UNIVERSALITY

AND IDENTITY
POLITICS
UNIVERSA LIT Y
A ND IDENTIT Y
POLITICS

TODD MCGOWAN

Columbia University Press New York

 Columbia University Press
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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) | ISBN 9780231552301 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Political participation—Social aspects. | Identity politics. |
Capitalism—Political aspects. | Right and left (Political science)
Classification: LCC JF799 .M345 2020 (print) | LCC JF799 (ebook) |
DDC 320.01— dc23
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 For Mari Ruti,
the closest I had to a twin

1
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Finding Universality 1

1 Our Particular Age 29
2 The Importance of Being Absent 59
3 Universal Villains 89
4 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents 119
5 This Is Identity Politics 149
6 This Is Not Identity Politics 177
Conclusion: Avoiding the Worst 207

Notes 213
Index 249
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

C
hapters 2 and 4 contain work revised from earlier pub-
lications. I am grateful to Problemi International for per-
mission to reprint some of “The Absent Universal:
From the Master Signifier to the Missing Signifier,” Problemi
International 2, no. 2 (2018): 195–214, 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): 473–494.
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 try-
ing to assert one’s identity.
Thanks to my mother, Sandi McGowan, who abandoned her
identity as a potential nun to heroically devote her life to the uni-
versalist 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 capitalism’s isolated particularism. He is a
political model for me.
 x Y Acknowledgments

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 Group—Joseph Acquisto, Sarah Alex-
ander, Bea Bookchin, Hilary Neroni, John Waldron, and Hyon
Joo Yoo—provided comfort by always expressing the appropri-
ate level of invective whenever it accidentally chose a particular-
ist text to study.
Thanks to Clint Burnham, Danny Cho, Joan Copjec, Veron-
ica Davis, Matthew Flisfeder, Adrian Johnston, Donald Kunze,
Juan Pablo Lucchelli, Hugh Manon, Jonathan Mulrooney, Ken
Reinhard, Frances Restuccia, Molly Rothenberg, Russell Sibri-
glia, Louis-Paul Willis, Jean Wyatt, Cindy Zeiher, and Slavoj
Ýiĥek, 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 soli-
darity with other species.
Anna Kornbluh’s strict formalism has often saved me from
temptations offered by Giorgio Agamben. She is the only leftist
 Acknowledgments Z xi

I know as unapologetic as I am in her insistence on the emanci-

patory function of the state.
Thank God that Quentin Martin believed enough in our soli-
darity 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 doesn’t reread it,
since I couldn’t 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, I’m positive
that he would have had to revise his negative opinion on this
figure.
Thanks to Fabio Vighi for his charitable reading of the man-
uscript and his enduring friendship. More than anyone else, he
taught me Marx’s 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 writ-
ten. His suggestions for this book stripped away the sentimen-
tality 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 wonder-
ing aloud, “How big a favor would be too big?” He responded,
“I don’t understand the sense of your question,” letting me know
that we have been in absolute solidarity from the beginning,
 xii Y Acknowledgments

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 commit-
ment to the universal.
UNIVERSALITY
AND IDENTITY
POLITICS
 INTRODUCTION
Finding Universality

AF TER THE GULAG

The promise of modernity is the promise of universal emancipa-

tion. When the revolutionaries in France name liberté, égalité, and
fraternité as their watchwords, they put into precise terms the
promise that appears with the dawning of the modern world.
With the break from tradition and traditional authority, moder-
nity puts an end to any theoretical justification for depriving
someone of freedom or establishing an unequal society. Univer-
sality means that everyone across all societies and within all soci-
eties shares in these values, that everyone is free, equal, and in
solidarity, even if ruling social arrangements obscure this. Tradi-
tion provides an excuse for unfreedom and inequality, but moder-
nity abolishes all such excuses. Any unfreedom or inequality
becomes unjustifiable in the modern world.
But a quick look around the modern world indicates that ram-
pant unfreedom and inequality are everywhere. From its ori-
gins, modernity has not kept the promise articulated in the
French Revolution. And now, contemporary society stands as a
monument to this failure. Young children labor under lethal con-
ditions in the Congo mining minerals for iPhones. Workers in
 2 Y Introduction

Vietnam assemble electronic equipment that costs thousands of

dollars in exchange for starvation wages. Police gun down black
individuals in the United States solely because they are black.
Networks of human traffickers trade thousands of women around
the planet as sex slaves. Gay teenagers commit suicide at a rate
four times that of straight teenagers. Right-wing populist lead-
ers harden national divisions to protect the power of wealthy
interests. The fact that these startling inequalities persist centu-
ries after the dawn of modernity indicates that they are not just
anomalies of the modern world but constitutive of it. In moder-
nity, we accept inequality even though it has lost its political
justification.
Inequality is not evident only in the signs of blatant poverty
and distress. What makes clear the presence of inequality is what
we see alongside the pervasive misery—the ostentatious display
of luxury and wealth. What distinguishes the contemporary
world is not just the massive divide between those who are suc-
cessful and those who aren’t, but the obviousness of this divide.
Today’s society leaves nowhere to hide from inequality. The
unequal exist in constant juxtaposition: the wealthiest neighbor-
hoods in a city are often a short drive from the most impoverished,
as a visit to Los Angeles or Baltimore will make abundantly clear.
Even when geographical distance separates profligate wealth and
abject poverty, the instant communication of the internet evap-
orates this distance and permits both sides to see each other.
Given our technological advances, it has become impossible to
miss just how widespread unjustifiable inequality is.
Despite the obviousness of inequality in contemporary society,
universal equality has ceased to be a thriving political project.
This is perhaps the strangest feature of the current order. Rather
than fight the massive inequality with a project of universal
equality, we engage in struggles for justice for a series of
 Introduction Z 3

groups—without ever defining justice, without ever naming the

equality that would constitute justice. The absence of universal-
ist claims today stands out and separates our epoch politically
from prior ones. But the turn away from universality is not just
one political development among many. To betray universality
is to give up on the project of emancipation altogether.
This is what all the great political revolutionaries of the past
have recognized. From the Jacobins in France to the suffragettes
in the United States to the African National Congress in South
Africa, the most significant political actors have seen universal-
ity as the absolute key to their struggle. This is why abolitionist
hero Frederick Douglass participated in the epochal Seneca Falls
Convention for women’s suffrage and why feminist Elizabeth
Cady Stanton joined the Anti-Slavery Convention. They were
not practicing coalition-building. Both understood that one
could not separate the emancipation of some from the universal
project of emancipation.
The necessary universality of emancipation is what diminishes
the grandeur of the American Revolution in the popular imagi-
nation relative to its French counterpart.1 Whenever anyone
refers to the revolutionary spirit of the late eighteenth century,
it is almost always the French Revolution, not the American, that
serves as the touchstone. It’s not just that the American Revolu-
tion, despite coming first, didn’t generate a catchy slogan like lib-
erté, égalité, and fraternité, nor have as many exciting behead-
ings.2 The problem is that the American Revolution betrayed the
universality of emancipation by excluding slaves from its eman-
cipatory project.
In 1794, when the Jacobins were in power in France, they made
it a point to free the slaves of Saint Domingue (Haiti). In con-
trast, those who wrote the American Constitution took pains to
avoid mentioning slavery or freedom for slaves in order to gain
 4 Y Introduction

approval from the slaveowners who helped to craft it. Instead of

addressing the issue head on, the document makes oblique ref-
erence to slaves by counting them as three-fifths of a person for
the purposes of representation, according to Article I, Section 2.
Subsequently, in Article I, Section 9, the Constitution prohibits
Congress from banning the slave trade until 1808, while still
managing to avoid the mention of slaves or slavery. The final allu-
sion to slavery occurs in the fugitive slave clause, from Article
IV, Section 2, which prohibits slaves from fleeing to states with-
out slavery in order to gain their freedom. But again, the authors
of the Constitution managed to construct a fugitive slave law
while circumventing the use of the term slave. As this quick sur-
vey reveals, slavery functions as the repressed content of the
American Constitution. 3 It haunts the document but never
explicitly appears. As this repressed content, slavery reveals the
ultimate failure of American universality. Despite the universal
claims of the Declaration of Independence—“We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”—the
Constitution exposes the American Revolution’s utter betrayal
of universal equality.
The American experience shows how costly the violation of
universality is. By giving up on universal equality, the U.S. Con-
stitution inaugurates centuries of inequality for all Americans.
Black Americans clearly suffer from this inequality as both slaves
and then as second-class citizens, but white Americans lose their
own equality as well. One cannot exist as an equal in a society
that institutionalizes inequality, especially if one is among the
privileged class.
Through the 1960s, attempts to fight this inequality focused
clearly on universal struggle. But eventually political struggle in
the United States and around the world became more diffuse,
 Introduction Z 5

and universal emancipation slipped into the background. Uni-

versality began to seem itself the badge of oppression, as if invok-
ing the universal put one on the side of mastery and violence.
While a universal struggle nonetheless continued, it could not
explicitly invoke the moniker of universal emancipation without
becoming politically suspect. The loss of the moniker was not
simply an insubstantial adjustment in the history of emancipa-
tion. The abandonment of the idea of universal emancipation
has had catastrophic effects.
But this abandonment did not occur in a vacuum. Perhaps the
main reason why the project of universal emancipation became
suspect is its horrific failure in the twentieth century. The story
of the twentieth century is the story of the egalitarian revolu-
tion gone awry. The victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917,
Mao’s conquest of China in 1949, the takeover of Cambodia by
the Khmer Rouge in 1975—all these events (and numerous oth-
ers) seem to reveal that egalitarian projects are not exactly a good
idea. If these movements show us what universal emancipation
looks like, we should probably think twice about advocating it.
They lead to the Soviet gulag, the Maoist Cultural Revolution,
or Pol Pot’s killing fields. The communist path to universal equal-
ity produced equality only in the very worst sense: all were equal
in death.
But these failed projects of universal emancipation did not fail
because of their universality. They failed because of their funda-
mental misconception about what universality was. In the twen-
tieth century, universal emancipation turned into butchery at
the moment when the political projects betrayed the universal-
ity that animated them. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot all believed in
the possibility of total belonging. To that end, they tried to cre-
ate societies in which everyone could belong, failing to grasp that
 6 Y Introduction

universality exists because everyone cannot belong—through the

failure of a social order to become all-inclusive. We cannot invent
universality as fully realized and present but must discover it in
the internal limit that every society confronts. But these mur-
derous projects viewed equality as a value to invent rather as a
value to discover. This is the formula for the gulag.
The invention of equality required a violent uprooting of the
past, which is why it led so easily to mass murder. This is the core
problem of the communist experiment. Typified by Stalin, these
regimes sought to break entirely with the past and to create a
new person, one without any of the prejudices of tradition.4 But
they missed the key fact that we do not need to invent equality
out of whole cloth. We need only look for it in a disguised form
in the gap that separates us from each other. Equality does not
require liquidation of the old or creation of the new.
Redeeming the project of universal emancipation requires
looking anew at what universality means. It requires a turn from
invention to discovery. When we discover universality, we see it
in what already animates our relations, even— or especially—
when we seem at odds with each other. The discovery of univer-
sality reshapes how we relate to each other and gives our politics
a form that it otherwise wouldn’t have. Turning to a viable con-
ception of universality is politically requisite. Without univer-
sality, we have no way to orient our political struggle toward a
widespread appeal.
The fear of universality on both the Left and the Right has
created a vacuum today. The Right rightfully fears universality
because it sees in universality the end of the privileges of wealth
and status that it wants to sustain. The Left’s fear stems from a
genuine desire not to repeat the experience of the gulag and the
killing fields. But the abandonment of universality cuts the heart
out of the Left.
 Introduction Z 7

Emancipation is always universal if it is genuine emancipa-

tion. Struggling for freedom, equality, and solidarity for some
and not others is not struggling for freedom, equality, and soli-
darity. If one’s struggle is not universal, if it does not have impli-
cations for everyone, there is no reason at all for others to join
one in it. Nonuniversal struggle is a zero-sum game that leaves
each group (and ultimately each individual) on its own and
incentivizes other groups to work against the particular group’s
struggle. What’s more, with the contemporary turn away from
universal emancipation, we destroy the promise of modernity
itself. We turn away from the important lessons of many of the
key figures of modern Western philosophy.

EMANCIPATION
THROUGH INTERRUP TION

The basic idea of the modern Western philosophical tradition is

that universality is emancipatory. It has become commonplace,
with good reason, to critique this tradition for the racial and gen-
der prejudices that it harbors. To some extent, the major thinkers
of the West were trapped within an oppressive ideology that
they could not think their way out of. According to this critique,
theorists such as Kant, Hegel, and even Marx held onto racial
and gender prejudices that they weren’t able to transcend.5 But
at the same time, what this critique misses is that they had an
insight into the possibility for universal emancipation that we
are now in danger of losing. Their prejudices represent their own
failure to accede personally to the grandeur of the universalist
principles they held. They are particular failings. One can upbraid
them for their prejudices only from the perspective of the univer-
salist project that they articulate and that remains viable today.
 8 Y Introduction

Emancipation occurs through universality and its ability to

lift us out of our immediate situation. Our immediate situation
is always unfree because it is given to us, either by the natural
world or by the society into which we are born.6 There can be no
immediate freedom. Freedom emerges when one begins to depart
from the givens of one’s existence, not by hunkering down and
attaching oneself to one’s identity.
Freedom lies in universality rather than in the particular iden-
tity that resists universality. Particular identity is a stumbling
block to overcome, the site of prejudices and unthought inclina-
tions, incapable of serving as the basis for emancipation. What
I immediately am is not my essential self but instead what the
ideological structure has made of me. Identity—conceived as sin-
gular or as an intersection of multiple aspects—is not a basis
from which I can fight against ideology but the result of ideol-
ogy’s operations.
This contrasts it with universality. The most important fig-
ures of modern Western philosophy from René Descartes onward
see in universality an alternative to the particular positions that
remain trapped in their isolation.7 These figures did not neces-
sarily theorize universality correctly, but even in their failures,
they touched on genuine universality and contributed something
to a possible understanding of it. This universalist tradition is
one that we abandon at our peril. Through a variety of thinkers,
it makes clear that universality is not oppressive but rather the
vehicle through which we can challenge ideology. What seems
like universality acting in an oppressive fashion is always some
particular identity passing itself off as universal, never the act of
an authentic universality. While authentic universality alien-
ates, it also emancipates through this alienation, which is what
distinguishes it from all particularisms.
One of the universals of the French Revolution—solidarity—
reveals the relationship between alienation and emancipation.
 Introduction Z 9

While I might feel an inherent solidarity with those closest to

me, like my parents, friends, and even colleagues, I don’t feel
such a bond with those I don’t know. I might read about their
suffering and think that this is unfortunate, but I lack the inher-
ent solidarity that I have with those close by. When I take up
solidarity as a universal value, however, I come to recognize
myself in the suffering of would-be strangers. If I am to be faith-
ful to the universality of this value, I cannot simply be what I
was and remain in solidarity only with my intimates. Solidarity
emancipates me from my parochialism as it alienates me from
my particular identity. It demands that I include those outside
my orbit in my conception of solidarity. By doing so, I cease to
be who I was and become alienated, but I also become free of
my local prejudices. Through this turn to universal solidarity, I
lose the natural sentiment of solidarity with those close to me.
But this alienation creates an emancipating solidarity, one in
which I take the side of those alien to me.
By making me other than what I immediately am, the uni-
versal opens up the possibility for me to act freely, to act against
what my ideological programming tells me to do. Only univer-
sality accomplishes this because only universality gives me dis-
tance from my ideologically given identity. Although emanci-
patory political projects might look as if they are identitarian
today, all emancipation is universalist, or it is not emancipation.
Even if this universalism remains unavowed and obfuscated, it
is nonetheless a necessary condition for emancipatory or leftist
politics.
Because the universal is not immediately there among the field
of the given, it marks a point of freedom from the given. Unlike
particulars, one discovers universality through recognizing what
does not appear among what the social order authorizes to be
perceived. Particulars are distinct individual formal positions,
and identity is the content that fills these particular forms. Our
 10 Y Introduction

perceptions follow the demands of the social order in the way

that we focus on what fits and has a place within the social struc-
ture. We see what ideology demands that we see, picking out
the particular entities that count and missing those that don’t.
But the recognition of the universal is the recognition of some-
thing absent in the social field. It is an absence that goes beyond
any social authorization. Universality cannot have a direct man-
ifestation because it is constitutively absent and emerges in the
form of a lack.
Universality is an interruption in the socially authorized field
of perception. No matter how clearly we observe, we can never
see it. We cannot look directly at freedom or equality. They exist
as universals precisely because they are not there to be perceived.
The universal plays a necessary role in constituting the field of
perception, and yet at the same time, it disturbs this field. Uni-
versal freedom and equality exist in what interrupts the social
terrain, in the fact that this terrain always has an absence within
it. No social authority produces universality, contrary to what we
might expect (and what its contemporary opponents contend).
Instead, it is the gap within the socially authorized visibility.
Universality cannot be reduced to any appearance, and yet it
guides how we must conduct ourselves. The radicality of the uni-
versal lies in its imperceptibility.

KANT ’S STRANGE BEDFELLOW

From the Enlightenment onward, universality comes to encom-

pass freedom. Freedom becomes integral to political struggle,
and emancipation implies universal freedom. Even if certain pro-
ponents of Enlightenment thinking try to restrict the range of
their universal proclamations and thereby violate universality,
 Introduction Z 11

they nevertheless articulate these proclamations in universal

terms. When Thomas Jefferson, for instance, fails to include slaves
among those “endowed by their creator with certain inalien-
able rights,” he still writes the Declaration of Independence as
an appeal to universality.8 The omissions like those that Jefferson
makes are always historically contingent and thus emendable in
the course of history.
This association of freedom with universality becomes fully
visible with Immanuel Kant and then gains the form of a fully
worked out political project with Karl Marx. In the mid-twentieth
century, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon extend the the-
orizing of universal emancipation to women and colonized peo-
ples. But what holds all these thinkers together is their shared
conviction that universality is liberating while particular iden-
tity represents an ideological trap rather than the site for poten-
tial political action.
Kant marks the great breakthrough in modernity when he
links our freedom to the universality of the moral law. Kant
rejects the idea that we are born free and then subjugated to soci-
ety and shows instead that our identity is the site of our unfree-
dom because it is given to us. We do not spontaneously produce
our identity from our own free act. Identity has an external ori-
gin. For Kant, nature and society violently impose our identity
on us. Identity is not even ours but the project of external (natu-
ral and social) determinations. When we locate our subjectivity
in a particular identity, we tacitly accept this external determi-
nation and thereby forsake the project of freedom. If I claim that
I am Irish, for instance, I simply accept the fact of my ancestral
heritage as who I am. Clearly, this identity is not the result of a
free act. Or if I identify myself as a white male, this cannot pos-
sibly be an act of freedom on my part. I have just taken up the
categories made available to me and inadvertently testified to my
 12 Y Introduction

unfreedom. Kant’s position on identity politics and its absolute

unfreedom is unyielding.
Our identity is, to put it in Kant’s terms, always pathological
and bespeaks heteronomy rather than autonomy. What he means
by this is that external forces, not ourselves on our own, produce
identity for us. Even when we opt for an identity different from
what the society initially assigns to us, we choose an identity
because of how external forces recognize it. Identity is how I
want others to see me and thus always involves a capitulation to
one form of social authority or another. Despite the feeling that
we really are this identity, it is not the product of our freedom.
It is a capitulation to the dictates of the social order. We do not
make ourselves who we are, but social and nature determinants
structure our identity. We need the intervention of another force
to liberate us from the trap that identity creates for us.
We become autonomous, Kant believes, when we impose the
universality of the moral law on ourselves. This is a violent, dis-
ruptive act. Without this encounter with universality, we remain
trapped within what we are born into or what socially determines
us. Unlike our particular identity, the universality of the moral
law doesn’t derive from natural or social factors. It is not the
determination of the social order but the law that emerges out
of the individual’s alienation in language. The moral law is a
moral law for speaking beings, and it alienates them from who
they are. Its dictates do not take into account particular differ-
ences but instead enable the individual to distance itself from the
trap of its identity.
Because it upsets our initial unfree situation, law isn’t the
enemy of freedom but constitutive of it.9 Though this line of
thought is counterintuitive, Kant clings to it because he under-
stands that we require the universal law to break from all the
 Introduction Z 13

external forces that initially shape us, often without our conscious
awareness. His first formulation of the categorical imperative
includes this explicit appeal to the universal. He writes, “So act
that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time
as a principle in the giving of universal law.”10 The universality
of the moral law is what frees us from the bonds of our identity
and enables us to experience ourselves as singular subjects.
This encounter with universality enables one to think for one-
self rather than thinking only in the terms one has inherited. It
offers subjects a point from which they can act differently and
not do what their identity prompts them to do. A revelatory
instance of the emancipatory power of the moral law occurs in
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, a writer not known
for his commitment to Kantian or any other type of morality.
The novel portrays a morass of amorality— characters use each
other without a second thought, spend most of their time intox-
icated, champion bullfighting, and revel in anti-Semitism. But
at the end of the novel, one of the characters in the book per-
forms an act that alludes to the Kantian moral law.
After conducting a brief affair with the young bullfighter
Romero, Brett Ashley decides to leave him abruptly rather than
stringing him along in a messy and drawn-out relationship that
would surely end badly for him. In the novel’s final pages, she
tells her friend Jake Barnes about this gesture. She contends that
this kind of act is “sort of what we have instead of God.”11 With
this statement, Brett locates her act on the level of universal
morality like Kant’s. Her act is Kantian.
This act shows how the universality of the moral law lifts Brett
out of the trap of her particular identity. She spends most of the
novel mired in the malaise of her particular life, unable to free
herself from continually doing what is expected of her. She has
 14 Y Introduction

her identity, but she experiences this identity as inescapable until

her moral act. The identities of American expatriate, divorcee,
fiancée, and lover leave her stuck repeating the same behaviors.
Events, like the beginning of the affair with Romero, simply
happen to her.
This changes with her final act, which she performs with an
almost explicit reference to the moral law.12 The universality of
this law enables her to break from the pattern that had defined
her life and to assert her own singularity. Brett’s final act shows
the relationship between universality and singularity. Although
the universality of the moral law upends particular identity,
at the same time it produces singularity. As we see in the case
of Brett, the universality of the moral law enables her to become
something other than what her world made out of her. Its uproot-
ing universality allows her to become singular.
Kant’s own example of the moral law is just as striking. In
order to evince the disruptive power of the universality of the
moral law relative to the claims of particular identity, he points
out that anyone could imagine not lying, when ordered to do so
by authorities, to frame an innocent person, even if the refusal
to do so would cost one one’s life. Our ability to imagine the pos-
sibility of not capitulating to the authorities demanding a lie
testifies to the freeing power of the moral law. Even if in the end
one lacked the courage and capitulated to the unjust authority
demanding this lie, one could at least envision not doing so. This
possibility is the moment of the break from authority’s strangle-
hold. Universality trumps particular identity—or at least has the
power to trump it. In doing so, it enables us to see what we are
in a way that identity, because it is simply given to us by our situ-
ation, does not.
Universality is the vehicle for the subject’s singularity because
it enables us to exist not just in our particular given identity but
 Introduction Z 15

to relate to it from a distance. Universality forges our singularity

through its alienating effect that each subject responds to differ-
ently. Our singularity is neither our universality nor our par-
ticular identity. It is how we relate to our particular identity.
Universality creates the alienation from particular identity that
makes a singular relation to our particular identity possible.
What is singular about me is not a unique combination of gen-
der, ethnic, religious, and national particular identities. It is
instead how I relate to these identities—my inability to exist
comfortably as a man or my attempt to be as Irish as I can be
while hiding my German identity. It might be my refusal to
accept any identity as substantial, or the opposite extreme, a bad
faith attempt to identify completely with my particular symbolic
identity.13
Singularity derives from setting particular identity aside, and
it is universality that makes this act possible. What defines us is
not what we are as identities but who we are as subjects. The sin-
gularity of the subject becomes clear at the point when univer-
sality strips away the particular identity that obscures it and
enables the subject to relate to its identity as if it were relating to
something foreign. One’s singularity does not exist outside of the
violence of the universal but through the uprooting that this vio-
lence performs on one’s particularity.
This is the case for Kant and for his unknowing follower
Hemingway. The universality of law frees the subject because it
emerges neither from the subject’s own private inclinations nor
from the conventions of the social order. Kant attributes the
moral law to reason, but his basic theoretical point is that we
must locate law in another realm than either that of the particu-
lar individual or that of the society. Law enables the subject to
act against all forms of compulsion keeping the subject mired
in unfreedom. In the universality of law, Kant recognizes the
 16 Y Introduction

shape of emancipation. He is drawn to the moral law for the sake

of his absolute commitment to freedom.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD

Marx betrays no immediate influence from Kant. His dialecti-

cal conception of the movement of history owes a debt to Hegel,
his more immediate predecessor, rather than to Kant. And yet,
Marx shares with Kant (and with Hegel) a commitment to
universality as the key to emancipation. He writes in order to pro-
vide the universal theory that he didn’t find in any of the social-
ist and communist thinkers writing around his time. As Marx
sees it, it is only when individual workers abandon their invest-
ment in their particular identities and take up the mantle of the
universal class—the proletariat—that they can achieve freedom.
Freedom requires that we step into the universal.
The clear argument of Capital and Marx’s other major works
is that particularity or the celebration of particular identity actu-
ally strengthens capitalism and its control over one’s existence.
Freedom, if it is seen and pursued as a purely particular strug-
gle, nourishes capitalism. The more we imagine ourselves as
identical to our particular identity, the more we see ourselves as
isolated subjects, which is what capitalism requires. Capitalist
subjects see themselves as isolated monads, and identification
with one’s particularity produces this sense of isolation. It is only
when freedom becomes a struggle for universal freedom that it
challenges the capitalist behemoth.
Far from seeing a danger in universality, Marx believes that
the real threat comes from accepting the value of one’s particular
identity within the capitalist socioeconomic system. Capitalism
thrives on a variety of particular identities because this variety
 Introduction Z 17

provides for more types of commodities to be sold. In our con-

temporary capitalist society, the goth can buy trench coats and
dark eyeliner while the jock can purchase sweatpants and jer-
seys. More identities lead to more commodities. Even if one’s
identity isn’t tied to a particular look, variety of identity still plays
into the capitalist system by providing more opportunity for the
production of needs. But more important, seeing oneself as par-
ticular puts one in the capitalist mindset, where there is no uni-
versality that might change the entire structure. By believing
oneself to be an isolated particular identity, one takes up the role
of the perfect capitalist subject. Capitalism depends on all indi-
viduals believing themselves isolated from everyone else.
Although capitalist society talks a great deal about freedom,
this freedom is actually a form of servitude for everyone, even
those at the top. From top to bottom, everyone in capitalist soci-
ety does what the economy demands as long as they remain
trapped within the bounds of particular identity. Of course, no
one can simply give up particular identity and exist as a pure uni-
versal, but it is possible to become alienated from this identity.
Doing so enables one to abandon one’s libidinal investment in
particular identity, an abandonment that makes participation in
universal struggle a viable option. But if particular individuals
fail to grasp their participation in the universal, they will continue
unknowingly to play out their parts in the capitalist economy.
According to Marx, emancipatory change comes through the
recognition of the universality of the proletariat, whose revolu-
tion frees not just the working class but all classes.14 As long as
I fail to see my universal connection with others in capitalist soci-
ety, I remain the dupe of that society. Attempts to challenge
capitalism through insisting on identity can do nothing to dent
capitalism’s dominance. Particular identity is what keeps one
a capitalist subject.
 18 Y Introduction

Just as Marx conceives particular identity as a lure for

oppressed subjects, so do Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon.
With Beauvoir and Fanon, unlike with Marx, although we
remain within the Western philosophical tradition, we leave the
arena of European white guys. Their insistence on universality
as the key to emancipation—a position they share with the West-
ern philosophical tradition—reveals that this is not just the
claim of those tied to their social advantages.
Beauvoir insists on demolishing the image of female other-
ness that is, for her, nothing but the badge of oppression. There
is no question, for Beauvoir, of celebrating feminine identity as
a radical alternative to patriarchy. Femininity holds no essential
secret that might provide the basis for emancipation. To the con-
trary, it is the idea of a feminine identity that she finds oppres-
sive. In The Second Sex, she claims, “If man fails to discover that
secret essence of femininity, it is simply because it does not exist.
Kept on the fringe of the world, woman cannot be objectively
defined through this world, and her mystery conceals nothing
but emptiness.”15 Rather than asserting an essence of femininity
that society must value and protect, Beauvoir’s move here is the
opposite: she wants to demolish feminine identity in order to
assert women’s participation in universality. Identity is an obsta-
cle to overcome rather than a foundation from which to base
one’s politics. Clinging to particular identity cannot possibly be
the source of emancipation since it clearly functions as the driv-
ing force for female subjugation.
It is so difficult to abandon feminine identity, Beauvoir rec-
ognizes, because its blandishments are almost the only symbolic
support that women receive in patriarchal society. As a woman,
I receive recognition for my embrace of a feminine identity and
ostracism when I reject it. In this way, it becomes clear why
 Introduction Z 19

identity has an appeal. If identity is oppressive, it nonetheless pro-

vides recognition from a social authority. But it is for this reason
that identity cannot be emancipatory. Identity remains within
the domain of the social authority that recognizes it and is thus
dependent through and through. For Beauvoir, valuing the par-
ticular identity of the feminine is not a way of fighting sexism
but the ultimate acquiescence to it. Beauvoir understands that
identity is an ideological trap that the feminist must avoid.16
By giving up the feminine as an identity, the feminist simul-
taneously undermines the masculine as well. Masculine identity
depends on its feminine counterpart that affirms it as its com-
plementary other. Without this support, masculine identity col-
lapses. This is why the feminist struggle against feminine iden-
tity that Beauvoir advocates is a battle against patriarchy.
Though Fanon advocates a more violent form of revolt than
Beauvoir, their investment in the universality of the struggle is
the same. When the colonized strike down their colonizing
oppressors, according to Fanon, they do so not on behalf of their
particular local identity that Europe has destroyed but in the
name of a universality that Europe has abandoned through its
turn to colonialism.17 The violence of European colonialism does
not consist in imposing a foreign universality on the colonized
people. This is the fabrication that the colonialists themselves
repeatedly broadcast with their claims of bringing culture to the
unenlightened. The violence lies instead in the subjugation of the
colonized beneath the foot of the European particular. Colonial-
ism does not involve European universality because universality
cannot be parochial in the way that the European colonial proj-
ect was.
As Fanon sees it, to abandon universality is to fall into the
same trap that ensnares Europe itself. The colonized must not
 20 Y Introduction

follow Europe down the path of retreating from universality into

the promulgation of a particular identity. To abandon universal-
ity for particular identity is to commit the sin of Europe, though
ironically today many criticize universality as a vestige of Euro-
centrism. The fight against colonialism is a fight to recognize the
universal equality and freedom that colonialism renders invisi-
ble. It is not a fight to preserve the particularity of local culture
that European colonialism wiped out.
Localism, despite its obvious appeal, is always a reactionary
phenomenon. Even if it drives out colonizers, it will replace them
with an oppressive regime that will not offer opportunity for the
distance from particularity that the universal provides. It is only
the move to universality, Fanon recognizes, that opens up a gen-
uine alternative to colonialist oppression. Localism is another
form of what it struggles against.
Through Beauvoir and Fanon, the emancipatory project that
begins with modernity continues its universalist form. For them
as for Kant and Marx, if emancipation isn’t universal in scope,
it isn’t really emancipation. Emancipation has its basis in univer-
sality and forges singularity through this universality. There can
be no equality or freedom for certain identities while others exist
outside of equality and freedom. Without an appeal to univer-
sals, we lose touch with the emancipatory project altogether.
Universality, in contrast to identity, cannot but be emancipa-
tory. Though there are innumerable cases when an oppressive
external force imposes itself on subjects in a holistic fashion, this
imposition does not involve universality. No external force can
impose universality because no one has the universal to impose.
It is not possessable. The universal is what the ruling order doesn’t
have, not what it does have. In this way, it is always on the side
of those fighting on behalf of freedom and equality because they
are what is missing, not what is manifested.
 Introduction Z 21

Due to its status as an absence that can never become fully

present, the embrace of universality represents a challenge
because it entails an acceptance of our necessary alienation. The
proponents of the universal cannot identify themselves directly
with the universal but can only recognize the distance that sep-
arates them from it. No subject can be a universal subject, though
the universal is the source of the subject’s singularity. We retreat
from universality because it deprives us of the consolations of
identity. But it is only by giving up the consolations of identity
that we can discover our freedom.

PARTICULAR ENTITIES

Since the latter half of the twentieth century, theorists of eman-

cipation have taken refuge in local particular identity as they seek
an alternative to the totalizing dangers of fascism, Stalinism, and
global capitalism. Universality, which was for earlier thinkers
integral to the emancipatory project, becomes the primary fea-
ture of oppression.18 Rather than freeing subjects from their ide-
ological particularity, universality comes itself to be seen as an
ideology that allows no quarter for difference or otherness. Fas-
cism, Stalinism, and global capitalism all appear to operate
through the imposition of their universality on oppressed par-
ticulars. The insistence on particular identity appears as the only
viable response.
Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction provides one prominent
instance (among many) of this turn to the particular and allergy
to the supposed violence of the universal. Through the practice
of deconstruction, Derrida undermines the pretensions to uni-
versality lurking in Western metaphysics. The deconstruction of
the metaphysical tradition is an attempt to reveal the particular
 22 Y Introduction

origins of its purported universality. As Derrida sees it, decon-

struction liberates us from the tyranny of the universal by high-
lighting its failure to be really universal—its reliance on the
denial of its particularity.
Nowhere is this strategy more evident than in the essay
“White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” which
figures the deconstruction of universality as a fight against its
inherent racism. Here, Derrida uncovers the mythological origin
of the supposed universality of reason. He notes, “Metaphysics—
the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the cul-
ture of the West; the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-
European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his
idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call
Reason.”19 Derrida is very clear here: the universal is nothing
but the substitution of one’s own particular mythology for a
structure that applies to all. Universality is the disguised violence
of an inflated particularity. Combatting this violence, for Der-
rida, is not just a matter of directly asserting particulars. It
involves instead revealing how the universal deconstructs itself,
how its universality points toward a spectral particularity that it
never directly articulates.
It is difficult to overstate the extent of the reversal that takes
place when universality comes to seem oppressive and particu-
larity comes to seem liberatory. Neither Kant, Beauvoir, nor
Fanon would have believed that such a reversal could even be
possible. They would be collectively rubbing their eyes today, sure
that their vision had been magically inverted. To claim that our
particular identity is the site of liberation is to give up on the
possibility that emancipation might occur for everyone— and
that it must occur for everyone if it is to truly be emancipation.
Affirming particular identity as the site for emancipation not
only reverses the historical alignment of emancipation with
 Introduction Z 23

universality but places an unnecessary barrier in the way of col-

lective political action. In a world that insists on particular
identity as emancipatory, it is always difficult to get people to
see the commonality of their struggles.
But the great setback is that universality, which is necessarily
emancipatory, begins to appear oppressive. If freedom and equal-
ity cannot be universal, they fall apart as values. When confined
to a select group, they necessarily imply unfreedom and inequal-
ity for those outside the group. There can be no freedom and
equality for some while others remain unfree and unequal. In
this sense, the turn from universality to identity betrays freedom
and equality. Universality is an integral part of these values. For
this reason, the political reversal that they have undergone is a
catastrophe. The theoretical attempt to avoid colluding with
totalitarianism has created a situation in which we have lost the
thread of universal emancipation.
But at the same time, the widespread suspicion of universal-
ity and corresponding elevation of identity make possible a clar-
ification of both universality and identity. The political catastro-
phe is a philosophical opportunity. In the wake of this political
reversal, we can make clear that universality is not totalitarian
and that particular identity isn’t actually outside of universality.
Universality is at once what is missing in the totality and the
necessary foundation of every particular identity. Paradoxically,
the structure of universality can become fully evident in the
aftermath of the political turn against the universal. This turn
demands a reevaluation of what universality actually is.
The universal is not what it seems to be. It is not a quality
that multiple particulars possess in common. The universal is
what particulars share not having. The shared absence of the
universal rather than the shared possession of it bonds par-
ticulars together. The key to an emancipatory politics in the
 24 Y Introduction

aftermath of Nazism and Stalinism—and in the epoch of global

capitalism—is the recognition that the universal is what we
don’t have in common or our shared absence.
Understanding the universal as an absence is the key to think-
ing about universality outside the context of the murderous
regimes that invoked it. Stalin can indiscriminately kill peas-
ants that he labels class traitors because he is imposing the uni-
versal on Soviet society. But if the universal is an absence—if
freedom is not something that one can impose but something
that one cannot possess—then this horror becomes theoreti-
cally unimaginable.
When we think of universality in terms of absence rather than
presence, it ceases to appear as an overarching whole that leaves
no room for particular difference and becomes the basis for the
subject’s singularity. I attain my singularity through my embrace
of universal freedom and equality. For instance, in a gesture of
refusing to participate in a system of segregation or in working
to expose the violent origins of the iPhone, I become who I am
through my contact with universality, through the act that
enables me to free myself from my given particular identity—
that of an unthinking segregationist or a cheerful iPhone user.
But the retreat from universality that occurs in the twentieth
century has militated against this possibility. Thanks in part to
the efforts of anti-universalist thinkers, we exist politically in the
abeyance of universality and the prevalence of identity.20 Politi-
cal struggles today appear as identitarian ones, not struggles par-
taking in the project of universal emancipation.
But this situation is not just the result of anti-universalist the-
orizing. It also follows from the structure of capitalist society.
Capitalism engenders identity politics. It does so by stripping
away the content of all particular identity by imposing the com-
modity form on every particularity. This commodity form is not
 Introduction Z 25

a universal but an empty form that necessitates total conformity.

Everyone and everything must be translatable into the commod-
ity form. As a result, within the capitalist system, the content of
every particularity becomes insignificant. The particular identi-
ties of the capitalist and the worker disappear in their roles as
capital and labor in the same way that the use value of the par-
ticular object disappears in its exchange value as a commodity.
The structure of capitalism vacates particular identity, leav-
ing subjects with a contentless abstraction that few find satisfy-
ing. Capitalism’s evacuation of identity creates a vacuum that
quickly fills. Identity politics emerges in response to the capital-
ist system.21 Although there is nothing necessary about the emer-
gence of identitarian struggles, capitalism is a breeding ground
for them. Capitalism’s emptying out of particular identity
through the general commodity form produces an untenable sit-
uation for the subject, an existential emptiness that the struggle
for identity attempts to fill. Often, these struggles paint them-
selves as anti-capitalist or articulate critiques of aspects of capi-
talism, but actually their role in creating a sense of identity for
capitalist subjects helps them to endure the capitalist system.
Particular identity cannot be the basis for the emancipation
of every identity because particular identity claims are inherently
in competition with other identity claims. Even if an identitar-
ian movement claims to advocate peaceful coexistence with other
groups, this claim is necessarily disingenuous. The recognition
of one identity comes at the expense of others, which is why iden-
titarians are always quarrelling about the need to recognize the
specificity of their identity. We can never reach a point of equi-
librium among different identity claims. As long as a movement
insists on its identity over universality, this equilibrium will
remain out of reach. The only path out of a Hobbesian war of
each identity against all others is that of the universal.
 26 Y Introduction

We experience identity as the essence of our subjectivity, but

this experience is profoundly misleading. Identity, no matter if
it seems intrinsic (like race and sexuality) or the result of a con-
scious choice (like club membership and religious affiliation), is
always rooted in the social recognition that sustains it. The most
private form of identity has its origin in the given social possi-
bilities. Identity politics hides the alienating quality of all iden-
tity and thus has an ideological function.
But many of the movements that we think of in terms of iden-
tity politics are actually mislabeled universalist political proj-
ects. We must distinguish between what is identity politics and
what is an appeal to universality burdened by the term identity
politics. Protests against racism or sexism, appeals for gay rights,
and calls for rights for trans subjects all seem to fit within the
typical definition of identity politics. When we look at these
movements closely, however, we can recognize their universalist
thrust. It is a mistaken understanding of both identity and uni-
versality that leads us to diagnose these movements in terms of
the former. The turn back to universality does not simply mean
that we must, with Marx, focus on the economy.
As the turn from universality to identity begins to look
increasingly irreversible, the time becomes more urgent for call-
ing out identity as an ideological trap. The same urgency demands
that we rearticulate the universality that has sustained struggles
from the French Revolution to the Haitian Revolution to the
Russian Revolution to the suffragist movement to the civil rights
movement to the Arab Spring. If certain of these struggles have
failed or have gone horribly awry, we must recognize that uni-
versality hasn’t betrayed us. We have betrayed it.22
It is always easy to retreat from the alienating universalist
project to the friendly confines of particular identity. The ease
 Introduction Z 27

of this retreat bespeaks its ideological function. In contrast, the

fact that taking up the universal always involves a disturbance
to our identity is the index of its authenticity. Though universality
is open to all, the path to recognizing it is narrow. Universal-
ity is only visible beyond the consolations of identity.
 1
OUR PARTICULAR AGE

CONSTRUCTION OF THE UNIVERSAL

The common image of politics is that of a divide between two

or more particular groups that battle it out for dominance.
According to this vision of things, politics is akin to tribal war-
fare. The political victor becomes the ruling tribe until such time
as the other tribe triumphs. In the way we typically understand
the struggle, the Left takes the side of the downtrodden or
oppressed groups, alongside those who don’t belong to such
groups but have compassion for them. This coalition constitutes
the left-leaning tribe. The Right, in contrast, takes the side of the
ruling class, those who benefit most from the capitalist system,
but since this group would constitute a powerless minority with-
out additional troops, the Right adds nativists, religious funda-
mentalists, and libertarians to this minority. This coalition forms
the right-leaning tribe.
When one imagines the political terrain in this manner, there
is no clear place for locating universality in the struggle. Partic-
ular tribes fight it out between each other with neither having
any contact with universality. If universality appears at all, it is
not the political starting point but emerges through the promise
 30 Y Our Particular Age

that each side makes for an investment in its position. This is

our casual understanding of the universal.
Within this understanding, the particular attempts to pass off
its interest as consonant with the interest of the society as a whole.
For example, economic libertarians contend that their tax poli-
cies will not just benefit the wealthy but all strata of the society
through a trickle-down effect. Investment in their side betters
the situation for all in the long run. Or those fighting for the
rights of immigrants claim that immigrants sustain the econ-
omy and thus benefit everyone by doing jobs that citizens refuse
to do. Both sides work from particularity to universality, seeing
in the particular fight a synecdoche for the universal. Even if uni-
versality doesn’t have an initial place in the tribal struggle of
particulars, it ultimately finds a place in what each side hopes to
accomplish. But the problem is that this way of moving to uni-
versality entirely fails to give universality its proper political due.
Universality disappears beneath the weight of particular fight.
Only a pseudo-universality would come about in this way.
The image of politics as a fight between particulars has become
increasingly widespread today, as people lament the division of
the social order into two opposing political camps that lack even
a common ground for their disagreements. From all sides of the
political spectrum, we say that we live in a period of political
tribalism. The problem with this image of politics is that, while
it pretends to neutrally present a basic opposition, the frame that
it constructs is thoroughly ideological.
Anytime someone laments the tribalism of contemporary pol-
itics or observes that each side is too entrenched in its particular
position, we know that this person has joined the conservative
side in the struggle, whether meaning to or not. It is not just that
any neutral position external to a conflict is inherently conser-
vative. It is that this way of seeing politics as a struggle between
 Our Particular Age Z 31

particular camps is the basic conservative picture of things. This

picture frames the struggle in a way that already takes a side
in it.
How one conceives a struggle is always more significant than
which side one takes in the struggle—because it determines which
side will be more psychically appealing. We should not measure
political victory by who wins elections or by whose issues tri-
umph but by how we envision the political struggle itself. The
decisive political question involves not the conclusions that we
come to but the form that politics takes.
This is evident on a very elementary level in the thinking of
Karl Marx: he sees that if we view global politics as the confron-
tation between sovereign nations, it is impossible to recognize
the class antagonism that knows no national borders. We’ll
always be thinking about international conflicts and will never
be able even to raise the question of class exploitation that tran-
scends national barriers. Historically, Marxists have spent so
much time fighting against nationalism because they recognize
that investment in the idea of the nation produces a fundamen-
tal barrier to seeing the possibility of class struggle.1 This is why
one of the first things that Lenin wanted to do when he created
a communist government in Russia was to put an end to Rus-
sia’s participation in World War I. Following Marx, he saw that
the question of an international conflict would render the class
struggle invisible. This lesson from Marxism shows that our con-
ception of what constitutes the form of political conflict shapes
the possibilities that will be able to emerge in the actual politi-
cal struggle.
Others have emphasized the importance of form in politics.
For instance, linguist and political theorist George Lakoff pro-
vides an instructive effort to establish the significance of form
in political campaigning. Frustrated with the consistent failures
 32 Y Our Particular Age

of the moderate Left in the United States, Lakoff offers some

advice. He argues that leftists tend to forget that what counts is
how we frame political issues, even more than the positions that
we take on them. Framing— or form—can render battles more
winnable before we fight them. According to Lakoff, the real
political struggle takes place on a symbolic level. It concerns the
terms that we use to describe the contest between each camp. In
the afterword to his book on this subject, Moral Politics, Lakoff
makes his clearest statement on this issue. He states, “The facts
themselves won’t set you free. You have to frame facts properly
before they can have the meaning you want them to convey.”2
Lakoff has a particular prescription for the moderate Left that
reveals how he thinks about form. He envisions changing the
moral frame that surrounds contemporary issues from one con-
ducive to conservatives (the Strict Father) to one favorable for
liberalism (the Nurturing Parent). For Lakoff, winning the sym-
bolic frame game will enable liberal politicians to triumph in
elections.
Lakoff grasps that form matters more than content, which is
surely right as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. Despite
his efforts at reframing in a leftist direction, Lakoff remains on
a basically conservative terrain because his vision of form is not
wide-ranging enough. The problem is that he continues to see
the struggle in terms of two competing particular camps but
imagines the camps differently than we currently do. He simply
wants to replace the particularity of the Strict Father with that
of the Nurturing Parent. The battle between these two forms is
a battle of opposed particulars, arranged so that a different par-
ticular might be able to win. Lakoff has no place for universal-
ity. His formalist vision is not formalist enough because it never
attains universality. The image he lights on—that of the Strict
 Our Particular Age Z 33

Father versus Nurturing Parent—is already an admission of

defeat before the battle.3
By conceiving of the struggle in a way that leaves universality
out of the picture, one accepts the basic conservative premise of
politics that says that the starting point for politics is the iso-
lated individual. According to this position, individuals exist in
a meaningful way outside the universality that constitutes them
as individuals in the first place. Once one accepts this premise,
the struggle is already over because universality will always
appear as an impingement on the privilege of the individual. No
argument about universality will ever ultimately prove convinc-
ing for those who see the isolated individual as the political start-
ing point. The conservative victory occurs with the dominance
of the image of two (or more) particular forces fighting it out for
political supremacy.
What this image gets wrong is that political struggle takes
place between universality and particularity rather than between
competing particulars, despite the fact that we don’t recognize
it as such. The struggle between competing particulars or opposed
tribes is always a play of shadows that obscures the fundamental
opposition between universality and particularity. Universality
concerns and sustains all particulars, but particularity is often
blind to the necessity of its connection to others that universal-
ity constantly foregrounds. Although universal and particular
exist in a dialectical relation—there is no universality without
particularity and vice versa—it matters which position one
chooses as a starting point.
This opposition between particular and universal as the start-
ing point is what constitutes the distinction between conserva-
tive politics of all stripes and emancipatory politics, even though
this is not how the distinction is commonly understood. My
 34 Y Our Particular Age

contention is that the most appropriate way to understand the

terms Right and Left is by associating them with particularity
and universality, respectively. If one doesn’t take this step and
instead sees the opposition as one involving competing tribes,
then one implicitly gives the Right the upper hand.

