Acknowledgments
Introduction: Finding Universality
1. Our Particular Age
2. The Importance of Being Absent
3. Universal Villains
4. Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents
5. This Is Identity Politics
6. This Is Not Identity Politics
Conclusion: Avoiding the Worst
Notes
Index
Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. His previous Columbia University Press books are The Impossible David Lynch (2007), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), and Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019). He is the coeditor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston.
I used to be among those left-leaning academics who believe that
universalism is problematic and that particularism represents a
corrective to false universalism. Not anymore. McGowan shows that a
genuinely emancipatory politics is intrinsically universalist, and
he reveals the various ways in which identity politics inevitably
serves the conservative establishment and traps us into a
conception of politics as a struggle of one identity against
others. Universality and Identity Politics is a groundbreaking
book.
*Mari Ruti, author of Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The
Emotional Costs of Everyday Life*
Passionately yet patiently argued, Universality and Identity
Politics looks back at earlier debates surrounding the universal
and mounts fresh defenses of it. More than timely, this book writes
to the moment.
*Joan Copjec, author of Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and
Sublimation*
What is universality? With his signature exactitude, Todd McGowan
radiantly argues that universality is what we lack in common, the
absent foundation for a nonetheless necessary sociality. Against
the many theories conflating universality with positive content and
violent oppression, Universality and Identity Politics illustrates
how movements beyond the particular are indispensable for
solidarity. Ceaseless catastrophes now rain down; McGowan boldly
underwrites new political imaginings of equality and freedom.
*Anna Kornbluh, author of The Order of Forms: Realism,
Formalism, and Social Space*
In calm, level-headed formulations that are as elegant as they are
clear, Todd McGowan presents a crucial insight into all
emancipatory political efforts. Those who want to liberate
themselves without at the same time aiming at liberating all others
do not lead an emancipatory struggle. As a result, they do not even
liberate themselves.
*Robert Pfaller, author of On the Pleasure Principle in Culture:
Illusions Without Owners*
He calls for uniting the process of emancipation for some with the
universal project of emancipation for all.
*Choice*
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