Todd McGowan - Universality and Identity Politics

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright 2020 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-55230-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McGowan, Todd, author.

Title: Universality and identity politics / Todd McGowan.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019052933 (print) | LCCN 2019052934 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231197700 (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Political participationSocial aspects. | Identity politics. | CapitalismPolitical aspects. | Right and left (Political science)

Classification: LCC JF799 .M345 2020 (print) | LCC JF799 (ebook) | DDC 320.01dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052933

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019052934

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Cover design: Mary Ann Smith

Cover image: Shutterstock

For Mari Ruti, the closest I had to a twin

contain work revised from earlier publications. I am grateful to Problemi International for permission to reprint some of The Absent Universal: From the Master Signifier to the Missing Signifier, Problemi International 2, no. 2 (2018): 195214, and to Continental Thought and Theory for permission to reprint part of The Particularity of the Capitalist Universal, Continental Thought and Theory 1, no. 4 (2017): 473494.

Thanks to Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press. She is a guiding light for theory in a practical world.

I am indebted to Dashiell and Theo Neroni, my twin sons, who generously gave up any idea of solidarity with each other solely in order to instruct me in the hostility that arises from trying to assert ones identity.

Thanks to my mother, Sandi McGowan, who abandoned her identity as a potential nun to heroically devote her life to the universalist project of education. I would thank my father as well, but he is not just structurally absent.

Thanks to my brother, Wyk McGowan, who saw sooner than I the hollowness of capitalisms isolated particularism. He is a political model for me.

Emily Bernard and Andrew Barnaby make the English Department at the University of Vermont more universal than it would like to be.

I appreciate the heroic efforts of Dean William Falls at the University of Vermont, who continues to give me time in exchange for money. I fear only that Bill is too kind to remain dean much longer.

The Theory Reading GroupJoseph Acquisto, Sarah Alexander, Bea Bookchin, Hilary Neroni, John Waldron, and Hyon Joo Yooprovided comfort by always expressing the appropriate level of invective whenever it accidentally chose a particularist text to study.

Thanks to Clint Burnham, Danny Cho, Joan Copjec, Veronica Davis, Matthew Flisfeder, Adrian Johnston, Donald Kunze, Juan Pablo Lucchelli, Hugh Manon, Jonathan Mulrooney, Ken Reinhard, Frances Restuccia, Molly Rothenberg, Russell Sibriglia, Louis-Paul Willis, Jean Wyatt, Cindy Zeiher, and Slavoj iek, for betraying their identity every day.

Many discussions with Jennifer Friedlander and Henry Krips have helped to subtract any investment I have in my own identity and reassure me that there is life only through what we lack.

Thanks to Ryan Engley, who discussed the dialectic of the universal and the particular with me through many podcasts. He has never stopped me from flogging this dead horse, despite his better judgment and the pleas of those who listen.

Thanks to Sheila Kunkle, who demonstrates, in the face of my stubborn resistance, that it is possible to have universal solidarity with other species.

Anna Kornbluhs strict formalism has often saved me from temptations offered by Giorgio Agamben. She is the only leftist I know as unapologetic as I am in her insistence on the emancipatory function of the state.

Thank God that Quentin Martin believed enough in our solidarity to tell me how much he hated the first draft of this book. I hope that now it has become a bit less terrible thanks to his incisive reading, though I also hope that he doesnt reread it, since I couldnt change enough.

I am indebted to Richard Boothby for his thorough reading of the manuscript at an early stage. Rick is my definition of the universal intellectual. If Foucault had met him, Im positive that he would have had to revise his negative opinion on this figure.

Thanks to Fabio Vighi for his charitable reading of the manuscript and his enduring friendship. More than anyone else, he taught me Marxs particular misstep.

Mari Ruti generously devoted her time not just to a thorough reading of the book but to rethinking along with me several of its key points. She sees what is not there as if it is and knows how to sustain absences. Every deviation that I made from her suggestions gives something new to lament about how things turned out.

Walter Davis has graciously read everything that I have written. His suggestions for this book stripped away the sentimentality that I wanted to cling to. I aspired to his level of ethical fervor but pulled back.

At the last minute, Paul Eisenstein, putting everything else aside, read the entire book and provided valuable feedback. When I asked him to do this, I prefaced my request by wondering aloud, How big a favor would be too big? He responded, I dont understand the sense of your question, letting me know that we have been in absolute solidarity from the beginning, when all we were doing was golfing and speculating about universality.

Hilary Neroni did almost everything.

Finally, thanks to Paul Eisenstein, Walter Davis, and Hilary Neroni. Their singularity comes from their unrelenting commitment to the universal.