FIGHTING PARTICULARIT Y IN
PORT- AU- PRINCE

Perhaps the greatest display of political universality in opposi-

tion to particularity in the history of the modern world occurred
in Haiti. A slave colony of France, Haiti perpetuated the first
successful large-scale slave revolt in history. It did so not, like
Spartacus, to free those revolting alone. This was not a particu-
lar revolt. Instead, Haiti revolted in the name of universal free-
dom, equality, and solidarity. Toussaint Louverture, the leader
of the Haitian Revolution, took seriously the universality of the
values proclaimed by the leaders of the French Revolution, which
was occurring in the very nation that had enslaved Saint
Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti in 1804.
When the Haitian slaves revolted for the sake of freedom,
equality, and solidarity, they used the watchwords of the French
Revolution. But these are not just particular watchwords. In
Haiti, Toussaint Louverture and his fellow revolutionaries saw
themselves fighting the same universal struggle as the revolu-
tionaries in France. In his retelling of the Haitian Revolution,
C. L. R. James points out that the French soldiers attempting to
subdue the revolting slaves found themselves shocked when they
heard songs of the French Revolution such as “La Marseillaise”
and “Ça Ira” coming from the opposing army of slaves.4 The fact
 Our Particular Age Z 35

that the Haitians could take up these anthems of the French

Revolution testifies to the universality of both struggles.
Freedom, equality, and solidarity are not values invented in
France and subsequently imported to Haiti. They are not initially
the properly of the European revolutionaries subsequently
imposed on Haiti. The revolutionaries in France didn’t invent
these values but discovered them, and the slaves in Haiti made
the same discovery. They didn’t need to invent their own values
in order to revolt because the values that the French discovered
were not particularly French or particularly European. Their uni-
versality belied the site of their discovery. Universal values can
be discovered anywhere because they are present nowhere.
For their part, the Jacobins in France also evinced the uni-
versality of their values in the attitude that they took up toward
slavery, an attitude that drew the ire of other, nonuniversalist,
participants in the Revolution. When the Jacobins took power
in the French Revolution, they freed the slaves of the colonies in
February 1794. But even before he became part of the ruling bloc
in France, Maximilien Robespierre, one of the Jacobin leaders,
campaigned unequivocally for the freedom of the slaves as a
member of the National Convention.
In a speech before this body, Robespierre courageously con-
tended that the slaves in Haiti were actually fellow citizens and
thus had to be immediately freed. According to Robespierre, the
colonial committee’s decree denying slaves the franchise was
unpardonable. He claimed, “From the moment you have pro-
nounced the word slave in one of your decrees, you have pro-
nounced your dishonor and—”5 Robespierre’s speech breaks off
because the Convention erupted with contrasting hissing and
applause, revealing how contentious Robespierre’s emancipa-
tory claim was. Moments later, he made an even more radical
 36 Y Our Particular Age

statement for the time: “The supreme interest of the nation and
of the colonies themselves is that you would remain free, and
that you would not overthrow the bases of this liberty with your
own very hands. Death to the colonies.”6 Again, hissing and
applause followed this remark, which Robespierre soon repeated
almost word for word, revealing how important this diatribe
against slavery was to him.
Both Robespierre in France and Toussaint Louverture in
Haiti insisted that revolution had to be universal in its ambitions.
But Robespierre ended up veering away from the universality he
expressed in his speech against slavery. His subsequent theoreti-
cal errors—and their practical consequences—played a large
role in the Reign of Terror, which ended up swallowing him and
ultimately giving birth to Napoleon. Unlike the Jacobins, Napo-
leon showed no interest in the universal values of the Revolution.
Instead of championing freedom, equality, and solidarity, he tried
to enact the particularity of French rule over the European con-
tinent. His emphasis on French particularity also produced a
dramatically different attitude toward Haiti than that of Robe-
spierre and the Jacobins.
As long as the radical Jacobin universalists were in charge in
France, the revolutionary government supported the freedom of
the former Haitian slaves. But after the toppling of Jacobin rule
that ultimately lead to a coup d’état in 1800, Napoleon ordered
a revival of slavery. In order to restore slavery in the colony, Napo-
leon brought Toussaint Louverture to France where he basically
starved and froze him to death in a prison cell. He topped this
off by waging war against the Haitian revolutionaries. The tra-
jectory from Robespierre to Napoleon is a trajectory from uni-
versal to particular and thus from freedom to slavery for Haiti.
Haiti followed a similar path itself. Toussaint Louverture’s
successor in Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, unfortunately
 Our Particular Age Z 37

paralleled Napoleon in the way that Toussaint paralleled Robe-

spierre. Months after Napoleon had himself crowned emperor of
the French in 1804, Dessalines had himself crowned emperor
of Haiti. This gesture represents the ultimate victory of the par-
ticular over the universal. An empire cannot be universal, and
an emperor cannot be a figure of universality. Universality pro-
mulgates freedom and equality against imperiousness, which is
the elevation of a particular leader and a particular nation at the
expense of all others. If the collapse of the French Revolution
into the Napoleonic Empire marks a page to lament in human
history, the transformation of the Haitian Revolution into Des-
salines’s brief empire is doubly so.
The Haitian Revolution is the far more important revolution
than its French (or American) counterpart. Whereas the French
Revolution proclaimed universal values, one could look on and
see them as particular to France as long as the revolutionary spirit
remained confined to France. When Haiti took up these same
universal values, it provided clear confirmation of their univer-
sality. This is why Haiti represented such a danger to conservative
defenders of the particularist status quo such as Napoleon.
While he eventually gave up the fight to re-enslave Haiti, Napo-
leon demanded, unironically, slave reparations to be paid by the
freed slaves themselves. The payment of these reparations from
Haiti to France continued into the 1940s. The reparations were
the ransom that universality pays to the triumph of the particu-
lar, a price borne by the Haitians themselves.
This identification of the Right with the particular and the
Left with universality appears counterintuitive given the time
that both spend advocating proposals that touch on particular-
ity and universality. At times, the Right seems to make univer-
salist claims, and the Left certainly shares the Right’s devotion
to the particular on other occasions. But when the Right invokes
 38 Y Our Particular Age

universality, it always does so in a limited fashion—which is to

say, it invokes the universal with its fingers crossed. This rightist
form of universality necessarily depends on exclusion. It becomes
the universality of those who really belong to the social order
(thereby excluding those who don’t work, immigrants, the racial
other, and so on).
One cannot genuinely advocate universality and remain con-
servative. The conservative call for freedom cannot be freedom
for all, just freedom for those who have the resources to be free.
It must exclude a certain number who don’t count and whose
forced labor keeps the social structure functioning. Likewise, the
conservative call for equality cannot be equality for all. Those who
have will always be more equal than those who don’t. An actual
turn to universality requires a break from conservatism and
even from liberalism.
In contrast, when the Left invokes particularity, if it does so
in a genuinely emancipatory way, its concern for particularity is
not really particular. It is always a universal concern: the Left
worries that immigrants aren’t enjoying universal equality or that
black individuals aren’t free to live without fear of a police shoot-
ing, to name just a few. The particular intervention occurs on
behalf of a universal value that the specific particular is being
denied. If the Left becomes mired in the particular and loses
sight of the universal altogether, it slips rightward onto conser-
vative turf. Each position in the political divide derives in the
last instance from this opposition.
But the opposition between the particular and the universal
does not just center on the ultimate position that each side
advances. It is not just a political question. It has roots in how
we know, and if we completely divorce epistemology from poli-
tics, we lose sight of the nature of the political opposition. If
we think about the opposition between Right and Left as the
 Our Particular Age Z 39

opposition between particular and universal, it is clear that the

struggle is epistemological as much as it is political.

ACTING LIKE WE KNOW

The fundamental distinction between Right and Left in politics

is the split between the particular and the universal as the start-
ing point for significance. In this precise sense, epistemology
is integral to politics. Rightists and leftists seldom think of any
link between their politics and their epistemology, and most
probably don’t think about their epistemology at all. But there
is an implicit and revelatory link between conceptions of knowl-
edge and political orientations, even if those embodying the
political orientation don’t recognize it.
Conservatism depends on beginning with a series of particu-
lars and then forming universals from the intersections of those
particulars. The same holds for liberalism, which is why liberal-
ism is not epistemologically different from conservatism. Both
see universality not as a starting point but as something that
derives from individuals coming together. We arrive at the uni-
versal, if we do, through the assembly of particulars. The genu-
ine leftist or proponent of emancipatory politics, in contrast, sees
universality as the starting point and derives the particular from
the universal. According to this view, we cannot just assume
that the particular is self-evidently particular prior to any inter-
vention of universality.
Given the individual point of departure, conservatism neces-
sarily has an inherent suspicion of the collective. Since the indi-
vidual comes first, the collective necessarily performs some vio-
lence on the individual when it subsumes the individual, unless
that collective has its basis in a particular identity, like that of
 40 Y Our Particular Age

the nation or the religious group. Conservatives have no prob-

lems at all with nationalist collectivity because it ensures their
particularity through the exclusion of everyone who does not
have the proper national identity. Religious collectivity functions
similarly. Collectivity exists for the conservative, but always with
clear borders.7
For the Left, in contrast, one starts with universals and rec-
ognizes that particulars have their existence through the universal.
There is a fundamental bond that provides the basis for com-
mitment to the collective deriving from the very structure of
signification itself. Signification is a universalizing structure that
does not rely on exclusions. In this conception, universality pre-
cedes particularity. And if universality comes first, the bond
between subjects is intrinsic rather than extrinsic: it doesn’t not
require a particular identity held in common. We are connected
through how we relate to the universality of the signifying
structure.
If we look quickly at the contrast between Plato and Aristo-
tle, this distinction between leftism and rightism becomes clear
in a way that defies our expectations. This contrast also expli-
cates the connection between epistemology and politics. The cur-
rent state of disrepute in which Plato’s philosophy exists among
leftists indicates how far the Left has moved away from the
universalism that should be its inherent position. For many
contemporary leftists, Plato represents everything that’s wrong
with Western philosophy. He constructs a philosophy in which
ideal forms have the ultimate reality. This runaway universalism
leaves behind particular difference, which is where would-be
leftists attempt to locate emancipation.8 Contra Plato, they seek
emancipation of the particular from the stranglehold of the
universal.9
Gilles Deleuze provides a typical expression of this hostility
toward Plato for the political implications of his philosophy. As
 Our Particular Age Z 41

Deleuze sees it, Plato shackles particularity (or what Deleuze

calls difference) in the cage of universality (or sameness). He
writes, “With Plato, a philosophical decision of the utmost
importance was taken: that of subordinating difference to the
supposed initial powers of the Same and the Similar, that of
declaring difference unthinkable in itself and sending it, along
with the simulacra, back to the bottomless ocean.”10 When one
initially thinks about it, Deleuze’s objection to Plato makes a
great deal of sense. The universal ideal form could not possibly
fit every particular variation. To insist on its priority over the par-
ticular is to narrow our political possibilities and to demand one
way for all. As one might imagine, this critique is in no way con-
fined to Deleuze. It represents the theoretical doxa in the last
half-century concerning the political implications of Plato’s phil-
osophical project.
Unlike Deleuze, Plato requires us to think beyond our com-
monsensical relationship to different objects. As Plato sees it,
thought doesn’t begin with the particular object that we perceive
directly in front of us but with the ideal universal form (or eidos)
that underwrites this particular appearance. Plato makes no
bones about his insistence on the universal as the starting point
of knowledge.
For Plato, the universal, in contrast to the particular, is what
is not there. It is an absence through which we come to know
the particular, an absence that enables us to make sense of what
appears evident. Although the standard interpretation of Plato
understands his universals as existing in an ideal realm distinct
from empirical reality, his great insight consists in separating
universality from any instantiation. By doing this, he conceives
of universality as an absence in the empirical world. The univer-
sal, as Plato grasps it, exists insofar as it is never fully manifested
in an object. Understanding the universal requires seeing the
importance of absence for making sense of what is present.
 42 Y Our Particular Age

Plato’s distinction between lovers of opinion and philosophers

is a distinction between those who embrace present particulars
just as they self-evidently are and those who instead recognize
absent universals as what makes the particulars into what they
are. The implicit link between philosophy and emancipation is
clear here. Emancipation is nothing if not the refusal to rest con-
tent with what is merely present. In doing so, one insists on the
universal as an absence that has a constitutive claim on what is
merely present. Conservatism accepts what is at hand and appar-
ently present as what is. In contrast, leftism—and this is what
makes Plato a fledgling leftist, perhaps despite himself—grasps
the importance of what is not there. What keeps Plato from gen-
uinely becoming a leftist is that he doesn’t yet conceive of the
universal as the point of a shared failure, but his association
of universality with absence is the first step in this direction.
We should view Plato as our forerunner who points us in the
right direction but can’t get there himself.
The difference between Plato’s lover of opinion and his lover
of knowledge (or philosopher) is the difference between Right
and Left. Plato’s philosophers are incipient leftists for the way
that they approach the question of the universal and particular.
In Book V of the Republic, Plato has Socrates state, “As for those
who study the many beautiful things but do not see the beauti-
ful itself and are incapable of following another who leads them
to it, who see many just things but not the just itself, and so with
everything—these people, we shall say, opine everything but
have no knowledge of anything they opine.”11 Lovers of opinion
continually stumble on particulars. But philosophers, according
to Plato, occupy themselves with the beautiful itself or the just
itself, even though these ideals cannot have an empirical exis-
tence. His point is not that philosophers actually see what lovers
 Our Particular Age Z 43

of opinion cannot but that they pay attention to what is not there,
to universality in its constitutive absence.
Plato is the first genuine theorist of the universal because he
recognizes empirical objects as inherently lacking something that
must remain absent and that nonetheless gives them their status
as objects. What they lack, for Plato, is the universality that they
nonetheless point toward. The empirical object suggests what is
missing through its inability simply to be what it is in total iso-
lation. The universal emerges where the object fails to be what
it is and thus relies on what it isn’t in order to be anything at all.
No particular object can simply be what it is without finding sup-
port in what it is not. Most readers of Plato locate the absent
universal in a transcendent beyond, thereby transforming Plato
into a magical thinker, one committed to the tangible existence
of what clearly isn’t real in the same way that everyday objects
are. But to do this is to miss that radicality of Plato’s equation of
universality with absence. This is an equation that Aristotle does
not take up, despite his position as Plato’s most famous student.
For many subsequent thinkers, Aristotle represents a progres-
sive move beyond Plato’s philosophy. Some go so far as to see in
Aristotle the initial gesture of existentialism or pragmatism
because he grounds the abstract universality of the Platonic sys-
tem in concrete beings. The abstract universal that constitutes
the essence of Plato’s thought ceases to exist in Aristotle’s. In its
stead emerges an embodied universality. It is easy to see why one
might look on this turn as a genuine step forward.12 But this way
of valuing Aristotle over Plato misses what is lost with the uni-
versal’s instantiation.
But from the perspective of universality, Aristotle’s great
advance on Plato marks a profound regression. By insisting that
universality must be embodied and thus always tied to its
 4 4 Y Our Particular Age

particular form, Aristotle strips away the heart of Plato’s theory—

the fact that the universal must be absent. Aristotle transforms
the universal from a constitutive absence to a particular presence.
In the third book of the Metaphysics, Aristotle points out that
although thought requires universals, without the particular
thing the universal is nothing.13 He pulls a switcheroo on Plato,
granting priority to the particular relative to the universal.
The political radicality of the universal depends on the fact
that it is absent from the empirical world. Aristotle’s insistence
that the universal exists only in its instantiation is a de facto
rejection of universality as such. To instantiate the universal is
necessarily to miss it, to transform its constitutive absence into
an empirical presence. If the universal can be present, it becomes
a positive identity that one can impose on others. Aristotle’s
turn away from Plato’s philosophy is a fundamentally conser-
vative gesture epistemologically—and it is ultimately politically
conservative as well.
In addition to pointing out that the universal must emerge
out of particularity, Aristotle insists on the ethical emptiness of
universals. For him, virtue does not base itself on universal ide-
als but works as an ethical practice. Virtue derives from how one
acts rather than from the ideals to which one subscribes. This is
why Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is such a different work than
Plato’s Republic. Aristotle’s text reads much more like a practical
guidebook for ethical life than Plato’s because he eschews any
discussion of universality disconnected from a particular way of
life. But the political charge of universality derives from this dis-
connection. To eliminate it, as Aristotle does, is to cut the heart
out of Plato’s philosophical discovery. It is a conservative response
to Plato’s radicality.
Given their positions on universality, it should not surprise
us at all that Plato and Aristotle take opposing positions on
 Our Particular Age Z 45

slavery. Plato imagines a republic that exists without any slaves,

whereas Aristotle’s vision of politics requires them. For Aristotle,
without slaves to take care of the household (or the oikos), free-
dom from necessity in the realm of politics is impossible. Aris-
totle’s vision of the subject as a deliberative political animal
depends on the exclusion of those who take care of economic
reproduction. When he reflects on Plato’s republic with its
absence of slaves and its equal treatment of women, he asks rhe-
torically, “But who will see to the house?”14 This is the panic of
the particularist in the face of the universalist, the slaveholder
in the face of the emancipator. Although this is brutally unfair
to Aristotle, one can imagine a white Southern slaveholder ask-
ing Frederick Douglass the same question in 1860. What Aris-
totle shows, unlike the slaveholder, is the connection between
this political position and how we know. Aristotle cannot imag-
ine a conception of politics that involves an appeal to universal-
ity and that doesn’t require a definitive exclusion of the economic
realm because he sees knowledge as beginning with particulars.
Plato’s investment in epistemological universality leads directly
to a universalist politics.15
Plato rejects the absolute divide between politics and econ-
omy because he recognizes the necessity of universality in poli-
tics. To exclude slaves or women from the political realm would
be to reduce politics to a struggle of particulars, which is what
Plato wants to avoid (and what Aristotle produces). Though there
are clear limits to Plato’s political radicality, he nonetheless points
toward egalitarian possibilities that emerge directly out of his
commitment to universality. These are possibilities that Aristo-
tle, due to his decision to instantiate the universal, subsequently
obscures.
Universality is the lack in every particular.16 It is the insub-
stantiality of the particular, the dependence of the particular on
 46 Y Our Particular Age

what it is not. No particular entity is simply self-contained and

exists on its own. It is always involved with what it is not.17 The
universal is not the other on which the particular depends but
what makes the particular’s self-sufficiency impossible. The point
at which the particular cannot sustain itself in isolation is the
point at which its involvement in universality becomes notice-
able. The lack that forges this connectivity is the site of univer-
sality. If particular objects were self-contained and isolated, it
would be impossible to affect them in any way. There would be
genuine particularity—isolated monads. But chopping down a
tree or eating a tomato or even skipping a rock across a lake
reveals the intrusion of universality in the particularity of these
objects. These are not just collisions of particulars with other par-
ticulars. The lack that makes such collisions possible is a univer-
sal opening insofar as it gives the lie to the isolation of the
particular.
Because it exists only as an absence, we can never simply have
universality. The universal’s status is thus always in question,
always subject to doubt and debate. It is never fully instantiated
in the way that Aristotle would have it, but this status is what
gives universality its transformative potential. By instantiating
the universal, Aristotle strips it of its power to transform the
present by reducing it to the present. Instantiating the universal
has the effect of hiding it.
The link between epistemology and politics is often obscure.
But it is my contention that a genuine leftist politics is ultimately
incompatible with an epistemology that begins with particulars
(or one that demands the instantiation of the universal as Aris-
totle does). This is the case not just with conservatism but also
with liberalism, which always shares the conservative epistemo-
logical starting point.
 Our Particular Age Z 47

If the particular is the unassailable beginning of our think-

ing, as conservative and liberal thought have it, we must do every-
thing we can to protect this particular from other particulars
that have conflicting interests. According to this position, we
begin as isolated beings that form bonds only in order to preserve
ourselves. If we believe that there are only particulars and that
universals are nothing but the constructs that result from the
assembly of these particulars, then it makes sense to move in
the direction of an authoritarian rule that would keep particu-
lars safe. The sole point of any social organization would be max-
imizing the security of the particular, as it is for Thomas Hobbes.
One might imagine the epistemology of the particular pro-
ducing a liberal politics. But this liberalism could never move
beyond conceiving of the state as the guarantor of the individual
rather than as the realm for freedom or equality— or it may go
so far as to call for a dissolution of the state. From this perspec-
tive, the aim of the state does not involve constituting subjects
as free and equal in solidarity with each other but rather enabling
individuals to preserve themselves and their property.18 In this
liberal conception of the state, particulars come together in order
to safeguard their particularity, not because they have an intrin-
sic relation to the other.
Beginning with the particular leaves both conservatives (like
Thomas Hobbes) and liberals (like John Locke) with an impov-
erished image of the state, one that provides the ideological basis
for capitalist relations of production. Particularity cannot pro-
vide the basis for the kind of connection that would forge equal-
ity or freedom through the state. If we begin with particulars,
we necessarily end up with a dramatically restricted conception
of politics, a conception that allows me to get mine with only a
tangential concern for others.
 48 Y Our Particular Age

Although conservatives and liberals seem far apart politically

and view themselves as belonging to different tribes, their shared
epistemology locates them both to the right politically. While
conservatives argue against the governmental apparatus that
liberals believe to be necessary, they nonetheless proffer a ver-
sion of the state feckless in the face of the power of the market.
In the last instance, there is no real political difference between
liberalism and conservatism. Their shared epistemology leads
ultimately to the same political situation—supporting in one way
or another capitalist relations of production.
As long as political liberalism begins with the particular as
its epistemological point of departure, it will always function as
the ideological support for rapacious economic liberalism. If
political liberalism can be joined to the leftist project of eman-
cipation, this marriage must be forged through universality
rather than through particularity. There is no emancipation start-
ing with the particular.

ADDING UP TO ALL

If one begins with particulars as the starting point of knowledge

or politics, one can never arrive at universality. From the per-
spective of this starting point, universality could only be a total-
ity that includes all particulars. The problem with this vision of
universal inclusion is that no inclusion can ever be universal
enough. There will always be one at least more particular to add
in order to arrive at the universal.
This becomes apparent if we think about the image of the
United States as a made up of all different identities. Official rec-
ognition of differences in the United States aims at arriving at
total inclusivity. Authorities at the U.S. Census Bureau create
 Our Particular Age Z 49

categories to recognize differences in identity that attempt to

leave no one out. To this end, they use a startling array of racial
designations. The Census begins by dividing between “Hispanic
or Latino” and “Not Hispanic or Latino.” Under each of these
ethnic categories, there are “White Alone,” “Black or African
American Alone,” “American Indian and Alaska Native Alone,”
“Asian Alone,” “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
Alone,” “Some Other Race Alone,” “Two or More Races Includ-
ing Some Other Race,” and “Two or More Races Excluding
Some Other Race, and “Three or More Races.”19 A quick glance
at this attempt to create an inclusive whole reveals the problem.
The categorization requires a catch-all category—“Some Other
Race Alone”—that exposes the failure of inclusiveness. If I
belong to a race other than those listed, I don’t belong to the uni-
versal group constituted by the Census except as an exception.
The same logic is at work socially as well. Out of a desire to
be inclusive, for instance, we might refer to general person as “he/
she/they.” Through the use of tripartite pronoun structure, we
strive to include all in our language. This addition of pronouns
to create a universal can never go far enough because inclusion
can never go far enough. The collection of pronouns “he/she/
they” fails to include “ze,” which is also in use today. But adding
“ze” would still not solve the problem because still there would
always be another pronoun that our attempted inclusion of all
failed to include. This failure does not mean that we should throw
up our hands and return to using the masculine pronoun to refer
to people in general, but it does suggest that inclusion can never
be total, no matter how strenuously we insist on it. Inclusion is
always a losing battle.
Universality is not a whole or all reached through addition.
We cannot arrive at universality by adding a series of particulars—
he + she + they + sie + ze + x—together to form an inclusive
 50 Y Our Particular Age

whole. Adding up particular identities to create a representative

whole is a failed political strategy. Each new addition only testi-
fies to the fact that more are needed. When we start with par-
ticulars, the cumulative whole that is never whole becomes the
only form of universality that appears as a possibility, which
exposes the poverty of this starting point. One must start with
universality as what is absent and move from the universal to the
particular. To this end, we must model our politics on Plato
rather than Aristotle. This approach articulates genuine univer-
sality while at the same time avoiding the trap of inevitably leav-
ing a particular out of the all.
Conceiving of universality as total inclusion fails to consider
how the structure of belonging depends on a necessary nonbe-
longing. There is always one more particular to add because the
totality depends on at least one being left out. Nonbelonging
defines the whole by letting us know the difference between
inside and outside. In this sense, the failure to include every par-
ticular in the all is a necessary failure that constitutes the all.
We have belonging only insofar as we have nonbelonging.20 As
a result, emancipation requires abandoning the dream of total
belonging altogether. We must recognize the fundamental dif-
ference between universality and belonging. It is only universal-
ity, not total belonging, that offers us emancipation.

FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM

We can see the link between emancipation and universality if

we look at how racism functions and how its political opponents
have reacted to it. All racism depends on the rejection of uni-
versality. There is no universalist racism, just as there is no
 Our Particular Age Z 51

racism that avoids immersing itself in the image of competing

particularities. Racists elevate their own particular identity over
that of others and explicitly reject the universality uniting them
across any racial barrier. The most extreme extension of racism—
slavery—requires the most thoroughgoing abandonment of
universality. In order to enslave someone, this other cannot
belong to universality. As a result, the assertion of universality
is always a threat to a slave society.
In his debut feature film The Birth of a Nation (2016), Nate
Parker depicts the ambivalent role that the black minister plays
in the slave world.21 The film depicts the most well-known slave
rebellion in American history—the revolt led by Nat Turner
(Nate Parker) in Virginia in 1831. Though the revolt ultimately
ended in defeat and death for Turner and his fellow rebels, the
rebellion killed over fifty white people before white authorities
squashed it, and Turner himself escaped the hand of these
authorities for more than two months. The rebellion generated
fear among whites that they would pay for their particularist
crime of enslaving blacks. The source of their punishment was
the universality of Nat Turner.
Parker shows the young Turner learning how to read the Bible
at a young age thanks to his owner Elizabeth Turner (Penelope
Ann Miller). Although her husband Benjamin Turner (Danny
Vinson) eventually puts a stop to this education, Nat Turner
nonetheless learns enough to become an expert in the Bible.
When he becomes an adult, Benjamin’s son Samuel Turner (Armie
Hammer), Nat’s master after Benjamin’s death, hires him out as
a minister to preach the docility of the Gospels and the hope
for an afterlife to slaves on plantations in the area. Nat Turner
becomes the leading ideologist in the Virginia area, where he
embodies Marx’s idea that religion functions nicely as “the
 52 Y Our Particular Age

opium of the people.”22 Turner’s brand of Christianity func-

tions as one of the master’s tools for sustaining unquestioning
servitude.
Turner’s special position does not spare his family or him any
of the horrors of slavery. He witnesses the horrible suffering of
fellow slaves, his wife endures a rape, and he himself suffers from
arbitrary violence. While Turner has more independence than
other slaves and is even able to convince his master to buy the
woman who eventually becomes his wife, the film never allows
us to forget that he remains a slave like any other. If others receive
worse treatment than him, he is always on the verge of receiving
that treatment himself.
Christianity plays an important role in establishing docility
among slaves. However, by employing Christianity for this role,
the white masters play with fire. Although Christianity enjoins
followers to respond to violence with forgiveness (and not with
rebellion), it is also the religion of universality in which every
subject has an equal status. In other words, racism can have no
place in any Christian theology that remains genuinely Christian.
It is not a particularist religion that allows for one group to be
chosen and another to be a priori excluded from the religious
community (except in heresies like Calvinism). The great Chris-
tian acts in the Gospels involve overcoming particular difference—
most famously in the case of the Good Samaritan—for the sake
of universality. The danger of Christianity for the white slave
owners becomes fully evident as Nat Turner’s ministerial career
progresses.23
The key moment in the film occurs when Turner violates pro-
tocol and baptizes a poor white man. In response to this act of
interracial Christian solidarity, Turner’s formerly mild master
(and childhood playmate) Samuel Turner becomes ruthless
toward him, subjecting him to unrelenting days in the stockade
 Our Particular Age Z 53

after giving him a brutal beating with a whip. Surprisingly, this

event leads directly to Turner’s revolt. It is not the brutality of
the beating that functions as the trigger but the rejection of the
universality of the Christian message. When the white master
punishes Turner for practicing Christian universality, Turner
responds by leading a large-scale revolt against the slave system.
Turner can stomach the particular abuse that the slave system
doles out, but he finally balks at its violation of the universality
that it professes to believe in—the universality articulated in
Christianity.
Clearly, slavery itself and the barbarism that it produces lead
to the revolt. Slavery is a straightforward denial of universal
equality. But the proximate cause of the revolt, as Parker envi-
sions it, is the master’s denial of Christian universality. Up to
this point, Turner accepts the horrors of slavery—including the
suffering of his wife, who is raped by a white man—but he reb-
els when these horrors include punishment for his invocation of
Christian universality. Parker depicts the origin of the revolt in
this way in order to illustrate the role that universality plays
in contesting racist violence.
Once one begins from the standpoint of the universal, the
fight against racism becomes exigent. As long as Turner remains
within the perspective of his own particular identity, no matter
how many wrongs he witnesses or suffers, he does not envision
the possibility of revolt. It is only when Samuel violates univer-
sality in a way that Turner can recognize that he turns to revolt.24
Universality in Birth of a Nation becomes apparent when Sam-
uel denies its existence. This is the trigger for an emancipatory
political act. Emancipation is always universalist. It arises when
one sees one’s identity—in this case, one’s identity as a slave—
not as a basis for how one knows but as a barrier to what one
knows and how one acts.
 54 Y Our Particular Age

THE LURE OF THE PARTICULAR

It makes sense that right-wing theorists from Thomas Hobbes

to Ayn Rand would see the particular as the epistemological
starting point and even go so far as to question the existence of
the universal.25 Beginning with the particular enables the conser-
vative or liberal thinker to theorize collectivity as violence toward
our initial position in the world, even if this violence might be
necessary. It makes far less sense, however, that this epistemology
has taken hold on the Left in the aftermath of World War II.
One of the most politically debilitating errors of recent thought
is the contention that one must construct the universal out of
particulars. According to this position, particulars are given,
while we derive universals from the act of bringing a series of
particulars together. This epistemological turn is politically
debilitating precisely because it occurs on the Left rather than
on the Right—its natural home. In contemporary politics, the
Left retreats to the terrain of the particular, which is the Right’s
terrain.
This position is fully visible in the contributions from Ernesto
Laclau and Judith Butler to the collection Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality. In different ways, Laclau and Butler voice their dis-
comfort with universality.26 This discomfort reveals that they
each see the particular as an ontological given and the universal
as what we arrive at through engagement with multiple particu-
lars. They are, to put it in the terms from above, disciples of Aris-
totle rather than Plato.
This position is not unique to Laclau and Butler among the
Left. They are representative figures that give voice to what has
become the leftist doxa. Laclau claims, for instance, “The ‘uni-
versal’ is never an independent entity, but only the set of ‘names’
corresponding to an always infinite and reversible relation
 Our Particular Age Z 55

between particularities.”27 Here, Laclau advances a nominalist

philosophy that assumes that particulars exist and that univer-
sals do not. By reducing the universal to a name or set of names
that indicates how particulars relate to each other, Laclau elim-
inates the universal’s epistemological priority, which is the foun-
dation for any sustainable claim to collective responsibility. If
the only bond between others and myself is our tenuous rela-
tionship, then I am justified in concerning myself with their
interests only insofar as I can reconcile them with my own. Or
at least my commitment to the collective is less clear than if one
assumes that universals exist.
Butler does not go as far as Laclau down this path, but she
nonetheless enacts an epistemological displacement of the uni-
versal. Butler contends that we construct the universal through
the act of negotiating between competing particulars. If we don’t
do this, she fears, we risk falling into what she calls a colonial
logic. Butler states, “Without translation, the only way the asser-
tion of universality can cross a border is through a colonial and
expansionist logic.”28 Butler sees translation of the universal from
particular culture to particular culture as the only way of avoid-
ing falling into the trap of the universal’s dominance, which is,
in her eyes, politically undesirable. From this perspective, the
universal represents a constant danger that we must guard
against. But it is such a danger only when one takes particular-
ity as the starting point.
Although the idea of beginning with particulars and focus-
ing on our concern for the particular sounds emancipatory to our
contemporary ears, it does so only because our hearing has
become so impaired by the blaring critique of universalizing,
which has been turned up to eleven. If we presuppose that we
begin as particulars and that the universal only arrives through
the accumulation of particulars, then any values that we might
 56 Y Our Particular Age

try to establish will inevitably seem like a violent imposition. The

attempt to defend universal values from the perspective of the
priority of the particular is an effort doomed before it com-
mences. Viable values depend on the priority of the universal.
What results from the priority of the particular is a world in
which one critiques instances of particular oppression without
any ability to articulate what values this oppression violates. We
know that particular instances of oppression are bad, but we have
lost touch with why. This is because we have lost touch with the
universal. It is only universality that gives us a reason to fight
collectively against the wrongs of an oppressive situation.
One of the great achievements of the civil rights movement
in the United States was its insistence on the universality of its
struggle. Lack of equality for black individuals stood for lack of
equality as such. Marches for voting rights made it clear that
securing black voting rights meant securing everyone’s freedom.
The particular struggle always had a universal backdrop to it, just
like the Algerians’ fight against the French or the Viet Cong’s
war against the United States. In each case, the emancipation of
some holds within it universal emancipation.
Today, we are far removed from this political situation. Now,
there is outcry about the treatment of immigrants, lack of accep-
tance of the transgendered, the ongoing environmental catastro-
phe, or institutional violence toward black individuals, but there
is no universal ground for the outcry or tie that binds all together
in a possible mobilization. Instead, the instances of oppression
exist in a purely particular fashion. One enumerates the situa-
tion of immigrants, the transgendered, people of color, the work-
ing class, and so on, while always leaving room for the addition
of another particular to the group. The problem with this serial
approach to instances of oppression is not that one is always in
 Our Particular Age Z 57

danger of forgetting one item in the group but that the list of
particulars never adds up to a universal.
The grouping approach to instances of oppression represents
an indirect refusal of universality. It is the necessary expression
of liberalism that derives from the ruling particularist epistemol-
ogy. The ideological violence of this operation is the violence
that derives from the abdication of universality. Whereas Butler
identifies ideological violence with the imperial imposition of the
universal, there is a much more brutal kind of violence in our
inability to refer to it. Stuck in the existence of a group of par-
ticulars without recourse to the universal, the individual endures
the violence of constantly recognizing itself in isolation. With-
out the emancipatory universal, the individual devolves into the
perfect cog in the capitalist machine—taking itself as an isolated
particular while performing the systematic role that capitalism
demands. The bond of the group of particulars is only contin-
gent and fleeting, never emancipatory.
For the conservative or the liberal, the collective is always on
the verge of collapsing. This is because the universal that holds
it together—a collective link always requires a universal—is con-
structed rather than constitutive. As a result, conservatives con-
stantly try to secure it through appeals to national or ethnic iden-
tity that would create collectivity through exclusion. Conservative
politics has its basis in the opposition between friend and enemy
because this is the only way for the conservative to secure a col-
lective bond. Liberals suffer from the same tenuousness but
avoid the divisiveness that conservatives use. Instead, liberals
advocate forging the connection through difference. For them,
the negotiation of differences can be the source of our bond.
For the leftist or the proponent of emancipation, the situa-
tion is altogether different. Universality is the condition of
 58 Y Our Particular Age

possibility for particulars. It plays a constitutive role relative to

its particulars. As a result, the collective link established through
the universal forms an indissoluble connection. The universal is
not a foreign outsider but an intimate point at which each par-
ticular finds itself lacking. Through this lack, the universal holds
the series of particulars together even when they themselves do
not register the connection.
 2
THE IMPORTANCE OF
BEING ABSENT

INCLUDING WHAT DOESN’T BELONG

People believe that the universal is what dominates and puts its
stamp on the particular. It forces every unique particular into
one general mold, which violates the uniqueness of particular-
ity. They think of universality as what constrains particular iden-
tities to conform to its dictates. According to this view, univer-
sality works like the popular clique that imposes its rules and
tastes on everyone at the school. Under this dominance, all the
particular identities at the school must see themselves in the light
of the clique’s supposedly universal standard that establishes the
expectations for looks, style, and behavior. This is the common
understanding of universality both popularly and theoretically
today, and it is the understanding that I aim to refute.
The problem with this way of theorizing the universal is that
it completely misplaces universality, locating it in what deter-
mines everything’s place within the structure rather than in
what doesn’t fit in the structure. Universality stems from the fail-
ure of social determination, not its success. When people align
universality with a force of domination, conceiving it like a pop-
ular clique, they assume that structures can be whole and that
 60 Y The Importance of Being Absent

their determinations of the particulars within them are com-

pletely effective. The problem with this assumption is that it
misses the fundamental way that structures exist and reproduce
themselves.
Structures do not continue because they are complete and just
keep going. Instead, they continue because they are constantly
coming up against a barrier. This barrier marks their failure. But
at the same time, the barrier drives everything within the struc-
ture in an attempt to overcome it. No structure would reproduce
itself if it did not have a barrier to drive it. The structure defines
itself through the striving against the barrier, which is the site
of universality. The point that doesn’t fit in within a structure, I
am arguing here and throughout the book, is the point of uni-
versality. The universal is the structure’s necessary stumbling
block. It is in the structure but doesn’t belong to it. Universality
is the nonbelonging that becomes evident when a structure runs
up against an external barrier as it strives to reproduce itself.
We can think of this in terms of the structure of a successful
American football team. The New England Patriots reproduce
themselves as a dominant team by erecting a series of external
barriers to their success: an aging quarterback, referees preju-
diced against them, the league commissioner unjustly penaliz-
ing them, new rule enforcements designed to block their con-
tinued excellence, and the extra enthusiasm that all the other
teams have for defeating them. All these external barriers drive
them to reproduce themselves and remain a championship team.
No matter how often the Patriots win, the external barriers
remain, even if some new ones replace the old ones. This tells us
that the drive to overcome these external barriers and to become
champions stems from an internal limit within the structure of
the team. The external barriers are how this internal limit
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 61

expresses itself, even though the Patriots focus solely on the

external barrier and avoid seeing that it reflects as internal limit.
In this example, universality is not the New England Patri-
ots as a whole team, nor is it their striving for dominance in the
Super Bowl. Universality is the various barriers that the team
comes up against that both spur it on and yet prevent it from
winning. The universal resides in these barriers and the fact that
they keep cropping up in the path of repeated dominance. As
points where universality emerges, these external barriers are
really just the manifestation of an internal limit that is the driv-
ing force of universality. The Patriots, unfortunately, don’t rec-
ognize any universality in their activity, which precludes them
from embracing what connects not only everyone on the team
but also everyone on other teams. They cannot function as a
model for the Left. But they have the virtue of demonstrating
the universal’s existence in the form of what their constant efforts
to win run up against. Leftist politics can benefit from the Patri-
ots’ lesson and recognize universality as the internal limit,
thereby making universality its point of departure.
Seeing universality in this way enables us to understand how
all our political struggles are connected through a shared non-
belonging, which is the internal limit to any group. This nonbe-
longing is what a focus on particular struggles misses. Particu-
lars belong to the structure without any explicit connection to
each other, while the universal, I am arguing, is what doesn’t fit
in. There is a dialectical relationship between them, however. The
universal is the stopping point that prevents particulars from
realizing themselves fully as particulars. They are universally
united through the failure of a full realization. When we under-
stand universality and particularity in this way, we don’t need to
form a collectivity by adding up individual elements together.
 62 Y The Importance of Being Absent

Instead, a collectivity exists from the beginning through the

connection that forms in the shared limit that the particulars
have, through their shared way of relating to the universal.
This shared way of relating to the universal can be seen as the
basis of freedom. Although societies may suppress the aware-
ness 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. No
society can determine its subjects with complete success but has
a point of nonbelonging on which mastery ultimately founders.
This point of nonbelonging universally marks every form of soci-
ety and every type of culture from within. Despite efforts to
minimize its effects, it acts as a constant disturbance of every
society’s daily functioning. As the point of nonbelonging, the
universal is the reverse side of total despotism. Universality exists
in despotism’s lack.1
Even if a structure of mastery assimilates one point of non-
belonging, it cannot assimilate nonbelonging as such. Mastery
strives toward becoming total, but as it comes closer to elimi-
nating all resistance, it runs into an insuperable barrier—its own
dependence on what it cannot assimilate—that acts as a brake
on its total control. This barrier energizes the compulsion to mas-
tery by giving it something to act on and thus a reason for being.
But despite the power exercised on it, the barrier proves unyield-
ing because it represents the necessary condition for the existence
of any mastery at all. As a result, despotic power can’t achieve
total despotism. Its external barrier is really an internal limit. If
the external barrier ceases to be intractable, another one will
emerge. When it comes to despotism, the elimination of one
barrier is always the prelude to a new one that will seem just as
intractable as the former one did.
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 63

We can see this even in the case of the actions of the rela-
tively nondespotic global capitalist order after the fall of the
Berlin Wall. This event signaled the end of what was an intrac-
table barrier for the capitalist order: the Iron Curtain. For a brief
interlude in the early 1990s, it seemed as if this order would elim-
inate nonbelonging altogether. But the interlude did not last
long. New manifestations of nonbelonging quickly arose, most
significantly in various forms of reactionary Islamicist projects,
including Al Qaida’s destructive assault on the United States
and the attempt by the Islamic State and the Levant (ISIL) to
establish a caliphate in the Middle East. This Islamicist terror
appeared in the guise of a new intractable barrier, which is
why George W. Bush imagined the war against it as an almost
unending one. By proclaiming a War on Terror with no definite
end point, Bush announced the replacement for the Iron
Curtain.
The emergence of this new external barrier to capitalism’s
complete globalization testifies to the internal limit of capital-
ism’s totalization, a limit not just for capitalism but one that ren-
ders every attempt at total mastery futile. Even if the form of
the barrier is contingent—for the capitalist order, it might have
been fundamentalist Christians rather than Islamicists—the
limit itself is necessary. The limit that every structure ultimately
runs into is an unassimilable nonbelonging that acts as a consti-
tutive absence for the structure. Nonbelonging is universal.
No society can include us without simultaneously alienat-
ing us from it. My belonging in a society always breaks down,
which enables me to turn against this society when it takes a
direction that I cannot accept. This is why I am free. Freedom is
not a value of belonging, of being a member of a free society.
Freedom becomes apparent as a value when we experience our
 64 Y The Importance of Being Absent

nonbelonging, a nonbelonging that is universal because it

applies to everyone, even those who most feel like they fit in.
We universally fail to fit in, and this universal failure is the
basis of our freedom from social determination. Even the most
authoritarian society cannot eviscerate the freedom that exists
as a result of its inability to integrate individuals into its order
with complete success. No matter how strongly social forces act
on us, we cannot simply obey without an unconscious supple-
ment to this obedience that undermines it in some way, which
is why the Stalinist Soviet Union required special sites for those
who didn’t go along. The gulag exists because universal freedom
pervades mass indoctrination as a structuring absence. This
absence owes its existence to the unconscious that throws the
individual out of joint with itself. If there were no unconscious,
there would be no freedom, even though we assume that the
unconscious, because it involves what we don’t consciously will,
is the site of our unfreedom.
Nonbelonging manifests itself in each subject as the uncon-
scious. To have an unconscious means that I can’t belong to
myself, that I can never be completely identical with what I am.
The gap that prevents the social order from completing itself
intrudes in me by installing a gap between what I will and how
I desire, a gap that psychoanalysis calls the unconscious. As
speaking beings with an unconscious, our unconscious desire is
at odds with our conscious will. I will to limit my caloric intake
every day in order to keep fit, but my unconscious desire leads
me to eat a Twinkie after dinner and sabotage my diet. Unfor-
tunately, my will to diet is not an act of freedom, but the sabo-
tage is.
Freedom emerges out of an unconscious desire that doesn’t
jibe with social demands, not in our free will. Acts of freedom
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 65

do not occur when I consciously weigh the options and make a

decision to revolt but when I feel that I cannot do otherwise and
act in accordance with my unconscious drive. This is the para-
dox of freedom and the result of its origin in what we lack rather
than what we have (our conscious will).
The universality of this internal distance in all subjects marks
their freedom from total coercion. If the demands of the social
order and the responses of the individual subject lined up per-
fectly, there would be no space for universal freedom. We would
be locked into our particular identity and locked into our given
world. But we constantly see their failure to line up with each
other. Even when I try to act in total conformity with social
injunctions, a gap remains between the command and my obe-
dience to it. This gap is necessary for both obedience and revolt.
It enables me to invest in obedience through an act of identi-
fication rather than just following it by rote. But on the other
hand, the gap between the social demand and my obedience
makes total obedience impossible. Total obedience necessarily
hides some degree of rebellion, which is why the appearance of
complete obedience always renders authorities suspicious.
The employee who always eagerly follows the boss’s orders
may come home at night and dream about killing the boss. The
conscious effort to be the perfect employee cannot exist without
some unconscious investment in subversion, even if it isn’t as dra-
matic as a fantasy of murder. It could be as simple as the enjoy-
ment of showing up colleagues who fail to follow orders as
promptly or as efficiently. In this way, the conforming employee
would contribute to the disorder of the company rather than its
efficiency. All communities suffer from the same problem of non-
belonging, not just corporations (which actually have incentives
in place to produce belonging, like employment itself and
 66 Y The Importance of Being Absent

salaries, that other communities don’t have). Nonbelonging

brings freedom because it indicates that we have no substantial
support in the social order to rely on.2
It is our inability to fully belong that also provides the basis
for the universality of equality. No one can fully belong to a social
order that is itself incomplete and thus cannot precisely dif-
ferentiate between belonging and nonbelonging. There is no
secure inside that can serve to define belonging.3 All fail to belong
equally, even though some cling to the illusion of their belong-
ing more than others.
Social hierarchies mask this failure and present some people
as more equal than others. But this value depends entirely on
the assessment of others. It is not self-sustained by any social
authority. If no one truly belongs, then no hierarchy has any sub-
stantial status. All social hierarchies depend on our collective
belief in them. Simply by collectively disbelieving in someone’s
importance, we can cause this importance to vanish, which
reveals the universal equality that becomes evident through the
lack of belonging.
This phenomenon becomes clear in the case of the celebrity
found guilty in the court of public opinion of violating the moral
norms of the society. In early 2017, Kevin Spacey was the star of
a successful television series and an important movie actor. He
was able to procure funding for any project that he endorsed. By
2018, Spacey’s importance completely evaporated after several
allegations of child molestation became public. The television
series House of Cards fired him, and a movie production already
in process dropped him at considerable cost rather than releas-
ing the film with him in it, which would have entailed certain
box office failure. When Spacey’s actions came to light, people
stopped believing in his importance, and he became completely
unimportant, except as a warning to others.
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 67

As Spacey’s demise indicates, social status based on belong-

ing is just a mask for an underlying equality in nonbelonging.
While it is straightforward in the case of Spacey’s transgressions,
it seems less clear when we look at the wealthy. They have social
standing and influence because they have money, not because
people respect or believe in them. But money itself is not much
more solid than public opinion. It exists solely on the basis of
the faith that everyone has in it.4 Although it would be difficult
to organize, we could collectively give up our belief in the value
of money and cease recognizing the privileges of wealth. The dif-
ficulty of imagining such an event contrasts with the actual his-
torical incidences of money losing all its value in economic
crashes. These incidences are moments when the society’s col-
lective belief in money’s value crashes along with the market.
Because they show how quickly the mark of inequality (wealth)
can disappear, they testify to the link between universal equal-
ity and nonbelonging. Our equal nonbelonging becomes evident
when our belief in the substantiality of wealth or social status
collapses.
Solidarity is the universal value that is most difficult to dis-
cern. During the everyday functioning of society, it is almost
impossible to detect. But when a crisis explodes, the status of
universal solidarity undergoes a thorough transformation. In the
aftermath of a crisis, universal solidarity becomes almost impos-
sible to deny.
We have solidarity in the equal nonbelonging that wealth and
social status obscure. There is universal solidarity because no one
fully belongs and everyone deals with lack. No one who tran-
scends the society’s structuring absence gains total belonging.
To view oneself in isolation is to misunderstand one’s dependence
on the universal. As a lacking subject, one simply cannot go it
alone or pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. Even in a
 68 Y The Importance of Being Absent

capitalist society that ideologically privileges an atomistic iden-

tity, one’s own subjectivity constantly refers to universality.
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 nonethe-
less exists universally.
The moments when universal solidarity becomes clearly artic-
ulated are times when a shared failure to belong becomes appar-
ent. This is why we experience solidarity during a crisis. When-
ever a crisis occurs in the world, we witness the universality that
always exists become visible through the struggle of people to
help. People rush to send supplies, donate blood, or even go in
person to the crisis area to provide aid. The crisis is never just a
crisis for particulars but a universal crisis, except for those who
reject universality and believe that only particulars exist. These
right-wing particularists hunker down and try to protect them-
selves from the crisis. But for everyone else, crisis represents a
moment when solidarity reveals itself as a universal value, not as
a bond restricted to only those who share our identity. Universal
solidarity doesn’t leave anyone out because it takes those who
don’t belong as its starting point. Universal solidarity is solidar-
ity with those who don’t belong formed through the universal-
ity of nonbelonging.
It is true that we sometimes engage in charitable efforts toward
crisis victims just to appear like we care when we really have no
actual investment in universal solidarity. And such efforts can
even have a tendency to backfire, making life worse for the tar-
gets of our charity. But these factors do not mitigate the univer-
sality of solidarity. Even if we perform charitable efforts for
nefarious reasons and they end up exacerbating the crisis, the
impulse to help expresses the fact of universal solidarity. When
one sees others clearly in distress, this evokes the universal
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 69

nonbelonging that we all share and that produces solidarity,

even if this solidarity requires a crisis to awaken it.
But we need not wait for a crisis to save us. Every day con-
fronts us with the failure to belong—whether in the form of
homeless people we pass on the street, a brief glimpse we catch
of life in the favelas around the world, or a blatant racist incident
we witness passing without any comment. In each of these
moments, we have an opportunity for discovering our partici-
pation in universal solidarity. At any point in our history, we can
recognize our solidarity in nonbelonging and assert that univer-
sal values cannot exclude anyone, not even those who don’t
belong.

