Universality and Identity Politics 9780231552301

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UNIVERSALITY AND IDENTITY POLITICS

UNIVERSA LIT Y A ND IDENTIT Y POLITICS TODD MCGOWAN

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press All rights reserved 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 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2019052933 LC ebook record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2019052934

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Mary Ann Smith Cover image: © Shutterstock

For Mari Ruti, the closest I had to a twin

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Finding Universality

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1 Our Particular Age 29 2 The Importance of Being Absent 3 Universal Villains

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4 Capitalism’s Lack and Its Discontents 119 5 This Is Identity Politics

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6 This Is Not Identity Politics 177 Conclusion: Avoiding the Worst 207 Notes 213 Index 249

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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hapters 2 and 4 contain work revised from earlier publications. I am grateful to Problemi International for permission to reprint some of “The Absent Universal: From the Master Signifier to the Missing Signifier,” Problemi International 2, no. 2 (2018): 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 trying 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 universalist project of education. I would thank my father as well, but he is not just structurally absent. Thanks to my brother, Wyk McGowan, who saw sooner than I the hollowness of capitalism’s isolated particularism. He is a political model for me.

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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 Alexander, Bea Bookchin, Hilary Neroni, John Waldron, and Hyon Joo Yoo—provided comfort by always expressing the appropriate level of invective whenever it accidentally chose a particularist text to study. Thanks to Clint Burnham, Danny Cho, Joan Copjec, Veronica Davis, Matthew Flisfeder, Adrian Johnston, Donald Kunze, Juan Pablo Lucchelli, Hugh Manon, Jonathan Mulrooney, Ken Reinhard, Frances Restuccia, Molly Rothenberg, Russell Sibriglia, Louis-Paul Willis, Jean Wyatt, Cindy Zeiher, and Slavoj 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 solidarity with other species. Anna Kornbluh’s strict formalism has often saved me from temptations offered by Giorgio Agamben. She is the only leftist

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I know as unapologetic as I am in her insistence on the emancipatory function of the state. Thank God that Quentin Martin believed enough in our solidarity to tell me how much he hated the first draft of this book. I hope that now it has become a bit less terrible thanks to his incisive reading, though I also hope that he 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 manuscript 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 written. His suggestions for this book stripped away the sentimentality that I wanted to cling to. I aspired to his level of ethical fervor but pulled back. At the last minute, Paul Eisenstein, putting everything else aside, read the entire book and provided valuable feedback. When I asked him to do this, I prefaced my request by wondering aloud, “How big a favor would be too big?” He responded, “I don’t understand the sense of your question,” letting me know that we have been in absolute solidarity from the beginning,

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when all we were doing was golfing and speculating about universality. Hilary Neroni did almost everything. Finally, thanks to Paul Eisenstein, Walter Davis, and Hilary Neroni. Their singularity comes from their unrelenting commitment to the universal.

UNIVERSALITY AND IDENTITY POLITICS

INTRODUCTION Finding Universality

AF TER THE GULAG The promise of modernity is the promise of universal emancipation. 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, modernity puts an end to any theoretical justification for depriving someone of freedom or establishing an unequal society. Universality means that everyone across all societies and within all societies shares in these values, that everyone is free, equal, and in solidarity, even if ruling social arrangements obscure this. Tradition provides an excuse for unfreedom and inequality, but modernity abolishes all such excuses. Any unfreedom or inequality becomes unjustifiable in the modern world. But a quick look around the modern world indicates that rampant unfreedom and inequality are everywhere. From its origins, 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 conditions in the Congo mining minerals for iPhones. Workers in

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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 leaders harden national divisions to protect the power of wealthy interests. The fact that these startling inequalities persist centuries after the dawn of modernity indicates that they are not just anomalies of the modern world but constitutive of it. In modernity, 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 successful 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 neighborhoods 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 evaporates 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

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groups—without ever defining justice, without ever naming the equality that would constitute justice. The absence of universalist 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 universality 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 imagination 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 Revolution, despite coming first, didn’t generate a catchy slogan like liberté, égalité, and fraternité, nor have as many exciting beheadings.2 The problem is that the American Revolution betrayed the universality of emancipation by excluding slaves from its emancipatory 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 contrast, those who wrote the American Constitution took pains to avoid mentioning slavery or freedom for slaves in order to gain

