immediacy — political engagement that requires no alienation from what one already is — while presenting identity as something essential, neither purely chosen nor purely imposed, which causes subjects to mistake it for their singularity. But identity is always symbolic identity, the result of a forced choice between subjectivity and a symbolic position, and its appeal is sustained not by ideological deception alone but by the jouissance of exclusion: identity can only be enjoyed if someone is excluded from it, which is why national identity surges in the face of insult or war, and why the dream of peacefully coexisting particular identities is structurally impossible.

The chapter's central analytical move is to take Nazism as the paradigm of identity politics — not in order to equate all identity movements with Nazism, but because Nazism pushes identitarian logic to its endpoint and thereby reveals what is structurally at stake in more modest versions. McGowan reads Mein Kampf closely to demonstrate that Hitler explicitly acknowledges the necessity of the enemy to the constitution of identity: the external threat is not incidental but logically prior to the identity it appears to endanger. The Jew functions in Nazi ideology not primarily as a particular racial other but as the embodiment of universality itself — the rootless, non-racial, communist-aligned figure whose universality must be extirpated for German particularity to secure itself. Operation Barbarossa and the Final Solution thus both follow from the internal logic of Nazism's identitarian project.

The chapter closes by articulating what distinguishes universality from identity politics: whereas identity politics requires an enemy against which to define itself, universality has no enemy — only potential converts. This is illustrated through Saint Paul's proclamation in Galatians ('neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free') as the model of universalist politics: not the erasure of difference but the refusal to constitute an opposing enemy. Freud's theory of drive and desire is also adduced, with McGowan arguing that it provides psychoanalytic grounds for social equality that Freud himself failed to recognize when he naturalized inequality as grounded in libidinal difference.

Key concepts: Identity, Jouissance, Identification, Symbolic Identity, Splitting of the Subject, Fantasy, Universality, Particularism Notable examples: Hitler, Mein Kampf; Nazism / Operation Barbarossa / Final Solution; Saint Paul, Galatians 3:28; Blade Runner (1982); Canada-US trade conflict (2018)

Chapter 6: This Is Not Identity Politics (p.177-205)

Chapter 6 reverses the polemical direction of Chapter 5: if Nazism is the model for identity politics, many movements routinely labeled identity politics are in fact expressions of universalism in disguise. McGowan begins by arguing that conservative and liberal attacks on identity politics — from Arthur Schlesinger's The Disuniting of America to calls for colorblindness — themselves mask a particularist investment in a fantasy of unity that refuses to acknowledge the universal contradiction operative in any social order.

The chapter's most sustained example is Black Lives Matter, which McGowan defends as a genuinely universalist project: it does not fight for the recognition of black identity (it is not calling for proportionate black police representation, for instance) but for the elimination of racist structures that make equality impossible. The universality of Black Lives Matter is not additive ('All Lives Matter') but negative — it reveals the constitutive absence of equality by fighting at the site of its denial. The chapter also analyzes the marriage equality movement as a case of universalist intervention into a particular public institution: by revealing the nonbelonging of gay couples to that institution, activists made universality manifest and thereby transformed the institution's meaning for all. These arguments are developed through a reading of Disney's Zootopia as an allegory of the dialectic between multicultural tolerance (which conceals hidden political antagonism) and genuine universality (which can only be achieved when subjects abandon investment in identity).

The chapter concludes by distinguishing these universalist struggles from the politics of recognition and diversity — which McGowan argues should simply be abandoned rather than reinterpreted. Diversity in representation leaves the structures of inequality intact and transforms political struggle into a zero-sum game of inclusion. The chapter also extends the universalist argument to climate change, arguing that the climate crisis is not universal because it affects everyone but because it is the point of constitutive absence within every social order — the shared lack that no particular solution can address, requiring a genuinely universalist epistemological and political response.

Key concepts: Universality, Particularism, Ideology, Emancipatory Politics, Identification, The Act Notable examples: Black Lives Matter; Marriage equality movement; Zootopia (2016); Arthur Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America; Karen and Barbara Fields, Racecraft; Climate change / disaster film

Conclusion: Avoiding the Worst (p.207-212)

The conclusion synthesizes the book's argument as a warning: the prevailing form of politics — multiple particular identities fighting for their share of the collective — is not a neutral description of the political terrain but a symptom of a theoretical and political defeat. McGowan argues that as long as politics is imagined as competition between identities, right-wing populism will always have the structural advantage, because it is more skilled at mobilizing identitarian enjoyment. Defeating Trump or Le Pen within this framework only guarantees the emergence of more capable successors.

McGowan addresses the obvious objection — that regimes claiming universalism (the Terror, the gulag) have produced millions of corpses — by insisting that these were not crimes of universality but crimes of a universality misconceived as realizable and possessable. The Committee of Public Safety and the NKVD became murderous when they refused the structural necessity of lack and attempted to instantiate a fully realized, all-inclusive universality. The subsequent theoretical retreat to particular identity does not avoid this error but deepens the betrayal of the universal, abandoning the possibility of emancipation altogether. Citing Badiou's warning that abdicating universality produces 'universal horror,' McGowan closes with the insistence that reclaiming universality as constitutive absence — as the shared lack that makes solidarity possible — is the only political path that can save the Left from its own complicity in the conditions that make right-wing populism inevitable.

Key concepts: Universality, Emancipatory Politics, Ideology, Lack, The Act Notable examples: Alain Badiou on universality; Right-wing populism / Trump / Le Pen

Main interlocutors

Karl Marx, Capital
Karl Marx, Grundrisse
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Immanuel Kant
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
Michel Foucault
Ernesto Laclau
Judith Butler
Theodor Adorno
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Giorgio Agamben
Slavoj Žižek
Alain Badiou
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Stalin, Foundations of Leninism
François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion
Claude Lanzmann, Shoah
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political
Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

Position in the corpus

McGowan's Universality and Identity Politics occupies a distinctive position in the Lacanian secondary literature as a work of explicitly political Lacanian theory that bridges ontology and contemporary politics. It shares important ground with Žižek's political writings — particularly The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Ticklish Subject, and The Parallax View — in deploying the structural logic of lack and the subject of the signifier as foundations for a critique of liberal and postmodern political theory. However, McGowan's book is less focused on symptomatic readings of ideology and more committed to making a single, sustained philosophical argument about the ontological structure of universality. It also shares ground with Joan Copjec's work (Read My Desire, Imagine There's No Woman) in its insistence on the irreducibility of the subject's constitutive lack against culturalist reductionism, and with Adrian Johnston's political Lacanian philosophy. Readers who have engaged Laclau's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and Butler's contributions to Contingency, Hegemony, Universality will find McGowan's book a direct and systematic response to that debate from a more Lacanian-Marxist direction.\n\nWithin the broader corpus, this book is best read after some familiarity with Lacanian concepts (lack, jouissance, the subject, the big Other, objet a) — McGowan uses them without extended exposition — making it most accessible to readers who have already encountered introductory secondary texts such as Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject or McGowan's own Enjoying What We Don't Have. It should ideally be read alongside or after Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology and in dialogue with Badiou's Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, which provides a related but distinct account of universality. Readers interested in the political applications of this framework should follow with McGowan's Capitalism and Desire and, for the Marxist dimension, with Fredric Jameson's Representing Capital.