FREEDOM IN FAILING

If we examine the predominant universal deployed in the con-

temporary capitalist universe, freedom, we confront the problem
of universality straight on. There is no struggle, no matter how
particular, that does not take place under the banner of freedom.
Even more than equality, it is the one universal today that has
the ability to unite people together. We clearly have to preserve
the concept of freedom in some form. 5 Without freedom, the
very possibility of acting against the social or biological deter-
minants of our existence disappears, which is why so many
people continue to invoke it. And yet, the widespread invoca-
tion of freedom often represents a betrayal of the universality
of freedom.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the American invasion
of Iraq done in the name of this universal—“Operation Iraqi
Freedom.” This onslaught against freedom took place under its
moniker. George W. Bush, the architect of the war, could even
 70 Y The Importance of Being Absent

celebrate a protest greeting him in London by identifying it with

the freedom that the United States was fighting for. Bush invaded
Iraq in order to impose American freedom on Iraq and thereby
make Iraq look more socioeconomically like the United States—
or make Iraq into a site that the United States could exploit
economically. Even though this attempt largely failed, the impo-
sition of Western freedom did incredible damage to Iraq as a
state and to the people there. The war killed at least 500,000
people and displaced millions, ironically transforming Iraq from
a stable nation not actively exporting terrorism to a hotbed of
terror. This catastrophe appears as yet another bad idea in the
supposedly long sad history of universality.
Listening to Bush himself at the time, it seems clear that he
had universal freedom in mind. In his State of the Union address
prior to the war, he famously claimed, “The liberty we prize is
not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity.”6
For Bush, freedom’s universality stemmed from God, and God
condemns us to it. In this way, Bush took up the same position
as the critics of universality, though he was obviously much more
sanguine about universality. Bush and the critics of universality
both believe that the universal imposes itself on people or that
we impose it on others. But if we look closer about the nature of
Bush’s war and its relation to universality, universality does not
appear where Bush himself tries to locate it. The Iraq War illus-
trates that the universal does not operate in the way that Bush
and contemporary critics of universality think that it does.
The universal in the American Operation Iraqi Freedom is
not present in the successful dissemination of the American way
of life in Iraq. Though Bush used the term universal freedom to
justify beginning the conflict, the war actually had nothing to do
with freedom as a universal. Instead, Bush imposed the partic-
ularity of American capitalist freedom, which is the freedom to
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 7 1

accumulate and consume with impunity. Universal freedom—

the freedom deriving from the failure of mastery—is precisely
what Bush’s war violated. He fought on behalf of the particular
against the universal.
His attempt to impose freedom transformed it from an absent
universal into a present particular. We don’t find universals—
freedom, equality, solidarity—by examining the positive struc-
tures or institutions that constitute our social order. Nor do we
find them by searching in different societies or in the differences
between societies. Universals exist on the basis of what is miss-
ing. We discover the universal through what cannot be said, even
as we name this absence as an absence. Every authentic univer-
sal refers to a lack.
Universals bring us together not by imposing a common struc-
ture on us but by revealing that we share what we don’t have and
can never have. The fact that no one can have a universal—no
one possesses freedom or equality—is the source of their eman-
cipatory quality. Universals are not possessions to have or lose
or give away. We don’t have to be suspicious of the universals
because no one can ever impose them on us, even if someone
wanted to.
If we return to Bush’s Iraq War, this becomes apparent. Bush
invoked universal freedom as the basis for the war, but universal
freedom emerged in the war only through the inability of the
American forces to impose their particular form of capitalist
freedom on Iraq. Although Bush didn’t intend it, the war made
evident the universality of freedom as an absence when the
American forces failed to impose the American way of life. Par-
adoxically, the freedom of the Iraqis manifested itself in the
American failure to set them free in the particular American
sense of the term. Despite their technological superiority, the
American forces could not just impose their particular form of
 72 Y The Importance of Being Absent

freedom on the Iraqis. There was a gap between Bush’s inten-

tion and the execution of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The Iraq War is instructive because it reveals that Bush and
the leftist critics of universality make the same error from oppos-
ing perspectives. The problem with Bush’s rationale for the war
and with the critics of universality stems from the misalignment
of the universal with imperiousness. Far from acting like a des-
pot that imposes an empty form on every particular content, the
universal is what disturbs all despotism. This disturbance of mas-
tery is what all genuine articulations of universality manage to
articulate.
The universal does not appear in the act of imposing itself on
people but in the failure of any regime to fully impose itself. It
is not mastery but the failure of mastery that is universal. The
master signifier, the foundational term of any social structure,
promises to include everything, to create a whole and harmoni-
ous society, but there are universals precisely because it can’t. In
this failure, we can recognize the basis for all universal values.
The universal reveals the impotence of every social master.7
As the failure of mastery, the universal is necessarily on the
side of emancipation. The more that leftists retreat into particu-
larity, the more they abandon the emancipatory struggle itself.
The emancipatory struggle must begin with universals, finding
them constituting each particular. Only in this way can the Left
return the struggle to its own turf. Emancipation must be uni-
versal, or it ceases to be emancipation.8

SPEAKING ABSENCES

Associating the universal with the failure of inclusion does not

mean that we must never attempt to articulate it. It is just that
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 73

we cannot articulate it directly because it emerges as an absence.

We access the universal through what doesn’t belong to a group-
ing, through the moment where the universal appears not to
hold. Since what we have in common is what we don’t have, the
universal can only emerge through what is missing. The figures
of the universal are not the supposedly privileged subjects in a
society—those who most clearly seem to fit in—but those who
reveal their nonbelonging. When individuals fail to register
within the field of symbolic recognition, their absence aligns
them with universality.
Because the universal is a shared lack, one must indicate it
through absence rather than presence. It is not as simple as say-
ing, for example, that all people are free or everyone is equal.
The universal is not a positive whole but the failure of the whole.
The attempt to transform the universal, which is an absence in
signification, into a positivity, necessarily misses it. Rather than
expressing authentic universality, one privileges the particular
identity that happens to stand in for the whole. This is why one
cannot articulate universality by saying “All Lives Matter”
instead of “Black Lives Matter.” This is to tacitly accept that
white lives matter more because they do in the current political
arrangement. If one formulates universality in this way, one
instantly produces an exception to the universality that one pro-
claims. In the guise of formulating a universal, one constructs
an exclusive particular.
Those who appear as unequal and cast aside are the figures of
universal equality. The ones receiving unequal treatment from
contemporary society—those working for a pittance, enduring
racist structures, or suffering from the threat of sexual assault—
don’t belong. In their nonbelonging, they stand for universal
equality. These figures reveal that the universal becomes visible
as a universal only through those who occupy the position of
 74 Y The Importance of Being Absent

absence. By making evident the failure to constitute the univer-

sal, they articulate it in its true form. Because the universal is an
absence, its appears where we assume it will not. It is the prov-
ince of those who don’t belong rather than of insiders.
In the thought of theorists of political struggle, we can see
this paradoxical dynamic at work. Thinkers like Frantz Fanon
and Karl Marx unabashedly locate the struggles that they cham-
pion in universal terms. They articulate the universal in the
challenge that the colonized or the proletariat poses to the hid-
den particularity of European capitalist society. Through their
nonbelonging, the colonized and the proletariat enable us to see
the universal in the form of what is missing from the social
structure.
When Frantz Fanon attacks Europe for its proclamation of
universal values while perpetuating violent domination of the
colonized, he is not attacking universality. This is the way that
he gives expression to universal equality. His attack targets
Europe for its reduction of universal equality to a system of uni-
versal inclusion that includes colonized peoples as those who
don’t belong. In order to formulate its purportedly universal val-
ues for those included in its vision, Europe had to create a class
that didn’t belong to its universality. Its distorted universality
required the nonbelonging of the colonized.
Importantly, Fanon’s aim is not to engender belonging for the
colonized, to enable them to participate in a fully realized Euro-
pean universality, which is why he enjoins the colonized to
abandon Europe. He doesn’t want to make Europe more expan-
sive and inclusive. He proclaims, “Let us leave this Europe
which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one
of its street corners, at every corner of the world.”9 This is not,
contrary to appearances, a call for an abandonment of univer-
sality but for the rejection of European false universality that
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 75

depends on the nonbelonging— and thus the inequality— of the

colonized.
In the act of formulating this critique, Fanon indicates that
the universal must be conceived differently. When Europe dis-
torts it, it ceases to be universal and produces the nonbelonging
of the colonized. All the attempts to include the colonized in
this particularity disguised as universality are mere pretenses. As
Fanon sees it, the universal emerges not through a general state-
ment about the unimportance of race but through the recogni-
tion of the universal as an absence, which occurs when those who
don’t belong make their presence felt. It is the struggle of the
colonized against Europe, not the European colonial project,
that embodies the universal values discovered in the Enlighten-
ment and articulated by the French Revolution.
Fanon links universality to the struggle that testifies to its
absence. The struggle emerges through the site of nonbelonging
that constitutes its universality. But the struggle does not aim at
a universality to come.10 The struggle for universal equality
already partakes of universal equality, insofar as the universal
cannot become fully present. Its full realization would eliminate
all nonbelonging and thus the very source of equality.11 There can
be no fully successful installation of the universal that doesn’t
fundamentally betray universality. To dream of a future when
the universal would become fully present is to return to the illu-
sion that we could create complete inclusion and overcome all
nonbelonging, which is precisely the European error relative to
the colonies.
Toward the beginning of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon dis-
cusses the link between the colonized recognizing their partici-
pation in the universal and their struggle against colonialism. He
states, “At the very moment when they discover their humanity,
they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory.”12
 76 Y The Importance of Being Absent

Fanon’s point here is that seeing themselves as universal—

discovering their humanity—functions for the colonized as a
weapon in the struggle against colonialism. Taking the side of
those who don’t belong to the colonial project places one on the
side of the universal. Or, formulated conversely, recognizing
the authentic universal inherently places one with the colonized
in their fight.13
For Fanon, the fight against colonial domination is a univer-
sal fight, a fight on behalf of universality. In contrast, colonial
Europe’s expressions of universal equality betray authentic uni-
versality insofar as they constitute the colonized subject as an
outsider to this universality. According to Fanon, Europe tells
colonized subjects that they must wait for this equality to come
in the indefinite future, but this future time is infinitely reced-
ing. Europe can promise it because it will never arrive. This uni-
versality that the colonizer promises in the infinitely deferred
future is universality in the form of its complete realization,
which isn’t universality at all. Authentic universality resides in
the struggle against the false European universality, which is
really just European particularity, that Fanon identifies.
But universality doesn’t condemn us to unending struggle. It
is possible for a social order to recognize the universality of non-
belonging rather than attempting to eliminate or repress it. This
does not mean universalizing recognition. We must recognize
universality rather than universalize recognition. Recognizing
universality requires a radical shift in point of view: rather than
looking at nonbelonging from the perspective of belonging, we
must look at belonging from the perspective of nonbelonging.
Marx advances a vision of universality closely related to
Fanon’s. When Marx identifies the proletariat as the universal
class, this is what he’s getting at. As Marx sees it, the proletariat
partakes in the universal when it assumes the mantle of the
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 77

leading force in the fight against class society. By struggling for

its own equality, the proletariat simultaneously struggles for
universal equality. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx makes this
clear. He claims that “the emancipation of the workers contains
universal human emancipation.”14 By demonstrating their exclu-
sion from the regime of purported equality, the proletarians
demonstrate equality’s absence from the capitalist system. In
this way, they highlight universal equality.
Despite its pretensions otherwise, capitalism cannot accom-
modate equality. That said, capitalism does depend on the prin-
ciple of universal equal exchange. At the nub of the capitalist
system, the capitalist exchanges money to the laborer for labor
power. From the perspective of the system itself, this is an equal
exchange. Each side gives something of value to the other side
without deceiving or cheating. But what Marx shows is that this
exchange occurs against a background of inequality that stains
the entire process.
The worker comes to the exchange needing to work in order
to survive, whereas the capitalist arrives looking for additional
accumulation of capital. As a result, the capitalist always has
leverage on the worker and sets the terms of the exchange in a
way that enables the extraction of not just the labor paid for but
also the surplus labor that the worker provides. This surplus labor
produces the surplus value that, according to Marx, is the basis
for the capitalist’s profit. Although the exchange of capital for
labor time is fair and equal, the capitalist always receives some-
thing additional in the bargain not paid for. This extra is the
result of the capitalist’s initial advantage that resounds through-
out the structure of the capitalist system. The discrepancy
excludes the worker from the system’s supposed equality.
Through class struggle, the proletariat draws attention to the
absence of equality within the particularity of capitalist society.
 78 Y The Importance of Being Absent

This struggle reveals equality as a universal through its absence.

Capitalist society proffers equality as already fully realized. It
pretends to a universality that it does not have. Marx identifies
the proletariat as the universal class because universal equality
actually becomes evident only when this class points out where
equality is missing in capitalist society. The proletariat is the uni-
versal class insofar as its fight touches on the failure of the capi-
talist system of equality.
In spite of this compelling formulation, Marx’s diagnosis of
the universality of the proletariat requires a slight corrective.
Though he comes close to Fanon in his political project, he makes
a misstep that Fanon does not. Marx doesn’t see that this uni-
versality cannot lie in the fully liberated society to come. Despite
what Marx thinks, the proletarian revolution will not create total
belonging. For him, emancipation would represent the point at
which we finally realized universality and eliminated nonbelong-
ing. In this way, Marx fails to recognize that universality resides
in what doesn’t fit, not in creating a world that would allow
everyone to fit in.15
To identify universality with the promise of total inclusion is
to betray universality by transforming its absence into a presence,
even if we defer that presence into the future. As a presence, the
universal ceases to be universal because it necessarily becomes
particular and entails additional nonbelonging, which will itself
become the site of universality.
It is in the nature of the universal as a failure of identity that
we will never fully realize it. The inability to make the universal
present is not, however, an external barrier to universality. It is not
that particulars ultimately resist their assimilation into it. The
nonrealization of the universal is fundamental to universality
itself. The absence of a fully realized universal is the essence of
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 79

universality because it is the result of mastery’s failure. The uni-

versal is just another name for the impossibility of complete
belonging. Consequently, we access universality through the
struggle to realize it, not through proclamations about its future
reality.
If universality requires struggle, this would seem to call into
question its status as universal. This suggests that it has an out-
side that limits its pretension to universality. It is surely the case
that the universal cannot include an enemy and remain univer-
sal. Even though universality involves struggle against an oppres-
sive structure, this struggle does not and cannot entail an external
enemy. When Fanon conceives of the colonized as champions of
humanity or Marx labels the proletariat the universal class, the
opposition that these figures of the universal encounter is the
universal’s own internal limit. The universal struggles against a
limit rather than an enemy, which is why universal struggles
never exclude the conversion of their opponents to the side of
the universal struggle. The opponents of the universal are not
enemies but potential allies who have not yet come around. The
universal struggle has no necessary opposition, though the limit
it encounters—and thus the struggle itself—is necessary.
The difference between struggle on behalf of the universal and
particular struggles lies in the nature of what one struggles
against. Particular struggles identify an enemy that they aim to
vanquish in order to advance the interest of their particular iden-
tity. This is the case, for example, with the Confederacy in the
American Civil War. The Confederacy did not fight for any uni-
versality but in order to maintain the integrity of its particular
identity that faced external threats.16 The election of Abraham
Lincoln endangered the Southern way of life that centered
around slavery. In the face of this external threat, the South
 80 Y The Importance of Being Absent

seceded and began a rebellion against an enemy threatening its

survival. From the perspective of particular identity, the enemy
is just another particular—in this case, the North.
In contrast, the opponent of universal struggle is not a par-
ticular but rather the structure that obscures universality as an
absence, the structure that insists on the insignificance of what
is absent. The universal struggle aims at drawing attention to the
universal as the result of a failure of integration. It consists in
showing that what is absent is actual. Its opponents are those
who deny the existence of the universal because they see only
the potential for successes rather than the actuality of failures.

THE FRENCH INCLUSION

When political movements go awry, we can often identify their

misstep as a philosophical as much as a political one. It can involve
a retreat from universality to particularity. Or it can involve try-
ing to turn authentic universality into a structure of universal
belonging. The promise of belonging is the betrayal of the uni-
versal and the betrayal of any revolutionary impulse. But it is a
temptation that few can refuse.
This is what happens during the French Revolution. The
movement away from the universal based in nonbelonging led
to a dream of complete belonging. This vision of complete inclu-
sivity turned the revolutionary dream into the nightmare of the
Reign of Terror. Terror is the attempt to force universal inclu-
sion, to eliminate all who don’t fit or resist belonging, but it
always stumbles over inclusion’s basic impossibility (which is,
ironically, the source of real universality).
There is nothing necessary about this movement. There is no
secret codebook of revolution that dictates that every revolution
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 81

must move from the universality of nonbelonging to the attempt

to instantiate universality as a completed structure where every-
one can have a place. The betrayal of universality for belonging
is not destined. It is only because we look at revolutions after their
failure that this failure seems necessary. In the case of the French
Revolution, this error is easy to see.17
In order to completely realize freedom and enable everyone
to belong to a free society, the Committee of Public Safety had
to identify those who were betraying the universal. But every-
one’s collective failure to belong makes this betrayal unavoidable.
If we examine every person closely enough, we will find that
none of them belong, that there is a point of betrayal or nonbe-
longing in all. Everyone was guilty, even those who consciously
devoted themselves entirely to the Revolution, because no one
escaped having an unconscious. Working with a fundamental
misconception of universality, the Committee of Public Safety,
as the year of the Great Terror advanced, was able to see treason
in everyone. This was not incorrect. Betrayal is written into the
attempt to create a world of completely realized freedom. In this
sense, no one could evade the guillotine, as ultimately the deaths
of Camille Desmoulins and George Danton, two of the Jacobin
victims of the Jacobins, reveal.
Understood as a value that one can fully realize all-inclusively,
freedom, just like equality, justifies terror. If we managed to cre-
ate a future society where all could be totally free, one might
reasonably claim that it is worth a few thousand deaths, as long
as this number excludes the one making the calculation. But no
such society is possible. The drive for it ends up resulting in its
own form of despotism. This is evident in Robespierre’s claim
during the Terror that “the government of the revolution is the
despotism of freedom against tyranny.”18 For Robespierre, free-
dom requires despotic efforts to ensure its full realization for
 82 Y The Importance of Being Absent

all—to forge total belonging—but it is just this commitment that

betrays universal freedom.
Despite Robespierre’s vehement opposition to the death pen-
alty expressed in a speech before the Constituent Assembly on
June 22, 1791, two years later Robespierre would become a lead-
ing figure on the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign
of Terror, during which time he would equate freedom with the
pursuit of the death penalty. This shift was possible because he
betrayed freedom in the effort to construct a free social struc-
ture to which everyone might belong. The goal of universal
belonging that overtook the French Revolution is the abandon-
ment of the universal because there is universality only in non-
belonging. Robespierre’s shift of viewpoint on the death penalty
does not represent a hardening of his heart after gaining power
but evidence of a transformation in how he conceived freedom.
By the summer of 1793, he came to believe that freedom was real-
izable for all in a society of total inclusivity. This required the
pursuit of freedom to become despotic.
The shift in the status of freedom is also visible in the speech
that made an ordinary Saint-Just into Saint-Just, the major fig-
ure of the Revolution—his “Discourse on the Judgment of Louis
XVI.” This crucial speech not only propelled Saint-Just into
notoriety but also marked a move away from authentic univer-
sality for the Revolution. Saint-Just argued against treating Louis
XVI as a king or even as a fellow citizen. In this speech, he pro-
claimed, “The King should be judged as an enemy.”19 Naming
the king an enemy rather than just a criminal reveals that the
universality of the Revolution was not operating here like an
actual universal. The key to authentic universality is that it doesn’t
require an enemy in the way that a state might because no one
possesses it fully. It is not akin to the Nazi’s German that requires
a corresponding Jew in order to constitute itself, which is what
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 83

Saint-Just implicitly says by casting the king as an enemy com-

batant. Even if the Revolution needed to execute the king for
symbolic or strategic reasons—given his treason, this would have
been a legitimate position—he did not need to become the enemy.
When Saint-Just elevated Louis XVI into an enemy that the
Revolution must destroy, he revealed that the Revolution had
abandoned universality as such.
As the cases of Robespierre and Saint-Just indicate, the Ter-
ror arose because of the transformation that universality under-
went during the course of the Revolution.20 The danger did not
lie in insisting on universal freedom but in transforming univer-
sal freedom into a form that promised complete belonging. When
we mistakenly identify universality with the possibility of its
realization and succumb to the dream of total belonging, any
price paid for realizing it seems worth it. To realize universality
fully is always to eradicate it, making this price too high.
In the early years of the Revolution, the greatness of the Jaco-
bins consisted in their refusal to fall into the trap of identifying
universality with the possibility of creating a society in which
everyone could belong. For this reason, despite their subsequent
missteps, the Jacobins are the real heroes of the French Revolu-
tion. They begin with the tacit understanding that freedom
resides in a collective inability to belong that everyone shares.
This is why Robespierre argued so vehemently against slavery
and against imposing the Revolution on other nations through
war. Advocacy for war was the position that the supposedly mod-
erate Girondins took up.21 Robespierre, for his part, saw that
war generates nationalist sentiments on both sides that undercut
the Revolution’s universality. War was a detour in which the Rev-
olution would lose its universality. Eventually, Robespierre’s fears
about war proved prescient, as it provided Napoleon an opportu-
nity to transform the revolutionary government into an empire.
 84 Y The Importance of Being Absent

We gravitate to the idea that the universal promises total

belonging because this simplifies our dealings with it. But believ-
ing that everyone might eventually belong to a free or equal
community represents a betrayal of universality’s political charge.
It is only by recognizing the universal as our shared failure to
belong to our community—what the Haitian slaves have in com-
mon with the Jacobins in France—that we can engage in poli-
tics. Without the universal, there is no politics. Universality pro-
vides us a politics without an enemy because it deprives us of
our own illusion of belonging.

WHAT IS NOT KNOWN

Conceiving universality through the failure to belong to society

enables us to avoid conceiving universality as what we possess in
common—a common trait or a common value. In one sense, of
course, universality must clearly deal with what is common
among different individuals. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be univer-
sal. But what subjects have in common isn’t what they possess
but what they don’t possess. The universal touches each subject
through the subject’s inability to fully identify with itself, through
what remains unknown within every subject even for the sub-
ject itself.
If we understand universality in this way, its connection to
love becomes apparent. It is this internal point of the unknown
that is the basis for love. When we love others, we do not love
them for particular qualities that they possess, for what we know
about them. Particular qualities can arouse our affection—
friendliness makes someone likeable or nice eyes can make
someone attractive, for instance—but they can never evoke love.
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 85

We love the other for the unknown blank spot within—the point
at which the other doesn’t even know itself.22
When this blank space within the other disappears for the
subject, love vanishes at precisely the same time. When love dies
out after too much familiarity, what dies is not the unknown
within the other that first evoked love but the belief in this
unknown. Familiarity kills love because it convinces us that the
blank space in the other doesn’t really exist. We think we know
all there is to know, but this is always a mistake. Just as there is
always something to love in the other, there is always a disjunc-
tiveness that indicates the point of universality.
The great novelist of universality as a shared lack is Haruki
Murakami. In his major novels, Murakami often weaves appar-
ently disparate narrative lines that operate independently but
parallel to each other. For instance, the novel Kafka on the Shore
alternates between the story of fifteen-year-old Kafka Tamura
and the elderly Nakata. Kafka runs away from his father, while
Nakata lives a life permanently damaged after lapsing into a
coma and losing all memory as a boy. The two have nothing in
common. And yet, Murakami juxtaposes their stories in order
to show how universality connects them.
During his flight from home, Kafka blanks out. After com-
ing to consciousness, he notices blood all over him and soon
learns about the murder of his father. At the same time, Nakata
kills a man who is torturing cats and calls himself Johnnie
Walker. The blood on Kafka implies a connection between
Nakata’s act and his, which occur at the same time but at a con-
siderable distance from each other. What both share is not the
murder but the blankness within, the times in which they com-
pletely lose touch with any sense of their identity. It is this inter-
nal blank space that Murakami’s narrative structure brings to
 86 Y The Importance of Being Absent

light as the source of our universality. The blankness goes unex-

plained in the novel, and yet it clearly serves as the point at which
these otherwise disparate characters connect with each other.
In his masterpiece The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami
shows a connection revealed between characters through sitting
alone at the bottom of a dry well. Lieutenant Mamiya tells the
novel’s narrator Toru Okada about his wartime experience being
left alone in a well. This confrontation with nothingness turns
Mamiya into an empty shell who just lives out his life afterward,
but it is also this confrontation with nothingness that creates the
possibility for accessing universality.
Prompted by Mamiya’s story of the war, Toru enters into a
dry well that he stumbles across in his neighborhood. Once he
climbs down into the darkened well, Toru notes, “A perfect
nothingness came over me.”23 It is this nothingness that each
character encounters within that they find at the bottom of the
well. Later, after Toru comes out of the well, another character,
Creta Kano, goes down into it. This experience connects her to
Toru and ultimately enables her to break from the trap of her
previous identity. The universality of what isn’t there is emanci-
patory for her.
Murakami’s narratives often leave large gaps within their
plots and his descriptions leave similar gaps in our knowledge of
the characters. Through this formal approach, absence becomes
a palpable force in each of his novels. It provides the universal
connection that goes beyond any shared experiences. Properly
reading a Murakami novel means being constantly in the pres-
ence of a universal absence.
As Murakami shows in each of his novels, universality is free-
ing, but it is also inextricable from an encounter with blankness.
We can connect to others through the universal because of the
intrusion of the unknown within us. Our inability to fully be
 The Importance of Being Absent Z 87

ourselves brings us together with others who are unable to fully

be themselves. Avowing universality depends on avowing our
self-alienation in the alienation of the other from itself.
We retreat from universality into the security of the promise
of belonging and the identity that it provides in order to avoid
confronting what the other doesn’t know about itself. To invoke
universality is always to play with the gravest danger, to come
up against a dark spot in the other that threatens to envelop one’s
subjectivity entirely. Hegel defines “knowing in its universal-
ity” as “pure self-knowing in absolute otherness.”24 This absolute
otherness is simultaneously an appeal and a threat. If the project
of emancipation has not gone smoothly in human history and
if it constantly threatens to go awry once and for all, this is
because the universality that provides the basis for this project
is itself more terrifying than the particularist vision of a war of
all against all.
Identity provides a security of self that universality destroys.
When we commit to the universal, we betray our identity. We
cease to have an ability to define ourselves through what we aren’t
because we recognize ourselves in the point at which the other is
other to itself. This is freedom, but it is freedom that leaves sub-
jects in anxiety before the other, which is why we don’t choose it.
The choice of belonging (and the identity it provides) versus
the universal (and the alienation it provokes) is the fundamental
political decision. Opting for belonging gives us the security of
knowing who we are by establishing who we aren’t. Opting for
the universal forces us to confront how our identity is enmeshed
in that of the other. Instead of securing identity, it uproots it.
The universal allows us to exist in common by taking away the
security that comes from living amid other identities.
 3
UNIVERSAL VILLAINS

HOW TO MISRECOGNIZE
A CATASTROPHE

Understanding how universality became toxic and particular

identity became politically desirable requires examining the
predominant responses to the catastrophic events of the twenti-
eth century. The contemporary theoretical suspicion of univer-
sality and corresponding embrace of identity politics has its
origin there. The Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet gulag are the
names of these catastrophes. Out of a legitimate impulse to avoid
repeating the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust or the Soviet gulag,
political thinkers in their aftermath often took the critique of
Nazism and Stalinism as their starting point. Such a critique
was a theoretical necessity. And yet, I will argue here, because
these thinkers tended mistakenly to interpret Nazism and Stalin-
ism as universalist movements—and locate their horrors in uni-
versalizing—they had the effect of fundamentally distorting
our political landscape. The opprobrium that surrounds univer-
sality gained dominance through the theoretical reception of
Nazism and Stalinism, a reception that hewed too closely to how
 90 Y Universal Villains

the victims of these horrors experienced them rather than to their

basic structure.
For the victim of Nazism or Stalinism, the experience had to
be one of a universal structure crushing the particular difference
of the individual. From this perspective, the horrors of the twen-
tieth century really were universal. They left no room for the
existence of individuals who didn’t fit into their structure: Jews,
communists, Gypsies, and gay men under Nazism, and the
bourgeoisie, property-owning peasants, and noncommunists
under Stalinism. The prevailing interpretations of Nazism and
Stalinism took the point of view of the particular individual vic-
tim as their point of departure. As a result, figures as diverse as
Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, despite their theoretical
divergence and personal animosity, created an inverted under-
standing of the twentieth-century catastrophes.
The problem is that how an individual experiences Nazism or
Stalinism does not reveal the logic of their structures. Just as the
experience of an individual worker at a company cannot testify
to the ethical status of the company—I may think of Google as
a beneficent employer because it gives me free smoothies at work,
but this doesn’t prevent it from being a predatory corporation,
for instance—how Nazism and Stalinism affect individuals
suffering under them does not provide a secret formula for deci-
phering how they function as oppressive systems. In fact, these
events show just how misleading individual experience can be
in this regard: it leads to mistaken analyses of these phenomena.
One could even go so far as to say that the interpretation of
the political catastrophes of the twentieth century was itself
another catastrophe. It produced fewer victims, to be sure, but
the damage to political thought that it left behind was long-
lasting. Rather than seeing Nazism and Stalinism as particu-
lar crimes stemming from an abandonment or distortion of
 Universal Villains Z 91

universality, the common interpretations of these phenomena

characterized them as instances of the universal’s inhuman bar-
barism. These were not crimes of the universal, but this is how
most interpreters saw them. Interpreters thus missed that these
were either crimes of particularity (in the case of Nazism) or
crimes of a deviation from the universal (in the case of Stalin-
ism). The deleterious effect of the predominant interpretation
reverberates through the theorization of politics up to the pres-
ent. We continue to exist in the wake of the fundamental mis-
interpretation of the horrors of the twentieth century.
Theodor Adorno is perhaps the exemplary figure of this wide-
spread misinterpretation. Adorno contends that the eradication
of difference is Nazism’s primary crime. (He doesn’t talk at length
about Stalinism but focuses exponentially more of his theoreti-
cal energy on Nazism.) His analysis of Nazism links its eradica-
tion of difference in the figure of the Jew to the history of uni-
versalizing German philosophy. While Adorno locates his own
thought in the dialectical tradition of Hegel and Marx, he also
sees Hegel’s universalism as guilty for preparing the way for
Nazism’s annihilation of the particular.1 Excessive universality
is not just the Nazi sin, but also that of the entire tradition of
Western thought beginning with Homer.
Adorno’s critique of universalism— especially Hegel’s—
reaches its high point toward the end of his life when he writes
Negative Dialectics. Here, he attempts to defend the nonidentity
of the particular against the onslaught of universality that reduces
all particular difference to sameness. In an exemplary passage
from this work, he writes, “Hegel’s transposition of the particu-
lar into particularity follows the practice of a society that toler-
ates the particular only as a category, a form of the supremacy of
the universal.”2 Philosophies such as Hegel’s err when they reduce
particular difference to nothing but a part of a universal system.
 92 Y Universal Villains

Although Hegel is not to blame for the rise of Nazism, a phi-

losophy that ceaselessly champions the “supremacy of the uni-
versal” and that has no concern for the particular not under the
sway of the universal offers a paradigm for mass annihilation.3
According to this view, it is a small step from Hegel’s suprem-
acy of the universal to Nazism’s Aryan supremacy.4 Adorno
insists on proclaiming the irreducibility of particular difference
because it provides a way to respond to what he perceives as the
universal violence of Auschwitz. 5 He argues that ethics after
Auschwitz must focus on particular difference rather than uni-
versality. If universality is to blame for Auschwitz, then we must
call universality into question.
This type of theoretical judgment about Nazism as an exagger-
ated universalism makes strange bedfellows, which testifies to
its ubiquity. It is not just one group of thinkers that makes this
judgment but thinkers from vastly different camps—conservatives
and leftists, anarchists and Marxists, parliamentary democrats
and revolutionaries. This shared verdict on Nazism brings oth-
erwise alien thinkers into proximity with each other through its
production of near unanimity across the political spectrum.
One cannot imagine Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, Leo
Strauss, Michel Foucault, Karl Popper, and Theodor Adorno
agreeing on anything at all. But they are united in their verdict
on Nazism and Stalinism. They all see Nazism and Stalinism as
the result of as excessive investment in the universal.
By imagining that Nazism and Stalinism represent universal
crimes or crimes of the universal, theorists slander universality
and transform it into a political sin to be avoided. This is where
we still stand today. In the aftermath of this theoretical distor-
tion, emancipatory politics becomes the assertion of particular
identity rather than the striving for universality—which means
that emancipatory politics ceases to be emancipatory politics,
 Universal Villains Z 93

because emancipation depends on the universal. This misstep

results in the Left paradoxically fighting on the turf of the Right,
since conservatism is essentially the propagation of particular
identity against what it sees as the danger of the universal. When
we lament the ease with which right-wing populism wins adher-
ents today, it is this slanted turf that we are lamenting.
Furthermore, the misinterpretation of Nazism and Stalinism
as crimes of the universal has the effect of depoliticizing them.
Once they become instances of universalist overreach, the sen-
sible response turns out to be an ethical rather than a political
one: one must respect particular difference. We must take ref-
uge in the ethical treatment of the other in order to avoid politi-
cal violence toward this other.6 To a large extent, the prosecu-
tion of this ethical demand replaces politics.7 The ethics that
replaces politics is not a Kantian ethic that foregrounds its uni-
versality but one that sees universality as the ethical problem that
it demands we avoid by respecting particular difference.
But the ethical call to respect particular difference seems
especially misguided when we take a closer look at the politics
of Nazism and Stalinism. Of course, neither Nazism nor Stalin-
ism was guilty of exhibiting too much respect for particular dif-
ference. But that said, Nazism perpetuated mass murder on the
basis of an ontology of particular difference, and Stalinism did
so by conceiving of a particularized version of universality that
tried to liquidate the enemy that blocked its realization.
In this sense, the violence of Nazism and Stalinism is distinct.
One cannot reasonably blend the two together under a single
label, such as totalitarianism. But they do both partake in a
betrayal of the universal.8 In contrast to how theorists of the twen-
tieth century treated them, they were political rather than ethi-
cal horrors, horrors that arose directly from the turn away from
universalist politics. The misinterpretation of these movements
 94 Y Universal Villains

has undermined the possibility for universality. The theoretical

legacy of the response to Nazism and Stalinism is an ethical
turn that leaves us politically crippled.9

NAZI IDEOLOGY

The postwar assessment of Nazism focused almost solely on its

assault on particular identities. In our popular consciousness, the
victims of the Holocaust were, first and foremost, Jews, and, sec-
ondarily, Gypsies and gay men.10 While the common under-
standing is correct about these particular victims, this list doesn’t
tell the whole story. What it leaves out is not just another group
but the people who reveal the political logic of Nazism most
clearly, those who make evident that Nazism was an attack not
just on Jews but also on universality.
The first victims sent to concentration camps—not yet to
death camps, which were not established until 1942—were polit-
ical enemies of the Reich and communists.11 The initial attack
on political enemies and communists bespeaks the political proj-
ect of Nazism. But communists do not figure in the most widely
disseminated depictions of the Holocaust. It is only as an after-
thought, if at all, that one includes communists when thinking
about those whom the Nazis targeted. However, Nazism saw
communists as every bit as much the enemy as Jews. Both were
political enemies, not just the victims of a universal evil.
Nazism targets Jews and communists because it sees both as
representatives of universality. In the case of communists, it is
clear why Nazism would draw this conclusion. Communists
openly avowed their commitment to universal equality and
rejected the Nazi theory of the superiority of one particular racial
identity. At first glance, the targeting of Jews seems less like
 Universal Villains Z 95

Nazism taking aim at the embodiment of universality than its

targeting of communists. Why couldn’t we say that Jewishness
was a particular identity that Nazism tried to eliminate?
Within Nazism’s fantasy structure, Jews, just as much as com-
munists, were the embodiments of universality. According to
the fantasy proffered by key Nazi figures, Jews have no distinct
racial identity of their own but are parasitical on other races. For
them, Jewishness is not a race but a nonrace, which gives it its
universalist hue. This makes Jews more dangerous than commu-
nists. They must be wiped out in order to get rid of their inher-
ent universality. Nazis might dream of converting a communist
to a Nazi-like identitarian political position, but there could be
no such conversion for Jews (which is why, ultimately, the Final
Solution—total annihilation—targeted Jews but not commu-
nists). As Nazism sees it, their universality is written into their
nonracialized bodies. The stereotypical particular traits that
Nazis associate with Jews bespeak a direct connection to uni-
versality. Their inherent universality makes them disconnected
from the soil and the identity that rootedness provides. It ren-
ders them incapable of being German. This universality is what
the camps serve to extirpate. For Nazism, the stain of Jewish-
ness is the hidden connection to the universal.
Many interpreters—and all popular accounts— of the Holo-
caust ignore this Nazi fantasy, just as they ignore the commu-
nist victims. The elision of communists as the initial targets of
Nazi suppression and the failure to mention the Nazism’s fan-
tasy image of the Jews are not simply contingent developments
in the analysis of Nazism. They are not just minor oversights.
They are the result of an implicit political choice to view Nazism
as an apolitical evil that targets particular groups rather than as
a thoroughgoing attack on all forms of universality. What ensues
is a massive failure to see Nazism as a political project rather than
 96 Y Universal Villains

just an evil movement bent on ethnic cleansing. Nazi genocide

was not an end in itself but part of a reactionary struggle against
the universality that communists and Jews represented.
Although the thoughtful interpreters of Nazism acknowledge
the role that politics played in Nazism’s systematic violence, this
understanding has not trickled down to the popular consensus.
Thanks to films like Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) and Schindler’s
List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), as well as memoirs like Night, the
image of Nazism as an apolitical evil took hold with a fero-
ciousness that has not abated to this day. In Shoah, Claude Lanz-
mann heroically highlights the complicity of ordinary Germans
and Eastern Europeans with the extermination, but he nonethe-
less sees their participation as an ethical transgression rather
than a political capitulation. While Lanzmann vehemently
opposed Steven Spielberg’s film and contrasted it negatively
with his own, there is nonetheless a judgment of Nazism that
both Lanzmann’s documentary and Spielberg’s Hollywood dis-
tortion have in common. Both films downplay Nazism’s polit-
ical struggle against universality and the role that this struggle
plays in the Holocaust. They transform Nazism from a right-
wing political decision into an ethical monstrosity. It becomes
an unspeakable evil that not enough people tried to prevent. That
is of course true. But it was also a political horror that attracted
participants because of its particular appeal. These accounts strip
away Nazism’s hostility to all universality and end up creating
an utterly false universalist image of it.12
If people today fail to see the logic of Nazism in contempo-
rary populist leaders and their disciples, this is directly attribut-
able to an education about the Holocaust that excludes any anal-
ysis of the politics that produced it. It is easy to watch Schindler’s
List in the morning and cheer at a Make America Great Again
rally in the evening because the film never forces the spectator
 Universal Villains Z 97

to confront Nazism as a political movement. If one wants to learn

the political lesson of the Holocaust, the first step is to avoid
watching any films about it.
Perhaps the key scene of Schindler’s List occurs when we see
the committed Nazi camp commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph
Fiennes) begin to waver in his belief that Jews are ontologically
different from Germans. In an awkward scene in his wine cel-
lar, Goeth tries to share an intimate moment with his Jewish ser-
vant Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz). As he comes close to her
and then backs away, he says, “I would like so much to reach out
and touch you in your loneliness.” Although we see Goeth shoot
Jews in the death camp purely for his own enjoyment and
thoughtlessly oversee their mass execution, here he entertains the
possibility of intimacy with Hirsch because for a moment he is
able to relate to her not through the prism of the Nazi universal
but as one particular to another. By showing even the horrific
Goeth capable of this type of interaction, Spielberg suggests that
the antidote to Nazism is concrete relations with others, rela-
tions between particulars that bypass the trap of universality.
As the scene progresses, Goeth becomes increasingly drawn
to Hirsch. He tells her, “Maybe what’s wrong isn’t us, it’s this.”
As he says this, he gestures with his hands to indicate their sur-
roundings, the universal Nazi structure that causes him to see
her only as not really a person at all. A few moments later, he
looks at her face in a close-up and asks, “Is this is the face of a
rat? Are these the eyes of a rat?” He looks at her intensely and
touches her hair as a lover might. Though ultimately Goeth
rejects the possibility that this scene raises as he blames Hirsch
for the temptation that he experiences and subsequently beats
her, the scene reveals Spielberg’s belief that the way out of Nazism
lies through an intimacy that bypasses the universal. If Nazis
could see Jews as particular individuals rather than through the
 98 Y Universal Villains

universal Nazi framework that eliminates their humanity, they

would no longer want to annihilate them. This is the explicit
point of Spielberg’s film.
Lanzmann’s film is less sanguine, but his essential point is
the same. The Holocaust was an ethical horror, not an anti-
universalist political one. The villains in Shoah whom Lanzmann
secretly records are those who participated in the mass extermi-
nation without any ethical compunction. For instance, Lan-
zmann shows his interview with Franz Suchomel, who worked
as an officer at Treblinka. Although Suchomel claims that he
vomited when he first arrived at the death camp and saw trenches
full of corpses, it is evident that his very ability to recount calmly
the horrors of the camp testifies to his ethical monstrosity (and
that of all Nazis). Lanzmann doesn’t interrogate Suchomel or
any of the other perpetuators he interviews about their political
position or that of Nazism. Shoah depicts more than nine hours
of horror but doesn’t explore the politics that produced it. This
would be a startling lacuna if we— or he— considered Nazism
to be a political project. As it is, the film provides an unequaled
account of how people justify their capitulation, but it does not
attempt to understand Nazism.
Particularist accounts of the horror of Nazism, like Spielberg’s
or Lanzmann’s film, while undoubtedly necessary for us to rec-
ognize exactly what happened, gain an outsized importance rela-
tive to an interpretation of the anti-universalist politics underly-
ing this phenomenon. What’s more, popular accounts of Nazism
have the effect of depoliticizing the phenomenon because they
tend to focus entirely on the regime’s Jewish victims to the com-
plete exclusion of its political ones.13 Even the number of dead
that we associate with the Holocaust—six million—refers to the
number of Jews killed, not the total dead. It specifically does not
 Universal Villains Z 99

include the number of communists killed in the aftermath of the

Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
The genocide of the Jews was a central Nazi project. But this
project emerged not out of Nazism’s pure evil but out of its spe-
cific identitiarian political philosophy.14 It was the result of iden-
tity politics. The attempt to assert the privilege of Aryan identity
requires the Nazis to have an enemy, but not just any enemy.
Nazism doesn’t target the Jews because of Hitler’s personal pro-
clivity or Germany’s long history of anti-Semitism (though this
history undoubtedly makes it easier to convince everyday Ger-
mans to participate). It targets the Jews because, in the Nazi fan-
tasy, they represent political universality, the contrary of Nazi
particular identity. In the Nazi account, the fact that Marx was
a Jew is not a coincidence.15 It is absolutely crucial. The universal
struggle of the communists is a Jewish struggle because Jews have
no race of their own and thus are inherently universalist.16 The
fact that there were Jews among the ruling elites in the Soviet
Union is a handy contingency that provides, for the Nazis, con-
firmation of their fantasy. Exiling, detaining, and killing Jews
is thus a thoroughgoing political action for the Nazis.
Even prominent historians of Nazi violence fall into the trap
of characterizing Nazism as an apolitical evil rather than a thor-
oughly political one. This is the case with Raul Hilberg. Despite
the monumental importance of his Destruction of the European
Jews for any understanding of how the Holocaust unfolded, his
interpretive misstep is evident from the very first chapter of the
work. In a chapter titled “Precedents,” Hilberg lays out the his-
tory of Christian anti-Semitic violence that, as he sees it, estab-
lishes the paradigm for the Holocaust.
Hilberg identifies an unbroken through-line from the anti-
Semitism of someone like Martin Luther to that of Hitler. After
 100 Y Universal Villains

noting Luther’s vile statements against the Jews and the violence
of Christian pogroms, he writes, “The Nazi destruction process
did not come out of a void; it was the culmination of a cyclical
trend.”17 Hilberg sees Nazi violence as an intensification of his-
torical anti-Semitism but not as a phenomenon different in kind.
While he rightly notes that traditional Catholic anti-Semitism
made Eastern Europeans eager to help out with the genocide,
he does not note that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was fundamen-
tally different and aimed at Jewish universality, as a reading of
Mein Kampf or a listen to Goebbels’s speeches makes absolutely
clear.
For all of the comprehensiveness of his account of the Holo-
caust, Hilberg’s assimilation of Nazism to the history of anti-
Semitic pogroms fundamentally distorts the logic of the Nazi
genocide. The Nazis did not kill Jews for their particularity but
for their lack of particularity, for the universality that they shared
with communists. Although it taps into traditional Christian
anti-Semitism in order to grease the wheels of its operation,
Nazism is anti-Semitic in a wholly new way. Because he focuses
solely on Nazi violence toward Jews and obscures their other
political targets, Hilberg misses this key distinction between the
Nazi genocide and traditional Christian anti-Semitism. As a
result, he ends up stripping Nazism of its particular politics.18
In order to secure the judgment that Nazism represents an
extension of the danger of an all-encompassing universalizing
system, the proponents of this view utilize the term Auschwitz
as a shorthand for the Holocaust.19 This is the point at which the
judgment of Nazism as universalist violence becomes clearest.
In one sense, it is easy to see why Auschwitz became the privi-
leged signifier for the Holocaust: Auschwitz is the death camp
that killed the most people and the one that operated most like
a factory. The fact that corporations had industrial operations
 Universal Villains Z 101

going on inside the camp testifies to the role that modern indus-
trialism played in its production of death. In Auschwitz, the
Nazis perfected the production of death through the mechanism
of the modern capitalist system.
But by using Auschwitz as the signifier for the Holocaust, one
places the guilt for this crime on the shoulders of modernity as
such, as if the modern factory system leads inexorably to mass
extermination.20 As a result of this sleight of hand, the problem
becomes a universal rather than a particular one. The Holocaust
ceases to be the result of a particular identity insisting on the
propagation of its identity and becomes a universal failure of cap-
italist modernity. The Nazi insistence on Aryan particularity
ceases to be the culprit. The universality of the modern world is
instead to blame. This extension of guilt has the effect of mis-
placing it. We cannot chalk up the Holocaust to modernity.
There is no inherent link between mechanized agriculture and
the production of corpses. Even though capitalist modernity
paves the way for the Holocaust, this event does not simply fol-
low from modernity. It is the effect of a reactionary identitarian
response to modernity, which is what the shorthand term Aus-
chwitz elides.
Theodor Adorno is one of the great popularizers of this short-
hand, especially through his famous dictum, “To write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric.”21 By proffering Auschwitz as a syn-
ecdoche for the entire Holocaust, Adorno and others categorize
the Holocaust as an industrialized annihilation. This is a mis-
categorization. Although more people died at Auschwitz than
at any other death camp, many more Jews were killed elsewhere
in a much less systematic and industrialized fashion. The Final
Solution was a holistic project, but its execution proceeded
through a variety of mechanisms. The systematic killing that
occurred at Auschwitz was not the paradigm.
 102 Y Universal Villains