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approval from the slaveowners who helped to craft it. Instead of addressing the issue head on, the document makes oblique reference 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 allusion to slavery occurs in the fugitive slave clause, from Article IV, Section 2, which prohibits slaves from fleeing to states without 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 survey 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. Constitution 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,

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and universal emancipation slipped into the background. Universality began to seem itself the badge of oppression, as if invoking 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 emancipation. 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 revolution 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 others) 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 equality 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 fundamental misconception about what universality was. In the twentieth century, universal emancipation turned into butchery at the moment when the political projects betrayed the universality that animated them. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot all believed in the possibility of total belonging. To that end, they tried to create societies in which everyone could belong, failing to grasp that

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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 murderous 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 universality reshapes how we relate to each other and gives our politics a form that it otherwise wouldn’t have. Turning to a viable conception of universality is politically requisite. Without universality, 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.

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Emancipation is always universal if it is genuine emancipation. Struggling for freedom, equality, and solidarity for some and not others is not struggling for freedom, equality, and solidarity. If one’s struggle is not universal, if it does not have implications 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 gender 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 universalist project that they articulate and that remains viable today.

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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 identity that resists universality. Particular identity is a stumbling block to overcome, the site of prejudices and unthought inclinations, 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 singular or as an intersection of multiple aspects—is not a basis from which I can fight against ideology but the result of ideology’s operations. This contrasts it with universality. The most important figures 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 necessarily 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 alienates, 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.

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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 inherent 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 faithful 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 universal opens up the possibility for me to act freely, to act against what my ideological programming tells me to do. Only universality accomplishes this because only universality gives me distance from my ideologically given identity. Although emancipatory 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

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perceptions follow the demands of the social order in the way that we focus on what fits and has a place within the social structure. 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 something absent in the social field. It is an absence that goes beyond any social authorization. Universality cannot have a direct manifestation 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. Universal 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 universal lies in its imperceptibility.

KANT ’S STRANGE BEDFELLOW From the Enlightenment onward, universality comes to encompass freedom. Freedom becomes integral to political struggle, and emancipation implies universal freedom. Even if certain proponents of Enlightenment thinking try to restrict the range of their universal proclamations and thereby violate universality,

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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 inalienable 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 theorizing of universal emancipation to women and colonized peoples. But what holds all these thinkers together is their shared conviction that universality is liberating while particular identity represents an ideological trap rather than the site for potential 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 society and shows instead that our identity is the site of our unfreedom because it is given to us. We do not spontaneously produce our identity from our own free act. Identity has an external origin. For Kant, nature and society violently impose our identity on us. Identity is not even ours but the project of external (natural and social) determinations. When we locate our subjectivity in a particular identity, we tacitly accept this external determination 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 possibly be an act of freedom on my part. I have just taken up the categories made available to me and inadvertently testified to my

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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, disruptive 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 differences 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 understands that we require the universal law to break from all the

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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 oneself 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 intoxicated, champion bullfighting, and revel in anti-Semitism. But at the end of the novel, one of the characters in the book performs 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

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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 uprooting 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 possibility 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 stranglehold. 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 situation, 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

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to relate to it from a distance. Universality forges our singularity through its alienating effect that each subject responds to differently. Our singularity is neither our universality nor our particular 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 gender, 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 singularity of the subject becomes clear at the point when universality 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 violence 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 particular 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

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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 dialectical 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 provide the universal theory that he didn’t find in any of the socialist and communist thinkers writing around his time. As Marx sees it, it is only when individual workers abandon their investment 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 actually strengthens capitalism and its control over one’s existence. Freedom, if it is seen and pursued as a purely particular struggle, 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

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provides for more types of commodities to be sold. In our contemporary capitalist society, the goth can buy trench coats and dark eyeliner while the jock can purchase sweatpants and jerseys. 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 particular puts one in the capitalist mindset, where there is no universality 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 individuals 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 society 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 universal, 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 revolution frees not just the working class but all classes.14 As long as I fail to see my universal connection with others in capitalist society, 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.