According to historian Timothy Snyder, people invoke the

term Auschwitz to indicate the Holocaust as a whole because they
want to dehumanize the event. He claims, “Auschwitz has also
become the standard shorthand of the Holocaust because, when
treated in a certain mythical and reductive way, it seems to sep-
arate the mass murder of Jews from human choices and actions.”22
Although Snyder seems to verge on a humanistic analysis of the
Holocaust, his critique of the use of Auschwitz as the signifier
for the Holocaust enables us to see how it exculpates the particu-
lar identity that motivated the mass murder.
Using the term Auschwitz is an act of mythologizing because
it displaces the responsibility for the event from German par-
ticularity to modern universality. If the Nazis employed the
methods of industrial capitalism to annihilate the Jews, they did
so not because these methods demanded such an annihilation
but because they wanted to assert their particular identity in
opposition to the universality unleashed in the modern world.
Far from being integral to the revolution of modernity, the Holo-
caust is the most notable reaction to that revolution. It is a reac-
tionary rather than a modernist project.
When we proffer the narrative that Nazism was an apolitical
evil and that it exterminated on the basis of race rather than poli-
tics, we cede too much ground to Nazism. The fundamental
aim of Nazism was the elimination of any reference to the uni-
versal and the creation of a terrain on which particular identities
struggle against each other for domination (which, they believed,
would allow for Aryan identity to triumph due to its superior
strength). To accept that the Nazi war on the Jews was a purely
a racial one is to accept how the Nazis understood themselves.
Though Nazis portrayed their fight against the Jews as a racial
one, we shouldn’t believe them.
 Universal Villains Z 103

It is always a mistake to take political actors at their word and

to believe that they know what they’re doing. There is always a
split between what they believe they are doing and what they
are doing, and the truth is always on the side of what they do.
We should not assume that political actors have a privileged
insight into their own actions. No matter how bald a confession
they utter, actions still require interpretation. Nowhere is this
truer than in the case of Hitler.
The misunderstanding of Nazism grasps it as an evil beyond
politics. Contemporary theorists adopt the initial error of Adorno
and the popular reception of the Holocaust. Today in many the-
oretical circles, Nazism stands for a biopolitical form of evil.
This is the judgment that Giorgio Agamben lays down in his
hugely influential Homo Sacer, for instance. Agamben’s catego-
rization of Nazism as a biopolitical rather than a traditionally
political regime has won many adherents, in part because Agam-
ben derives his interpretation of Nazism from Hitler’s own
description of his project.
Agamben distances the extermination of the Jews from the
act of sacrifice and thus from the realm of traditional politics.
He contends that the Nazis exterminated the Jews as figures of
bare life. In Homo Sacer, he writes, “The Jews were exterminated
not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had
announced, ‘as lice,’ which is to say, as bare life. The dimension
in which the extermination took place is neither religion nor law,
but biopolitics.”23 Here, Agamben simply takes Hitler at his
word, which assumes that Hitler actually knows what he’s doing.
He makes this misstep because his debt to Hannah Arendt and
Michel Foucault betrays him in the analysis of Nazism. From
Arendt, Agamben borrows the idea of Nazism’s elimination of
politics, and from Foucault, he takes up the concept of biopolitics.
 104 Y Universal Villains

What both thinkers miss is the nature of the Nazi political

project and its attack on universality.
Agamben believes that Nazism relegates the Jews to the sta-
tus of bare life in order to eliminate them because Hitler says so.
Although Hitler does refer to the Jews as “lice,” this reference is
entirely misleading. This is a point at which Hitler doesn’t know
what he really believes. To know this, we have to look at what
Nazism does. The Nazi extermination of the Jews does not in
any way resemble the extermination of lice or other pests. On
the most basic level, one cannot even imagine humiliating lice
prior to killing them or forcing them to participate in the anni-
hilation of their fellow lice. The killing of Jews aimed at elimi-
nating a je ne sais quoi that no one supposes animals to have, cer-
tainly not lice. But Agamben doesn’t see this. Agamben sees
the Nazi crime as the universal’s destruction of Jewish particu-
larity that became identified with bare life.
Jews are not the enemy of Nazism because they are figures of
bare life but because they stand for the universal break from bare
life. In this sense, Adorno, Hilberg, and Agamben misunder-
stand Nazism in the same way. Nazism aims at eliminating what
it sees as the singularity that comes from the Jewish relationship
to universality, at destroying the Jewish investment in the uni-
versal that serves as the constitutive threat for Nazi identity. If we
miss this, then we miss why Nazism wins so many adherents.

NAZISM’S POSTH UMOUS TRI UMPH

Though Nazi Germany lost the war, it won the battle for our
hearts and minds. This seems, at the least, like hyperbole, given
the near universal ignominy that Nazism now enjoys. The point
is not that there are thousands of Nazi clones ready to come to
 Universal Villains Z 105

power somewhere in South America but that Nazism triumphed

through the way that we judge it in defeat. The victory consists
in convincing those who survived its murderous regime that its
fundamental thrust was not political.
Perhaps the greatest testament to Nazism’s ideological victory
is the way that Hollywood has employed Nazis since the con-
clusion of World War II. Although Nazis star as the villains in
countless Hollywood films, it is hard to think of one in which
they appear as political villains rather than as figures of pure evil.
According to Hollywood ideology, Nazis are evil not because of
their identity politics but because they desire too much power.
The pursuit of power constitutes their claim to evil.
We can see this depoliticization in almost any Hollywood
thriller utilizing Nazis as villains, such as Steven Spielberg’s
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its sequels. Here, the archae-
ologist hero Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) continually struggles
against Nazis, who threaten to use archaeological discoveries that
belong in museums for evil purposes. In Raiders of the Lost Ark,
the Nazis want the Ark of the Covenant in order to wield its
power. They are villains for their hubris, not for their reaction-
ary politics. At the end of the film, the Ark of the Covenant—or
God, working through the power of the Ark—destroys the Nazis
for their attempt to use it for maleficent ends. The film is indif-
ferent to Nazi identity politics. They have the status of a univer-
sal evil.
Spielberg goes so far in the third Indiana Jones film as to nat-
uralize the evil of the Nazis, to treat them as if they were the
equivalent of a natural pest. When Indiana Jones comes upon a
group of Nazis in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), he
states, “Nazis, I hate these guys.” The wording of this statement
is important because it harkens back to the first film, Raiders of
the Lost Ark, where Indiana uses exactly the same grammatical
 106 Y Universal Villains

structure to express a different hatred. While flying in a plane,

he discovers a pet snake on the floor. He yells to the pilot, “I
hate snakes.” When Indiana echoes this same sentiment about
Nazis and delivers the line in the same way, the parallel between
them becomes striking. For Spielberg, the evil of Nazis is at the
same level as that of snakes. They are no more a political danger
than snakes are. They are instead a natural danger that we must
reckon with, not a political project that we have to counter with
another kind of politics.
All of Spielberg’s films depicting Nazis, inclusive of Schindler’s
List, contribute to the misperception of Nazism. If we cannot
see Nazis as anti-universalist political actors, this testifies to the
posthumous victory of the Nazi project, which wants us to see
every struggle in terms of a battle for power between competing
particular identities. If we believe that Nazism is evil because it
seeks too much power, its military defeat announces its ideologi-
cal victory.
Echoes of Nazism remain threats because the appeal of iden-
tity resonates even louder today as the capitalist evacuation of
identity has proceeded apace. For many thinkers, Nazism pro-
vides a paradigm for the chief danger that confronts modernity.
This is correct, but not for the reasons that they postulate. Nazism
is not dangerous because it proffers a universal system that threat-
ens to engulf the whole world but because it refuses to think uni-
versally. Its efforts at world conquest stem from its lack of univer-
sality, not an abundance of it.

THE SILENT TURN AWAY

FROM STALIN

The misinterpretation of Nazism that dominates the twentieth

century has a parallel with the misinterpretation of Stalinism.
 Universal Villains Z 107

Although Stalinism did not promulgate particular identity in the

way that Nazism did, it was another instance of turning away
from the confrontation with universality. Stalinism’s crimes were
not crimes of the universal, nor were they just the crimes of one
murderous leader.24 They were the result of an erroneous con-
ception of universality, a belief that universal equality was an end
to be fully realized through invention rather than a value dis-
covered as the basis for the struggle for it. It is not universality
but the Stalinist misconception of universality that led straight
to the gulag. Stalin believed in his own particular capability to
realize universality, but this belief in his own particularity would
not have been so deadly had he not combined it with the dream
that the revolution would permit everyone to belong.
This is not, however, the prevailing interpretation of Stalin-
ism. As with Nazism, most interpreters of the Stalinist phenom-
enon take it as a primary exhibit for the lethal danger of insist-
ing on universality to the exclusion of the particular. Stalinism
is what leads François Furet to conclude that communism rep-
resents “a pathology of the universal.”25 Although Furet, a con-
servative, dismisses all communism because of the rise of Stalin-
ism, his belief that Stalinism’s guilt lies in its excessive universality
pervades the leftist analysis of the phenomenon as well. Accord-
ing to this interpretation, Stalin sent to death those particulars
who didn’t fit in the schema of universal history.
The problem with this interpretation is similar to the prob-
lem with the interpretation of Nazism. By interpreting Stalin’s
violence as that of the universal, it accepts Stalin’s own view of
what he is doing, just as the prevailing interpretation of Nazism
accepts Hitler’s own conception of the Nazi program. In Foun-
dations of Leninism, Stalin puts the Soviet project in what seem
like universalist terms. He writes, “The existence of factions is
compatible neither with the Party’s unity nor with its iron dis-
cipline. It scarcely needs proof that the existence of factions leads
 108 Y Universal Villains

to the existence of a number of centres, and the existence of a

number of centres means the absence of one common centre in
the Party, the breaking up of unity of will, the weakening and
disintegration of discipline, the weakening and disintegration of
the dictatorship.”26 As Stalin describes it, his Soviet Union is a
universal that eliminates all particulars that don’t fit within its
universality. In this statement Stalin is propagating a fantasmatic
account of the Soviet Union, one in which all particular devia-
tions must disappear within the Party’s universal mission.
Although Stalin himself misunderstands Stalinism, it remains
necessary to identify precisely how Stalin betrayed the univer-
sal. The error that immediately comes to mind is deceptive. It is
tempting to locate Stalin’s retreat from universality in his idea
of socialism in one country. By focusing his attention on the
Soviet Union to the exclusion of the international struggle, he
seems to betray the universalism inherent in Marx’s project. But
Stalin did not turn to socialism in one country in order to aban-
don communist universality. It was just a strategic step toward
the future universalization of communism that many other com-
munist politicians at the time endorsed as well. He had to shore
up the Soviet Union and succeed there before realizing the world
revolution.
Stalin’s misstep relative to universality is not as clear-cut as
one might want it to be. Unlike Hitler, he is not a champion of
particular identity, so we can’t explain his error in this way. The
problem consists rather in how his conception of universality, a
conception that builds on the erroneous foundation that Marx
establishes, aims at eradicating nonbelonging. By transforming
universal belonging into a goal that the proletarian revolution
would accomplish, Marx misidentifies the nature of universal-
ity. Stalin adds to this misconception by believing in his own
ability to inaugurate the revolution and bring everyone within
 Universal Villains Z 109

the new society, even those who preferred not to belong. Given
Marx’s error, one cannot completely exculpate Marx for all of
Stalin’s crimes. He shares the same conception of universality,
even if Stalin took it in a murderous direction that Marx would
have never embraced.
Stalin compounded Marx’s misunderstanding of universality.
Not only did he take from Marx the erroneous idea that the pro-
letarian revolution would be unlike previous revolutions and
inaugurate an era of total belonging, but he also believed he could
bring this total belonging about through his decision to force col-
lectivization on the peasants. When he enacted forced collec-
tivization, what resulted was not total belonging but mass resis-
tance and brutal famine. Because Stalin believed that he had
ended nonbelonging through collectivization (which is the real-
ization of what Marx foresees), he also had to find an explana-
tion for why nonbelonging persisted in the form of recalcitrant
peasants who would rather destroy their livestock than contrib-
ute it to the collective. The very existence of these recalcitrant
peasants (whom Stalin labeled kulaks) testified to the failure of
the proletarian revolution to eradicate nonbelonging, which was
what Marx predicted it would do.
When one conceives of universality as a realizable future that
leaves no one out, it demands the erection of enemies that stand
as obstacles to this realization. These enemies of the revolution
are necessary to explain why we haven’t yet achieved universal
equality. They will remain necessary as long as we fail to confront
the impossibility—and undesirability— of a fully realized, all-
inclusive universal. The fact that Stalin’s universality depends on
enemies indicates that it is something less than genuine univer-
sality. Universality cannot have enemies and remain universality.
The kulaks became the enemy that the revolution must elim-
inate in order to realize total belonging. But they could not have
 110 Y Universal Villains

subverted the revolution on their own. Enemies among the Soviet

leadership, primarily Trotsky, must have sabotaged the revolu-
tion from within and blocked the revolutionary end to all non-
belonging. Otherwise, it would have come about. The mass kill-
ings of peasants and the purges of the party leadership during
the 1930s (highlighted by show trials) resulted from Stalin dou-
bling down on Marx’s initial wager. Marx believed that the pro-
letarian revolution could create a society in which everyone
belonged, and Stalin saw himself as having actually brought this
society about. This misconception about the universal was to
blame for the violence of Stalinism, but theorists have gone out
of their way not to recognize it in order to better demonize
universality.
Unlike Nazism, Stalinism was an explicitly left-wing project
that went awry. For this reason, it has caused more questioning
of universality on the Left than the horrors of the Nazi Holo-
caust. Interestingly, however, most left-leaning theorists of the
late twentieth century do not directly confront the problem of
Stalinism. This is a near-universal absence itself. Instead, they
either transform their understanding of Marxism into a nonuni-
versalizing version, or they abandon Marxism and universalist
politics altogether for the sake of particular, local critiques.
While Hannah Arendt makes clear that the error of Stalin-
ism is, along with Nazism, its overinvestment in universality, few
other theorists take up her lead explicitly when it comes to Stalin-
ism. While leftist thinkers in the twentieth century tend to
break with the Soviet Union during the course of Stalin’s regime,
they don’t make an effort to theorize its error as they do with
Nazism. Ironically, one of the figures who does offer an expla-
nation about what goes wrong with Stalinism, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, also wrote the major defense of Stalin’s Show Trials,
 Universal Villains Z 111

conceiving them as the expression of the struggle for future of

universal equality in Humanism and Terror.27
Although the Show Trials did not blunt Merleau-Ponty’s
enthusiasm for Stalin, the Korean War did. After its outbreak,
he reassessed Stalinism and concluded that revolution itself was
doomed because it inevitably ossified as a regime. He writes, “It
is no accident that all known revolutions have degenerated: it is
because as established regimes they can never be what they were
as movements; precisely because it succeeded and ended up as
an institution, the historical movement is no longer itself: it
‘betrays’ and ‘disfigures’ itself in accomplishing itself. Revolu-
tions are true as movements and false as regimes.”28 Here,
Merleau-Ponty sees Marxism’s descent into Stalinism as a com-
mentary on the fate of all revolutionary activity. But at least
Merleau-Ponty remains committed to the necessity of the uni-
versal, which contrasts his response with that of most left-wing
theorists.
Most left-wing theorists turned away from universality after
Stalinism without directly commenting on it. With the excep-
tion of Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and a few others, the-
orists simply took up a defense of the particular as their response
to the gulag. The silence of Theodor Adorno on Stalinism is
especially conspicuous, given how much time he devoted to the
analysis of Nazism and the individuals who succumbed to its
appeal. But equally noteworthy is the lack of analysis by figures
like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jürgen Habermas, just
to name a few. Almost no major theorist of the generation that
emerges during the 1960s tries to theorize why the communist
project went so wrong with Stalin.
Instead of explicitly critiquing Stalinism for its universality
as they do with Nazism, most theorists tended to particularize
 112 Y Universal Villains

Marxism in order to make it more palatable and to eliminate

the danger of the Marxist universal that Stalinism represents for
them. In this vision, there become multiple forms of Marxism.
Stalinism results from the narrowing of this multiplicity to a
single universal model. Stalin oversteps by taking Marxism too
far in a universal direction, but we can retain Marxism as long
as we jettison the universality that makes it unpalatable.
Here, Jacques Derrida is the representative figure. Despite
Derrida’s theoretical distance from Marxism throughout his
early career, toward the end of his life he attempts to create a
new form of Marxist multiplicity. In his late work Specters of
Marx, Derrida explains the attitude that he advocates, taking
up Marx and Marxism in a post-gulag world. The weight of
Stalinism leads Derrida away from any straightforward embrace
of Marxism, but at the same time, Derrida doesn’t want to give
up Marxism’s critical apparatus.
Derrida elaborates the relationship between deconstruction
and Marxism in very careful terms. He refuses either to identify
his project with Marxism or to reject this identification, but what
is most important is that he rejects the conception of Marxism
that sees it as a unitary and universal theory. He states, “Decon-
struction has never been Marxist, no more than it has ever been
non-Marxist, although it has remained faithful to a certain spirit
of Marxism, to a least one of its spirits for, and this can never be
repeated too often, there is more than one of them and they are
heterogeneous.”29 For Derrida, we cannot dismiss Marxism, but
neither can we continue to sustain it as a universalizing project.
To do so is to fall victim to the version of Marxism that led to
the horrors of the twentieth century.
Derrida attempts to align himself with Marxist critique with-
out any longer being a Marxist in order to avoid any complicity
with Stalin. Others take a similar path as they turn away from
 Universal Villains Z 113

Marxism’s universal struggle toward a series of particular strug-

gles. They don’t advocate total revolution but particular changes—
toppling of hierarchies, exploding of binaries, undermining of
institutions, and so on. This shift occurs as a way of moving
away from the universalism that supposedly produced a figure
like Stalin and the horror of the gulag.30
Instead of inspiring suspicion about Marxism’s overinvest-
ment in universality, the Stalinist catastrophe should have led
thinkers to see the danger of total belonging. It should have led to
a revaluation of the identification of the universal with the ideal
of inclusivity. But this is not what happened. A series of think-
ers moved away from the universal social analysis provided by
Marxism and toward the analysis of particular power dynamics.
This entailed a turn from Marx to Nietzsche as the central fig-
ure for emancipatory politics, which was a disastrous turn for
the Left.

THE POWER OF MICHEL FOUCAULT

Michel Foucault provides the model for contemporary politics,

even among those who have never heard of him. Foucault is the
leading theoretical light for the move from a universalist pro-
gram to particular political interventions. The ultimate practi-
cal result of Foucault’s particularism is the emergence of the cri-
tique of power that results from universalist violence. Power has
become anathema among leftists today, and Foucault says why.
Foucault moves leftism away from Marx and toward Fried-
rich Nietzsche. Rather than providing a universal schema for
understanding history, Foucault turns to the analysis of power,
an analysis that he takes up from Nietzsche.31 For Foucault,
power always operates in particular ways. It is not a new
 114 Y Universal Villains

universal. The analysis of power relations enables us to avoid

involving ourselves with the temptation of universality that
leads to the gas chamber or the gulag.
No one embodies the suspicion of the universal that charac-
terizes the latter half of the twentieth century more than Fou-
cault. Foucault’s enduring popularity as a thinker is inextricable
from the particularist and anti-universalist tenor of his thought.
His works continue to ring true to our ears because he tunes into
the retreat from universality that would dominate political think-
ing long after his death in 1984. Though Foucault’s thought moves
through several distinct iterations, what unites each of these is
an active resistance to the universalizing tendency that he sees all
around him. His hostility to the universal stems from a belief that
it deforms our access to particulars and always involves an act
of violence. Foucault rejects universality first for epistemologi-
cal reasons and then for ethical ones.
Foucault is both a cause of suspicion about universality on the
Left and a symptom of it. He becomes an important thinker
because the epoch is already wary of universality. But at the same
time, his influence leads subsequent thinkers and political move-
ments to immerse themselves in particular local details and
divorce this local inquiry from any universal claims. Though
multitudes of people don’t declare themselves acolytes of Fou-
cault, his approach nonetheless establishes a pattern that pre-
dominates across academic disciplines and even among those
involved in practical politics. One might object that the halls of
academia are not filled with self-professed Foucault followers.
But the fact that Foucault has a limited number of openly iden-
tified epigones is itself the result of his disdain for universality
and for the status of a universal intellectual. This is not in any
way a barrier to his influence: his methods dominate even when
 Universal Villains Z 115

he personally does not. His anti-universalism contrasts him with

the intellectual milieu in which he emerged.
As Foucault came to prominence as a French intellectual,
Jean-Paul Sartre cast a massive shadow over the theoretical land-
scape. Like other thinkers of his age, Sartre not only felt com-
fortable weighing in on a variety of political questions but did so
with universal proclamations. Sartre established himself as a uni-
versal intellectual. Foucault set himself up in contrast to this
type of figure. Though he did protest with Sartre in a variety of
political movements—in 1972 they both took part in the protest
against the murder of activist Pierre Overney at a Renault fac-
tory, for instance—Foucault didn’t do so from the same position
that Sartre took up. It is telling and not at all surprising that as
Sartre’s theoretical star has faded in the years following his death,
Foucault’s has ascended. The demise of Sartre coincides with that
of the universal, just as Foucault’s meteoric rise coincides with
that of particularism.
In an interview titled “Truth and Power,” Foucault differen-
tiates between what he labels the universal intellectual and the
specific intellectual. The former category clearly applies to Jean-
Paul Sartre, though Foucault doesn’t mention him by name in
the interview. According to Foucault, “For a long period, the
‘left’ intellectual spoke and was acknowledged the right of speak-
ing in the capacity of master of truth and justice. He was heard,
or purported to make himself heard, as the spokesman of the
universal.”32 Foucault sees the privilege of the universal intellec-
tual as a derivative of the privilege that Marxism ascribes to the
proletariat as the universal class. He announces the end of the
epoch of this type of intellectual. What replaces the universal
intellectual is a specific intellectual, one who intervenes in spe-
cific local situations without recourse to universal proclamations,
 116 Y Universal Villains

without doing what intellectuals from Immanuel Kant to Jean-

Paul Sartre have always done.
Foucault creates a method out of the local intervention. This
method examines the specificity of the field that it investigates
and pays attention to the diversity that characterizes this field
without seeking to unify this diversity into a universal theory.
In contrast to psychoanalysis or Marxism, Foucault does not
uncover a universal like unconscious desire or class struggle in
every situation that he examines. Instead, he looks at particu-
lars and accounts for their differences.
When Foucault discusses his method, he defines his project
initially as an archaeological one and later as one of genealogy.
Both archaeology and genealogy, despite their differences for
Foucault, share a common core. They identify differences lying
beneath the guise of identity.33 By unpacking details of the his-
tory of madness or medicine or punishment, for example, Fou-
cault recognizes what universal histories obliterate. His strategy
is to look for the particulars that stick out from universalizing
explanations.
Foucault’s critique of the universal category, like his critique
of the universal intellectual, focuses on the hierarchical fashion
in which universals function. Universals are abstractions that
theorists impose on concrete particulars. In the process, they
destroy particularity in the name of the universal. This suspicion
of the universal as an abstraction and investment in the particu-
lar as concrete reflects Foucault’s belief that practice has a prior-
ity over theory. That is to say, practices have a revelatory power
that theory, because of its inherent abstraction, does not.
This viewpoint becomes clearest at the beginning of The Birth
of Biopolitics lecture series. In his opening remarks, Foucault lays
out the direction that his thought takes. He contends, “Instead
of deducing concrete phenomena from universals, or instead of
 Universal Villains Z 117

starting with universals as an obligatory grid of intelligibility for

certain concrete practices, I would like to start with these con-
crete practices and, as it were, pass these universals through the
grid of these practices.”34 Foucault’s insistence on bypassing the
universal to immerse himself in concrete and particular practices
is undoubtedly a key component in the posthumous durability
that his thought enjoys. He provides a path for immersion in
local practices to suffice in itself as a mode of analysis. One need
not—and must not—connect these local practices to a universal
historical struggle.
As Foucault’s thought develops, he becomes increasingly con-
cerned about the ethical implications of universality. Thinking
universally implies doing violence to particulars. By taking the
particular practices as his starting point, Foucault resists taking
part in this violence, which follows directly from theorizing
itself. In this sense, Foucault attempts to theorize outside the
constraints of the production of truth and knowledge. By link-
ing his thought to the concrete analysis of practices, he believes
that he avoids the violence of universality.
Foucault’s suspicion of universality stems from his conception
of it as a vehicle of mastery, not as what remains always absent
and lacking. Foucault takes universality as domination without
thinking about how universality is the key to challenging domi-
nation. This inability to see universality correctly produces his
politics of the particular that continues to inform our thinking
today, decades after his death. When we fail to see the universal
operating and neglect the appeal to universality, we lose touch
with its emancipatory power and come to view it, like Foucault
does, as a shackle that we must cast off. Suspicion about univer-
sality ends up as capitulation to our situation.35
The suspicion about universality that the twentieth century
produces creates a fertile ground for identity politics. That is,
 118 Y Universal Villains

it derails the leftist emancipatory project from its proper course

and shifts its struggle to the conservative terrain of identitarian
battles. The dangers of twentieth-century totalitarianism were
particular dangers. To theorize them as universal is to unwit-
tingly turn the tide of history in their direction.
 4
CAPITALISM’S LACK AND
ITS DISCONTENTS

THE PERILS OF ISOLATION

The capitalist epoch is the first in human history that permits

individuals to view themselves as isolated entities with no inher-
ent connection to their fellow beings. In the capitalist universe,
there is neither a divinity binding everyone together nor a leader
that has the fealty of the whole society. One would think that
such a structure bespeaks capitalism’s vulnerability to revolution-
ary change, its precariousness. A system that doesn’t create explicit
connections between people seems destined to be short-lived. The
irony is that the isolation of individuals does not threaten the
capitalist system but ensures its perpetuation.
The structuring principle of capitalism is not the figure of a
master. It is not God or the name of a monarch but the com-
modity form. The commodity form provides the foundation for
all value in the capitalist system, just as God does in a theocratic
system. One can say or do whatever one wants in capitalist soci-
ety as long as one submits to the commodity form, which means
treating everything as a commodity to be exchanged and accu-
mulated. This form dictates not just economic relations but every
way in which people interact and even how they think about
 120 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

themselves. Their value relies on how they view themselves as

commodities on the market.
Marx’s fundamental discovery in Capital is not surplus value,
not the tendency of profit to fall, and not even the contradic-
tions that beset the capitalist mode of production. The discovery
of the commodity form as capitalism’s structuring principle is
Marx’s greatest theoretical breakthrough. With this discovery,
he unlocks the mystery of capitalism’s structure, which is why
he begins the first volume of Capital with a chapter on the com-
modity. Once one understands the dominance of the commod-
ity form, one understands why capitalism works so well despite
not giving individuals an explicit master with whom to passion-
ately identify.1
Capitalism depends on individuals immersing themselves
entirely in their own particular concerns. When they do so, they
unknowingly betray their investment in the capitalist structur-
ing principle. Individuals display their devotion to capitalism not
by openly proclaiming it but by retreating into their isolated par-
ticularity. This paradoxical structure gives capitalism its unique-
ness as a socioeconomic system. It perpetuates itself in a way no
other previous socioeconomic system could. In the capitalist
epoch, the more disconnected you feel, the more involved you
are. This is why the supposedly radical position of “Turn on, tune
in, drop out” did nothing to upset the development of capital-
ism. The more one drops out, the more one plays the part of the
capitalist subject. Dropping out is simply turning a blind eye to
the commodity form without challenging its dominance. Blind-
ness to the structuring principle that capitalism produces also
leads to its proclivity for provoking unprecedented historical
catastrophes.2
By thrusting subjects into an isolated particularity without
explicit reference to a master, capitalism leaves individuals
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 121

without any relatively consistent sense of identity. All individu-

als under capitalism are empty particulars bent on accumulat-
ing, bent on acquiring commodities and turning themselves into
commodities. Many try to use the commodity itself as a way of
creating identity out of the empty commodity form. They believe
that if they accumulate enough commodities or discover the right
one, they will fill out the empty form of capitalist particularity
with a content. But no number of commodities are ever enough,
and none is the right one. The identity of the capitalist subject
remains empty.
The emptiness of identity under capitalism distinguishes it
from earlier eras. Subjected to the Roman Empire or living under
the Han Dynasty or working as a serf under a feudal lord, one’s
identity had a clear content. One had the identity associated with
the ruling master. (Under Rome, one had the identity of a
Roman, for instance.) This sense of an identity disappears as
capitalism empties out all identities into the pure form of the
commodity.
But it is impossible to live without an identity. Even though
identity is always ideological insofar as it obfuscates the self-
division of the subject with an image of wholeness, it is none-
theless unavoidable. By emptying out identity through reducing
subjects to a pure particularity, capitalism puts them in an unten-
able situation. This is why so many under capitalism seek an
identity to give their subjectivity some content, and they often
find it in religious, ethnic, or nationalist projects.
Even though versions of these projects all predate capitalist
modernity, their contemporary form is a product of the capital-
ist universe and thus a phenomenon as new as capitalist moder-
nity itself. The Christian zealot of the first century is radically
different from the contemporary Christian fundamentalist
because the latter adopts this identity in response to the empty
 122 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

particularity of capitalism rather than the oppressive mastery of

the Roman Empire (as in the case of the former). In prior epochs,
people had an identity directly available to them through an evi-
dent master.
In modernity, the project of turning to identity attempts to
compensate for what capitalist subjectivity lacks. It produces
movements like Nazism, the National Front, America First, and
Islamic fundamentalism. These movements are so virulent
because they are trying to establish an identity that the prevail-
ing socioeconomic structure— capitalism— constantly under-
mines. Even when they are not explicitly anti-capitalist, funda-
mentalist movements such as these engage in an unending
struggle to create what the global system itself renders impos-
sible, which is why fundamentalism cannot finally triumph. If
fundamentalists do win and defeat capitalist modernity, they
would find themselves without the background that undergirds
the identity that fundamentalism provides. They need the capi-
talist universe that they oppose, which is why any victory would
be self-defeating. Fundamentalism can exist only against the
backdrop of the capitalist modernity it criticizes. But the inevi-
table failure of identity projects in the capitalist epoch doesn’t
eliminate them. This impossibility of victory gives them their
intransigence and often leads to carnage.
Identity politics is the reactionary compensation for the empty
isolation that capitalism imposes on the subject. Rather than
challenging the dictates of capitalism, this form of politics keeps
capitalist subjectivity going. Seeking solace in a sense of iden-
tity enables one to endure the prison of one’s isolated particular-
ity without calling this particularity itself into question. As long
as one can believe that one is one’s identity, one need not chal-
lenge the capitalist structuring principle. One need not call into
question the commodity form. The commodity form continues
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 123

to impose itself without disruption when we retreat into an iden-

tity. Identity seems like a refuge but leaves us unknowingly on
the turf of the commodity form, which forges the determinants
of our situation. A sense of unalienated identity blinds us to this
structuring principle, giving us no path to truly contest the func-
tioning of capitalism. In this sense, identity performs a double
function in sustaining the capitalist system. It sends us off in the
direction of false alternatives and obscures the possibility of a
true one.

A NEW FORM OF OBEDIENCE

Within the capitalist system, one cannot simply obey. When

Marx writes the first volume of Capital, he sees that individuals
under capitalism cannot know what they are doing. If the com-
modity form functions as the capitalist structuring principle,
individuals relate to themselves through the deception of the
commodity form, which has no inherent content. Capitalism
deceives individuals not with false beliefs—ideology is not reduc-
ible to a set of (erroneous) beliefs—but on the basic level of who
they are. In order to act as a capitalist subject, one must con-
sciously pursue one’s own particular aim while actually doing
the behest of the capitalist structuring principle.
The commodity form imposes itself on capitalist subjects
through the demand for the incessant accumulation of capital.
Although individuals or corporations do the accumulating, when
they do this they are heeding this social demand. Nothing must
get in the way of unlimited accumulation, which is why capital-
ism destroys all traditional limits on production and consump-
tion. A telling example of capitalism’s ability to blow through tra-
ditional limits on the accumulation of capital is the elimination
 124 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

of restrictions on when stores could be open in the United

States. Religious tradition, often formalized in so-called blue
laws, led to stores being closed on Sunday throughout the his-
tory of American retailing. This began to change in the 1970s, as
business owners started to see an opportunity for acquiring
capital from customers eager to spend money on both days of
the weekend, not just one. Consequently, retail shop after retail
shop decided to open on Sunday. Today, almost every retailer
has Sunday hours. Sometimes there remains a slight nod to tra-
dition when a store opens an hour later on Sunday than on week-
days, but often the store hours on Sunday are exactly the same
as the hours for every other day. The artificial limit to capital
posed by the religious idea of the Sabbath as a day of rest falls
victim to the imperative of accumulation. Even if this notion of
the Sabbath and its enforced rest were already part of the struc-
ture of capitalism, its destruction nonetheless testifies to the
expansion of the capitalist structuring principle. Capital runs
roughshod over tradition with its drive to accumulate and to
transform everything into the form of the commodity.
The commodity form reaches everywhere. But no one within
capitalist society works on behalf of capitalist society itself or on
behalf of accumulation in general. There are no explicit cham-
pions of the commodity form that cede their own particular
interests to those of capitalist society. Even those serving in
the military of capitalist states believe that they defend the
nation and not the capitalist economy. Unlike the Christian
martyr or the soldier of the French Revolution, I don’t have to
die so that the commodity form can live. Instead, capitalist sub-
jects think that they use capital for their own satisfaction, not
recognizing that capital is actually using them to satisfy its own
drive.3 This is the basic capitalist deception.
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 125

Marx lays out different versions of this necessary deception

at key points in his analysis of capitalism. When he discusses
commodity fetishism, he indicates the discrepancy between how
people treat the commodity and how it appears to them. Later,
he claims that those within the capitalist system must see labor
time not as labor time but as money. Then, when he examines the
self-valorization of capital, he recognizes how the actions of the
capitalist are not individual actions but those of capital itself.4
These individual errors are not just contingent illusions but nec-
essary ones. They speak to the basic way that capitalism mysti-
fies how it works for those most involved in it. Self-deception
about the structuring principle is the sine qua non for the func-
tioning of capitalism. In the capitalist epoch, not knowing what
one does becomes, for the first time in human history, essential
(rather than just beneficial) to the reproduction of the ruling
socioeconomic system.5
The great transformation that the emergence of capitalism
enacts is the change in how the structuring principle reproduces
itself. In traditional society, society’s masters demand that peo-
ple submit their particularity to the dictates of the ruling author-
ity. Even though the authority can use deceptions like promising
an eternal reward for obedience, people can obey straightfor-
wardly and without self-deception. They are presented with a
choice of obedience (which will be rewarded) or disobedience
(which will be punished). Although choosing not to obey might
entail exile or death, one nonetheless confronts the authority as
an authority rather than in the guise of one’s own particularity.
This is the basic difference. In an imperial society, the emper-
or’s dictates indicate the authority to which subjects must con-
form. In a theocratic society, the commands of the priest
serve the same function. The content of this authority can be
 126 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

deceiving—it can convince subjects that their lives have worth

only in being sacrificed for the empire or for God—but the form
of the authority is not a deception. This enables subjects of tra-
ditional society consciously to confront the authority governing
their existence.
Once capitalism becomes the ruling socioeconomic system,
this structure undergoes a revolution. In the capitalist epoch, a
bizarre inversion occurs: one’s obedience occurs through one’s
isolated particularity.6 One obeys not by submitting to the dom-
ination of an authority’s command but by following one’s own
self-interest. This has radical effects on the experience of the
subject.
Capitalism does not eliminate obedience, though it does elim-
inate the act of submission to a structure of mastery. Individuals
continue to participate in a structure that guides their exis-
tence, but they cease to experience it as a structure of mastery.
In other words, with capitalism, the society’s structuring prin-
ciple becomes unconscious.7 It no longer requires particulars to
accede to it consciously. This does not lessen the power of the
capitalist structuring principle relative to the authorities of prior
epochs. In fact, the unconscious status of the structuring prin-
ciple within capitalism increases its power. Even at the moments
one believes oneself to be breaking from it, one finds oneself
doing its inexorable bidding.
The more one pursues one’s private self-interest with no regard
for any other considerations, the more one acts as the puppet of
the commodity form. This is why it is so difficult to break sub-
jects of their attachment to capitalism. The attachment doesn’t
feel like at attachment at all. It feels like I am doing just what I
want to do. My insistence on my own private interest has already
been taken into account by the functioning of capitalism.
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 127

This is clearest in the case of stock market traders. These fig-

ures are the engines of the capitalist system, deciding which
companies to fund and which to devalue. Though they seem
parasitical on the production process—they often receive moral
condemnation for their parasitical status relative to those who
make useful things—they represent the pure form of capitalist
subjectivity.8 Unlike other individuals who permit an admixture
of other concerns to dilute the capitalist demand, their only aim
is to use capital to generate additional capital. They do this with-
out concerning themselves with producing anything. They
operate solely at the level of exchange value and ignore use value
entirely. The point is accumulating capital, which is the aim of
the capitalist system as well. Stock market traders are the most
loyal servants of the capitalist system.
No one starts to work on the stock market due to a heartfelt
yearning to serve the cause of the capitalism. This separates it
distinctly from other occupations, in which the idea of service
can contribute to the choice of occupation. One can become a
doctor to help the sick. One can become a teacher to educate the
young. One can become a garbage collector to allow people to
live in relative cleanliness. One can even become a lawyer with
the idea of assisting those in trouble. Of course, we can imagine
those who pursue these occupations just for the money and not
to serve anyone. The aspect of service may even be an ideologi-
cal illusion designed to suck unsuspecting labor into these areas
of the economy. But it is at least possible to consider the alterna-
tive of helping others as a motivating factor. If it weren’t a factor
in any way, it is difficult to explain why the teacher, for instance,
didn’t choose a more lucrative occupation. In the case of the stock
trader, there can only be one aim—the accumulation of capital—
because stock traders are indifferent to the type of companies
 128 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

they invest in or divest from. From the perspective of the trader,

a munitions manufacturer is the same as a children’s hospital.
The company is nothing but a formal entity. The content of what
it does is not a factor in its ability to generate capital.
Of all the forms of capitalist subjectivity, stock traders are the
most open in pursuit of their own self-interest. These subjects
don’t allow other considerations like social welfare or political
implications to interfere with the straightforward accumulation
of capital.9 But these pure capitalist subjects don’t know what
they are doing. To do what they do, they must believe that they
are using capital to serve their own interests, otherwise they
would find another racket. Stock traders experience their occu-
pation as a way of finding satisfaction through making money.
But what really happens in their trading is something else alto-
gether. Capital uses traders to develop itself while leaving them
with a lingering dissatisfaction that they never have enough.
Their accumulation doesn’t serve their own interests but those
of capital.
Stock traders give a significant portion of their lives to serve
capital. They serve the capitalist system even though they have
no conscious investment in such service. Traders are the foot sol-
diers of the capitalist system, but unlike the foot soldiers of the
Catholic Church or the British Empire, they do not conceive of
themselves as soldiers of the system at all. Instead, they have a
thoroughgoing conviction that they are acting solely on behalf
of their own particular interest. They think that they are pulling
one over on everyone else by becoming rich simply by trading
stocks. They pity the poor slobs who labor in the companies that
they buy and sell throughout the day. The fact that traders don’t
know what they are doing makes them even more effective sol-
diers of the capitalist demand. Unlike conscious soldiers, they
never hesitate between their particular interest and that of the
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 129

system since both are entirely aligned. In the capitalist epoch,

pursuit of particular interest becomes the way that the capitalist
system advances itself.
As a result, insistence on particularity against the claims of
the universal—the privileging of private interest—becomes the
new mode of conformism. Marx states this directly in the first
volume of Capital, when he claims that in capitalist society “social
power becomes the private power of private persons.”10 We don’t
confront social power as an external force that imposes itself on
us. The structure of mastery now perpetuates itself through the
private activity of particulars, not through a public authority. In
this way, the functioning of the structuring principle becomes
mystified for the subjects of capitalist society.

ON NOT SEEING INVISIBLE HANDS

With the emergence of capitalist society, one’s participation in

this society comes to depend on one’s inability to recognize this
participation while one is participating. Once we take capitalist
society as such into account, once we consider the society as a
whole rather than our own particularity, we cannot act on behalf
of the commodity form because this structuring principle requires
an immersion in particularity, a blindness to the fact that there
is a structuring principle at all. In this sense, what Adam Smith
calls the capitalist “invisible hand” is not just contingently invis-
ible. It must remain invisible. Capitalism’s destruction of the
public world and the commons is integral to its survival. By elim-
inating reminders of the ties that bind people to each other,
capitalism sustains their investment in the capitalist system.
In order to be an effective capitalist subject, one must disavow
knowledge of the capitalist project as a whole and not allow it to
 130 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

factor into one’s decisions. This is what Adam Smith is getting

at in The Wealth of Nations when he analyzes the relationship
between individual pursuit of self-interest and the social good.
Smith states, “Every individual is continually exerting himself
to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever cap-
ital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not
that of society, which he has in view. But the study of his own
advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that
employment which is most advantageous to society.”11 Within
capitalism, thinking in terms of one’s own particularity doesn’t
hinder the working of the system. This type of thinking is instead
absolutely necessary for it.
Smith’s analysis points us in the right direction for under-
standing the relationship between the particular and the struc-
turing principle within capitalism. But the problem with his view
lies in the slippage that the notion of advantage undergoes from
the first sentence of the quoted passage to the second. Accord-
ing to Smith, subjects seek out the most “advantageous employ-
ment” for their capital. What is advantageous for one’s capital,
however, is not necessarily to one’s “own advantage,” as Smith
puts it in the second sentence. Smith never attempts to prove that
the accumulation of capital works for the advantage of those
doing the accumulating. He even goes so far as to confess the
contrary.
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (which he published seven-
teen years before The Wealth of Nations) Smith explains how the
belief that accumulation is advantageous is a necessary decep-
tion that keeps the capitalist engine running. He claims that the
“real satisfaction” that the pleasure of wealth provides is actually
“in the highest degree contemptible and trifling.”12 Smith has no
illusions about the benefits that accumulation provides for the
individual doing the accumulating. Accumulation, according to
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 131

Smith, is the path to ensuring one’s perpetual sense of dissat-

isfaction. To paraphrase the great joke from Ernst Lubitch’s
neglected masterpiece To Be or Not to Be (1942), when the rich
accumulate, the rich do the accumulating while capitalism does
the enjoying. Smith recognizes the necessary role that this decep-
tion plays in the perpetuation of capitalism. He adds that this
false belief that accumulation brings real satisfaction is the driv-
ing force for “the industry of mankind.”13 Capitalism relies on
the deceptive equation of the individual’s own advantage with
the advantage of capital itself. If individuals really pursued their
own satisfaction, they would not be proper capitalist subjects but
would refuse to invest themselves in endless accumulation.
The great trick of the capitalist economy is that individuals
enthusiastically embrace the sense of dissatisfaction that its fun-
damental axiom of endless accumulation demands. Accumula-
tion takes a toll on our ability to recognize our satisfaction. It
leaves us constantly believing that there is more satisfaction to
be had in the accumulation of additional commodities. But the
more one accumulates the less one is able to see that one will
never have enough. In the attempt to accumulate more and more
satisfaction for oneself, one actually increases one’s sense of dis-
satisfaction. Capitalism nourishes itself on our inability to ever
have enough. Our private endeavors to have more are always
inadvertent tributes to the capitalist demand. Thinking that it is
doing what it wants, the capitalist subject sacrifices itself for the
capitalist demand.14
In a startling passage from The Economic and Philosophic Man-
uscripts of 1844, Marx details the choice that confronts the sub-
ject within the capitalist system. One can either invest oneself
in the project of accumulation, or one can recognize that no addi-
tional number of commodities can deliver an ultimate satisfac-
tion. Satisfaction is never total, despite what capital promises.
 132 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

Marx writes, “The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you
go the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you
think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—
the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust
will devour—your capital.”15 Here, Marx points out that being a
capitalist means passing on the satisfactions of existence. One
who tries to find a surplus satisfaction through the accumula-
tion of capital misses out on the real satisfaction that comes from
the travails of subjectivity itself—eating, reading books, going to
the cinema, loving. Of course, all of these activities require some
money to engage in them, but they don’t require the incessant
accumulation of capital. If one constantly strives for more, one
cannot see that satisfaction requires less. We give up the possibil-
ity of recognizing our satisfaction in order to satisfy the capital-
ist structuring principle.
Individuals who spend their time accumulating continue to
do so because they accept the dictate of the capitalist structur-
ing principle that they never have enough. This is why we see
the strange phenomenon of incredibly wealthy people like Bill
Gates or George Soros doing whatever they can to earn more.
Once one accepts that accumulation is the path to satisfaction,
one accedes to an unending dissatisfaction that ensues when one
does one’s duty for the sake of the commodity form and its
demand for infinite accumulation.

A DISDAINF UL STRUCTURE

The necessary blindness to the functioning of authority that

occurs in the capitalist epoch has terrible consequences for those
at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. While every system
in history disdains those that it leaves behind, under capitalism
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 133

this disdain becomes even more pronounced. One’s failure under

capitalism is a result of one’s personal weakness and inability, not
the dictates of birth or the social apparatus. Since, in the capi-
talist universe, there are only isolated particulars, the cause of
my failure must reside in my particularity. If I don’t have a job,
it is my fault, not the fault of a system that declares me an out-
cast. The obscurity of the capitalist structuring principle leads
us to blame those excluded from the work force for their own
fate, as the case of unemployment nicely illustrates.
When we conceive ourselves as an aggregate of particular indi-
viduals rather than as participants within the capitalist system,
unemployment can only be the result of a lack of industriousness.
Those who don’t have a job are the ones who don’t try hard enough.
They have done something—or not done something—that leaves
them in this position. A strict system of merit governs employ-
ment, enabling us to feel morally justified in our condemnation of
the idleness of the permanently unemployed. But we can adopt
this attitude only because we don’t see the structural necessity of
their unemployment.
Even if one doesn’t go as far as Marx and assert the economic
necessity of a reserve army of the unemployed, it is nonetheless
clear that the proper working of the economic system depends
on a certain level of unemployment.16 Capitalist economists
themselves accept that eliminating unemployment altogether
would portend skyrocketing inflation and economic disaster.
Thus, economists search for a level of unemployment that they
label “full employment.” Full employment, despite the name, is
not the elimination of all unemployment but rather the mini-
mum percentage of unemployed that the economy can endure
without triggering runaway inflation.
Debate rages about where we draw the line and whether or
not the line is always the same in every form of capitalist
 134 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

economy. But almost all economists accept that there exists

what is called the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemploy-
ment” (or NAIRU). If unemployment passes beneath this
threshold, a crisis will ensue. The health of capitalism as a sys-
tem derives from a certain percentage of workers filling the role
of the necessarily unemployed.
Capitalism’s dependence on this level of unemployment
removes joblessness from the failures of the particular and places
it on the terrain of the success of the system. Though the capi-
talist economy doesn’t determine which individuals don’t have
jobs, it does require that at least some individuals are in this posi-
tion. In this sense, even if the unemployed are lazy and unambi-
tious, they are nonetheless fulfilling the role that capitalism
demands of someone.
In the academic labor market where the reserve army of labor
is massive, the inability to recognize this dynamic appears among
those who should know better. Each open permanent position
in the humanities typically attracts hundreds of applicants. Those
who attain a doctorate in the humanities thus have dismal
chances of finding a decent position at a four-year university. But
there are those who attend prestigious schools, publish numer-
ous works, and have recommendations from famous professors.
In this way, they establish themselves as top job candidates. These
few end up with appealing positions, while their fellow gradu-
ates in the humanities toil away as contingent laborers in obscure
institutions.
Everyone within the system of academic cutthroat capitalism
knows the rules of the game. Those who don’t have permanent
positions are structurally condemned not to have them. If they
had permanent positions, they would simply dislodge others
who would take their place among the marginalized. And if
they worked harder and were more meritorious, they would do
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 135

nothing but force those who succeed to work even harder them-
selves. One would have to have published three books to get
tenure at Yale instead of just two, for instance. There is no way
of escaping the necessity of these unemployed and underem-
ployed as long as the market demands it.
Full employment would be just as destructive for the contem-
porary university system as it would be for the capitalist system
at large. Universities would lose their ability to exploit contin-
gent labor, and tuition would skyrocket, leading to fewer and
fewer students able to afford higher education. The university
system functions through the precarious employment of the
majority of those laboring for it.
And yet, those working within the humanities in the acad-
emy by and large accept the notion that merit will be rewarded.
Even when one knows full well that the unemployment is struc-
tural, one tells one’s graduate students that they can work hard
enough to beat the system, that there is a way to triumph in the
system if one is really industrious.17 It is almost impossible to stop
believing in the promise of merit no matter how much one knows
about structural unemployment.
The problem is that capitalist subjects, ensconced in their own
particularity, cannot view the unemployed from the perspective
of the system as a whole. When one approaches the problem of
unemployment as a capitalist subject, it necessarily appears as a
particular failure rather than as the result of a structural neces-
sity. Examining the activities of particular unemployed individ-
uals will always turn up moments where they didn’t do all that
they could to find a job. They didn’t get perfect grades in col-
lege, didn’t have the proper experience, or had a typo on their
résumé. This is because it is impossible to spend every second
maximizing one’s job prospects. All time that the unemployed
have spent eating, sleeping, dancing, going to the theater, and
 136 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

amusing themselves could provide proof that they deserve their

unemployment. Because there is no perfect capitalist subject,
there is no way to escape the notion that the unemployed have
some culpability for their position when one analyzes them from
within the capitalist system.
From the perspective of the particular, this analysis is correct.
Often, those who don’t have jobs have at some point done less
than others who do, even if capitalism doesn’t fairly reward effort.
But this failure is structurally necessary. If those who are cur-
rently unemployed didn’t fall through the cracks, others would
have—and they would also seem culpable for their failure to find
a job from the perspective of the particular. Because capitalism
confines subjects to this perspective, it renders everyone incapa-
ble of seeing the unemployed as fulfilling a necessary role within
the functioning of a capitalist economy. Rather than blaming
them for their miserable condition, one should thank them for
occupying the position within the economy that no one would
want to occupy.
Our collective inability to recognize the necessity of the
unemployed is the result of the form that capitalist subjectivity
takes. As capitalist subjects, we have no direct access to the cap-
italist structuring principle. This is why Marx claims that “the
immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual
capitalist as a coercive force external to him.”18 The enforced par-
ticularity of capitalist subjectivity establishes the structuring
principle as foreign. The capitalist subject cannot adopt the per-
spective of the capitalist system—with its requisite amount of
unemployment—while remaining a capitalist subject. One per-
petuates the capitalist system only when one doesn’t occupy one-
self with its perpetuation. The contempt for the requisite unem-
ployed is just one more indication of this inherent blindness.19
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 137

THE EMP T Y SUBJECT

Though capitalism leaves subjects isolated in the experience of

their own particularity, this particularity is always empty. The
capitalist structuring principle leaves this particularity without
any content. The subject becomes itself nothing but the empty
commodity form. I am my producing and my consuming, noth-
ing else. Capitalism provides commodities for individuals to
enjoy, but it doesn’t offer any type of identity, which differenti-
ates it from all other socioeconomic systems. It remains com-
pletely neutral on the question of what identity one has as a
particular in the capitalist universe. As a capitalist subject, one
has no identity at hand. One experiences oneself as a particular,
but this particularity bears the imprint of the commodity form,
which is why it is empty.
The emptiness of capitalist subjectivity derives from the role
that the general equivalent (or money) plays in capitalism. Capi-
talism does not invent the general equivalent—there was money
prior to the rise of capitalism—but it undergoes a radical trans-
formation with capitalism’s emergence. In fact, one could define
capitalism as much by its privileging of the general equivalent
as by its imperative to endlessly accumulate. The general equiv-
alent is a mortal threat to traditional society and the lifeblood of
capitalist society. Marx describes this difference in Capital. He
notes, “Just as in money every qualitative difference between
commodities is extinguished, so too for its part, as a radical lev-
eller, it extinguishes all distinctions. . . . Ancient society there-
fore denounced it as tending to destroy the economic and moral
order. Modern society, which already in its infancy had pulled
Pluto by the hairs of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets
gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of its
 138 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

innermost principle of life.”20 Traditional society rightly fears

the leveling power of the general equivalent, but modern capi-
talist society uses this power to transfer society’s structuring
principle to the care of the particular, a feat unimaginable in
traditional society. Money is the vehicle through which particu-
lars perpetuate the capitalist structuring principle.
As a result of the central role that the general equivalent has
in capitalist society, the identity that subjects have in traditional
society loses its intrinsic status. Capitalism’s indifference to par-
ticular identity makes us unable to simply take identity for
granted, as traditional societies allow.21 Identity doesn’t disap-
pear altogether but becomes a figure that the individual puts on
or adopts. The subject no longer is its identity. One’s identity
becomes alien, even when one embodies it.
The contrast with premodern traditional societies is stark. In
a traditional society, my identity derives from my identification
with the figure of mastery. I am a subject of the monarch or the
territory. This identity has its basis in a foundational social myth:
the identity is just a story that the society tells me about myself.
And yet, the myth is effective. I can believe that I really am what
the society tells me I am. In this way, traditional society encloses
me completely within the prison of the identity that it offers.
Capitalism’s annihilation of this mythic natural identity frees
individuals to seek their own identity. In this sense, this anni-
hilation is part of the emancipatory role that capitalism plays in
human history. But it also renders all my choices of identity con-
tingent and even false. Identity doesn’t give me a sense of unique
belonging to a group, nor does it attest to my singularity as an
individual. It becomes almost as insignificant as a commodity
that I acquire, just another effect of the general equivalent. Cap-
italism produces a generalized identity crisis.
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 139

In earlier epochs of capitalism, the corporation’s loyalty to the

worker— or the worker’s membership in a union—might have
mitigated this identity crisis. I could identify myself as a proud
employee of General Motors, thereby acquiring an ersatz sense
of belonging to replace what was once offered by traditional soci-
ety. But this type of identity vanished as soon as corporations
recognized that it stands in the way of maximizing accumula-
tion. Capitalism destroys identity because identity is a barrier to
the inexorable logic of the commodity.
The general equivalent doesn’t just enable us to equate all
commodities with each other, but goes even further. It reduces
every subject to an interchangeable market actor without an iden-
tity that distinguishes it from other subjects. No matter how I
identify myself, I’m really just an interchangeable part in the
capitalist universe. From the perspective of the capitalist system,
my identity is completely meaningless. Marx describes this in a
key passage from the Grundrisse. He says, “In the money rela-
tion, in the developed system of exchange (and this semblance
seduces the democrats), the ties of personal dependence, the dis-
tinctions of blood, education, etc. are in fact exploded, ripped
up.”22 In the wake of the general equivalent’s dominance, dis-
tinctions of identity cease to matter. Who I am becomes insig-
nificant, despite the fact that capitalist ideology insists that all I
have is my own particular interests. Capitalism gives me indi-
viduality while simultaneously making it worthless.
This becomes apparent when we look at how the market oper-
ates. The particular identity of those interacting on the market
has no bearing at all on their actions. For instance, one sells one’s
labor the same way whether one is male or female, Muslim or
Christian, young or old, Russian or Chinese, and so on. The
teenage Indonesian girl has a far greater disadvantage relative to
 140 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

the capitalist employer than the middle-aged white man in Chi-

cago, but this discrepancy does not affect the transaction itself.
Further, these different identities don’t affect how one buys
commodities, even if they might impact which commodities one
buys. In the exchange itself, one is always just an empty particu-
larity, even if the content of one’s particularity locates where or
how the exchange takes place. The logic of capitalism doesn’t
change because of differences of identity but rather openly
accommodates these differences. If they follow its logic, the
organs of capitalism want to hire those who will work for the
least, and they want to sell to those who will pay the most. In
neither case does identity enter into the calculation.23
It is true that prejudice injects itself into capitalist exchanges
all the time. A company may not want to make wedding cakes
for gay couples, for instance. This is a clear moment in which
the logic of capitalism does not hold sway in capitalist society. It
is even possible that prejudice could be so widespread that no
company would attempt to fill the void in the market. Gay cou-
ples might find no one willing to make them wedding cakes. But
in this case, the prejudice is external to the demands of capital-
ism, which call for subjects to take advantage of the possibility
for accumulation regardless of the identities involved. One can
disobey capitalism’s demands, but its demands never take iden-
tity into account.24
The market demands that subjects act according to its dictates,
and subjects comport themselves appropriately, regardless of
their particular identity. If they fail to do so, other subjects will
act in their place. In this way, capitalism simultaneously absolves
individuals of personal culpability for their misdeeds—someone
would always be doing the exploiting if a certain individual didn’t
do it—while rewarding them for acting ruthlessly. Those who
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 141

refuse to ruthlessly exploit every opportunity will inevitably fall

to those who have no such compunctions.
The case of Wal-Mart aptly illustrates this logic. Wal-Mart
destroys local retailers by underselling them. The company can
do this because it puts pressure on suppliers to lower costs, which
has the effect of creating horrible working conditions for those
manufacturing the products that Wal-Mart sells. The damage
that this practice does to local businesses and workers around
the world is ruinous. It is why many consumers refuse to shop at
Wal-Mart and contribute to this destruction. But within the
capitalist system, one cannot blame the executives at Wal-Mart
for this predatory practice. Boycotting the store is akin to the
family of an executed person avenging itself on the executioner
rather than contesting the criminal justice system. If the execu-
tives at Wal-Mart didn’t exploit the possibility of underselling
local retailers, other executives would. They act as capitalist sub-
jects devoted to the commodity form that structures their exis-
tence. Their particular motivations are unimportant.
The same logic applies to those at the other end of the spec-
trum. Workers who have jobs at Wal-Mart participate in the
decimation of local retailers and the immiseration of those pro-
ducing the goods that Wal-Mart sells. But when they work at
Wal-Mart, they do so as capitalist subjects enthralled by the
capitalist structuring principle. They seek the best wages that
they can find or even the only job available. The competition for
jobs forces someone to work at Wal-Mart. The workers there are
capitalist subjects acting in the way that the capitalist system
demands. Capitalism ensconces everyone—both capitalists and
workers—in a commodity form that prescribes their activity
while granting them a subjective experience of freedom. Every
capitalist subject is the capitalist subject. Through this systemic
 142 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

emptying out of identity and creation of individuals with no

sense of belonging, capitalism paves the way for its own histori-
cal demise, which is exactly what Marx anticipated. But some-
thing gets in the way.

THE MISSING REVOLU TION

Marx’s wager in Capital and elsewhere is that the capitalism’s

destruction of identity would create workers with no attachment
to their particularity. Capitalists themselves at least can fill the
emptiness of their particularity with money and other commod-
ities. Capitalists have their particular accumulation to give
themselves a content. Even if this accumulation offers them
nothing but dissatisfaction after dissatisfaction, they can at least
hope that some future level of accumulation will provide what
they’ve been missing. This hope is what keeps them invested in
the capitalist system, despite its broken promises. Workers don’t
have that option. In Marx’s account, they are pure form without
content and thus the engine for revolutionary subjectivity.
In the Grundrisse, Marx identifies the limitation that con-
fronts workers who attempt to follow the path of the capitalists
toward accumulation, which is what all the apologists for capi-
talism recommend: “Work hard, save, and you can become like
us.” But such a position is impossible for workers to take up in
large numbers. As Marx puts it, “An individual worker can be
industrious above the average, more than he has to be in order to
live as a worker, only because another lies below the average, is
lazier; he can save only because and if another wastes.”25 The
worker who accumulates like the capitalist can only do so as an
exception, which is why if I try to do it myself, I should also
encourage my fellow workers to waste their money at the bar or
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 143

on video games. Instead of trying to set an example, I should

confess the stupidity and pointlessness of my hard work because
I want no disciples. If every worker took my path of industrious-
ness, they would decrease the value of their commodity—labor
power—so that it would earn less for all of us. Too much collec-
tive industriousness and accumulation simply result in less
income for workers to use for the project of accumulation. The
path of the capitalist is not open to the worker as such, only to
the worker as exception.
This absence of any path for workers to provide a content for
their particular subjectivity is the basis for Marx’s supposition
that the working class functions incipiently as a revolutionary
class. Without the possibility of the accumulation that gives the
capitalist a content, the working class lacks the identity that the
capitalist class has. Because its particularity is empty, it can
assume the mantel of the revolution without sacrificing anything
but its chains. The working class has everything to gain and
nothing to lose with the turn toward revolution.
Most autopsies of Marxism’s fate in the twentieth century
focus on capitalism’s ability to adjust and accommodate the inter-
ests of the working class. This is the conclusion that Herbert
Marcuse reaches in One-Dimensional Man. He argues that “the
more the rulers are capable of delivering the goods of consump-
tion, the more firmly will the underlying population be tied to
various ruling bureaucracies.”26 Marcuse’s belief that the avail-
ability of consumer goods on a mass scale diluted the revolution-
ary impetus of the working class is not an isolated view. Most
Marxists accept it because it seems almost self-evident. If work-
ers can accumulate some goods (though they still cannot accu-
mulate capital), they find enough satisfaction within the capi-
talist system that they no longer have nothing to lose. These cease
to be a pure form, which is what Marx saw as the source for their
 14 4 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

revolutionary potential. Twentieth-century capitalism discovered

a solution to the problem of the emptiness of working-class sub-
jectivity, a solution that kept this subjectivity from attacking
capitalism.
As tempting as it is to follow Marcuse in the direction of con-
sumption, we should nevertheless reject this possible answer.
Clearly, it does not go completely astray. The availability of con-
sumer goods for the working class played an important role in
the investment of this class in the capitalist system. But not the
decisive role. If consumption were the source of the workers’
attachment to capitalism, they would undoubtedly express more
of an objection to the inequalities of consumption that the capi-
talist system produces. Consumption alone cannot explain
capitulation.
The answer lies in the reactions that capitalism’s emptying out
of identity has aroused. Throughout the twentieth century, proj-
ects of identity politics arise in order to provide what capitalist
subjectivity lacks. These projects have either a nationalist, reli-
gious, or ethnic hue—and some, like Nazism, manage to com-
bine all three. In these projects, particular identity acquires a
specific content. Because these projects are concerned only with
giving a content to particular identity, they do not threaten the
capitalist system with a universality that would challenge it. They
actually assist capitalism by providing a missing identity for
workers struggling with the emptiness of their particularity
within the capitalist system. Without identity politics, capital-
ism would not be able to keep the working class at bay. In democ-
racies, identity politics plays the crucial role in convincing
workers to vote for pro-capitalist parties. Even though projects
of identity sometimes present themselves in opposition to capi-
talism, it continues to function in concert with these projects,
even in their most extreme form.
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 145

No project of identity politics in the twentieth century goes

further than Nazism. Nazism values German national identity
and Aryan ethnicity above the dictates of capitalism, which it
often identifies as a conspiracy of “International Jewry.” Hitler
himself makes this plain in Mein Kampf when he claims that in
the assertion of German national identity, “The hardest battle
would have to be fought, not against hostile nations, but against
international capital.”27 But despite this outsized role that Nazism
gives identity relative to capitalism, the project of capitalist accu-
mulation runs apace during the Nazi Holocaust.
Nazism was bad for Jews, but it was not bad for business.
Although it diverted resources from productive enterprises to
death camps, Nazism did enable Germans to have an identity
that oiled the capitalist structure. What’s more, capitalist enter-
prises accommodated themselves to the extermination and even
made use of it. The most celebrated example of capitalist accu-
mulation working in concert with the Nazi assertion of Aryan
identity is the behavior of the company I. G. Farben at Aus-
chwitz. I. G. Farben, a chemical and pharmaceutical company,
did not just employ a few Jews at Auschwitz as cheap labor. The
company went so far as to build a factory at the camp in order to
make use of the site itself and the massive potential for labor
power that Auschwitz provided. I. G. Farben made itself into
an integral part of the functioning of Auschwitz. If we look at
how Auschwitz related to business concerns, the compatibility
of the Nazi project of identity with capitalism is impossible to
doubt. Although Jewish businesses certainly did not prosper and
there were some other business leaders who resisted Nazism,
these were the minority. Most found Nazism palatable because
it did away with labor unrest, unions, and the threat of commu-
nism. This is also why Nazism had support among prominent
conservatives throughout the world prior to the war.28
 146 Y Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

Identity politics is not necessary for capitalist enterprises.

Outside of I. G. Farben and a few others, they do just fine with-
out it. However, identity politics is an absolute necessity for capi-
talism as such. Without some project of identity to give their
isolated subjectivity a content, workers would simply not accept
the inequality of the capitalist system. Identity enables them to
embrace the capitalist system in spite of their humble position
within it.
This is why political figures who appeal to anti-immigrant
sentiments gain such traction. Immigrants function as a pass-
key to national identity because immigrants play the part of the
invading enemy against which one can constitute an identity.
There is no identity without an enemy that serves as its limiting
point: the nationalist has the immigrant; the religious funda-
mentalist has the secular nonbeliever; and the racial purist has
the interracialist or the other race. In each case, the point of the
identifying the enemy is fostering one’s own identity in a capi-
talist universe that empties identity of all content.
Populists insist on identity as a rampart against the effects of
unchecked economic liberalism. By providing a national iden-
tity through the definition of the immigrant as a foreign invader,
populists promise to ameliorate the most noxious effects of this
liberalism. But the politics of identity never ends up keeping
its promises. Rather than countering economic liberalism, it
assists in accommodating discontented individuals to its struc-
ture. Ensconced in the security of identity, one knows that the
source of one’s problems is not today’s global capitalism but
instead the enemy that threatens one’s identity.
When he was first campaigning for president in the spring of
2008, Barack Obama analyzed the role that identity politics plays
in the acceptance of the capitalist status quo by the working class.
Talking about this class, Obama said, “They get bitter, they cling
to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them
 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 147

or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to

explain their frustrations.”29 While Obama’s analysis undoubt-
edly hit the mark—too well, which generated lasting trouble for
him—the problem with it is that he called into question all the
reasons members of the working class have for remaining invested
in capitalism. Since Obama wasn’t running as an anti-capitalist
candidate, this comment stripped away the only identity avail-
able for people and left them nothing in its stead—specifically,
no alternative universal to the capitalist structuring principle. His
promise of hope and change was abstract, not tied to universal
equality or solidarity.
The subjects of capitalism for whom unbridled accumulation
is not an option do cling to their religion, their ethnic identity,
and their nation— and they often take up enthusiastically the
prejudices that secure these identities. The turn to identity gives
capitalist subjects something when they otherwise have nothing
but an empty form. This is why political projects based on the
assertion of identity have had such an appeal throughout the
capitalist epoch. And as capitalism develops, the clamor of iden-
tity politics will inevitably become louder and louder.
When leftists wonder about the missing revolutionary class
and lament the investment that any would-be revolutionary
class has in reactionary projects of identity politics, they should
consider what these projects offer the members of this class that
they cannot find anywhere else. Islamic fundamentalists, nation-
alists such as Donald Trump, and purveyors of ethnic purity
like the Nazis all supplement the denuded particularity of capi-
talist subjectivity with a missing content. By doing so, they
make this subjectivity endurable. Projects of identity politics are
essential for the flourishing of capitalism. Capitalist subjectivity
is a bland particularity that has difficulty sustaining the enthu-
siasm of adherents among those working to keep it going. The
appeal to identity is capitalism’s secret sauce.
 5
THIS IS IDENTITY POLITICS

PLEASE RECOGNIZE ME

The chief appeal of identity politics lies in its apparent imme-

diacy. Rather than taking up a political cause that is foreign to
ourselves in which we must deal with outsiders, we can assert
our own identity itself as a political position. If I assert my iden-
tity as a political position alongside those who share it, I avoid
the alienation that inheres in traditional political practice, like
joining a party where I have to deal with annoying others who
clamor about issues that don’t directly concern me. In contrast,
even if I am not at the head of the identity movement, the lead-
ers are like me and thus adopt a platform in keeping with my
own interests. Identity provides a political position that enables
one never to leave the confines of what one already is.
This immediacy of identity appears self-evident. Although I
may not have chosen the aspect of identity privileged in the
assertion of identity politics, it nonetheless constitutes something
I deem essential about myself. In this sense, identity is far dif-
ferent from a commitment to, say, socialism. If people abandon
their commitment to socialism, they remain more or less who
they are. But if identities change from white to black or from
 150 Y This Is Identity Politics

woman to man or from straight to gay, the people themselves

seem to undergo an essential change. We talk about conversion
to Christianity as rebirth, but the same could equally be said
about discovering one’s lesbianism or transitioning from male to
female.1 Whatever way we think about it, identity seems more
intrinsically linked to who we are than taking a political
position.
Identity feels essential because of the position that it occupies
for us. It exists in a liminal zone between determination and free
choice. On the one hand, there is no precise conscious moment
at which I decide to be gay, white, or female. And even my reli-
gious identification is most often not the result of a conscious
choice but is rather what I’ve been born into or turned uncon-
sciously toward before I made my conscious decision. On the
other hand, in many parts of the contemporary world, I can
increasingly decide on my identity for myself as much as (if not
more than) I can decide on my political project. Unlike my polit-
ical project (which involves me with others), my identity is the
result of how I identify myself. I can opt to identify as straight,
queer, bisexual, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, male, female,
trans, and so on. I can even go so far as to choose the pronoun
that people will use to refer to me.2 It is only when it comes to
racial and ethnic identity that the rule of free choice never comes
into question, though this exception speaks to the fact that iden-
tity never really seems like a choice.3
Because identity operates in this nebulous realm between an
imposed necessity and a conscious choice, we mistakenly believe
that it is our essence. The mystery associated with identity—it is
neither inherent nor chosen, or both inherent and chosen—leads
us to interpret it as who we are rather than just what we are. We
take the particular identity that we have as a stand-in for our
singularity. The more we emphasize the importance of identity,
 This Is Identity Politics Z 151

through efforts such as including our preferred pronoun along

with our introduction, the more we promulgate the idea that our
identity is really who we are and the more we obfuscate the sin-
gularity of our subjectivity.
This error follows directly from the way that identity emerges
as a solution. Identity seems to answer the question of what is
singular about us as subjects insofar as it resists any reduction to
external determinism (either natural or social) or conscious
choice. The obscurity of identity’s origin is the key to its power.
If I could simply say that I chose my identity or that it is the result
of natural determinants, I would no longer mistake it for my
essence.
But in fact, far from being the subject’s essence, identity serves
as the basic proving ground for the subject’s ideological inter-
pellation. It performs this function as the arena for the subject’s
forced choice, a choice that the subject can make freely provided
that it chooses correctly. The term itself, forced choice, suggests
that the freedom involved in it is just a ruse. The forced choice
gives me freedom only after the fact, after I’ve chosen according
to the force put on me. The forced choice does not involve the
particular identity that the subject takes up. Contemporary lib-
eral capitalist society allows individuals some discretion in their
choice—concerning profession, religion, or gender, for instance.
Even when a society constrains the choice of a particular iden-
tity (like Amish communities that require children who remain
in the community to identify as Amish), this is not the forced
choice.
The forced choice is between subjectivity and identity. In order
to be part of society, one must identify oneself with some socially
recognized form of identity, even if that identity lies outside the
typical social norms. It is the fact of having an identity that con-
stitutes the subject as part of the social order. The primal form
 152 Y This Is Identity Politics

of identity is one’s name, the signifier that others use to refer to

the subject and to locate it within the societal matrix.
Identity is the result of a forced choice because if one refuses
all identity one ceases to be part of the social order. One cannot
be a pure subject without giving that subjectivity some identity
as a content. Others would not be able to negotiate their inter-
actions with a subject that refused this choice. In this sense, the
act of obeying the forced choice and taking up an identity is a
necessary initial capitulation. To refuse identity is to refuse the
possibility of engaging others at all.
Although identity is necessary, it is also the foundation for
ideology. By adopting an identity (no matter which one), I accede
foundationally to the demands that the social structure makes
on me. I adapt myself to a symbolic position whose strictures
determine the boundaries of my actions. Those with a Jewish
identity, for example, will look at situations with their Jewish-
ness informing the very possibilities that they can see. If they
are strict in their identity, they will not see those who aren’t Jew-
ish as possible romantic partners. If they identify as Jewish in a
looser, cultural sense, perhaps they will just look at every situa-
tion as a possibility for inserting a Jewish joke. Even though this
latter example seems like a pure benefit to Jewish identity, it
nonetheless functions as a boundary of what one can do, even if
one doesn’t experience it as such.
In the case of gender identity, the constraints are even more
evident. If I identify as a male, I see every situation as a proving
ground for my masculinity. I must either expose my strength,
reveal my intelligence, display my quick wit, demonstrate my
authority, or even show my ability to help. The cage of mascu-
linity is manifest even when subjects appear to enjoy its limita-
tions. The fact that a subject might enjoy mansplaining does not
 This Is Identity Politics Z 153

obviate the role that this display plays in limiting the possibility
of subjectivity. The mansplaining male exchanges freedom for
the rewards of identity.
This is the true even for marginal identities within the social
order. If I identify as gender fluid, this appears initially to avoid
the limitations that accompany both the masculine and feminine
positions. But fluidity is also its own trap because it entails social
determinations for how a gender fluid person should act. Even if I
make up my own gender from my imagination, it will ultimately
run into the same problem. Because identity is always symbolic
identity—identity for the social authority or Other—it cannot
avoid trapping the subject in external ideological determinations.
The experience of identity is what renders it politically sus-
pect. The problem with identity is that my capitulation to the
demand that occurs when I take it up doesn’t feel like capitula-
tion. The immediacy of identity causes me to experience it as my
own and not the result of a social demand made on me. Because
I can take up an identity without experiencing the necessary
alienation that accompanies a universal political project, iden-
tity has the ideological effect of obscuring the fundamental alien-
ation that constitutes politics as such. This is what makes iden-
tity politics so dangerous.
Identity is always symbolic identity. As symbolic identity, it
depends on the recognition of others to establish it. While I
might attach myself to a certain identity simply because this
identity fits how I want to see myself, the act of identification
involves recourse to an anonymous social authority or Other that
recognizes it. There is no identity in isolation. Even though I may
not consciously avow any demand for recognition when I adopt
my identity, this demand nonetheless functions as an uncon-
scious support for the identity.
 154 Y This Is Identity Politics

If individuals are born with pale skin in the United States,

through the course of their childhood the Other will make them
aware of their whiteness— and thus their distinctiveness from
black individuals, on whom the Other also acts to create a racial
identity. The imposition of gender identity most often occurs
even earlier and more incessantly. The Other can create a gender
identity in the form of baby room decorations, clothing, activi-
ties, and countless other ways. A subject might later opt to
change its gender identity, but initially the Other gives this iden-
tity to the subject in the most heavy-handed manner.
While we all go through times when we are not aware of our
identity, identity is not an unconscious phenomenon. This is not
to say that it doesn’t evoke the unconscious. We might have an
unconscious investment in our identity that leads us to believe
that this identity is worth more than our moral sensibility or even
our life. This unconscious investment produces a range of
activities—from participating in lynching to baking cupcakes to
wearing a certain outfit. Though these activities may follow from
the identity that we consciously avow, it is our unconscious
investment in identity that makes them so enjoyable. But iden-
tity itself is conscious even if our investment in it is not. I can
always say what my identity is. Its association with conscious-
ness creates the impression that we can have a mutual under-
standing of different identities. On questions of identity, I can
understand and get along with others.
In addition to the sense of immediacy associated with it, what
appeals to us about identity as a political position is that it enables
us to envision multiple different identities coexisting together
without imposing themselves on each other. We can imagine one
large community in which the multiple identities do not strug-
gle against each other, a community in which Irish and Germans
live alongside Saudis and Congolese, where the identities of
 This Is Identity Politics Z 155

Muslims and Christians do not disturb those of Buddhists and

Hindus. If we know who we are and you know who you are, we
can get along by staying out of each other’s way. This together-
ness of diversity sounds great, but it quickly runs into an intrac-
table barrier. The barrier is enjoyment.
Ideology imposes identity on us, but we do not invest our-
selves in identity because ideology has fooled us into doing so. Our
investment in identity derives from the enjoyment that iden-
tity provides for us. We enjoy our identities. This is why ideologi-
cal interpellation into an identity works. We accept ideological
manipulation due to the enjoyment benefit that we receive from it.
Identity is nothing without the factor of enjoyment, even
though I don’t consciously associate this enjoyment with iden-
tity. Without this enjoyment, no one would find anything at all
appealing about adopting or insisting on an identity. The enjoy-
ment derives from the sense of belonging that the identity exudes,
the belonging that emerges when the Other recognizes us as hav-
ing a certain identity. But the recognition of the Other is not
enough to generate the enjoyment of an identity. Exclusivity is
requisite.
When I enjoy the identity that I share with others, my enjoy-
ment is tied to the ostracism of those who don’t share this iden-
tity. This becomes most readily apparent in the case of national-
ist or fundamentalist religious identity. The enjoyment of my
American identity depends on those who remain excluded from
it, just as the enjoyment of my fundamentalist Christianity relies
on those whom I know are headed for damnation.4 Even if we
establish a community of diverse identities that doesn’t seek to
exclude anyone, this community will only be possible insofar as
some identity—like those who reject our system of mutual
tolerance— exists outside. Through this outsider position, all
those who have the identity enjoy themselves. The excluded serve
 156 Y This Is Identity Politics

as a mechanism of enjoyment for the included, which is why

there can be no universal inclusion.
The role that ostracism plays in the enjoyment of an identity
explains why nation-states rely on war and other forms of inter-
national conflict. Sometimes even pseudo-wars are enough to
generate national enjoyment. In 2018, the role that international
conflict plays in national enjoyment showed itself in a nation that
takes pride in its absence of nationalist pride— Canada. When
Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canada and publicly described
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau as “weak,” Canada
experienced an outpouring of nationalist pride. Both rightist and
leftist opposition parties expressed support for the centrist
Trudeau. Canadians, who previously had little to enjoy about
being Canadians, began to unfurl flags and publicly profess their
belonging to Canada.5 Just an insult has the power to create a
sense of ostracism—now we know we are not Americans—and
to foster identitarian enjoyment. In an actual war or a World Cup
match, this enjoyment of ostracism multiplies. Too bad Trump
did not send tanks to the border or even launch an invasion: the
explosion of Canadian enjoyment would have been unmeasur-
able. But in contrast, no one enjoys national identity while watch-
ing the nation participate in an inclusive group at the United
Nations or providing relief to disaster victims alongside other
multiple nations. Identity can’t apply to everyone and still be a
site of enjoyment.
If we think about our identity as human beings, the failure of
identity to count when it applies to everyone is clear. People often
have recourse to our shared humanity when they decry the folly
of war or the senselessness of longtime feuds. But shared human-
ity can never function as a point of identification unless we posit
someone ostracized from it. When animal rights activists
 This Is Identity Politics Z 157

propose extending human rights to animals, all of a sudden it

becomes easy to identify with all humanity (by opposing our-
selves both to animals and to those who would give them human
rights). Or if we were faced with a threat from replicants as in
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), we would have no difficulty
in recognizing humanity as an identity that we could adopt. But
these examples show the impossibility of identifying with a cat-
egory that includes all. We need to have at hand another iden-
tity opposed to the identity that we opt for ourselves in order to
enjoy our identity.
Identity politics runs aground on its need for an enemy.
Although some proponents of identity politics try to imagine a
world in which disparate identities peacefully coexist, such a uto-
pia is actually unimaginable. We can picture it only as long as we
don’t fill in the lines and complete the picture. It must remain a
utopia to come. A community of coexisting particular identities
would not be a community at all but a world resembling the state
of nature that Hobbes imagines in Leviathan, in which we could
describe our life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”6

WE DO THE CONCENTRATING

Conservative critics glom onto the label identity politics in their

condemnations of leftist political activity. But a careful look at
this activity reveals that it is often universalist rather than iden-
titarian in its aims. To see how the logic of identity politics works,
one must look elsewhere. As conservative identity politics pro-
liferates through the political landscape today, a glimpse back
into the past century offers a clearer understanding of this
phenomenon.
 158 Y This Is Identity Politics

It is where so many theorists of the twentieth century saw the

extreme danger of universalism that we can now recognize and
diagnose what is really the opposite danger—the threat of iden-
tity politics. As I suggested earlier, Nazism is the model not for
the domination of the universal but for the brutal retreat into
the security of a particular identity. It shows us the ramifications
of identity politics taken to its end point. Precisely because
Nazism pushes identity toward its end point, it reveals what’s at
stake in the comparatively modest versions of identity politics
that follow in its wake. Far from advocating a universality that
it would impose on the world, Nazism propagates an almost
unalloyed form of the identitarian political project. In doing so,
Nazism provides the paradigm for all identity politics, which is
why it continues to deserve our careful attention.
Though versions of identity politics proliferate throughout the
contemporary political landscape, none has the unique revela-
tory power of Nazism. The trajectory of Nazism—its initial
triumphs and its ultimate self-destruction—holds the key to
its paradigmatic status. As a movement, Nazism allows us to see
how identity politics offers enjoyment to its adherents and why
an identity is always incompatible with other particular
identities.
To examine Nazism as the paradigm for identity politics is
not to paint all conservative political movements with the brush
of Nazism or to compare every right-wing leader to Hitler. This
is obviously a temptation to be avoided. The investigation of
Nazism is requisite for taking stock of the logic of identity poli-
tics because it makes explicit what other identitarian projects
obfuscate.
But Nazism does require interpretation because its superfi-
cial form is misleading. It is not surprising that so many theo-
rists of the twentieth century misdiagnosed its structure.
 This Is Identity Politics Z 159

Nazism’s drive to global conquest creates the impression that it

is a totalizing universalist political project. The universalist aspi-
rations of Nazism seem self-evident. Hitler’s dream of a thousand-
year Reich fantasizes total control of both space and time—the
whole world and the future. Nazism wants to leave nothing
either external nor internal outside of its reach. This is how the
image of a universalist political project emerges. But despite
these seemingly self-evident indications, universality is anath-
ema to Nazism.
Nazism demands total conquest not for the sake of universal-
ity but for the sake of German identity. The survival and advance-
ment of this particular identity is the sole preoccupation of
Nazism. Identity is not just a haven into which Germans can
retreat from the encroaching world, but the only source of value.
When one roots value in identity one ends up within the same
logic that underlies Nazism, even though one’s identity move-
ment may look nothing like the Nazi project.
What separates Nazism from Italian fascism, the America
First movement, Afrikaner nationalism, and Islamic fundamen-
talism is that it expresses openly the hidden logic of every ver-
sion of identity politics: the only way to ensure the establishment
of a particular identity is through the subordination of every
competing identity. While these other movements often express
themselves through a philosophy of difference rather than sub-
ordination or elimination of the other, Nazism makes it clear that
the mere presence of the other outside its control represents an
existential threat to the identity that it wants to promote. Nazism
demands total conquest in order to avoid this existential threat.
Through the example of Nazism, it becomes apparent that the
mere presence of competing identities serves as an insufferable
offense to the project of identity politics, even to those that do
not make this as explicit as the Nazis do.
 160 Y This Is Identity Politics

Due to its commitment to the global domination of German

identity, Nazism reveals the ultimate contradiction that under-
mines all identity projects. It shuns universality, yet it aims at
global dominance. It must eliminate all other identities, yet it
requires them in order to sustain German identity. The closer
that Nazism comes to realizing its fundamental fantasy of
installing itself as the only identity, the more the project itself
begins to teeter. As it rids itself of other competing identities,
Nazism must erect additional enemies to take their place. Like
every version of identity politics, it is a hysterical project, one
that constantly undermines what it purportedly aims to
accomplish.
The identitarian nature of the Nazi program becomes clear
through the choice of the Jews as the primary enemy. To embrace
German identity is to see the German people as chosen for a
historical destiny. But the Jews already have occupied the status
of the chosen people. Hitler famously argues for the need to elim-
inate the Jewish presence in Germany and Europe precisely
because there cannot be two chosen peoples, both Germans and
Jews.
Identity politics is not just a politically dangerous project that
one should counter politically. It also entails its own necessary
failure. Although it can wreak incredible destruction, it has no
viability and inevitably runs aground through its destruction of
the other that it requires for its own subsistence. The annihila-
tion of self with the other stems from the role that the other plays
in constituting identity. Without the other in the position of the
enemy, there is no identity. And yet the identity project aims at
eliminating this other. For identity politics, to succeed is ulti-
mately to fail.7 This is why its vision is one of perpetual struggle
toward the achievement of becoming fully present some day in
the future.
 This Is Identity Politics Z 161

EVERY DAY A STRUGGLE

No identity is ever secure. The proponent of identity politics con-

stantly works to shore up the identity that is the source of value.
The identitarian project does this through the struggle against
those that would encroach on or threaten the identity. To have
an identity is to picture the identity as constantly under an assault
that one must work to repel.
It is not an accident that Hitler titled his autobiographical
manifesto for German identity Mein Kampf or My Struggle. The
assertion of German identity can only emerge through the strug-
gle against the threat of the Jew that manifests itself through
Bolshevist politics. Nazism is an unending struggle to wipe out
the threat to the particularity of Nazi identity. As Hitler paints
it, the figure of the Bolshevik Jew represents a lurking enemy
that constantly seeks to derail his own identity and that of the
German people. Communism is the ultimate ruse of the Jew
because it aims at eliminating all particular racial identity and
giving the world over to universalism. Without this enemy to
struggle against, the identitarian project of Nazism could not
exist.
Hitler does not hide the fact that he uses the figure of the Jew
as a source of manipulation. In Mein Kampf, he confesses that
the key to uniting a group in its particular identity involves tar-
geting a clear enemy that represents a danger to that identity.
He writes, “In general the art of all truly great national leaders
at all times consists among other things primarily in not divid-
ing the attention of a people, but in concentrating it upon a sin-
gle foe.”8 By focusing the nation on a single threat, one gives the
nation an identity through the definition of the enemy that it
must fight against. When Hitler targets the Jew as the single foe
that threatens Germany, he admits that this is a political ploy.
 162 Y This Is Identity Politics

This ploy is necessary because identity only becomes identity

when it is under siege. The external threat that menaces identity
is also the force that constitutes it. There is no innocent form of
identity politics, no claim to identity without an enemy, which
is why every evocation of identity necessarily involves a reference,
however oblique, to reactionary politics. Identity does not sim-
ply exist but comes into existence through the establishing of the
barriers that delimit it. Barriers enable us to see what belongs to
the identity and what does not.
The contrast between the Jew and the German redounds to
the benefit of the German. The deceptive Jew has its counter-
part in the honest German. The Jew lives a rootless itinerant life,
while the German is rooted in a specific place. The Jew embarks
on a universalist project of creating a communist world, and the
German holds fast to a particular ethnic identity. Despite the
investment in communism, the Jew paradoxically pursues unbri-
dled egoism, which is why Hitler can contradictorily link Jews
to both communism and international capitalism. The German,
in contrast, submits individuality to the requirements of the
group, even though the German thoroughly rejects communism.
The contrasts pile up throughout Mein Kampf and elsewhere
within Nazi treatises and speeches. The virtues of the German
exist only through their contrast with the vices of the Jew.
The logical priority of the enemy forces any group attempting
to assert its identity to begin by articulating the threats that this
identity faces. This is clearly evident in the various white nation-
alist movements that have emerged around the world in recent
years. Their positing of immigrants as the enemy doesn’t figure
immigrants as simply different but always as an existential threat.
According to the white nationalism, immigrants become part of
a program of white genocide, even though they might simply be
 This Is Identity Politics Z 163

the tools of globalists in this program. The threat of annihilation

that white European or American identity faces is integral to the
formation of the identity.
Without the immigrant to form a threat to their identity,
white nationalists would have no identity whatsoever. While
they paint it as external, the threat is actually constitutive of
the identity that the white nationalists partake in. They are thus
in exactly the same situation as the Nazis relative to the Jewish
Bolshevik. They require the immigrants that they want to
eliminate.9
Carl Schmitt, himself an adherent of Nazism, provides the
philosophical rationale for the type of identity politics that
Nazism employs. According to Schmitt, the distinction between
friend and enemy constitutes the political field as such. Without
this distinction, without the enemy, one loses politics. All value
becomes exchangeable, and life loses the risk that animates it and
makes it worth living. Writing in Germany just before Hitler’s
rise to power, Schmitt gives voice to the philosophy that under-
girds all identity politics, including that of the Nazis.
The alternative to the distinction between friend and enemy
is the abandonment of politics altogether. Such an abandonment,
for Schmitt, creates a world in which nothing can challenge the
market for supremacy. Despite Nazism’s fundamental sympathy
with capitalism, Schmitt sees it (and all versions of the political
struggle between friend and enemy) as a brake on capitalism’s
global dominion. The identification of the enemy provides a value
in the form of identity that goes beyond the logic of capitalism.
One cannot, according to Schmitt, propose a universal alter-
native to identity politics. The universal suffers from abstraction,
so that no one really occupies the position of the universal except
through a feint. Schmitt claims, “When a state fights its
 164 Y This Is Identity Politics

political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the

sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular seeks to usurp
a universal concept against its military opponent.”10 Universal-
ity is here nothing but a stratagem, a mask for the interest of
some particular identity. Schmitt imagines a nominalist world
bereft of universals, a world in which all that exists are particu-
lar identities that can define themselves through opposing
particular identities.
For Schmitt and the project of identity politics, the act of rec-
ognizing and struggling against the enemy gives existence a
worth beyond the meaningless cycle of production and consump-
tion that characterizes the capitalist epoch. The division into
friend and enemy creates a value for which one can sacrifice one-
self. Identity politics provides a way of sustaining enemies in a
capitalist universe that tends to dissolve them and to reduce
struggle to nothing but the struggle to accumulate. The appeal
of identity politics is not that it provides a path for us to defend
ourselves against an encroaching enemy but that it erects an
enemy against which we can struggle. The struggle that identity
politics requires is not a defect for potential adherents but its chief
selling point.
In other words, Hitler knows that Mein Kampf serves as a bet-
ter rallying slogan for the Nazis than Mission Accomplished.11
Once we imagine that the struggle is over, our identity begins
to crumble, and our identification with the leader wavers. The
vanquishing of the enemy is at the same time the undermining
of the pillars of our own identity. When the project of identity
politics seems like it is losing the struggle, the identity that it
proffers becomes even stronger, which is one key reason why the
German people identified themselves with Nazism even more
fervently in the final year of the war, when their defeat was clearly
inevitable.
 This Is Identity Politics Z 165

THE UNIVERSAL ANATHEMA

The great fear that runs through Nazi rhetoric is that of the uni-
versal. This is the fear underlying every project of identity poli-
tics. All identity politics sees in universality its own evanescence.
Even though Hitler aims at global domination, his vision involves
extending German identity, not installing some form of univer-
sality. Instead, universality is the threat that would undermine
German identity, which is why Nazis struggled against it. What
underlies Nazism’s constant invectives against Judeobolshevism
(Jüdischer Bolschewismus) is the universality that they associate
with both poles of this term. According to the Nazi ideologues,
the danger of the Jews is the danger of a universalist project that
has no allegiance to any specific identity. What defines Jewish-
ness for Nazism is its absence of any identity that is its own. To
be a Jew is to be a universal subject and thus to have a parasitical
relationship to Aryan identity. It also makes one a ready-made
communist.
The bond that unites Jews and communists, from Hitler’s per-
spective, is their shared investment in universal claims for free-
dom and equality combined with a desire to eliminate the par-
ticularity of race, nation, and religion. Communism, especially
in its Bolshevist incarnation, is up-front about its universal pre-
tensions. As Marx insists, the working class as a revolutionary
entity has no nation and no ethnic identity. To attempt to con-
fine communism to a particular identity would be to betray
entirely the emancipatory project that it names. The proletariat
is necessarily the universal subject—and thus historically aligned
with the universality of the Jew.
Modernity’s destruction of particular identity through the
aegis of the universal finds its specific culprit in the terrifying
figure of the Jewish communist. For the Nazi, communism is
 166 Y This Is Identity Politics

the vehicle through which Jews propagate the universality that

threatens German identity. Though many consider Hitler’s inva-
sion of the Soviet Union (“Operation Barbarossa”) a great stra-
tegic blunder that cost Germany any chance at victory, its polit-
ical necessity was evident from the founding moments of the
Nazi movement. Operation Barbarossa and the Final Solution
both followed from the logic of Nazism and its drive to extir-
pate the paired icons of universality.
From Adolf Hitler to Alfred Rosenberg to Joseph Goebbels,
Nazi thinkers make clear the link that they see between Jewish-
ness and Bolshevism. It is a constant theme running throughout
their written work and speeches. The connection between the
two lies in their universality, in their refusal to accept the claims
of identity politics. In Mein Kampf, Hitler claims, “In Russian
Bolshevism we must see attempt undertaken by the Jews in the twen-
tieth century to achieve world domination.”12 As Hitler sees it,
communism is a tool in the hands of the Jews through which
they will eliminate race. In his famous “Total War” speech,
Joseph Goebbels echoes Hitler’s statement from twenty years
earlier while slightly altering the causality. He states, “The goal
of Bolshevism is Jewish world revolution.”13 For Goebbels, Bol-
shevism is not necessarily a Jewish conspiracy, as it is for Hitler,
but the endgame is the same—Jewish domination of the world.
While it is clear why communists represent the danger of the
universal—they openly profess as much—it is much less self-
evident in the case of Jews. Historically, anti-Semitism has tar-
geted Jews because their insistence on remaining ensconced
within their particular identity posed a threat to Christian
universality. Jewish refusal to intermarry and insistence on pre-
serving Jewish identity were reasons for hating Jews. Jews were
too particular. Not even the most committed anti-Semite thought
to come up with the idea of hating Jews for their universality.
 This Is Identity Politics Z 167

Instead, one hated them, ironically, in the name of Christian uni-

versality. This is the case with the Catholic Church, as a series
of popes perpetuated violence on Jews throughout the Church’s
history. From the Church’s perspective, Jewishness is offensive to
Christians because it embodies a particular identity in the face
of universal emancipation.14
Since hatred of Jews focused on their resistance to the uni-
versal, conversion typically allowed Jews to save themselves from
pogroms. To convert was to disavow one’s identity for the sake
of the ruling order and to abandon the defense of Jewish iden-
tity that anti-Semites detested. The fact that conversion would
ever work to diffuse the threat of the pogrom testifies to what
anti-Semites hated when they hated Jews. They saw Jewish iden-
tity as a threat to their Christian universalism (even if they were
betraying the universal in their condemnation of the Jew, which
is a whole other story).
Hitler takes pains in Mein Kampf to distance himself from
what he sees as the uninformed anti-Semitism that surrounded
him as a youth. This anti-Semitism failed to hit the mark, Hit-
ler believed, because it focused on Judaism as a religion rather
than Jewishness as a race. This was the error that Hitler aimed
to correct throughout Mein Kampf and in his political career.
Following Hitler’s ideological revolution, the Nazis, unlike ear-
lier Christian anti-Semites, did not target their hated at Juda-
ism as a religion but at Jews as a racial other. This is why, under
Nazism, it did no good for a Jew to convert to Christianity, which
could save one’s life during a Christian pogrom. Far from want-
ing Jews to convert, Nazis investigated nominal Christians for
hiding a Jewish identity.
As a result of his focus on race rather than religion, Hitler
represents a new sort of anti-Semite. Though Hitler and other
Nazi ideologists view the Jews as a particular race, they insist
 168 Y This Is Identity Politics

that this race has no proper identity. Nazis do not hate Jews
because of their Jewish identity but because Jews lack any par-
ticular identity. This is an absolutely crucial point that we mis-
understand when we confound Nazi anti-Semitism with older
forms of anti-Semitism.
The basic problem with Jewishness, from Hitler’s perspective,
is that Jewishness is not a proper identity. What sticks out about
Jewishness is its failure to be an adequate particular identity like
Germanness. Jews relate parasitically to other races and secretly
promote the destruction of race altogether in the neutrality of
the universal. This is why Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg
claims that Jews are actually an anti-race. He states, “Regarded
from the primordial aspect, this Jewish infection is alien to our
national feeling and the ideas of State of the European peoples.
An attempt to really form an organic community of Jewish farm-
ers, workers, craftsmen, technicians, philosophers, soldiers and
statesmen, contradicts the instincts of this anti-race.”15 Jews are
an anti-race, Rosenberg thinks, because they lack their own
particular creative identity. This leads them to champion the
universal.
Nazism’s alignment of Jews with universality results undoubt-
edly from the diasporic status of Jews throughout modernity.
Jews were both Jews and citizens of the countries in which they
resided. From the perspective of Nazism, they had less attach-
ment to national identity. Their diasporic situation produced, in
Nazi thinking, an inherent universality.
The radical departure of Nazi anti-Semitism from the history
of anti-Semitism must be at the forefront of any analysis of
Nazism. Understanding what separates the traditional anti-
Semite from Hitler is the key to understanding not just Nazism
but also identity politics as such. Nazis broke from the history
of anti-Semitism by inverting the traditional figure of the Jew.
 This Is Identity Politics Z 169

The revolution that Nazism performed on the figure of the Jew

was unparalleled. From a subject too wedded to its particular
identity, the Jew becomes a subject without a particular identity
and thus a full-throated adherent of the universal.16 As histo-
rian Timothy Snyder puts it in Black Earth, “Any nonracist atti-
tude was Jewish, thought Hitler, and any universal idea a mech-
anism of Jewish domination.”17 The dangers associated with
Jewishness undergo a reversal. Jews aren’t too tightly knit as a
particular identity. They have no sense of identity at all because
they have lost themselves in universality. The secret of Jewish-
ness, as Hitler posits it, is the short-circuit between Jews and
the universal. That is the Jewish secret—the je ne sais quoi of
Jewishness—that the mass killings attempt to extirpate.
With this ideological revolution, all Jewish practices must
completely shift their valence. The defenses of Jewish identity
that Jews perform become, for the Nazis, ruses through which
Jews can hide their true universalist intentions. As an anti-race,
they have no identity to protect. They are thus the perfect agents
for delivering the universality of the communist plague. For Hit-
ler and the Nazis, Jews represent the same threat as the com-
munists, which is why Hitler so often refers to them through a
single moniker—Judeobolshevist.
For the principal Nazis and especially for Hitler, the danger
of Jewishness is inextricable from the danger of communism.
Both involve the rejection of racism and the promulgation of uni-
versality. Communism is not just another enemy that the Nazis
posit but the basis for Nazism as a particular identity. Commu-
nism is the universalist project against which Nazism vies. The
problem, as the Nazis see it, with the universality promulgated
by communists is that it destroys what gives our life its value.
Racial identity has a creative power that any turn to universal-
ism eradicates. Communism, for its part, is a fundamentally
 170 Y This Is Identity Politics

universal project that must include everyone regardless of their

racial pedigree. Race means nothing at all for communism. This
is the source of the threat that it poses to the Nazis. Their fight
against communism is thus a fight not for survival or for power
but for the basis of value itself within their identitarian project.
Whereas communists hope to win adherents among the rest
of the world— one can imagine a whole world converted to com-
munism that has no more enemies, at least in theory—Nazism
does not seek converts among non-Aryans. Nazi ideologists
speak and write to convince their racial brothers and sisters,
not everyone. Those who do not belong to the stronger race do
not require good arguments but simply subjugation. The retreat
from a universal appeal separates Nazism thoroughly from
communism.
None of the Nazi ideologues, inclusive of Hitler himself, have
any interest in making universal appeals in the way that Stalin
does. One can read this difference on the pages of Foundations
of Leninism and Mein Kampf. For all his bloody violence, Stalin
is a true believer: he hopes to create a communist world, even
though he has a perverted conception of universality. Hitler has
no such hope for National Socialism. As the term itself suggests,
National Socialism is fundamentally particular, confined to a
particular nation. It is the promotion of an identity. It doesn’t
want to give the benefits of its program universally, just to
those who genuinely belong to the identity. As historian Arno
Mayer notes, “The Nazi vision of the present and future was
essentially parochial, untouched by universal criteria of truth
and knowing, which Hitler repudiated.”18 If Hitler’s arguments
for National Socialism bear no resemblance to how things really
are in the world, this doesn’t detract from their power but
enhances it. He wants to distance himself as far from universal-
ity as he can in order to appeal to the particularity of German
identity. Even the criterion of truth itself bears the stain of
 This Is Identity Politics Z 17 1

universality that Hitler rejects. Identity politics demands that

one give up all universality, even that of truth existing outside
identity. This is why all identitarians inveigh against universal
truth claims and insist on the validity of their alternative facts.

WHAT UNIVERSALIT Y HAS

INSTEAD OF AN ENEMY

The difference between reactionary or conservative politics and

emancipatory politics—between Right and Left—becomes
clearest in the opponent that each struggles against. It is not as
simple as saying that the Right has an opponent and that the
Left doesn’t, but this formulation does point in the direction of
the solution. The opponents that each has differ radically.
Reactionary political projects, like Nazism, struggle against
a clear enemy. In the case of Nazism, it is Judeobolshevism. In
the case of contemporary fundamentalist Christianity and reac-
tionary Islamism, it is the secular West. Each one has a defined
enemy against which it fights. These identitarian struggles would
be impossible without the enemy to prop them up.
The universality of emancipatory politics, in contrast, has no
enemy. This becomes apparent in Saint Paul’s articulation of
Christian universality in Galatians. He proclaims, “There is nei-
ther Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is nei-
ther male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gala-
tians 3:28).19 Where identity politics would recognize an opponent
(Jew against Greek), Saint Paul’s universalism sees only a poten-
tial Christian comrade. All universalism has the same open
structure that Saint Paul envisions for Christianity.
This is not because universality is a vast expanse in which all
divisions disappear or becomes irrelevant. This form of purported
universality is not universality at all but vague generality or what
 172 Y This Is Identity Politics

François Julien calls the uniform.20 It mimics universality but

only by betraying its structure. Universality is not the uniform
but the absence that puts subjects at odds with themselves.21 The
struggle on behalf of the universal is always also a struggle against
oneself. In this sense, there is no enemy of the universal in the
way that there is an enemy for the project of identity politics.
Unlike identity politics, universality is not attempting to
purify itself, to forge a universality without any taint of particu-
larity. Instead, universal politics struggles to make the universal
manifest in the form of a necessary absence. Identity politics
gives subjects an identity in common, but universality is what
they share not having. Emancipatory politics consists in making
this absence palpable by fighting against the lure of having, which
appears clearly in the form of identity.
The proponents of identity politics who despise universal val-
ues appear as if they function as universality’s own necessary
other, its own enemy. Certainly, the advocates of universality
fight against these figures. But there is a crucial difference with
the wars waged on behalf of identity. Though universality does
involve struggle against opponents, these opponents are never
enemies. Instead, they are always potential converts to the uni-
versalist project. The universalist always wants the opponents to
put down their weapons and join the fight for emancipation. This
fight is truly everyone’s fight. One cannot imagine the same thing
for the Nazi confronting the Jew or the America Firster con-
fronting the immigrant. These identitarians want the other to
leave or die, not to join. Joining is what they most fear.22 What
defines universalist emancipatory politics is that it sees a poten-
tial partisan of the universal even in those it struggles against.
At first blush, this seems to paint too rosy a picture of uni-
versality, which is why Freud refuses precisely this distinction.
He doesn’t grant the fundamental difference between the
 This Is Identity Politics Z 173

identity politics of Nazism and the universality of communism.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud rejects the prospect of
universality, specifically as manifested in Christianity and com-
munism. For Freud, there is no difference between identitarian
projects that require an enemy in order to constitute the privi-
leged identity and universalist projects that claim not to need an
enemy. It’s all the same because the problem is not so much con-
stituting the identity as dealing with the excess aggressiveness
at play within the group. Appealing to the universal doesn’t elim-
inate aggressiveness but actually provides a more compelling
justification for the violence that it produces.
Universality, as Freud sees it, is a fiction. Thus, the universal-
ity of the Christian and the communist projects is not really as
universal as all that. It depends on the existence of the enemy
every bit as much as a nationalist movement would. This skepti-
cism about claims to universality becomes apparent as Freud
claims,

When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between
men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intol-
erance on the part of Christendom towards those who remain
outside it became the inevitable consequence. . . . Neither was it
an unaccountable chance that the dream of a German world-
dominion called for anti-semitism as its complement; and it is
intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civi-
lization in Russia should find its psychological support in the per-
secution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern,
what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their
bourgeois.23

Though universal struggles such as Christianity and communism

claim to seek converts rather than enemies, the fact that they
 174 Y This Is Identity Politics

have historically created enemies to annihilate, in Freud’s view,

is not a contingent development but a necessary one, a develop-
ment that betrays the sham of their universality.
Freud’s critique of universality rejects the attempt to see it as
anything other than a disguised particularist project as a self-
delusion. We use universality to bathe ourselves in the purity
of an emancipatory ideal all the while enjoying our particular
identity through the struggle against our enemy. While Freud
accepts the universality of scientific inquiry, he does not believe
that this is transferable to the political realm. His political cau-
tion stems from his conviction that political universality does not
exist.
While equality might be a laudable goal, it is also, Freud
thinks, an impossible one. In this sense, universal politics is
deceitful about its very possibilities. In a footnote to Civiliza-
tion and Its Discontents, Freud insists that there is an “obvious
objection” to the claim for universal equality. He writes, “Nature,
by endowing individuals with extremely unequal physical attri-
butes and mental capacities, has introduced injustices against
which there is no remedy.”24 Here, Freud has recourse to the clas-
sic conservative position: natural bestows inequality on us
through our varied abilities, and no social organization can undo
this natural injustice.
Unfortunately, Freud dies before he has time to read Marx’s
rebuttal avant la lettre to his dubious claim that natural inequal-
ity obviously undermines any claim to universal equality. As he
dies in 1939, Freud just misses the posthumous publication of
Marx’s Grundrisse, his notebooks that are published for the first
time in that year. If only the editors had gotten the Grundrisse
to press a bit more quickly, Freud might have had time to read
it and revise his comments about social inequality before dying.
In this work, Marx enters into an extended discussion of
 This Is Identity Politics Z 175

equality in relation to capitalism and capitalist ideology. Against

the ideological claim about capitalism simply reflecting natu-
ral inequality, Marx introduces a novel argument.
Marx doesn’t dispute the existence of natural inequality
among human animals. But for him, this does not militate
against social equality. It is instead the basis for it. Marx makes
the dialectical case that natural inequality is the ground for social
equality. He contends that humans, unlike other animals, are
capable of social equality precisely because they are so naturally
unequal. Their disparate abilities force them into a social arrange-
ment in which each must depend on the other. In the Grun-
drisse, he writes, “The content of exchange, which lies altogether
outside its economic character, far from endangering the social
equality of individuals, rather makes their natural difference into
the basis of their social equality.”25 The formal equality that
occurs in exchange relies on differences in content attributable,
Marx believes, to natural inequality. My natural ability to grow
vegetables and your natural ability to build houses leave us unable
to exist on our own: I wouldn’t have a house, and you wouldn’t
have anything to eat. When we come together to exchange, how-
ever, we each have both something to eat and a place to live.
Our natural inequality drives us into a relationship of exchange
in which we are equal participants.26
While the vision of Marx coming to Freud’s intellectual res-
cue is appealing, in actuality, it wouldn’t have been necessary.
Freud did not have to read the Grundrisse to see that his claim
about natural inequality leading directly to social inequality was
erroneous. He could have simply read himself more closely.
Refuting the naturalistic explanation for social inequality
requires nothing more than applying the basic insight of psy-
choanalysis to this question. Psychoanalysis emerges out of the
fundamental disjunction between the subject’s natural being
 176 Y This Is Identity Politics

and its cultural identity. As psychoanalytic thought understands

it, subjectivity is neither natural nor cultural but what happens
when culture wrenches the subject out of nature.
Freud’s own conception of the drive, the fundamental motor
for all our activity, is a rejection of reducing any individual to its
natural being. Freud conceives of the subject’s drive as a result
of the collision between nature and culture, “a concept on the
frontier between the mental and the somatic.”27 If the uncon-
scious drive is ultimately determining what we do, we are not
simply natural beings. Our natural inequality—what Freud
insists we cannot overcome—is psychoanalytically meaningless
and cannot be the basis of a negative judgment about universal
equality.
The primary conclusion of Freud’s entire project is that no
natural or cultural determination can explain subjectivity, even
though Freud himself tends to forget this. The subject’s desire is
irreducible to nature or culture, and thus inequality in nature
cannot possibly serve as a refutation for the possibility of equal-
ity among subjects. Desire uproots the subject from its natural
and cultural being. The natural or cultural tendencies of the sub-
ject have no explanatory power because they have too much.
When he attacks the idea of universal equality, Freud invokes
the obviousness of natural inequality. But both Marx and Freud’s
own entire life’s work show that natural inequality does not elim-
inate the possibility of social equality. Universal equality exists
in the distance that separates us from our natural and cultural
being. Freud’s own theory offers the basis for recognizing the
universalism that he derisively rejects. Our alienation from nature
and culture is subjectivity rather than being an unfortunate
condition that we must overcome. We are alienated into equal-
ity. It remains for us to discover it.
 6
THIS IS NOT
IDENTITY POLITICS

THE JORDAN RULES

Conservatives typically use the charge of identity politics to

attack those fighting racism, sexism, or homophobia. To accuse
a group of practicing identity politics indicates that this group
focuses on a grievance that has to do only with their particular
identity to the exclusion of universal political concerns, while the
ones making the charge claim to have universal interests in mind.
The charge of identity politics is a way of winning the debate by
pretending to be more universal than one’s opponent. Accord-
ing to this line of critique, rather than advocating justice for
everyone, the proponents of so-called identity politics want jus-
tice for themselves and their allies. They place a greater value on
particular identity than they do on the fate of all. As a result,
the conservative opponents of identity politics feel justified in
attacking them. They support the good of the whole, not that of
the few.1
Although most ventures in identity politics that reject uni-
versality are conservative or reactionary, today we associate the
term identity politics with leftist groups. This association of iden-
tity politics with the Left rather than the Right marks a
 178 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

significant conservative political victory, since the label instantly

produces a misunderstanding of the nature of these political proj-
ects. Often, what people condemn as identity politics is really
universalism in disguise. One of the key political battles involves
distinguishing who is the real exponent of identity politics and
who is engaging in a universalist struggle. The struggle between
Left and Right is a struggle between the universal and the par-
ticular. This is how we should define Left and Right. But in order
to see the contours of the struggle, we need to recognize that
many of the projects labeled identity politics are often universal
and that many calls for unity mask an underlying particularism.
Conservative or liberal attacks on identity politics use this
label as a cudgel. In doing so, they call for a return to the lost
unity that identity politics has supposedly destroyed. This nos-
talgic fantasy of unity is one form that right-wing particularist
politics takes today. By seeing ourselves as part of a unified whole,
we fail to recognize the contradictions that make any unity
impossible. We don’t see the universality of our lack. The fan-
tasy of unity is opposed to the universal hole.
If we look at the critiques of identity politics, the predomi-
nance of this fantasy of unity— and the particularism that it
hides—becomes clear. From this starting point, we can investi-
gate some of the projects that have been labeled identity politics
in order to judge whether or not they earn this appellation. What
will quickly become apparent is that many versions of so-called
identity politics are thoroughly universalist in their aims. By
uncovering this universalism and disentangling it from the ques-
tion of identity, we can clarify the real political battle lines.
The first substantive critique of contemporary identity poli-
tics emanates from a liberal centrist position. In his 1991 work
The Disuniting of America, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. criticizes the
divisive effect of identity politics on American society. He fears
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 179

that the retreat into particular identity among the oppressed will
lead to a “tribalization of American life.”2 Schlesinger and other
liberal critics attack identity politics for destroying the bond that
holds the nation together. But put in this way, it becomes clear
that the liberal critique is not a universalist one but another form
of particular identity politics. Schlesinger simply privileges
national identity over ethnic identity. There is no appeal to uni-
versality. He is just calling for a different form of identity poli-
tics in the guise of criticizing it.
Conservative critics now take up the same avenue of critique
as Schlesinger. The most vocal of these critics, Jordan Peterson,
laments the destruction of unity that the proponents of identity
politics perpetuate. He explains that in the vision of the identi-
tarians, “it’s groups, groups of people, united by their . . . group
identity, whatever that is. . . . The groups cannot communicate
with one another because there is really no way of engaging
in reasoned discourse between groups of disparate origin.” 3
Although Peterson expresses concern for the unifying power of
reasoned discourse, his real fear is the threat that identity
politics poses to hierarchies. In his view, equality is a danger
because hierarchy is both natural and beneficial. Human hierar-
chies mirror animal hierarchies and allow us to flourish as a
civilization.
What Peterson doesn’t admit is that any investment in hier-
archy is identitarian because it elevates one particular identity
above another in a definitive rejection of universality. His claim
for a smooth translation from a (selective) analysis of the animal
world to the world of speaking beings precludes any consider-
ation of universality, which is precisely what the animal world
doesn’t have. He misses the actuality of universal equality because
he makes no room for the absence that subjects share and that
animals do not.
 180 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

Peterson claims to be advocating a critique of identity while

he smuggles his own identitarian project in under this cover, fol-
lowing Schlesinger’s model in a cruder way. Peterson seeks a
path for justifying his anti-universalist defense of hierarchy, and
attacking identity politics provides the platform for him to
unleash this justification. His magic trick is that he enables his
listeners to enjoy their identity and believe themselves to be crit-
ics of identity politics at the same time.
When the conservative and liberal critics of identity politics
attack it, they aim at all struggles against racism, misogyny,
homophobia, and so on. Although they claim to mount these
attacks in the name of unity, their rhetoric exposes their own
investment in identity. They want to imagine their enemy as
identitarian in order to assert a moral high ground that they can-
not rightfully occupy.
Rather than look for new articulations of universality that the
term identity politics obfuscates, critics use this term to wage their
own identitarian war against universality. They fight against uni-
versality under the cover of fighting against identity politics,
which is what an analysis of the attacks reveals. They present
themselves as the champions of the universal by attacking iden-
tity politics, but they do this, like Jordan Peterson, for the sake
of identity politics. The privileged vehicle for contemporary iden-
tity politics is, ironically, the criticism of identity politics.
In contrast, what these critics criticize as identity politics is
often universalist, even if this universalism is not avowed. The
confusion of these opposing forms of struggle blurs the political
landscape. It becomes difficult to tell who is fighting for their
own particular way of being and who is advocating a form of
universality because those defending their particularity tend to
express themselves in calls for unity or on behalf of the whole,
while those championing the universal can seem focused on
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 181

questions of identity. We must find the obscured universality

while exposing the identitarians criticizing identity politics.4

COLORBLIND OR JUST BLIND

The use of the attack on identity politics as a way of advancing

identitarian claims becomes evident in the response to any criti-
cism of society’s racism. A corresponding call for a colorblind
approach to social issues typically accompanies this critique. The
virtue of colorblindness appears self-evident. In contrast to the
criticism of racism in society that focuses on the particular vic-
tims of racism, colorblindness supposedly treats all as equal. The
idea of colorblindness thus seems to have universality on its side,
unlike the purported identity politics that it criticizes.
The colorblind position insists that we should not see race at
all, that seeing race is the cause of racism. By acting as if racial
difference doesn’t exist, this position contends, we can effectively
eliminate the inequality that stems from racism. The assump-
tion here is that racism follows from racial difference, which is
why not seeing race functions as a panacea for the problem of
racism. One fantasy that sometimes accompanies the colorblind
position is that of a future world in which interracial marriage
would eliminate racial difference and by the very fact racism. But
the proponents of colorblindness have the causality backward: it
is not race that produces racism but racism that produces race.
Many leftist critics have pointed out the obvious problem with
colorblindness as a political program. In the guise of treating all
equally, it supports a system of racial inequality because it assumes
that the absence of conscious racism eliminates racism as such.
It also fails to see how racism functions within social institutions,
like policing and imprisoning, to ensure that the racial divide
 182 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

remains potent. In short, colorblindness presupposes a world

without an unconscious and without ideologically tainted social
structures—a world that cannot exist. Nonetheless, the ideol-
ogy of colorblindness wins many adherents.
The ideology of colorblindness is in some sense more insidi-
ous than the separatist ideology that it replaced. This is because
it enables those invested in it to believe in their utter nonracism
and at the same time to adopt clearly racist prejudices that they
do not experience as prejudices. In his aptly titled Racism With-
out Racists, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls this contemporary rac-
ism “colorblind racism.”5 Those adopting this position insist on
not seeing race in order to avoid interrogating racism.
The struggle against the ideology of colorblindness plays itself
out most clearly on the contemporary political stage in the rhet-
oric surrounding the fight to combat police violence against black
subjects.6 The Black Lives Matter movement focuses on shoot-
ings in which black subjects experience disproportionate violent
responses from the police, responses that often result in the death
of black victims who do not represent a danger to the police or
to society. The movement began in response to the 2013 acquit-
tal of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch leader who
shot and killed the unarmed black youth Trayvon Martin in
Florida. After the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Mis-
souri and Eric Garner in New York, Black Lives Matter gained
a national visibility. As nonthreatening black individuals con-
tinued to die at the hands of the police in the subsequent years,
the movement became a fixture on the political landscape.
As its name suggests, Black Lives Matter does not propose
colorblindness as a solution to racist police violence. It doesn’t
claim that police departments should offer officers colorblind-
ness training. Instead, it contends that we as a society must
become aware of the racism that underlies policing in the United
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 183

States and work to eliminate it. Colorblindness cannot be a fea-

sible solution because race plays an explicit role in the problem
itself. Black Lives Matter focuses on race not for its own sake or
to create a sense of racial identity but because race is the site of
inequality. Any attempt to forge universal equality has to take
racism into account.
The movement recognizes that advocating colorblindness
would exacerbate rather than address the problem. To imagine
that colorblindness would solve the problem of police violence is
akin to believing that putting on sunglasses would enable one to
look directly at the sun during an eclipse. While sunglasses do
address the problem of the sun’s brightness for one’s eyes, they
do so in such a limited way that they have no prophylactic value
at all and actually do additional damage insofar as their pres-
ence leads sun-gazing individuals to think that they are pro-
tected. The ideology of colorblindness appears to take on the
problem but doesn’t do so. Instead, it disarms us for confronting
the real problem.
The critique that Black Lives Matter launches against racist
policing is not identitarian. It is a way of intervening universally
by advocating equality. This is why almost every statement from
the group includes an appeal for everyone to join their struggle.
For instance, toward the end of the group’s response to Donald
Trump’s 2018 “State of the Union” speech, they write, “We invite
all oppressed peoples who can feel themselves being written out
of the American dream to join us in this project.” 7 Black Lives
Matter recognizes that we don’t arrive at universality by includ-
ing all in a colorblind identity but by fighting inequality.
The logic of Black Lives Matter is not inclusionist but uni-
versalist. The partisans of Black Lives Matter do not lobby
American society for inclusion in its privileges but inveigh against
the persistence of inequality that sustains this society. Inclusion
 184 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

can lead only to another identity’s exclusion, but equality can be

universal when it is not attached to identity. Black Lives Matter
asserts universal equality by fighting at the site of the system’s
evident inequality. This is why it has nothing at all to do with
identity politics.
And yet, the most common charge that critics on the Right
level at the Black Lives Matter movement is that it propagates
identity politics (if not terrorism, according to the more extreme
rightist critics). As a result, the movement is at odds with the
interests of those who don’t have a black identity. Writing in the
American Conservative, Rod Dreher voices a representative cri-
tique, couched in an acceptance of the foundational political aim
of Black Lives Matter. This acceptance of the opposition to police
killings has the effect of enhancing rather than detracting from
the critique because it dissociates Black Lives Matter from its
universalist project. Dreher writes, “Black Lives Matter and
related identity politics movements . . . are by no means only
about police brutality. If they were, this wouldn’t be a hard call.
No decent person of any race supports police brutality.”8 After
this admission that reveals his basic evenhandedness, he adds the
punch line: “The material interests of non-progressive white peo-
ple are often in direct tension with the identity politics of many
blacks and their progressive non-black allies.”9 The conservative
critic of Black Lives Matter wants to imagine the struggle tak-
ing place between competing particular identities, despite the
fact that he attacks Black Lives Matter for not being universal-
ist enough.
Though most often what passes as identity politics on the Left
is actually part of a universal struggle, conservative commenta-
tors and activists constantly work to place these struggles under
the rubric of identity politics. They do so in order to deny the
universality of the movements and thereby to undermine what
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 185

the Left is trying to accomplish. As long as we see the political

fight as occurring between two opposed particular identities, no
matter which side wins, the battle has been won a priori by the
conservative forces because it is being fought on their terrain. The
denial of any universality is the sine qua non of a conservative
victory.
Conservative particularism becomes evident in the primary
responses to Black Lives Matter. At first, some proffered the ide-
ology of colorblindness in the form of All Lives Matter. This
then morphed into Blue Lives Matter as a way of defending the
police officers who shoot black individuals. Finally, certain con-
servatives began to take up the mantel of White Lives Matter,
a term that lays bare their ultimate investment in particularity
at the expense of the universal.
Although the particularism of White Lives Matter is appar-
ent, that of All Lives Matter is less so. In fact, the champions of
this slogan present it as an inclusive response to the supposed
identity politics of Black Lives Matter. It is a slogan that seems
difficult to object to. However, the move from Black Lives Mat-
ter to All Lives Matter is not one from identity to universal. It
marks a retreat from universality.
Unlike All Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter articulates uni-
versality by focusing our attention on those who don’t belong—
the black lives that the police treat with disregard. Success for
Black Lives Matter could only be everyone paying attention and
recognizing that we all partake in the nonbelonging that the
murdered black people represent. This mark of this success would
not be total integration. Instead, it would occur when lives that
don’t belong would become impossible to shoot without collaps-
ing the entire social order.
The fundamental confusion that surrounds universality is that
we often mistake the adding up of all particulars, which is what
 186 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

All Lives Matter proposes, for the universal. According to this

logic, if we add black and white and yellow and brown, we’ll
finally have all. But the universal is not all particulars assem-
bled together.10 It is not a combination. It is what remains absent
from a complete collection of particulars. It is what all the par-
ticulars lack. The point of political struggle is not to include all
within the social structure but to recognize the failure of all
inclusion. When the inclusion of some is the goal, the nonbe-
longing of at least one is inevitably the result. And when the
inclusion of all is the goal, the nonbelonging of at least one is
still inevitably the result.
This is because inclusion relies on nonbelonging. In order to
constitute an inside where some people belong, there must be an
outside of those who don’t. In contrast, the solidarity organized
around a shared absence does not necessitate the nonbelonging
of some because it accepts that no one is really belongs. We can
discover universal solidarity only through what doesn’t belong,
not through the act of belonging. This is the only way to avoid
the problem that stems from adding one particular after another
in order to arrive at an all that always leaves some out.
What’s more, if we attempt to conceive universality as the
complete collection of all particulars, we will find ourselves with
an infinite task that will inevitably come up short. The project of
inclusion will never reach an end. We are left with the sense that
we could always do more. No matter how much we do, it will
never be enough. There will always be one more particular to
include, one more position that doesn’t belong that must be
brought inside. Including all requires a necessary nonbelonging
that it produces by failing to arrive at the all.
The project of universal inclusion is hysterical: it doesn’t want
the total inclusion that it strives for. In this sense, All Lives Mat-
ter isn’t about all lives but about countering the universalist
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 187

political project of Black Lives Matter. Its inclusiveness is a lie

that hides its particularity. Inclusion cannot reach its goal of
including all—we cannot reach the point where all lives matter—
because belonging relies on nonbelonging. It is only through
exclusion that inclusion becomes possible. If one were to succeed
and include everything, one wouldn’t achieve universality but
instead the dissolution of the project altogether.
Black Lives Matter, in contrast, represents a genuine univer-
salism. By pointing out the lives that don’t matter, this move-
ment articulates a project of universal equality in which no one
has a privileged position relative to police violence. In a racist
society, saying Black Lives Matter is the only way to respond
universally to police shootings. Ironically, the popularity of All
Lives Matter relative to Black Lives Matter represents the tri-
umph of particularism in the face of the latter’s universality.
But many on the Left have also failed to recognize the uni-
versality of the struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia,
and so on. This is the crucial point in any discussion of identity
politics. When we turn the focus, for instance, from racism to
racial identity, we have already conceded the ground of the uni-
versal. This is the central point of Racecraft by Barbara and Karen
Fields. In this work, the Fields sisters note that “disguised as
race, racism becomes something Afro-Americans are, rather
than something racists do. Racists and apologists for racism have
long availed themselves of the deception.”11 The very visibility
of race, as the Fields sisters see it, attests to the predominance of
racism. We see race in order not to see racism. The struggle for
equality is not a struggle for a particular identity but for the elim-
ination of racism.
The problem of missing universality does not lie in the type
of political struggles that are occurring around the world. The
problem is not that identity questions have taken the place of
 188 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

economic contestation in leftist politics.12 Any political struggle

can be the political struggle. No one knows in advance where
universality will manifest itself.
The failure of identity politics lies in approaching political
questions of racism, sexism, and homophobia as if they were
questions about identity. The struggle against racism and the
struggle against trans oppression are universalist struggles,
despite the label of identity politics often attached to them. In this
sense, they occur at the same level as economic struggles and are
no less universalist than the latter.
But in order to be genuinely universalist, they also cannot
neglect the capitalist structure that itself makes equality impos-
sible. No universalist project can isolate itself from the critique
of capitalism today and still pretend to be universalist. This is
because capitalism acts as the most intransigent barrier to rec-
ognizing the universal. By forcing everyone into their bare par-
ticularity, capitalism renders the universal obscure and almost
impossible to detect.
The capitalist structure doesn’t enable us to see that the trans
subject fighting against an oppressive society fights the same
battle as the coal miner struggling for health insurance to cover
black lung disease. Although their identities and experiences may
be radically different, they participate in the universal through
their fights that reveal what is constitutively absent. Their solidar-
ity exists through their universality. They do not need to form
an alliance of identities or focus on the intersection of identities
but simply to uncover the solidarity that their egalitarian strug-
gle contains.
If we understand the struggle against racism as a case of iden-
tity politics rather than universalism, we will not only be unable
to see its intrinsic kinship with other struggles, but we will also
misrecognize its aim. Because identity is always symbolic
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 189

identity, the only aim of identity politics can be that of social

recognition for a particular identity. If Black Lives Matter were
a species of identity politics, it would be fighting for the recog-
nition of black identity—for guarantees that a proportionate
number of police officers were black, for instance. But this is not
the nature of its project at all. Instead, Black Lives Matter aims
at blocking police violence, eliminating the criminalization of
blackness, and even extirpating the racism at work in policing.
In short, it calls for black equality that racism makes impossible.
Even though Black Lives Matter doesn’t address, say, the vio-
lence that those trapped in the French suburbs endure or the
suffering of children mining cobalt in the Congo or the situa-
tion of displaced mine workers in West Virginia, there is none-
theless a coherence between all these struggles that the univer-
sality of Black Lives Matter makes evident. But placing Black
Lives Matter under the rubric of identity politics obscures this
coherence. Thinking about Black Lives Matter in the terms of
identity politics renders the universality of its aims invisible
beneath what would appear as the struggle for recognition. This
way of thinking about it attempts to reduce its importance and
its impact.

ZOOTOPIA VS. U TOPIA

The hit Disney film Zootopia (Byron Howard and Rich Moore,
2016) begins with the utopia of identity politics—a community
of diverse identities in which everyone coexists in relations of
mutual tolerance. In the megapolis of Zootopia, animals stand
for different types of identity, and each animal performs the
functions associated with this identity while not intruding on
the identity of other animals. This is the situation that the film
 190 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

initially presents for the spectator. But Zootopia quickly intro-

duces a complication: the hero, Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin),
is a rabbit who wants to work in law enforcement, which is a
domain typically reserved for animals more suited to policing,
like cheetahs, rhinoceroses, or buffalos. Although no explicit
rules prohibit crossing into the territory of another identity, social
pressure constrains the possibility and works against Judy’s
decision.
The initial set-up of Zootopia—even the title of the film trig-
gered some criticism—produced a conservative reaction against
the film for its blatant political propaganda and even its cultural
Marxism.13 After all, here is a children’s film that propagates the
ideal of a multicultural utopia in which there is no explicit bar-
rier to everyone getting along through mutual tolerance. It’s a
conservative nightmare. But the film’s introduction of Judy
Hopps with her unaccountable desire upsets this multicultural
community, even as Judy expresses her appreciation for it and
wants to join it.
The disturbance that desire creates for the community of
mutual tolerance becomes evident in Judy’s relationship with her
fellow police officers. They see her refusal to accept the confines
of her identity as a rabbit as a threat to their own identities. The
most conspicuous antagonist she encounters is her police chief,
Chief Bogo (Idris Elba). Rather than giving Judy an assignment
consummate with her valedictorian status at the police academy,
Bogo assigns her to traffic duty. When he does give her a chance
on a criminal investigation, he negotiates a deal that expresses
his disdain for her: if she doesn’t solve the crime in forty-eight
hours, she has to give up her dream of being a police officer.
This first criminal investigation involves the disappearance of
the otter Emmitt Otterton. It leads her to uncover a political
antagonism hidden beneath the apparent mutual coexistence of
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 191

diverse identities in Zootopia—an antagonism between preda-

tors and prey. Judy finds that Dawn Bellwether (Jenny Slate), a
sheep and assistant mayor of Zootopia, conspired to drug a num-
ber of predators into “going savage” in order to arouse the
majority prey sentiment against them. What appeared to Judy
at first as a multicultural utopia where everyone respected the
other’s identity turns out to have been a world of hidden politi-
cal division.
The key to the film is that it doesn’t attribute this division to
differences in identity, though Judy herself initially proffers this
explanation. She initially posits that the tendency of predators
to go savage represents the fundamental social conflict. Judy
locates this tendency in their identity. But subsequently, she dis-
covers that the savageness of the predators does not follow
directly from their identity as predators but from the political
intervention of Assistant Mayor Bellwether. The revelation of
Bellwether’s chemical manipulation of various predators in order
to coerce them into acting like predators is the film’s most impor-
tant moment.
When Judy brings this plot to light, she at once gives the lie
to any biological determinism and to any sense of identity being
essential for the subject. Rather than simply acting according to
their identity, the supposedly savage predators in the film only
act like savage predators when a conspiring group of prey drugs
them. There is a distance between identity and who one is,
between what one is and who one is, between identity and sub-
jectivity. Zootopia undermines identity politics by highlighting
this distance.
The point of the film is not that identity is malleable, that prey
can act like predators and that predators can act like prey. It is
rather that identity is a false solution to the problem of subjec-
tivity. As long as we are invested in identity in the way that Judy
 192 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

initially is, we cannot recognize the universality that connects

us to others. Judy recognizes universal equality at the moment
she comprehends the falsity of identity and abandons her invest-
ment in it.
The film reveals the impossibility of a community in which
diverse identities can coexist side by side in a state of mutual tol-
erance. In this sense, the point of the film is not what conserva-
tive critics fear. It’s much worse. Zootopia concludes with the idea
that coexistence requires a universalist political intervention, like
the one that Judy makes when she acts against the forces of con-
servative identity politics. Judy and her fox friend Nick Wilde
(Jason Bateman) represent the forces of equality, which cuts
across identities and renders identity insignificant. They cham-
pion equality that undermines identity rather than propping it
up. The fight for equality in the film requires subjects to aban-
don their investment in identity because this investment ulti-
mately proves a barrier to universality.14

A PARTICULAR GUISE

One can see appeals to the universal in the contemporary queer

and trans movements, even if these appeals are not always
explicit. This is most apparent with the success of marriage equal-
ity struggle around the world. During the 2010s many nations
granted legal status to gay marriage, thereby eliminating not just
one barrier to equality but indicating that equality as such can-
not exclude sexual preference. This represents one of the great
victories of universalist political struggle in the twenty-first
century.15
The example of the marriage equality movement reveals the
alternative of a genuine universality. One cannot express
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 193

universality by simply saying that marriage should be available

for all or arguing for an inclusive institution of marriage. We
don’t achieve universality at the mythical point when all are
included since we can never reach universal inclusion. Univer-
sality is not the assembling together of all particulars. Instead,
we can discover universality by pointing out those who don’t
belong to a public institution and seeing them as the bearers of
universality in relation to the institution.
During the marriage equality movement, by pointing out
their nonbelonging to the public institution, activists revealed
its particularity and thereby articulated universal equality. This
articulation of universality altered the public institution of mar-
riage. A subtle transition occurred wherein the economic origins
of the marriage ritual became increasingly less important and the
idea of the affirmation of a love relation came to the fore. Obvi-
ously, marriage remained involved in questions of social repro-
duction, inheritance, and other socioeconomic calculations. But
the introduction of gay marriage as a moment of universality
occasioned a significant change that brought the universality
within the public institution to light. This had the effect of push-
ing the question of universal equality to the fore, which is why
marriage equality had such a dramatic impact on the society’s
prejudices toward homosexuality.
Marriage equality was an issue that divided gay activists (who
largely championed it) from queer theorists (who largely saw it
as an incorporation of queer radicality into traditional norms).
Many theorists were indifferent to marriage, but some openly
attacked the movement for its lack of connection with other
struggles for equality.16 And indeed, marriage itself as an insti-
tution cannot have a fully realized universality because universals
are always only absent, not present in the form of social institu-
tions. No amount of effort can make public institutions universal
 194 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

since universality is based in what doesn’t belong. We can none-

theless make universality apparent within the particularity of
the institution through the struggle to universalize it. This is
precisely what occurred with the marriage equality movement.
If we look at what happened to the institution of marriage with
the introduction of gay marriage, we see how the universalist
intervention has the effect of changing the particularity of the
public institution— and other public institutions. Most impor-
tant, it reveals that striving for the universal should be at the
heart of every public institution.
Because the universal is absent, we cannot fully realize it.
Public institutions such as marriage can never be completely
equal or guarantee complete freedom. The minute we think they
do, we fall for the lure of total belonging that demands some
nonbelonging, which is inherently an unequal relationship. We
are equal not because we are all included but because society can-
not fully include us. Universalist politics involves embracing
lack of belonging.
Psychoanalysis already shows us what embracing lack looks
like. For psychoanalysis, the point is understanding lack not as
a burden that I must overcome in order to achieve satisfaction
but recognizing that it is only through my lack that I can actu-
ally discover my satisfaction. Understood psychoanalytically, my
lack appears at the same time as a barrier to my enjoyment but
is also the thing that impels me toward it. Lack is both obstacle
and impetus.
Once I recognize this, I can relate differently to the obstacle.
I cease trying to get rid of it and see something salutary in the
barrier that it erects. For instance, rather than continually try-
ing to overcome my fear of speaking in front of others, I might
develop a speaking style that highlights my own nervousness
through comedy and self-contempt. I might see this or any
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 195

constitutive defect as the source of my ability to find a satisfying

existence. Embracing my lack is simultaneously unleashing an
excess that is integral to my satisfaction.
We can do the same thing for political struggle. The neces-
sary political project today is not to overcome the lack but to
embrace it. When we root universalist projects in the embrace
of lack, they look far different than the purportedly universalist
projects that led to the gulag or the killing fields. They do not
try to impose a particular idea of equality but instead pay attention
to the equality of what doesn’t belong. They ask that we treat
those who don’t belong as the bearers of universal equality rather
than trapping them in the dream of total inclusion.

UNREPRESENTATIVE REPRESENTATION

But it is not enough to interpret every social movement so as to

find its universalist politics. There are political movements asso-
ciated with the moderate Left that belong to the particularist
logic that characterizes the Right because they invest themselves
in gaining recognition. If gaining recognition is the end point
of a political movement, we can be sure that this movement is
particularist.
The politics of recognition most often emerges to stamp out
the threat of a universalist project. If the authority structures
can transform a universalist project into a particularist one
focused on recognition, the rule of the particular (or the global
capitalist system) wins the political struggle. There is much at
stake in the turn from universalism to the politics of recogni-
tion. As a result, rather than reinterpreting movements for rec-
ognition as unacknowledged expressions of universality, we
should simply abandon them. This is the case with the most
 196 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

widespread recognition movement—the call for diversity in

representation.
While active opposition to diversity efforts tends to expose
the racism or sexism of the critic when not coupled with a cri-
tique of racism and sexism, these efforts themselves have noth-
ing to do with emancipatory politics. Diversity is not a leftist
project.17 The push for diversity is an attempt to eliminate dis-
cussion of inequality in order to privilege proper representation.
Rather than advocating diversity, we should attack the structures
of inequality that produces a racist or sexist institution. In doing
this, we will ipso facto bring more equality in representation,
since the inequality can only be the result of racism and sexism.
But diversity in representation cannot be the primary goal.
Simply increasing representation of a particular group within
institutions (universities, corporations, governments) does not
change the inequality that creates the underrepresentation in the
first place. It is a way to keep the structure of this inequality in
place. The most forceful attack on the particularist politics of rep-
resentation comes from Karen Fields and Barbara Fields. In
Racecraft, they point out that this turn away from universal
struggle begins with terminology. They lament the ultimately
conservative political process through which “the neutral shib-
boleths of difference and diversity replace words like slavery, injus-
tice, oppression, and exploitation, diverting attention from the
anything-but-neutral history those words denote.”18 The Fields
sisters note that an act of political translation occurs: words that
bespeak particular identities replace words that evoke universal
political struggle. The end result is that politics appears as a zero-
sum game in which each particular must fight for its own piece
of the pie with no universality at all in sight.
When the aim is diversity rather than equality, political strug-
gle disappears entirely beneath the logic of inclusion. But the
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 197

logic of inclusion can never do anything more than changing the

composition of those who belong and those who don’t. Inclu-
sion can never transpire without throwing someone else out. The
Fields sisters conclude, for those committed to diverse represen-
tation and inclusion, “the most radical goal . . . remains the real-
location of unemployment, poverty, and injustice rather than
their abolition.”19 The project of including presently excluded
groups or ensuring representation for the currently underrepre-
sented cannot change the oppressive structure itself, which is the
fundamental problem. The particularism of calls for diversity
dooms them to mask inequality under the banner of adequate
recognition of the few rather than fighting it for all.
We can see one revelatory expression of diversity or represen-
tational politics in the case of Sheryl Sandberg, a figure who
sees herself enacting a feminist project by penetrating into a top
corporate position as a woman. In her bestseller Lean In, Sand-
berg proclaims the importance of women aspiring to lead, to
occupy the spots formerly reserved only for men in the corpo-
rate and governmental worlds.20 For too long, women have held
themselves back out of fear for the barriers that would make
achievement impossible. Sandberg contends that women must
risk and challenge themselves in order to achieve parity with
men. The point is gaining recognition for women.
According to Sandberg, there is a value in woman attaining
leadership positions because this diversity or increased female
representation will inevitably change male-dominated corporate
culture, or so the case goes. Sandberg’s feminism makes no bones
about its particularism. It calls for individual women to seek out
business and governmental success, not for universal equality or
even solidarity for women’s causes. It is for this reason that many
feminists took issue with Sandberg taking up the term feminist
at all.
 198 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

In the wake of the revelation of Sandberg’s behavior as chief

operating officer at Facebook, it is easy to take potshots at her
personally as a feminist. She covered up the company’s misdeeds
that ultimately contributed to the election of Donald Trump,
despite her nominal support for Hillary Clinton. But the dan-
gers of her particularist feminism were apparent with the pub-
lication of Lean In, which is why it did garner feminist critique
at the time of its publication from figures such as bell hooks.
Hooks specifically attacked Sandberg for her failure of uni-
versality, for “not creating a space of feminist solidarity” but a
situation where she is the “lone queen.”21 Although feminist
icons like Gloria Steinem celebrated Sandberg as a new femi-
nist hero, Sandberg’s feminism was from the beginning thor-
oughly immersed in the particular, allowing it to fit so well
with the functioning of global capitalism. This kind of femi-
nism not only champions the success of particular women to the
exclusion of any universal connection, it also resists any attempt
to think it alongside other emancipatory programs. There is no
link between Sandberg becoming the chief operating officer
of Facebook and the struggle of Black Lives Matter or that of
coal miners with black lung disease in West Virginia. The par-
ticularist politics of representation brooks no partners.
This contrasts the politics of representation with anti-racism
and anti-sexism. Instead of pursuing the anodyne liberal policy
of diversity, the social order can commit itself to a thoroughgo-
ing anti-racism and anti-sexism. Unlike a diversity program,
such a project would take aim at the structural inequalities that
create a lack of representation. It would conceptualize the strug-
gle against racism and sexism as the universal struggle for
equality.
The logic of diversity is that of the particular and recognition
for a few particulars. There is no hidden universality to interpret
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 199

or discover. This is because diversity itself is not a universal value

like freedom or equality. Diversity derives not from my individ-
ual singularity as a subject—if this were diversity, then the call
for more diversity would be nonsensical—but from the group or
groups that I belong to. Rather than affirming my group iden-
tity, the universal reveals that I am not my identity, that there
is a divide between who I am and what I am. It is this divide
that makes political acts possible at all. When we lose sight of
it and believe ourselves to be what we are, we may achieve
some recognition, but we lose contact with the possibility of
emancipation.22

UNIVERSALISM OR DEATH

There is one arena where the limitations of particularism become

fatal. The political implications of the refusal of universality are
catastrophic when we look at climate change. Even when we
think about climate change as a global phenomenon, our start-
ing point is too often the various disturbances that we link
together to form the idea of climate change. We encounter cli-
mate change in particular manifestations like shifting weather
patterns, more intense storms, higher water levels, increased tem-
peratures, and so on. The question then becomes whether or not
the particulars constitute climate change, which is precisely what
opens the door to climate skeptics. But even if we all agree that
these particular indications amount to climate change, particu-
larist thinking shapes how we respond.
Although climate change requires a universalist approach, we
confront it from the perspective of the particular. As a result,
most political initiatives are particular: recycling, driving less,
biking more, not using the air conditioning, placing solar panels
 200 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

on one’s roof, planting trees, and so on—up to taking a ship

across the ocean to reduce one’s carbon footprint. Even the more
holistic solutions like the carbon tax or restrictions on carbon
output do not confront the crisis through a universalist politics.
We can only address the problem of climate change effectively
when we address it in universal rather than particular terms.
The problem is not just that our solutions are particularist but
that we perceive the crisis through a particularist way of know-
ing. Epistemology rooted in the particular makes itself felt most
prominently in the assumption of an existential scarcity of
resources. Those who believe that human-created climate change
is occurring also presuppose this existential scarcity because they
take the particular individual as the starting point. For the par-
ticular individual, there are a limited number of resources avail-
able that the society must distribute in some way. The economic
division of resources takes place against the background of a fun-
damental scarcity. But as the capitalist system hurtles us closer
and closer to a global catastrophe, it is important to avoid think-
ing in particular terms. One cannot fight climate change by not
having children, eating vegan, eliminating air travel, or any of
the other particular remedies that the advocates of scarcity
preach. The only way to join the fight is to embrace universal-
ism. Our universalism must become unrelenting, or we will
destroy ourselves through our particularism.
The climate crisis presents us with a unique opportunity for
recognizing universality. The climate crisis is universal not
because it affects everyone but because it is the point of absence
within every social order. What every society shares today is the
environmental catastrophe that it cannot master. This hole within
every society doesn’t affect every society in the same way, but it
marks the limit that no society can eliminate.
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 201

By foregrounding the fundamental absence within every

social order, the climate crisis puts us directly in touch with the
universal. We become aware of the lack that we have in com-
mon. Here, Hollywood cinema, which so often leads us astray,
offers an instructive example. The disaster film provides an occa-
sion for Hollywood to turn massive destruction into a spectacle
for entertainment. In this sense, we should be suspicious of it,
since this is the formula that Walter Benjamin uses to define the
aesthetics of fascism. But in addition to the spectacle of destruc-
tion, the disaster film, at its best, shows us what few other main-
stream films do: the reintroduction of absence into the social
field, alongside a connection to universality. Within the disaster
film, the disaster does not simply pose a threat to the lives of
characters. Much more important, it confronts them with the
fact of a structuring absence. The disaster disrupts the daily lives
of the characters, makes privacy unsustainable, and brings every-
one in touch with universality.
In order to register this disruption, every disaster film begins
with a variety of characters engaged in their quotidian behavior.
Private concerns predominate the openings of these films. We
see, for instance, a display of marital troubles in Mark Robson’s
Earthquake (1974), the interaction of a town mayor and her
children in Roger Donaldson’s Dante’s Peak (1997), or a class
field trip in Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow
(2004). In each case, the focus on private activity serves only as
a prelude to its coming insignificance. In the face of the disaster,
subjects must turn their concern away from their own particu-
larity and toward the universal.
In the typical disaster film, the disaster makes everyone aware
of a fundamental lack that harbors the universal. When the disas-
ter strikes, characters immediately begin to concern themselves
 202 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

with others. The reintroduction of the structuring absence

through the disaster is simultaneously the reintroduction of uni-
versality. Everyone confronts their equality with everyone else.
The disaster film transforms a particularized world containing
only isolated monads into a lacking world of the universal.
Perhaps the outstanding example of this trajectory toward
universality in absence occurs in Mick Jackson’s Volcano (1997).
As a volcano unexpectedly erupts in the middle of Los Angeles,
we see characters abandon their private isolation and come
together to struggle against the destructiveness of the volcano
and the lava flowing through the city streets. But what is most
significant about the film is the relationship that it depicts
between universality and capitalist particularity. In order to stop
the lava flow from destroying a heavily populated portion of the
city, the chief of emergency management Mike Roark (Tommy
Lee Jones) plans to dynamite a newly constructed skyscraper to
form a dam that would direct the lava to the ocean. The sky-
scraper is the pride of capitalist Norman Calder (John Corbett),
who champions particular concerns over the universal in the
film.
The dynamiting of Calder’s building represents the destruc-
tion of particularity that rejects any universality. The film under-
lines this idea through its earlier presentation of Calder. As the
threat increases, he attempts to persuade his wife, Dr. Jaye Calder
(Jacqueline Kim), to stop treating the victims of the volcano and
leave the hospital. Norman wants Jaye to forsake any universal-
ity for her particular existence. At one point, he comes to the
hospital to beg her to escape the danger. He says to her, “These
people are strangers, Jaye. Are you doing to die for them?. . .
Answer me!” In response, Jaye simply continues treating the
patients and, without ever looking at him, says, “I am answer-
ing you.” Jaye answers Norman’s rebarbative particularity with
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 203

an unwavering universalism. The fact that she articulates her

commitment to universality through the act of not speaking
befits this commitment perfectly. Through the depiction of this
exchange, the film shows that it understands that a point of
absence in the structure of signification constitutes genuine uni-
versalism. The disaster awakens her solidarity with others while
her husband remains unaffected by it. Through this exchange,
the film presents the fundamental choice that the disaster makes
evident. We can choose to isolate ourselves in our particularity
or avow the universal.
Just as in the disaster film, the catastrophe of climate change
makes universal equality apparent. In the face of the incipient
disaster, all are equal, even though climate change affects peo-
ple differently. No one can escape, not even the wealthy indi-
viduals now buying up land in areas that they believe will be least
affected by the disaster. If they survive in some future isolation,
they will survive as empty beings, beings without any universal-
ity to set them free. The absence of any viable escape for par-
ticular individuals is the form that equality assumes today. This
is why any project of confronting the disaster must at the same
time confront the growing economic inequality in the contem-
porary capitalist universe.
Capitalism’s inherent refusal of universality leaves it com-
pletely ill-equipped to deal with the climate crisis. Its solutions
will always be particular—carbon tax, recycling, bike riding,
and so on—when the universal is requisite. When large-scale
responses emerge within capitalism, they will be profitable for
some at the expense of others. We should reject them in the name
of universality. The particularist nature of capitalism will attempt
to pit people against each other in the name of saving the planet.
When walking through the streets of Berlin in fall 2019, I
glanced up at a placard that ominously portended the capitalist
 204 Y This Is Not Identity Politics

future and made me wish that I was unable to read German. The
sign (with a very environmental look to it) read: “Berlin Lässt
die Unwelt im Regeln Stehen; Mietendeckel bedeutet: Wir kön-
nen nicht mehr in den Klimaschutz investieren” (“Berlin Let
the Environmental Regulations Stand; Rent Caps mean: We can
no longer invest in climate action”). Here we have the perfect
particularist (and capitalist) twist to the climate crisis. Rather
than see the climate crisis as the occasion for articulating uni-
versal equality, the placard enjoins Berliners to see a direct oppo-
sition between concern for equality and action on the climate.
Attempts such as this pose climate action against egalitarian
concerns. On the one hand, the placard accepts that the climate
crisis is universal, but it uses this universality as a reason for jet-
tisoning the egalitarian project of rent caps. This has the effect
of particularizing the climate struggle. The inherent universal-
ity of the climate crisis transforms into a particular struggle when
the exigencies of capitalism enter into the equation. But capital-
ism, due to its complete investment in particularism, is unequipped
to address a crisis that demands universality. Thus, the fight
against climate change must be a universalist fight against
capitalism as well.
Particular identity is always a trap, but when the question so
clearly involves the whole planet, particularism becomes even
more dangerous. It causes us to miss both pitfalls and solutions
that universality renders visible. To retreat into our own partic-
ular identity is to participate in the ultimate destruction of
human existence itself. More than ever before in human history,
the urgency of the climate crisis demands an explicitly univer-
salist politics—and a universalist epistemology—in response.
When we sit around wondering why climate skeptics reject
the obvious fact of climate change, we need look no further than
the universality that environmental destruction makes evident.
 This Is Not Identity Politics Z 205

Identitarians see in climate change a clear argument for the uni-

versality that they oppose. Accepting its existence entails admit-
ting the universality that their political position denies.
Universality is inherently dialectical. It lets us see what par-
ticular identity hides—connection in the midst of division. Uni-
versality allows for a response to a catastrophe like climate
change that is equal to the magnitude of the event. Our particu-
lar identity, in contrast, leaves us with only a series of responses
that can never add up to being adequate to the problem. The stake
of the struggle between particular identity and universality is
now existence itself.
 CONCLUSION
Avoiding the Worst

T
oday, the prevailing form of politics is that of multiple
particular identities each fighting for their own piece of
the collective pie. This form itself testifies to the reac-
tionary status of our epoch, an epoch that began with the onset
of the Cold War and the theoretical retreat from universality
after World War II. During this time, the dramatic expansion of
the capitalist system pushed us increasingly toward the particu-
larism of this theoretical turn. The fact that right-wing popu-
lists are winning elections all around the world is the result of
this fundamental theoretical victory.
The point cannot be taking a stand against right-wing popu-
lists within this struggle but instead changing what makes their
emergence possible. As long as we envision politics as the battle
between different identities, right-wing populists will have an
easy time of it. If Le Pen or Trump goes down to defeat, heirs
will quickly rise in their stead. The more we defeat them, the
more power the next ones will have. If we defeat Donald Trump
today, we will have Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump on a joint
ticket tomorrow.
By accepting this prevailing image of political struggle, we
give up on the dream of universality, which is the only path that
 208 Y Conclusion

can save us from the future victories of right-wing populists. If

we abandon the universal, we pave the way for the most banal
dystopia in which no one expresses any concern for anyone else
and identity is the only value. According to Alain Badiou (him-
self a champion of the universal), acceding to this view of things
“will be everyone for him or herself.” He adds, “This is the sur-
est road towards the worst. When one abdicates universality, one
obtains universal horror.”1 Once we accept this picture, we are
firmly ensconced in the universe of inextirpable inequality with
no possible respite.
That said, given the horrors committed in the name of uni-
versality, one can perhaps understand the retreat from it. From
the Reign of Terror to the gulag, proponents of what they claimed
was universalism have racked up millions of corpses. But the
dead of these regimes were not the victims of the universal. The
Committee for Public Safety and the NKVD perverted univer-
sality into a realizable aim and failed to see it as an absence that
informs emancipatory politics. By doing this, these regimes
licensed mass killing. This perversion was itself a betrayal of the
universal, and the subsequent retreat to particular identity does
nothing but further the betrayal and thereby abandon the pos-
sibility of emancipation altogether.
We must resist the impulse to label those killed at the
behest of purportedly universalist regimes victims of the uni-
versal. These regimes became murderous only because they
succumbed to the lure of creating an all-inclusive universality
that would end all divisions. Once they believed that they could
invent a new form of universal equality that they would fully
realize, all was lost. At this point, the politics of universality
became perverse and refused the structural necessity of lack.
It is easy for the champions of the universal to fall into the trap
of defending these regimes as attempts at a genuine universality,
 Conclusion Z 209

but doing so gives away too much to the particularist cause.

Universalists don’t have to defend the Reign of Terror or the
gulag.
Universalist projects always threaten to become seduced by
the possibility of creating the universal into a full presence rather
than discovering it as a necessary absence. In doing so, they suc-
cumb to terror. This is the perversion that universalism must con-
stantly be on guard against. Whenever people insist on their
ability to create a world of complete equality, we should recog-
nize this perversion at work. Even if the perversion of univer-
sality is an unavoidable danger inherent in universalizing, it is
nonetheless worth the risk. The alternative of total particularity
is more murderous and barbaric than the Committee for Public
Safety. This is why the solution cannot be a retreat into the con-
fines of particularity.
Particularity does not exist without the absent universal that
gives this particularity its sense. The universal is antecedent to
the particular. The attempt to retreat from the danger of the uni-
versal to the security of a particular identity is doomed to fail.
What’s more, the repression of universality for the sake of a full
embrace of particularity leads to disaster.
Although it doesn’t appear as evident, the danger of the
extreme particularity that capitalism produces is even more omi-
nous than the gulag. The dangers of particularity have the advan-
tage, however, of being much more difficult to discern than those
of universality. This is why no one talks about the number of
people killed under capitalism. The visibility of the gulag for us
today contrasts with the invisibility of exploited laborers, racist
institutions, and underlying misogyny that sustain the capitalist
system. Although we don’t readily see the horrors that capital-
ism’s unbridled particularity unleashes, we must nonetheless
pay attention to them when tallying up corpses.
 210 Y Conclusion

When we examine the horrors of capitalism’s insistence on

particularity, the leger of destruction ceases to seem so one-sided.
The suffering perpetuated in the name of universality actually
pales in comparison with what occurred quietly under the ban-
ner of particularism. From children working in sweatshops to
millions living in favelas to the reign of military warlords, par-
ticularism destroys lives without even holding out the promise
of universal freedom and equality. It does so in order that a few
individuals can pursue the project of accumulation without
restraint.
The destruction that capitalist particularity has perpetuated
includes two world wars, when the capitalist insistence on par-
ticularity led to national identitarian conflicts that make the
Reign of Terror look like a time of peace and prosperity. The
violence of particularism doesn’t appear as part of an explicit
project in the way that universalism does, which is why we don’t
chalk it up to particularism or identity as such. The structure of
particular violence—a particular identity commits it—ends up
exculpating particularism because we blame the individual iden-
tity rather than the political philosophy of particularism (or the
capitalist structure that demands it). Our judgment on particu-
lar identities like that of the Nazis rather than identity as such
enables identity to get off scot-free from the judgment of his-
tory. When it comes to universalism, the situation is reversed,
the blood that universalism sheds redounds to the universal itself,
not to the individual actors who order the violence.
When one attributes the violence of two world wars to the
capitalist insistence on particularity, this immediately raises
questions. The violence that particularism produces seems like
natural violence rather than the result of any political project.2
No one entered into the wars in the name of particularity itself
 Conclusion Z 211

but rather for the sake of national interest. This is the case even
for the aggressors. But when one enacts violence for the sake of
an identity, one is not acting naturally, since there is nothing
natural about identity. Every claim about the natural status of
violence conceals the particularity (and identitarian philosophy)
performing the violence. Such violence always exists against the
background of a particularist system and a particularist politics.
Blindness to the violence of particularism makes it easy to
impugn universality and to envision political struggle without
it. But without the appeal to universality, politics becomes noth-
ing other than a battle between competing interests. When this
situation arises, the strongest interest, the interest of capital itself,
inevitably wins. The retreat into identity neither spares us from
violence nor gives us a more secure route to emancipation. It does
nothing but create the possibility for conservative rule.
For too long, politics around the world has been staged on
right-wing terrain. We envision a particular world with partic-
ular causes. This image of politics leads inevitably to right-wing
victories, even when moderates win elections. One cannot count
the election of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, or Emmanuel Macron
as a triumph for emancipation but as part of the contemporary
conservative wave, despite the explicit political affiliation of these
figures. In a world of competing particulars, there is no possi-
bility for an emancipatory breakthrough.
But this is not the only possible way of envisioning political
struggle. If we view political contestation as a struggle for the
form that the universal will take, we are on the terrain of the
Left and the project of emancipation. We don’t need to opt for
the universal in one grand act but must begin to theorize uni-
versality as the fundamental stake in political contestation. The
great leap forward consists in recognizing politics as the
 212 Y Conclusion

struggle between universality and particularity. Once we take

this leap, we force the Right to play all their political games on
the road. Unlike in football games, in a political struggle home
field advantage always wins, and gaining this advantage depends
on recognizing the role of universality in politics. The fight for
emancipation must be a universal fight, or it cannot be won.
 NOTES

Introduction: Finding Universality

1. The most notable exception to the widespread judgment about the radi-
cality of the French Revolution relative to its American counterpart
comes from Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, the American Revolution
was a more properly political revolution and thus had much greater
staying power, whereas the French Revolution, because it became
caught up in extra-political problems like the attempt to end all pov-
erty, had to flame out and devolve into purges. See Hannah Arendt,
On Revolution (New York: Penguin: 2006). For a clear account of why
Arendt is surely mistaken in her evaluation, see Jean-Claude Milner,
Relire la Révolution (Paris: Éditions Verdier, 2016).
2. There were equally appealing phrases stemming from the American
Revolution, like “We the People,” “Give me liberty or give me death,”
or “All men are created equal.”
3. See U.S. Constitution, http://constitutionus.com.
4. Primarily, of course, they needed to transform peasants into collective
farmers. In order to facilitate this transformation, Stalinists invented
a category—the Kulak—that the revolution had to liquidate in order
to bring about collective equality among the peasantry.
5. For instance, Kant’s short essay “Of the Different Races of Human
Beings” illustrates his acceptance of the ruling European prejudices of
his time and his belief in whiteness as an ideal. See Immanuel Kant,
“Of the Different Races of Human Beings,” trans. Holly Wilson and
 214 Y Introduction

Günter Zöller, in Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter

Zöller and Robert B. Louden (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 82– 97.
6. The idea that our initial situation is one of unfreedom originates in
Immanuel Kant. He associates the moral law with freedom precisely
because it has the power to lift us out of our situation. Among con-
temporary thinkers, Alain Badiou follows most clearly in Kant’s lin-
eage, sharing his judgment on our situation. But for Badiou, it is not
the moral law but the event that marks the site of freedom for us.
7. There was a divide between modern European philosophy on the Con-
tinent and in Britain. On the Continent, the investment in the uni-
versal was almost universal, even among thinkers openly opposed to
each other, like Descartes and Pascal or Spinoza and Leibniz. In con-
trast, British thinkers tended to be more sanguine about particular
identity, a difference that stemmed from British empiricism and then
bled into the political realm.
8. Despite the fact that he was a slaveholder, Jefferson included a critique
of the slave trade in his rough draft of the Declaration of Independence
that would not survive the editing process of the committee appointed
to draft it. Jefferson was able to write against slavery while holding
slaves not because he was a hypocrite but because of his commitment
to the universal, his ability to see that freedom for some is politically
impossible without universal freedom. Unfortunately, in his life Jef-
ferson failed to sustain the same type of commitment to universal
emancipation. He owned slaves until the day that he died, despite rec-
ognizing the damage that slavery did the psyche of both the slave and
slaveowner.
9. In his speculative reading of the fall from paradise recounted in Gen-
esis, Kant indicates that our violation of the law is the necessary con-
dition for freedom. He writes, “The history of nature thus begins from
good, for that is the work of God; the history of freedom from evil, for
it is the work of the human being.” Immanuel Kant, “Conjectural Begin-
ning of Human History,” trans. Allen  W. Wood, in Anthropology,
History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 169.
 Introduction Z 215

10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy,

trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 164.
11. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 2003), 249.
12. Not every reader of Hemingway’s novel recognizes a free act in Brett’s
decision to leave Romero. Hemingway scholar Donald Daiker con-
tends that, contrary to the usual reading and contrary to what Brett
herself says, it is Romero who leaves her. Her claim to act morally—
the climax of the novel—is simply a lie covering over the fact that
Romero dumped her. Through this ingenious reading, Daiker manages
to transform Hemingway’s novel of universality into an apology for
contemporary cynicism. See Donald A. Daiker, “ ‘Brett Couldn’t Hold
Him’: Lady Ashley, Pedro Romero, and the Madrid Sequence of The
Sun Also Rises,” Hemingway Review 29, no. 1 (2009): 73–86.
13. In Being and Nothinigness, Jean-Paul Sartre defines bad faith as the
attempt to take up one’s symbolic identity fully and to refuse to accept
any distance between one’s subjectivity and one’s identity. His famous
example is the garcon de café who plays the part so well that he really
believes he is a garcon de café. Though Sartre doesn’t put it this way,
what he’s labeling bad faith is the act of refusing one’s singularity by
imagining that all one is is one’s particular identity.
14. As Marx famously puts it in The Poverty of Philosophy, “The condition
for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every class.”
Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Pub-
lishers, 1963), 126.
15. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila
Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2012), 259.
16. Psychoanalytic feminist theorists like Joan Copjec and Jennifer Fried-
lander retain the feminine as part of a universalist political project, but
for them the feminine is the failure of identity, not an identity that one
can take up. As they see it, there is only male identity, and feminine
identity is a direct confrontation with our lack of an ability to be any
identity at all. It is, to use the term from Jacques Lacan, not-all. See
Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1994), and Jennifer Friedlander, The Feminine Look:
 216 Y Introduction

Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion (Albany: State University of New

York Press, 2008).
17. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon claims that “the colonized subject
fights in order to put an end to domination.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched
of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004),
233. The struggle against colonialism is a struggle against domination
as such and thus a universal struggle.
18. There are prominent exceptions who continue to insist heroically on
universality, chief among them, Alain Badiou. But in the name of uni-
versality, Badiou has a tendency to highlight the communist hypoth-
esis as the one expression of universality at the expense of, say, the fight
against sexism or homophobia. This becomes clearest near the conclu-
sion of his book on Nicolas Sarkozy. He writes, “The communist
hypothesis as such is generic, it is the basis of any emancipatory enun-
ciation, it names the sole thing that is worthwhile if we are interested
in politics and history.” Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, trans.
David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2008), 113–114. Badiou holds on to
communism as the only true universal because it incorporates all other
struggles within it. He takes up this position because he believes that
one can realize the universal, that it is not an absence.
19. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philos-
ophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982), 213.
20. The anti-universalist thinkers begin with the Critical Theorists
responding to Nazism and Stalinism (such as Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer), and they continue through the leading French
thinkers of the 1960s (such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze).
Today, they include those following in the wake of these two wide-
ranging movements, in addition to those who wish to horizontalize
relations with matter, replacing subjectivity, which is integral to uni-
versality, with relations of objects. One such figure is object-oriented
ontologist Graham Harman. As he puts it, “All objects must be given
equal attention, whether they be human, non-human, natural, cultural,
real or fictional.” Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New
Theory of Everything (New York: Penguin, 2018), 9. Once one takes
this position, the question of universality is foreclosed once and for all.
 1. Our Particular Age Z 217

21. Samo Tomšië makes a similar point about the bond between capital-
ism and identity politics, but he sees a direct rather than an indirect
relationship. He writes, “The politics of capital comes down to iden-
tity politics, while the politics of labour stands for non-identity poli-
tics.” Samo Tomšië, The Labour of Enjoyment: Towards a Critique of
Libidinal Economy (Berlin: August Verlag, 2019), 91– 92.
22. One of the leading figures in the contemporary insistence on holding
on to universality in feminist, queer, and trans struggles is Mari Ruti.
Countering Derrida’s claim about the particular origin of universal val-
ues, Ruti expresses the proper disdain for this sort of question. She
writes, “When it comes to the values of freedom, equality, and soli-
darity, I don’t care about where they originated; whether they are the
brainchild of Confucius, Immanuel Kant, Audre Lorde, or someone
else really smart does not much matter to me. And I am not convinced
that France or the United States—the places that are usually credited
with the birth of these values—have any special claim to them. If any-
thing, both countries have betrayed them in the most obvious manner
conceivable. What is important to me is that these values seem worth
upholding regardless of setting.” Mari Ruti, Distillations: Theory, Eth-
ics, Affect (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 50. Ruti makes the perspica-
cious point here that those credited with inventing universal values
have done more to betray them than uphold them, which shows that
they never belonged to these particular territories in the first place.

1. Our Particular Age

1. Some Marxists have gone as far as Rosa Luxemburg and dismissed the
significance of anti-colonial revolts on behalf of national independence
as unimportant for the worldwide workers’ struggle. Despite the con-
troversy that surrounds this position, the fact that a leading Marxist
thinker could take it up reveals the problem that any turn to nation
poses for Marxist politics.
2. George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think,
2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 420.
3. Despite Lakoff ’s contention that all the research on raising children
shows that the Nurturing Parent has more success than the Strict
 218 Y 1. Our Particular Age

Father, anyone who has suffered under the unrelenting solicitude of

an excessively Nurturing Parent might have grounds for questioning
the blanket superiority of this figure over that of the Strict Father, put-
ting aside the relationship to universality. If one watches Dead Poets
Society (Peter Weir, 1989), one can see clearly how the figure of the Nur-
turing Parent, Charles Keating (Robyn Williams), can drive a child to
suicide.
4. See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the
San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1963).
5. Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres de Maxmilien Robespierre, Tome VII:
Discours Janvier-Septembre 1791, ed. Marc Bouloiseau, Georges Lefeb-
vre, and Albert Soboul (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950),
362.
6. Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres de Maxmilien Robespierre, Tome VII,
362.
7. While it seems surprising that libertarians might also be nationalists,
the connection between nation and particular identity provides the
solution to this puzzle. Nation does not restrain individual particular-
ity because it is itself the product of the same particularity.
8. When Michel Foucault turns back to the study of the Greeks and the
Romans in the midst of his research for his account of the history of
sexuality, it is precisely what he perceives as the absence of a universal
that draws him back. What he discovers as a care of the self is explic-
itly not universal. He states, “A certain particular form of life, which
is distinct from all other forms of life in its particularity, will in fact
be regarded as the real condition of the care of the self. So, in reality,
the care of the self in ancient Greek and Roman culture was never really
seen, laid down, or affirmed as a universal law valid for every individ-
ual regardless of his mode of life.” Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics
of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, trans. Gra-
ham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 113. Foucault has to return
to Antiquity to escape from the tyranny of modern universality, but it
is an Antiquity in which Plato’s philosophy plays no major part at all—
and where the absolute exclusion of women from the care of the self
garners only a few brief mentions.
9. The great leftist exception to the contemporary slandering of Plato is
Alain Badiou. Badiou not only wrote his own loose translation of
 1. Our Particular Age Z 219

Plato’s Republic, but he also constantly works to redeem Plato’s repu-

tation from its fall in the twentieth century. He writes, “We must
break with the Heideggerian historical montage, restore Plato to his
place, and construct, without the least bit of shame, a contemporary
metaphysics.” Alain Badiou, “Logology Against Ontology,” in The
Adventure of French Philosophy, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (London:
Verso, 2012), 320. As Badiou sees it, Plato represents the heroic refusal
to subjugate philosophy to art or science, which is what occurs in the
twentieth century.
10. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 127.
11. Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve, in
Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1997), 479d– e.
12. Once again, Deleuze provides the paradigmatic statement on Aristo-
tle’s advance relative to Plato. Whereas Plato reduces everything to
sameness, Aristotle creates “an organic representation of difference.”
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xv. Although Aristotle fails
to think difference in itself, according to Deleuze, he nonetheless marks
a major step beyond the monotonous sameness of Plato’s universality.
13. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of
Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1984), 1552–1728.
14. Aristotle, Politics, trans. B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle,
vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1984), 1264b:1–2.
15. The need to exclude the economy from politics also marks a funda-
mental limit in Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy. While Arendt
has incredible insight into the evanescence of politics in the modern
world, she never overcomes Aristotle’s dualism that sustains the econ-
omy as a separate realm that politics must keep to the side.
16. In The Science of Logic, Hegel articulates his most sophisticated account
of the relationship between universality and particularity, which pro-
vides one of the central pillars for how I theorize universality here.
Although this account is never completely limpid, it becomes clearest
when he turns to a metaphor about a particular form reaching its point
of failure. He writes, “The ripest maturity, the highest stage that
 220 Y 1. Our Particular Age

anything can attain is the one at which its fall begins. The fixity of the
determinacies which the understanding appears to run up against, the
form of the imperishable, is that of self-referring universality. But this
universality belongs to the concept as its own, and for that reason what
is found expressed in it, infinitely close at hand, is that dissolution of
the finite. This universality directly contradicts the determinateness of
the finite and makes explicit its disproportion with respect to it.” Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di
Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 539– 540.
Hegel remarkably sees that universality emerges at the point where the
finite particular fails to continue to be itself. If particulars did not
die, we would never be able to recognize the universal. The death of
the particular occurs when it is overcome by contradiction defining it.
The end point of Hegel’s philosophy is that there is universality only
through contradiction.
17. Slavoj Ýiĥek has gone further than anyone today to make clear the pri-
ority of the universal and the importance of insisting on universality
for political struggle. For Ýiĥek, the universal cuts through the social
fabric and creates a rupture that particulars try to address. He con-
tends that “the Universal names the site of a Problem-Deadlock, of a
burning Question, and the Particulars are the attempts but failed
Answers to this Problem.” Slavoj Ýiĥek, The Parallax View (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2006), 35.
18. According to the liberal John Locke, “The great and chief end there-
fore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves
under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.” John Locke,
Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 350– 351.
19. US Census, “Race and Ethnicity,” https://www.census.gov/mso/www
/training/pdf /race-ethnicity-onepager.pdf.
20. Jacques Lacan describes the necessary exclusion that forms a totality
as the masculine structure of sexuation or the all. In this structure,
the exception is the one figure not subjected to symbolic castration,
the real man, who defines the ideal that all the other men strive to
reach.
21. The title of Parker’s film is an explicit allusion to the film that more or
less originates feature filmmaking, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation
 1. Our Particular Age Z 221

(1915). Griffith uses cinema as a way of giving the spectator a particu-

lar vantage point on American history, one in which the Ku Klux Klan
acts as a heroic force. Parker doesn’t counter with an alternative par-
ticular perspective but with that of the universal itself.
22. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” trans. Annette Jolin
and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970),
131.
23. In his recent work on psychoanalysis and religion, Richard Boothby
points out that it is the attitude toward the enemy that definitely sepa-
rates Christianity from its parent Judaism. It is this attitude that makes
it impossible to employ Christianity as the ideology of slavery and to
have it function without a hitch. Those who used Christianity as an
ideological support for slavery had to perform incredible ideological
contortions. Boothby writes, “It is the exhortation of love for the enemy
that most separates Christianity from Judaism. It is also what charac-
terizes the strikingly unconventional gestures and behavior of Jesus,
who repeatedly seeks the company of the outcast, the scapegoat, the
pariah. He goes out of his way to reach not only toward the poor and
forgotten but also toward the positively rejected and condemned: the
whore, the leper, the criminal, the prisoner. It is with respect to this
most challenging aspect of Jesus’s own scandalous mode of loving that
Mary Magdalene, the former prostitute, becomes such an important
figure for understanding the essential message of Christianity.” Rich-
ard Boothby, unpublished manuscript. It is clear from even the most
cursory reading of the Gospels that Christ is on the side of the slaves,
not the slave owners.
24. Parker received a great deal of criticism at the time of the film’s release
for his role—he was tried and acquitted but admitted involvement—in
a sexual assault during his college years. While he went on to a suc-
cessful career, the woman ended up killing herself after the assault.
This case derailed the release of the film. Parker’s attempts at damage
control only exacerbated the situation as he tried to deflect responsi-
bility and excuse his actions. Given how Parker acted, the criticism was
merited. But this event did cause critics subsequently to misread fac-
tual details of the film. For instance, certain reviewers claimed that
Parker, in a typical patriarchal fashion, uses the rape of Turner’s wife
as the triggering event for the revolt. But this is simply not the case. It
 222 Y 1. Our Particular Age

is the violation of universality that drives Turner, not his particular

investments. Turner revolts not after the rape of his wife, as the critics
allege, but after the slave owner beats him for baptizing a white man.
The film does not offer a definitive confirmation of Turner’s sexism.
25. In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand has her hero John Galt refer to Aristot-
le’s particularism approvingly. She writes, “Centuries ago, the man who
was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has
stated the formula and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is
itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here
to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.”
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Penguin, 1999), 1016. Her
unapologetic investment in the most rapacious form of capitalism has
an indissoluble link with this epistemology.
26. The third author of this collective work, Slavoj Ýiĥek, is a passionate
defender of universality and thus stands out from Butler and Laclau,
who form a tag team in their attacks on him. At many points in his
works, Ýiĥek formulates an idea of universality very close to the idea
of universality as nonbelonging that I am developing here with a
slightly different stress. He aligns universality with the antagonism
that divides every society from itself and simultaneously forms the
basis for hostility between societies. No matter how peaceful a society
becomes, it cannot, according to Ýiĥek, eliminate the universality of
antagonism. This conception of universality achieves its most devel-
oped form in Sex and the Failed Absolute, where he claims, following
Hegel, that “the stability [of a social edifice] is not threatened only from
the outside (war with other states) since this external threat (of war) is
what sustains a civilization from within.” Slavoj Ýiĥek, Sex and the
Failed Absolute (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 343. If we eliminate
antagonism within a society, it will necessarily emerge between societ-
ies. The stable internal bond with fellow members of the society depends
on the external conflict with other nations. There is no way around the
constant conflict of antagonism. This is why, Ýiĥek adds, “each indi-
vidual’s readiness to particulate in [international] barbarism is the ulti-
mate support of the state’s ethical edifice.” Slavoj Ýiĥek, Sex and the
Failed Absolute, 344. Universal antagonism between societies is the
only way to create peaceful coexistence within society. Universality
 2. The Importance of Being Absent Z 223

for Ýiĥek means that there must be a violent struggle going on

somewhere.
27. Ernesto Laclau, “Structure, History and the Political,” in Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith
Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Ýiĥek (London: Verso, 2000), 194.
28. Judith Butler, “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of
Formalism,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, ed. Judith Butler,
Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Ýiĥek (London: Verso, 2000), 35.

2. The Importance of Being Absent

1. In this sense, it is not surprising that the thinker who most vehemently
denies the existence of lack also rejects universality as a philosophical
trap. In the same text where Gilles Deleuze (along with Félix Guat-
tari) claims that “lack is created, planned, and organized in and through
social production,” he later famously insists, “The only universal history
is the history of contingency.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-
Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1983), 28, 224.
2. Hegel was the first to make this point. He writes the Phenomenology of
Spirit as a way of showing how every position of purported belonging
ends up undermining itself. When we reach absolute knowing in this
book, we do not recognize that we finally belong but that must con-
front our inability every to belong. That is what we know absolutely.
Psychoanalysis later comes along and confirms this verdict through an
analysis of the structure of the psyche.
3. When Hegel formulates that “everything hangs on grasping and
expressing the true, not just as substance but just as much as subject” in
the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, he articulates the formula
for universal equality, although he doesn’t directly state that this is his
aim. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 12.
4. Georg Simmel makes this point in his classic work The Philosophy of
Money. He states, “Without the general trust that people have in each
other, society itself would disintegrate, for very few relationships are
 224 Y 2. The Importance of Being Absent

based entirely about what is known with certainty about another per-
son, and very few relationships would endure if trust were not as strong
as, or stronger than, rational proof or personal observation. In the same
way, money transactions would collapse without trust.” Georg Sim-
mel, The Philosophy of Money, 2nd ed., trans. Tom Bottomore and David
Frisby (New York: Routledge, 1990), 178–179. If we collectively stop
believing that money has any value, the rich would all of a sudden
become much less rich.
5. At a recent talk where I was extolling the political necessity of free-
dom, one audience member suggested that its association with capi-
talist oppression has rendered it unviable today. While I understand
this impulse, if one gives up on freedom, the very idea of the political
act disappears as well. Unfortunately, the audience member was not at
all convinced by this response.
6. George W. Bush, “2003 State of the Union Address,” January 28, 2003,
http:// w w w .washingtonpost . com / wp - srv /onpolitics /transcripts
/ bushtext_012803.html.
7. To borrow a metaphor from Jennifer Friedlander, the master is like the
bald man who wears a toupee. The slightest jolt disrupts the image of
potency associated with it into a scene of humiliation. The authority
of the master depends on an image that threatens to collapse at any
moment. For more on this analysis, see Jennifer Friedlander, Feminine
Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2008).
8. Universality emerges out of the rupture that gives birth to the signify-
ing structure, out of the cut of the signifier itself. A master signifier
attempts to make sense of this cut and establish the system of signifi-
cation as a meaningful structure, but it necessarily fails. The master
signifier’s attempt to create a meaningful structure is also an attempt
to give the universal a particular expression. This particular expres-
sion always comes up short and in this way attests to the irreducibility
of the universal to any particular social form. The reason why the par-
ticular expression always fails to articulate the universal is what Jacques
Lacan calls the signifier of the lack in the Other. This is the missing
signifier, the signifier of primordial repression, that signifies the limit
of the master signifier. It is the signifier of the lack in the Other, not
 2. The Importance of Being Absent Z 225

the master signifier, that is universal. Our confusion about the role of
these two signifiers leads us to slander universality and associate it with
mastery. Lacan himself left unexplored the political implications of this
distinction because he never theorized the signifier of the lack in the
Other as the site of political universality. He never linked it to the
assertion of universal values.
9. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New
York: Grove Press, 2004), 235.
10. Fanon is not adopting the position of someone like François Julien, who
theorizes the universal in terms of an ideal that remains ever out of
reach. According to Julien, “The vocation of the universal: that of
reopening a breach in all confining and satisfied totality, and reviving
the aspiration towards it.” François Julien, On the Universal: The Uni-
form, the Common, and Dialogue Between Cultures, trans. Michael Rich-
ardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), 114.
Julien theorizes the universal as a future state that recedes the closer
we come to it. Fanon, in contrast, sees it as already actual in the act of
struggling on behalf of it.
11. To invoke a distinction between Realität (reality) and Wirklichkeit
(actuality) that Hegel makes in The Philosophy of Right and elsewhere,
the universal’s lack of reality is its actuality. It becomes actual through
its inability to realize itself.
12. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 8.
13. This is what Jean-Paul Sartre does in his famous and much-maligned
preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Sartre’s emphasis on
the necessity of violence earned him the reproach of humanist critics,
but his primary concern was the violence that Fanon’s book might do
to the European psyche, which itself relied on a disavowed colonial
violence.
14. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans.
Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 118.
15. Fanon does not make Marx’s error because he is a Hegelian thinker
before he is a Marxist. Unlike Marx, Hegel does not view emancipa-
tion as arriving at a future free from contradiction but rather recog-
nizes the necessity of contradiction, which entails recognizing uni-
versality in nonbelonging.
 226 Y 2. The Importance of Being Absent

16. This is why Marx typically refers to the American Civil War as the
“Pro-Slavery Rebellion.” This term functions as the proper antidote to
the thoroughly ideological reference often still employed in the Amer-
ican South—the “War of Northern Aggression.” It would be appro-
priate if educators in the American North took up Marx’s term, which
is actually the properly universalist one, in contrast to the false neu-
trality evoked by Civil War.
17. Hegel sees a different error at work in the French Revolution. In his
(justly) famous critique of the Reign of Terror, Hegel argues that the
Terror is the result of an attempt to impose abstract universality on
the world. The French Revolution attempts to enact universal freedom
but the enactment of freedom can only occur through individuals.
Thus, abstract universality has to manifest itself negatively—through
terror. In the section of the Phenomenology of Spirit titled “Absolute
Freedom and Terror,” Hegel claims, “Universal freedom . . . can pro-
duce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only a nega-
tive action; it is merely the fury of destruction.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phe-
nomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 359. As Hegel sees it, the French Revolution goes awry by
trying to instantiate the universal as such. The Terror arises as an
expression of abstract universality. The French Revolution goes off the
rails as the result of its investment in abstraction rather than concrete
freedom. While Hegel’s analysis of the French Revolution provides a
compelling explanation for the emergence of the Terror, it underem-
phasizes the philosophical error at work. Rather than conceiving free-
dom too universally, the Reign of Terror results from misconceiving
the universal altogether.
18. Maximilien de Robespierre, “Sur les principes de morale politique,”
in Oeuvres de Robespierre (Paris: F. Cournol, 1867), 302.
19. Saint-Just, “Discours sur le jugement de Louis XVI,” in Oeuvres com-
plètes, ed. Anne Kupiec and Miguel Abensour (Paris: Gallimard,
2004), 476.
20. I did not just cherry-pick the cases of Robespierre and Saint-Just. One
could find similar statements among many of the leading Jacobins. For
instance, Jean-Paul Marat claims, “One must establish liberty by vio-
lence; and the moment has currently come to organize the despotism
 3. Universal Villains Z 227

of freedom, to crush the despotism of kings.” Jean-Paul Marat,

“Débats,” in Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: 1793 (April 6, 1793):
387.
21. The contemporary champions of the Girondins contra the Jacobins
conveniently forget the Girondin embrace of war as a strategy for
exporting the Revolution, as well as Robespierre’s vehement opposi-
tion to this path.
22. It is not surprising that one of the contemporary thinkers most invested
in universality, Alain Badiou, would also be equally invested in love.
Badiou goes so far as to give love the status of a truth procedure, on a
par with politics, science, and art, which have much more historical
impact than instances of love.
23. Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, trans. Jay Rubin (New
York: Vintage, 1997), 250.
24. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 16.

3. Universal Villains
1. In direct contrast to Adorno, Paul Eisenstein argues that Hegel’s uni-
versality offers us to the key to grappling with the trauma of the Holo-
caust. He claims, “When we occupy a totalizing position, we do not
achieve a static, transcendental position of substantial knowledge; we
do not displace or disavow or defer an encounter with the trauma of an
event like the Holocaust and its unsymbolizable, but nonetheless pres-
ent, presence. On the contrary, we bear witness to its real trauma.”
Paul Eisenstein, Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the
Hegelian Subject (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003),
12. Eisenstein’s account of the Holocaust, which approaches it from an
unapologetic universality, is one of the few to see its evil as that of the
particular.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New
York: Continuum, 1973), 334.
3. Karl Popper goes much further than Adorno in assigning blame to
Hegel for the Holocaust. According to Popper, Hegel is the theoreti-
cal inspiration for the Nazi totalitarianism. But Popper doesn’t see
Hegel’s universalism as the problem. Instead, it’s his Germanic
 228 Y 3. Universal Villains

tribalism. From Hegel the Nazis discover the philosophical basis for
their resistance to universality. Popper claims that Hegel takes part
in “behind the perennial revolt against freedom and reason. Hege-
lianism is the renaissance of tribalism.” Karl R. Popper, The Open Society
and Its Enemies, Volume 2: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and
the Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 30.
Against universality, Popper claims, Hegel promulgates the tribalism
of identity politics that nourishes Nazism. For anyone with a passing
knowledge of Hegel’s thought, this objection, in contrast to Adorno’s
much more plausible case, simply seems like that of a lunatic. Of all
the charges one might direct at Hegel, tribalism must be the most
incomprehensible, given how Hegel celebrates the universal at every
turn. That Popper’s book continues to be in print is one of the signs
that we remain on the verge of the apocalypse.
4. Karl Popper, who unlike Adorno has a profound antipathy to Hegel,
makes this accusation much more directly in The Open Society and Its
Enemies, Volume 2: The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the After-
math, one of the worst slanders of a philosopher in the rich history of
philosophical slanders.
5. Adorno states, “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hit-
ler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so
that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will hap-
pen.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365.
6. The exemplary figure for the ethical turn is Emmanuel Levinas. For
Levinas, our ethical responsibility incarnated in the confrontation with
the face of the other has an absolute priority over not just politics but
even ontology.
7. This is why there are so many calls for a return to politics today. They
occur after the ethical conquest of the political terrain. For just two
contrasting examples, see Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and
Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999), and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1998).
8. Hannah Arendt not only blurs together Nazism and Stalinism under
the banner of totalitarianism, but she also clearly sees them as
 3. Universal Villains Z 229

universalist projects aimed at destroying particular lives. See Hannah

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968).
9. If Nazism and Stalinism weren’t bad enough, capitalism in the twen-
tieth century also reveals itself as a total system that traps any particu-
lar that tries to escape its gravitational force. As the twentieth century
advances and the communist alternative reveals its ultimate bank-
ruptcy, capitalism’s totalizing structure becomes increasingly evident.
Even though Marx already identified capitalism as a global system in
the nineteenth century, this globalism did not become fully self-evident
until the end of the twentieth century. Capitalism becomes the only
game in town, a game that imposes its structure on everyone, even for
those who refuse to play. One place becomes indistinguishable from
another and even countries come to resemble each other as a result of
capitalism’s homogenizing effect. McDonalds colonizes the entire
world and places the same stamp on all differences. There is nowhere
to escape capitalism’s apparent universalizing force. Furthermore, the
structure of capitalism demands that everyone and everything submit
to the logic of commodification. How much I earn measures who I am.
How much an object costs determines its worth. Exchange value
becomes the only form of value, imposing its form on everything it
encounters. The capitalist system functions under the veneer of uni-
versality that admits of no exceptions, which makes it seem as if the
clearest path of resistance must surely be through the insistence on par-
ticular differences and local economies, which is what many take up
in response. But as is the case with Nazism and Stalinism, how capi-
talism appears is quite different from how it actually functions. Capi-
talism depends on the betrayal of universality every bit as much as
Nazism and Stalinism. It generalizes the logic of the commodity in
order to ensconce individuals in their isolated particularity, not as part
of an authentic universality.
10. Nazism by and large left lesbians alone because they did not pose a
threat its particular form of identity politics. Gay men, on the other
hand, represented a mortal danger to the Nazi movement because it
relied on a repressed homosexual bond. This is why Hitler had to elim-
inate Ernst Röhm and his SA (Sonderabteilung). Rather than allowing
homosexuality to operate as a repressed source of group connection,
 230 Y 3. Universal Villains

Röhm and his followers were practicing homosexuals. By making the

repressed source of the Nazi bond explicit, this practice threatened the
entire Nazi project. Hitler had Röhm killed for the same reason that
he sent male homosexuals to the death camps: to preserve the uncon-
scious status of the Nazi bond.
11. Although the January 1942 Wahnsee Conference officially set the Final
Solution in motion through the system of death camps, mass execu-
tions of Jews already occurred in 1941, most infamously at Babi Yar in
September 1941.
12. Lanzmann’s decision to rely solely on testimony in his lengthy film
has the effect of characterizing the horror of the Holocaust as an
absence that we can never make present. As a structuring absence in
the film, the mass extermination functions just like universality,
which itself is located in a constitutive absence.
13. Soon after entering the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, one
encounters a sign titled “The Victims” that reads, “The Holocaust was
the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million
Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Millions of others,
including political opponents, persons with disabilities, homosexu-
als, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, and Soviet
prisoners of war, died as a result of Nazi persecution and mass mur-
der.” According to the logic of the museum, political killings were inci-
dental to the Nazi project, which had Jewishness as its primary tar-
get. But this logic misses the fact that the first concentration camps
contained political prisoners and that the Nazis targeted the Jews as
their political enemy. One searches in vain for a political account of
the Holocaust in the otherwise compelling Holocaust Museum. Best
to read Paul Eisenstein’s Traumatic Encounters prior to going.
14. As Arno Mayer points out, “The Judeocide was forged in the fires of a
stupendous war to conquer unlimited Lebensraum from Russia, to crush
the Soviet regime, and to liquidate international bolshevism.” Arno J.
Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in His-
tory (London: Verso, 2012), 234.
15. The one highlight of Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946)— otherwise
perhaps his worst film— occurs at the moment when ex-Nazi Charles
Rankin (Orson Welles), hiding under a false identity in a small
 3. Universal Villains Z 231

Connecticut town, accidentally gives himself away to investigator

Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) from the War Crimes Commis-
sion. During a dinner with Wilson, at the very moment he tries to
throw suspicion away from himself by impugning Germany for its
collective refusal of justice and human solidarity, he reveals his Nazism.
When someone at dinner objects that Marx constitutes an exception
to this indictment of all Germans, Rankin responds, “Marx wasn’t a
German; he was a Jew.” Later, Robinson reflects that this is exactly
the sort of claim a Nazi would make— as he says, “Who but a Nazi
would deny that Marx was a German because he was a Jew?”— and it
ultimately leads to the death of Rankin.
16. Alfred Rosenberg notes, “From the patriarchs . . . a single line extends
up to Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and to all the Jewish Bolsheviks
who have served the ‘cause of freedom.’” Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth
of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Con-
frontations of Our Age, trans. Vivian Bird (Newport Beach, CA:
Noontide Press, 1982), 300.
17. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, rev. ed. (New York:
Holmes and Meier, 1985), 8– 9.
18. It is not coincidental that Hilberg was especially conservative on the
question of Israel. Because he viewed Nazism as a universal evil that
attacked Jewish particularity, he believed that the Jews had to vigor-
ously defend that particularity in the form of a nation.
19. In 2005, the BBC created a six-part documentary history of the Holo-
caust titled Auschwitz: The Nazis and “The Final Solution”— a title that
bespeaks the ubiquity of this shorthand.
20. The association of the Holocaust with the mechanization of modern
industry is what leads Martin Heidegger to compare the Holocaust
with modern agriculture. Heidegger states, “Agriculture is now a
mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of
corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the
blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of
hydrogen bombs.” Martin Heidegger, “Positionality,” in Bremen and
Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Think-
ing, trans. Andrew  J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2012), 27. While many have rightly assailed Heidegger for the
 232 Y 3. Universal Villains

comparison that he makes in this statement, this association stems

directly from use of Auschwitz as shorthand for the Holocaust. In both
cases, modernity shoulders part of the blame that should properly
belong to Nazism’s rejection of the universal.
21. Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans.
Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1983), 34.
22. Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning
(New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 208.
23. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998),
114.
24. When Marxists defend Marxism against the crimes of Stalin by claim-
ing that these were just the crimes of one deranged individual, they
inadvertently betray their lack of allegiance to Marxism in their defense
of it. Privileging of an individual in history, even for the sake of excul-
pating an emancipatory theory like Marxism, cuts against the foun-
dation of the Marxist theory of history, which sees history as the ter-
rain of class struggle. For Marx, it is only the bourgeois historian who
credits an individual with having a major impact on the development
of history.
25. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the
Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1999), 29.
26. J.  V. Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, Marxists Internet Archive,
https:// w w w . marxists . org /reference /archive /stalin / works / 1924
/foundations-leninism /ch08.htm.
27. Merleau-Ponty attempts to redeem the Show Trials (and specifically
the trial of Nikolai Bukharin) by invoking the future of universal
equality that the trials point toward. He writes, “Bourgeois justice
adopts the past as its precedent; revolutionary justice adopts the future.
It judges in the name of a Truth that the Revolution is about to make
true; its proceeding are part of a praxis which may well be motivated
but transcends any particular motive.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. John
O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 28. Here, Merleau-Ponty places
 3. Universal Villains Z 233

Stalin on the side of the universal, in the same way that Stalin envi-
sions himself.
28. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 207.
29. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourn-
ing, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1994), 75.
30. The most influential theorists in this movement of a nonuniversalist
Marxism were Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, who forged a new
conception of alliance politics. The basic problem with their version of
alliance politics is that it starts with the a priori abandonment of uni-
versality and then attempts to build coalitions that strive for this lost
universality but never get there. In the 1980s and 1990s, this theory of
liberal politics had an outsized impact because it spoke both to the sus-
picion of the universal and the unarticulated sense that it might be
necessary. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985).
31. While Foucault adopts the analysis of events in terms of power from
Nietzsche, he enacts a moralization of Nietzsche that the latter would
find completely reprehensible.
32. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Inter-
views & Other Writings, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John
Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 126.
33. Foucault explains, “Archaeology is a comparative analysis that is not
intended to reduce the diversity of discourses, and to outline the unity
that must totalize them, but is intended to divide up their diversity into
different figures. Archaeological comparison does not have a unifying,
but a diversifying, effect.” Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge,
trans. A.  M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, 1972),
159–160.
34. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Politics: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 3. Fou-
cault adds, “I start from the theoretical and methodological decision
that consists in saying: Let’s suppose that universals do not exist.” Fou-
cault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 3. For Foucault, whether one turns to the
universal or not is the result of a decision, as he makes clear here. He
 234 Y 3. Universal Villains

doesn’t consider the possibility that the universal might be operative

regardless of one’s decision or in direct contrast to it.
35. Foucault’s conception of the universal imagines it functioning as a pure
form, which is why he sees it as at once dangerous and impossible. For
him, the universal would provide an empty form into which one would
pour particular content. When he discusses freedom later in The Birth
of Biopolitics, he buttresses this claim by pointing out that freedom is
always a particular practical relationship rather than a universal to
be realized. Foucault states, “We should not think of freedom as a
universal which is gradually realized over time, or which undergoes
quantitative variations, greater or lesser drastic reductions, or more or
less important periods of eclipse. It is not a universal which is particu-
larized in time and geography. Freedom is not a white surface with
more or less numerous black spaces here and there and from time to
time. Freedom is never anything other—but this is already a great
deal—than an actual relation between governors and governed, a
relation in which the measure of the ‘too little’ existing freedom is
given by the ‘even more’ freedom demanded.” Foucault, The Birth of
Biopolitics, 63. This conception of freedom is not just attack on the
universal but also an implicit critique of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre’s
universalism provides a point from which Foucault constantly main-
tains his distance.

4. Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

1. In the original essay from which this chapter derived, I made the
unconscionable error of positing the existence of a capitalist universal
as the hidden engine driving subjectivity in the capitalist system. This
cannot be correct because the commodity form is not an authentic uni-
versal. It is constantly seeking new subjects and new territory to trans-
form through commodification, which universality doesn’t do. Uni-
versality is only promised, never attained under capitalism. Given the
magnitude of this error, please don’t see Todd McGowan, “The Par-
ticularity of the Capitalist Universal,” Continental Thought and Theory
1, no. 4 (2017): 473–494. The archived existence of this essay is itself the
punishment for the sin of having written it.
 4. Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 235

2. When Jacques Lacan develops his theory of the four discourses in Sem-
inar XVII, he provides a way of conceptualizing capitalism’s relation-
ship to traditional society in terms of the type of social link it estab-
lishes. Whereas traditional society organizes the social link around an
explicit master signifier, capitalism does not. This contrast is clear in
the different figures that take up the position of what Lacan calls the
agent in the discourse. In the master’s discourse (which is the social
link of traditional society), the master signifier (S1) occupies the place
of the discourse’s agent. The master signifier founds the social link. In
his lectures in Seminar XVII, Lacan contrasts the master’s discourse
with three others: university discourse, the hysteric’s discourse, and the
discourse of the analyst. In university discourse (which resembles the
social link of capitalism), knowledge (S2) occupies the position of
the agent, while the master signifier drops to the position of the truth,
operating stealthily below the agent. This indicates that this discourse
ultimately supports the master, through in a furtive way. The next year
after Lacan introduces the four discourses, Lacan suggests the exis-
tence of a fifth—the capitalist discourse, which is distinct from that of
the university. It is no longer the master signifier or knowledge in the
position of the agent, but the divided subject (the barred S). The mas-
ter signifier remains, as in university discourse, in the place of the truth.
Lacan’s point is that capitalism foregrounds the divided subject and its
desire in order to serve the distinct structure of mastery that it creates.
While speaking in Milan on this additional discourse, Lacan claims
that “the exploitation of desire is the grand invention of the capitalist
discourse.” Jacques Lacan, “Excursus,” in Lacan in Italia: 1953–1978
(Milan: La Salamandra, 1978), 84. Capitalist discourse uses the desire
of the subject in the service of the hidden truth of the master signifier.
In this sense, for Lacan, it shares the structure of university discourse,
though it employs a different agent.
3. In Realizing Capital, Anna Kornbluh notes how subjects become inev-
itably caught up in “the repetitive, immutable, immeasurable propul-
sion of Capital’s drive. Drive in its blindness, in its immanence, in its
absoluteness, in its infinity, bespeaks a force terrifyingly indifferent to
the subjects it animates.” Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Finan-
cial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham
 236 Y 4. Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

University Press, 2014), 127. Kornbluh’s insightful analysis of the capi-

talist drive reveals that not only is this drive to accumulate indifferent
to the subjects that it ensnares but that it is also indifferent to the
object of increased accumulation. The drive to accumulate satisfies
itself in accumulating, not in having accumulated. This is why there is
never enough in the capitalist universe.
4. Marx states clearly, “As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His
soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the
drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part,
the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of sur-
plus labour.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol-
ume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 342. In order to
function as the personification of capital in this way, individual capi-
talists have to believe in their own individual agency.
5. Whereas the dying Christ points out that the enemies of the universal
who put him to death do not know what they do, under capitalism pro-
ponents of the commodity form are the ones who act unknowingly.
6. Though he had no acquaintance with capitalism, Aristotle, if he had
had the chance, would undoubtedly have labeled capitalist society a
perversion. In the Politics, he condemns rule focused on the particular,
which is what capitalist society requires, as perverse. He states, “Gov-
ernments which rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the
one, or of the few, or of the many, are perversions.” Aristotle, Politics,
trans. B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan
Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1279a:29–30.
What Aristotle can’t imagine, because he has no experience of capi-
talism, is how a focus on private interest can become the vehicle for
the perpetuation of society as whole.
7. The fact that the society’s structuring principle becomes unconscious
in the capitalist epoch makes the discovery of psychoanalysis possible.
In earlier epochs in which the authority was conscious, it would have
been impossible for Freud to discover the effects of the unconscious. It
is only with the bizarro world of capitalism that the existence of the
unconscious would become evident for someone like Freud to recog-
nize it. Which is not to say that psychoanalysis is just a capitalist
endeavor. Given the structure of capitalism, paying attention to the
unconscious is the only path to challenging this structure.
 4. Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents Z 237

8. The romantic image of true capitalists as those who produce things

rather than just speculating on the stock market is a fantasy that helps
to justify the capitalist system. The fantasmatic dimension of this image
becomes evident in one of the most powerful fantasy films of the 1990s.
In addition to its depiction of prostitution on the streets of Los Ange-
les as the path to untold riches, the hit film Pretty Woman (Gary Mar-
shall, 1990) shows a ruthless stock trader, Edward (Richard Gere),
converting at the end of the film to a capitalist who actually produces
commodities rather than just speculating on them. The film presents
this conversion as an ethical turn operating in parallel with Edward’s
realization of his love for the prostitute Vivian (Julia Roberts). But just
like the romance of the prostitute with the millionaire, the image of
the capitalist who really produces things disguises how capitalism
works.
9. Though there are traders who specialize in socially conscious trading—
investing only in companies that don’t destroy the environment, that
treat workers well, and so on—this specialty enables them to attract
the capital of those who would might otherwise withdraw their capital
from the market. They are thus aiding unbridled accumulation through
their discriminating accumulation.
10. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 230.
11. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations (Hamburg: Management Laboratory Press, 2008), 343– 344.
12. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Penguin,
2009), 214.
13. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 214.
14. For more on the subject’s sacrifices for capitalism, see Todd McGowan,
Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016).
15. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans.
Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 150. Marx
expresses this same idea in different terms in the first volume of Capi-
tal. There, he says, “There develops in the breast of the capitalist a Faus-
tian conflict between the passion for accumulation and the desire for
enjoyment.” Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 741.
16. Marx states, “Capitalist production can by no means content itself with
the quantity of disposable labour-power which the natural increase of
 238 Y 4. Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents

population yields. It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial

reserve army which is independent of these natural limits.” Marx, Cap-
ital, Volume 1, 788. This industrial reserve army depresses the wages
that labor can earn and thus facilitates the accumulation of capital.
17. I have been guilty of reproducing exactly this line of argument with
an outstanding graduate student, despite recognizing all along the
structural nature of the unemployment he would confront. The fact that
he did ultimately obtain a desirable position further ensconced me in
the illusion of the particular perspective.
18. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 381.
19. The contempt for those who necessarily fail in the capitalist system
reveals its basic hostility to the project of Christianity. Whereas capi-
talism traps subjects in their particularity, Christianity highlights their
participation in the universal like no other religion. Whereas capital-
ism scorns those left behind, Christianity sees in them the figures of
its universality. The fact that capitalism emerged where Christianity
dominated is one of the greatest perversities in human history.
20. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 229– 230. In his Philosophy of Money, Georg
Simmel makes a related point. He notes, “Money has provided us with
the sole possibility for uniting people while excluding everything per-
sonal and specific.” Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 2nd ed.,
trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 1990),
345.
21. Kojin Karatani points out that the main appeal of money is its ability
to allow us to transcend any identity. With money, identity becomes
exchangeable. He writes, “People turn to money because it is the gen-
eral equivalent form that offers direct exchangeability. This fetishism
of money is expressed in our desire to avoid the selling position—that
is, subordinating ourselves to the will of others— and, instead, to seek
the position from which we can exchange directly at any time.” Kojin
Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, trans.
Sabu Kosho (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 169–170. In Karatani’s
terms, being in the selling position means precisely not being stuck in
an identity.
22. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin,
1993), 163–164.
 5. This Is Identity Politics Z 239

23. Capitalism’s destruction of identity leads Gilles Deleuze and Félix

Guattari to celebrate it as the paradigmatic revolutionary system. The
only problem with capitalism, as they see it, is that it doesn’t go far
enough. They write, “Capitalism and its break are defined not solely
by decoded flows, but by the generalized decoding of flows, the con-
junction of deterritorialized flows. It is the singular nature of this
conjunction that ensured the universality of capitalism.” Gilles Deleuze,
and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen  R. Lane (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 224. Identity is an arresting of
flows, and when capitalism decodes flows, it frees us from the trap of
identity.
24. Those who refuse to bake cakes for gay couples experience their posi-
tion as a radical one, but they don’t recognize themselves as rebels
against capitalism. They are convinced that they rebel against modern
secularism. They can’t see the commodity form that their rebellion tar-
gets because it is constitutively invisible.
25. Marx, Grundrisse, 286.
26. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964),
43.
27. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin, 1943), 213.
28. Nazism’s challenge to communist universality drove many conserva-
tive political leaders in Great Britain and the United States to see Hit-
ler initially as an ally rather than as a threat. They saw in his brand of
identity politics a buffer against the omnipresent threat of a universal-
ist anti-capitalism.
29. Quoted in Ed Pilkington, “Obama Angers Midwest Voters with Guns
and Religion Remark,” The Guardian, April 14, 2008, https://www
.theguardian.com /world /2008/apr/14 / barackobama.uselections2008.

5. This Is Identity Politics

1. Evangelical Christian groups believe in the pliability of identity
every bit as much as Judith Butler. This belief leads some of them
to  force teenagers into conversion therapy programs that aim at
 240 Y 5. This Is Identity Politics

heterosexualizing them. Although they view identity as completely

pliable, they nonetheless believe that it defines who one is.
2. Most American universities now ask incoming students to choose what
pronoun they would like to identify as their own. Typically, the uni-
versities offer more than just two choices—he or she. Many, like the
University of Vermont where I teach, include they as the third option,
but some are even more expansive in their offerings. None could ever
be expansive enough.
3. The conspicuous instance of the failure to accept racial identity as a
free choice is Rachel Dolezal. In 2015, public pressure forced Dolezal
to resign from her post as regional president of the NAACP amid con-
troversy that she invented stories of hate crimes against her. As the
alleged fabrications came to light, so too did the fact that she was white
rather than black. Later, Dolezal gave up her claim to being black by
birth but continued to insist that she identified as black. This argu-
ment did not find widespread acceptance.
4. As a teenager, I once had a conversation with a fellow fervent funda-
mentalist Christian about the nature of the afterlife. She took extreme
delight in describing the view that we would have of the damned,
including her recently deceased nonbelieving brother. My recoil from
her delight was perhaps the first step on my own road to perdition.
5. Saying that members of a nation had little to enjoy about their nation
is, of course, the ultimate compliment that one can pay to them.
6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hack-
ett, 1994), 76.
7. The logic of universality works in precisely the opposite direction: for
universality, to fail is to succeed.
8. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin, 1971), 118.
9. This is why Donald Trump could never build a fully successful border
wall. Since most immigrants do not simply sneak across the border, a
wall cannot serve as an effective tool against immigration. That said,
any type of barrier that genuinely kept immigrants out of the United
States would completely defeat Trump’s political project.
10. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 54.
 5. This Is Identity Politics Z 241

11. When he proclaimed the end of the Iraq War, George W. Bush spoke
in front of an immense banner that read “Mission Accomplished.” The
fact that the war carried on for many years gave the lie to this banner,
which made it the mark of disidentification with him for many. Per-
haps he should have had the banner say “My Struggle” instead.
12. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 661.
13. Joseph Goebbels, “Total War,” in Landmark Speeches of National Social-
ism, ed. Randall L. Bytwerk (College Station: Texas A&M Univer-
sity Press, 2008), 117.
14. Martin Luther is a middle point between the anti-Semitism of the
Catholic Church and that of Hitler, which is why his treatise The Jews
and Their Lies is so popular among Nazis. Luther condemns Jews for
their refusal of Christian universality, but he views them as so recalci-
trant in their particular identity that he dismisses efforts at conversion
and proposes violence instead. Although Nazi Jules Streicher defended
himself at Nuremberg by comparing his anti-Semitism to that of Luther,
a gap nonetheless remains. Luther continues to see the danger of Jewish-
ness as that of particularity, not of universality, as the Nazis would.
15. Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of
the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age, trans, Vivian Bird
(Newport Beach, CA: Noontide Press, 1982), 300– 301.
16. To be clear, Nazism’s transformation of the figure of the Jew was not
sui generis. Others in the West responded to the prominent Jews
involved in the Russian Revolution with anti-Semitic critiques. Win-
ston Churchill is here a representative figure. He fears Jewish com-
munism but sees it as a betrayal of the more natural Jewish project—
nationalism or Zionism. In a 1920 article titled “Zionism Versus
Bolshevism,” Churchill writes, “There is no need to exaggerate the part
played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about
of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part
atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs
all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the
leading figures are Jews.” Winston Churchill, “Zionism Versus Bolshe-
vism,” Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), February 8, 1920, https://en
.wikisource.org/wiki/Zionism_versus_Bolshevism, 5. Though Churchill
acknowledges the same threat that Hitler sees (five years earlier!), he
 242 Y 5. This Is Identity Politics

nonetheless continues to identify Jewish nature with identity and

sees the universalist turn to communism as a betrayal of this identity.
This distinguishes him from the new form of anti-Semitism that the
Nazis practice, despite his sympathy with Hitler on the question of
Judeobolshevism.
17. Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning
(New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 5.
18. Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution”
in History (London: Verso, 2012), 96. Mayer adds, “They authenticated
the nonuniversalist character of their latter-day imperial pretense with
their specious social Darwinist and racist lore.” Mayer, Why Did the
Heavens Not Darken?, 96.
19. As a result of this and other similar statements, Alain Badiou sees Saint
Paul as a central figure in the discovery of universality. He claims, “Paul
is a founder, in that he is one of the very first theoreticians of the uni-
versal.” Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans.
Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 108.
Despite his explicit atheism and his refusal to give religion the status
of what he calls a truth procedure, Badiou nonetheless sees Saint Paul’s
relationship to Christianity as the paradigm for fidelity to the event.
20. According to François Julien, “The uniform is the perverted double of
that universal which is now being spread by globalization. As it satu-
rates the world, it surreptitiously masquerades as the universal with-
out being able to evoke its legitimacy.” François Julien, On the Universal:
The Uniform, the Common, and Dialogue Between Cultures, trans. Michael
Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), xi.
It is the dominance of global capitalism that forces Julien to employ
the category of the uniform. Though capitalism accommodates itself
perfectly to a wide variety of disparate contents, it does so provided
that they are amenable to the commodity form. The commodity form
is how the uniform manifests itself today.
21. Slavoj Ýiĥek repeatedly makes the point that we can only discover
universality through taking a side rather than in attempting to remain
neutral or encompass both sides.
22. Both fundamentalist Christianity and Islamism seem like excep-
tions to this characterization of identity politics. Both belong to a
 6. This Is Not Identity Politics Z 243

proselytizing tradition and constantly seek out new adherents. This

indicates that within both, in contrast to Nazism or America First,
there is some remaining connection with the universalist project of
Christianity and Islam. But at the same time, their preference for
death for the faithless rather than conversion shows that the any uni-
versality that they continue to harbor is only a remnant and no longer
active.
23. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere,
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth, 1961), 114–115.
24. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 113.
25. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin,
1993), 242.
26. In the Grundrisse, Marx also contends that freedom and equality do
not exist as values prior to capitalism’s introduction of the fiction of
free and equal exchange. To believe in them as values is to fall for an
idealist ruse, like the Jacobins in the French Revolution. He says,
“Equality and freedom are . . . not only respected in exchange based
on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the
productive, real basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas they are
merely the idealized expression of this basis; as developed in juridical,
political, social relations, they are merely this basis to a higher power.”
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 245. Marx here overlooks the Christian mes-
sage of universal equality, which certainly predates the capitalist epoch.
27. Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” trans. C. M. Baines,
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol.  14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957),
121–122.

6. This Is Not Identity Politics

1. This is evident in the critique of identity politics that libertarian Bren-
dan O’Neill authors. He complains, “The politics of identity is stron-
gest among the young, especially on campus. There, the dread phrases
‘As a woman’, ‘As a gay man’ and ‘As a Muslim’ are commonplace.
Things have gone so far that some students now insist that you ask a
 24 4 Y 6. This Is Not Identity Politics

person what their preferred gender pronoun is before addressing them,

on the basis that if you were to use the wrong one— such as calling a
man a ‘he’ when in fact ‘he’ identifies as a ‘she’—their personhood
would be crushed and they would require months of therapy and tea
to recover. The politics of identity is narcissistic and needy. It encour-
ages self-reflection over solidarity with others, sectionalism over uni-
versalism.” Brendan O’Neill, “Identity Politics Has Created an Army
of Vicious, Narcissistic Cowards,” Spectator, February 19, 2015, https://
blogs.spectator.co.uk /2015 /02 /identity-politics-has-created-an-army
-of-vicious-narcissists /. The final word of this passage from O’Neill
reveals where he wants to position himself: on the side of the universal
against the particularism of identity politics.
2. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections of a Mul-
ticultural Society (New York: Norton, 1991), 18.
3. Jordan Peterson, “Identity Politics and the Marxist Lie of White Priv-
ilege,” Sovereign Nations Conference, Washington, DC, 2017, https://
www.youtube.com /watch? v=ofmuCXRMoSA.
4. The first sustained use of the term identity politics occurs in “The Com-
buhee River Collective Statement.” This collective made up of black
feminists met in the 1970s. They use the term to define a political strug-
gle that emanates from their own experience of oppression. But soon
after they deploy the term identity politics in their statement, these femi-
nists reject all forms of separatism, revealing that their political aims
are not actually confined to their experience. Their proposal is actually
one of radical universal emancipation, not narrow advances for their
own identity. While the women of the collective advocate for a social-
ist revolution, they contend that an economic revolution would not be
sufficiently universal to be truly emancipatory if it were not also anti-
racist and anti-sexist. Their insistence on universal equality demands
more than economic change, which they see as too narrow. If one takes
the time to read the statement, it quickly becomes clear that the origi-
nal manifesto of identity politics is actually a universalist tract, every
bit as much as, if not more than, the Communist Manifesto. The Col-
lective states, “We are socialists because we believe that work must be
organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and cre-
ate the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources
 6. This Is Not Identity Politics Z 245

must be equally distributed among those who create these resources.

We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is
not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our libera-
tion.” Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective
Statement,” https://americanstudies.yale.edu /sites /default /files /files
/ Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf, 1977. It is perfectly clear that
the paradigmatic statement of self-proclaimed identity politics does not
invoke identity as a political position but sees identity as a portal to
the universal.
5. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Colorblind Racism and
the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 5th ed. (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2018), 2.
6. My thinking on the universality of the Black Lives Matter movement
takes as its point of departure an excellent unpublished essay, “Mobi-
lizing the Universal: Black Lives Matter against the Postmodern ‘All,’ ”
by Ryan Engley (Pomona College). Given my debt to Engley’s essay,
any problems with my argument in this section should be sent to
ryan .engley@pomonia .edu. The highlight of Engley’s essay is the
critique of Judith Butler’s critique of All Lives Matter, which
wrongly identifies this movement and not Black Lives Matter with
universality.
7. Black Lives Matter, “In Response to the State of the Union,” Febru-
ary 14, 2018, https:// blacklivesmatter.com /pressroom /responsestate-of
-the-union /.
8. Rod Dreher, “The Moral Blindness of Identity Politics,” American Con-
servative, October  25, 2016, http://www.theamericanconservative
.com /dreher/moral-blindness-of-identity-politics/.
9. Rod Dreher, “The Moral Blindness of Identity Politics.”
10. Jacques Lacan defines feminine sexuality according to the logic of the
not-all in his Seminar XX. He contrasts this with a masculine logic of
the all, which attains wholeness through positing an exception out-
side the all. In this way, Lacan shows that the only possible universal-
ity is that of the not-all. The universality of the all is faked, just like
masculine potency.
11. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality
in American Life (London: Verso, 2012), 96– 97.
 246 Y 6. This Is Not Identity Politics

12. See, for instance, Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Iden-
tity Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).
13. One can read a sampling of conservative audience responses that make
these charges on imdb.com. See the User Reviews section for Zootopia
at https://www.imdb.com /title/tt2948356/.
14. One of the great filmic depictions of how overcoming identity politics
is necessary for engaging universal equality is John Sayles’s Matewan
(1987). In this film, white miners must abandon their racism in order
to strike alongside black miners (who must abandon their suspicion of
the whites) instead of viewing these miners as excluded from their iden-
tity and thus not partaking equally in the universal.
15. One of the chief competitors for this honor would be the Arab Spring
of 2011. Like the gay marriage movement, the Arab Spring sprang out
of the articulation of a universalist impulse. But it did not have the
lasting impact of the gay marriage movement: instead of producing an
outbreak of more egalitarian regimes, it led to a reactionary rebuttal,
leaving people in a position worse than when the revolt began. It is as
if the Arab Spring moved directly from the storming of the Bastille to
Napoleon, without any intervening years of exploding equality.
16. Mari Ruti provides an outstanding account of these theoretical objec-
tions and reveals just how compelling they are. She states, “Queer crit-
ics of gay marriage see marriage as the rotten foundation of a thoroughly
rotten system.” Mari Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s
Defiant Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 16. She
almost persuaded me.
17. The fact that diversity is common sense is grounds for questioning it.
When a social movement seems commonsensical or garners near-
unanimous approval, there is a good reason. Ideology determines
common sense. Movements that have the status of common sense are
almost always ideological movements.
18. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality
in American Life, 147.
19. Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 147.
20. See Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New
York: Knopf, 2013).
21. bell hooks, “Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In,” The Feminist Wire, Octo-
ber 28, 2013, https://thefeministwire.com /2013 /10/17973 /.
 Conclusion Z 247

22. The great depiction of the impasse that confronts the politics of rec-
ognition occurs in Hegel’s account of the dialectic of the master and
servant in the Phenomenology of Spirit. One seeks recognition from the
other, but if the other offers recognition, it testifies to the other’s
unworthiness to grant said recognition. I value the other as a site for
recognition only insofar as the other doesn’t capitulate and agree to
recognize me. Or, in its more modern expression, I would never want
to join any club that would have me as a member. Given Hegel’s defin-
itive statement in this discussion on the inevitable failure of the proj-
ect of recognition, the fact that several followers of Hegel advocate for
mutual recognition as a political program is one of the great philosophi-
cal problems in human history.

Conclusion: Avoiding the Worst

1. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York:
Continuum, 2009), 181.
2. In her book On Violence, Hannah Arendt notes, “Nothing, in my opin-
ion, could be theoretically more dangerous than the tradition of
organic thought in political matters by which power and violence are
interpreted in biological terms.” Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando,
FL: Harcourt, 1969), 75. Once we interpret politics as natural or as bio-
logical, we abandon the field to particularism.
 INDEX
Adorno, Theodor, 90– 92, 101,
103–104, 111, 216– 217n20, 227n1,
227– 228n3, 228n4–5
African National Congress, 3
Agamben, Giorgio, 103–104,
228n7
All Lives Matter, 73, 185–187, 245n6
Al Qaida, 63
American Civil War, 79–80, 226n16
American Revolution, 3–4, 37,
213nn1– 2
Amish, 151
Anti-Slavery Convention, 3
Arab Spring, 26, 246n14
Arendt, Hannah, 90, 92, 103,
110, 213n1, 219n15, 228– 229n8,
247n2
Aristotle, 40, 43–46, 50, 219n12,
222n25
Auschwitz, 92, 100–102, 145, 228n5,
231n19, 231– 232n20
Auschwitz: The Nazis and “The
Final Solution” (documentary),
231n19
Badiou, Alain, 208, 214n6, 216n18,
218– 219n8, 227n22, 242n19
Beauvoir, Simone de, 11, 18– 20, 22
Benjamin, Walter, 201
Berlin Wall, 62
biopolitics, 103–104
Birth of a Nation, The (1915 film),
221– 222n21
Birth of a Nation, The (2016 film),
51–53, 221– 222n24
Black Lives Matter, 73, 182–189,
198, 245n6
Blade Runner (1982 film), 157
Blair, Tony, 211
Blue Lives Matter, 185
Bolshevism, 5, 161–166, 169, 171,
230n14, 231n16, 241– 242n16
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 182
Boothby, Richard, 221n23
Brown, Michael, 182
Bukharin, Nikolai, 232– 233n27
Bush, George W., 63, 69– 72, 241n11
Butler, Judith, 54–55, 57, 222n26,
239– 240n1, 245n6
 250 Y Index
Calvinism, 52
capitalism, 16–17, 21, 24, 29, 47, 57,
63, 68– 71, 77– 78, 101, 106,
119–147, 151, 162–164, 175, 188,
195, 200– 204, 207– 210, 222n25,
229n9, 234n1, 235n2, 235– 236n3,
236nn4– 7, 237n8, 237nn14–15,
237– 238n16, 239nn23– 24, 239n28,
242n20, 243n26
Catholic Church, 100, 128, 167,
241n14
Chinese Revolution, 5
Christ, 236n5
Christianity, 51–53, 63, 99–100, 121,
124, 139, 150, 155, 166–167,
171–173, 221n23, 238n19,
239– 240n1, 240n4, 241n14,
242n19, 242– 243n22
Churchill, Winston, 241– 242n16
civil rights movement, 56
Clinton, Bill, 211
Clinton, Hillary, 198
climate change, 199– 205
Cold War, 207
colonialism, 19– 20, 35– 36, 55, 74– 79,
216n17, 217n1, 225n13, 229n9
Combahee River Collective,
244–245n4
Committee of Public Safety, 81–82,
208– 209
commodity form, 17, 24– 25, 119–132,
137–146, 229n9, 234n1, 236n5,
237n8, 239n24, 242n20
communism, 5– 6, 16, 31, 90, 94– 96,
99–100, 107–108, 111, 161–170,
173, 216n18, 229n9, 239n28,
241– 242n16, 244– 245n4
Confucius, 217n22
Constitution, U.S., 4
Copjec, Joan, 215– 216n16
Cultural Revolution, 5
Daiker, Donald A., 215n12
Dante’s Peak (1997 film), 201
Danton, George, 81
Day After Tomorrow, The (2004
film), 201
Dead Poets Society (1989 film),
217– 218n3
Declaration of Independence, U.S.,
4, 11, 214n8
Deleuze, Gilles, 40–41, 92, 112,
216– 217n20, 219n12, 223n1,
239n23
Derrida, Jacques, 21– 22, 112,
217n22
Descartes, René, 8, 214n7
Desmoulins, Camille, 81
despotism, 62, 72, 81–82,
226– 227n20
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques,
36– 37
Dolezal, Rachel, 240n3
Donaldson, Roger: Dante’s Peak,
201
Douglass, Frederick, 3, 45
Dreher, Rod, 184
Earthquake (1974 film), 201
Eisenstein, Paul, 227n1, 230n13
Emmerich, Roland: The Day After
Tomorrow, 201
empiricism, 214n7
Engley, Ryan, 238n17, 245n6
 Index Z 251
Enlightenment, 10, 75
epistemology, 38–40, 44–48, 54–57,
114, 200, 204, 222n25
existentialism, 43
Fanon, Frantz, 11, 18– 20, 22, 74– 79,
216n17, 225n10, 225n13, 225n15
fascism, 21, 159, 201
feminism, 18–19, 197–198, 215–216n16,
217n22, 244– 245n4
Fields, Barbara, 187, 196–197
Fields, Karen, 187, 196–197
Foucault, Michel, 92, 103, 111,
113–118, 216– 217n20, 218n8,
233nn31– 33, 233– 234n34, 234n35
French Revolution, 1, 3–4, 8, 26,
34– 37, 75, 80–84, 124, 213n1,
226n17, 243n26
Friedlander, Jennifer, 215– 216n16,
224n7
Freud, Sigmund, 172–176, 236n7
Furet, François, 107
Garner, Eric, 182
Gates, Bill, 132
General Motors, 139
Girondins, 83, 227n21
Goebbels, Joseph, 100, 166
Griffith, D. W.: The Birth of a
Nation (1915), 221– 222n21
Guattari, Félix, 239n23
gulag, 1, 5– 6, 64, 89, 107, 111–114,
195, 208– 209
Habermas, Jürgen, 111
Haitian Revolution, 26, 34– 37, 84
Harman, Graham, 216n20
Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 16, 87, 91– 92,
219– 220n16, 222– 223n26,
223n2– 3, 225n11, 225n15, 226n17,
227n1, 227– 228n3, 228n4, 247n22
Heidegger, Martin, 218– 219n9,
231– 232n20
Hemingway, Ernest: The Sun Also
Rises, 13–15, 215n12
Hilberg, Raul, 99–100, 104, 231n18
Hitler, Adolf, 99–100, 103–108, 145,
158–171, 229– 230n10, 241n14,
241– 242n16
Hobbes, Thomas, 25, 47, 54, 157
Holocaust, 89, 94–103, 145, 227n1,
227– 228n3, 230nn12–14,
231– 232n20
Holocaust Museum, 230n13
hooks, bell, 198
Horkheimer, Max, 216n20
House of Cards (U.S. TV show), 66
Howard, Byron: Zootopia, 189–192,
246n13
I. G. Farben, 145
immigrants, 30, 38, 56, 146–147,
162–163, 172, 240n9
inclusion, 6, 48–50, 72– 75, 78–82,
109, 113, 156, 170, 183–187,
193–196, 208
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
(1989 film), 105–106. See also
Spielberg, Steven
Iraq War, 69– 72
Iron Curtain, 63
Islam, 63, 122, 147, 159, 171,
242– 243n22
Islamic State and the Levant, 63
 252 Y Index
Jackson, Mick: Volcano, 202– 203
Jacobins, 3, 35– 36, 81, 83–84,
226– 227n20, 227n21, 243n26
James, C. L. R., 34
Jefferson, Thomas, 11, 214n8
Judaism, 152, 167, 221n23
Judeobolshevism, 165, 169, 171,
241– 242n16
Julien, François, 172, 225n10,
242n20
Kafka on the Shore (Murakami),
85–86. See also Murakami,
Haruki
Kant, Immanuel, 7, 20, 22, 116,
217n22; and freedom, 11–16,
214n6, 214n9; and moral law,
11–16, 93, 214n6; and racism,
213– 214n5
Karatani, Kojin, 238n21
Khmer Rouge, 5
Korean War, 111
Kornbluh, Anna, 235– 236n3
Ku Klux Klan, 220– 221n21
Lacan, Jacques, 215– 216n16, 220n20,
224– 225n8, 235n2, 245n10
Laclau, Ernesto, 54–55, 222n26,
233n30
Lakoff, George, 31– 33, 217– 218n3
Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah, 96, 98,
230n12
Leibniz, Gottfried, 214n7
Lenin, Vladimir I., 31
Le Pen, Marine, 207
Levinas, Emmanuel, 228n6
Lilla, Mark, 246n12
Lincoln, Abraham, 79
Localism, 20
Locke, John, 47, 220n18
Lorde, Audre, 217n22
Louis XVI, 82–83
Louverture, Toussaint, 34– 37
Luther, Martin, 99–100, 241n14
Luxemburg, Rosa, 217n1, 231n16
Macron, Emmanuel, 211
Mao Zedong, 5
mansplaining, 152–153
Marat, Jean-Paul, 226– 227n20
Marcuse, Herbert, 143–144
Marshall, Gary: Pretty Woman,
237n8
Martin, Trayvon, 182
Marx, Karl, 91, 229n9, 230– 231n15;
accumulation, 131–132, 237n15,
237– 238n16; commodity, 120,
123, 125; equality, 174–176,
243n26; errors, 7, 108–113, 225n15,
232n24; freedom, 11, 16, 243n26;
money, 137; nationalism, 31;
particularity, 129, 133, 136,
142–143, 165; religion, 51–52;
surplus value, 236n4;
universality, 16–18, 20, 26,
74– 79, 99, 108–113, 215n14,
226n16
Marxism, 31, 92, 110–116, 143, 190,
217n1, 232n24, 233n30
Matewan (1987 film), 246n14
Mayer, Arno, 170, 230n14, 242n18
McDonalds, 229n9
 Index Z 253
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 110–111,
232– 233n27
Milner, Jean-Claude, 213
Moore, Rich: Zootopia, 189–192,
246n13
Mouffe, Chantal, 233n30
Murakami, Haruki: Kafka on the
Shore, 85–86; The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle, 86–87
Napoleon, 36– 37, 83, 246n15
Nazism, 24, 82, 89–107, 110–111, 122,
144–147, 158–173, 210, 216n20,
227– 228n3, 228– 229n8, 229n9,
230n13, 230– 231n15, 231nn18–19,
231– 232n20, 239n28, 241n14,
241– 242n16, 242– 243n22
New England Patriots, 60– 61
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 113,
233n31
Night (Wiesel), 96
NKVD, 208
nominalism, 55, 164
Obama, Barack, 146–147
O’Neill, Brendan, 243– 244n1
Operation Barbarossa, 166
Operation Iraqi Freedom, 69– 72
Overney, Pierre, 115
Parker, Nate: The Birth of a Nation
(2016), 51–53, 221– 222n24
Pascal, Blaise, 214n7
patriarchy, 18–19
Paul, Saint, 171, 242n19
Peterson, Jordan, 179–180
Plato, 40–45, 50, 54, 218n8,
218– 219n9, 219n12
Pol Pot, 5
Popper, Karl, 92, 227– 228n3, 228n4
pragmatism, 43
Pretty Woman (1990 film), 237n8
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981 film),
105–106. See also Spielberg,
Steven
Rancière, Jacques, 228n7
Rand, Ayn, 54, 222n25
Reign of Terror, 36, 80–83,
208– 210, 226n17
Robespierre, Maximilien, 35– 36,
81–83, 226– 227n20, 227n21
Robson, Mark: Earthquake, 201
Röhm, Ernst, 229– 230n10
Rosenberg, Alfred, 166, 168, 231n16
Russian Revolution, 5, 26,
241– 242n16
Ruti, Mari, 217n22, 246n16
Sandberg, Sheryl, 197–198
Saint-Just, Louis Antoine de,
82–83, 226n20
Sarkozy, Nicolas, 216n18
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 111, 115–116,
215n13, 225n13, 234n35
Sayles, John: Matewan, 246n14
Schindler’s List (1993 film), 105–106.
See also Spielberg, Steven
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 178–180
Schmitt, Carl, 163–164
Scott, Ridley: Blade Runner, 157
Seneca Falls Convention, 3
 254 Y Index
slavery, 3–4, 11, 34– 37, 44–45, 50–53,
79–80, 83–84, 171, 196, 214n8,
221n23, 221– 222n24, 226n16
Shoah (1985 film), 96, 98, 230n12
Show Trials (Soviet Union),
110–111, 232– 233n27
Simmel, Georg, 223– 224n4, 238n20
Smith, Adam, 129–131
Snyder, Timothy, 102, 169
Soros, George, 132
Spacey, Kevin, 66– 67
Spartacus, 34
Spielberg, Steven: Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade, 105–106;
Raiders of the Lost Ark, 105–106;
Schindler’s List, 96– 97, 106
Spinoza, Baruch, 214n7
Stalin, Joseph, 5– 6, 21, 24, 106–113,
170, 232n24, 232– 233n27
Stalinism, 21, 24, 64, 89– 94,
106–112, 213n4, 217n20,
228– 229n8, 229n9
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 3
Steinem, Gloria, 198
Stranger, The (1946 film),
230– 231n15
Strauss, Leo, 92
Streicher, Jules, 241n14
Suchomel, Franz, 98
suffragettes, 3
Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway),
13–15, 215n12
Tomšië, Samo, 217n21
tribalism, 29– 30, 33– 34, 48, 179,
227– 228n3
Trotsky, Leon, 110
Trump, Donald, 147, 156, 183, 98,
207, 240n9
Trump, Donald, Jr., 207
Trump, Eric, 207
Turner, Nat, 51–53
Volcano (1997 film), 202– 203
Wahnsee Conference, 230n11
Wal-Mart, 141
Weir, Peter: Dead Poets Society,
217– 218n3
Welles, Orson: The Stranger,
230– 231n15
White Lives Matter, 185
Wiesel, Elie, 96
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The, 86.
See Murakami, Haruki
Zimmerman, George, 182
Ýiĥek, Slavoj, 220n17, 222– 223n26,
242n21
Zootopia (2016 film), 189–192, 246n13