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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 Western 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 otherness 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 contrary, it is the idea of a feminine identity that she finds oppressive. 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 obstacle 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 driving force for female subjugation. It is so difficult to abandon feminine identity, Beauvoir recognizes, 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 provides 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 particular 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 simultaneously undermines the masculine as well. Masculine identity depends on its feminine counterpart that affirms it as its complementary other. Without this support, masculine identity collapses. This is why the feminist struggle against feminine identity 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. Colonialism does not involve European universality because universality cannot be parochial in the way that the European colonial project 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 universality for particular identity is to commit the sin of Europe, though ironically today many criticize universality as a vestige of Eurocentrism. The fight against colonialism is a fight to recognize the universal equality and freedom that colonialism renders invisible. 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 genuine 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 universality 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 universals, we lose touch with the emancipatory project altogether. Universality, in contrast to identity, cannot but be emancipatory. 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.

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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 separates 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 emancipation 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 feature of oppression.18 Rather than freeing subjects from their ideological particularity, universality comes itself to be seen as an ideology that allows no quarter for difference or otherness. Fascism, Stalinism, and global capitalism all appear to operate through the imposition of their universality on oppressed particulars. 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 universality 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, deconstruction liberates us from the tyranny of the universal by highlighting 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 culture of the West; the white man takes his own mythology, IndoEuropean 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 Derrida, 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 particularity 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 collective 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 equality cannot be universal, they fall apart as values. When confined to a select group, they necessarily imply unfreedom and inequality 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 universality and corresponding elevation of identity make possible a clarification of both universality and identity. The political catastrophe 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 particulars 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 thinking about universality outside the context of the murderous regimes that invoked it. Stalin can indiscriminately kill peasants that he labels class traitors because he is imposing the universal 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 theoretically 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 Political struggles today appear as identitarian ones, not struggles partaking in the project of universal emancipation. But this situation is not just the result of anti-universalist theorizing. 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 commodity 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 commodity form. As a result, within the capitalist system, the content of every particularity becomes insignificant. The particular identities of the capitalist and the worker disappear in their roles as capital and labor in the same way that the use value of the particular object disappears in its exchange value as a commodity. The structure of capitalism vacates particular identity, leaving subjects with a contentless abstraction that few find satisfying. Capitalism’s evacuation of identity creates a vacuum that quickly fills. Identity politics emerges in response to the capitalist system.21 Although there is nothing necessary about the emergence 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 situation for the subject, an existential emptiness that the struggle for identity attempts to fill. Often, these struggles paint themselves as anti-capitalist or articulate critiques of aspects of capitalism, 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 identitarian 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 identitarians are always quarrelling about the need to recognize the specificity of their identity. We can never reach a point of equilibrium 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 conscious 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 possibilities. Identity politics hides the alienating quality of all identity and thus has an ideological function. But many of the movements that we think of in terms of identity politics are actually mislabeled universalist political projects. 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 universality 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 calling 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 universality 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. Universality 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 warfare. 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 without additional troops, the Right adds nativists, religious fundamentalists, 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. Particular 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 policies 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 economy 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 universality 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 universality 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 politics 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 conservative. It is that this way of seeing politics as a struggle between

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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 triumph 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 confrontation 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 transcends 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 fundamental 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 Russia’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 conception of what constitutes the form of political conflict shapes the possibilities that will be able to emerge in the actual political struggle. Others have emphasized the importance of form in politics. For instance, linguist and political theorist George Lakoff provides an instructive effort to establish the significance of form in political campaigning. Frustrated with the consistent failures

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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 conducive to conservatives (the Strict Father) to one favorable for liberalism (the Nurturing Parent). For Lakoff, winning the symbolic 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 particular might be able to win. Lakoff has no place for universality. 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 isolated 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 convincing for those who see the isolated individual as the political starting 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 universality 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 starting point is what constitutes the distinction between conservative politics of all stripes and emancipatory politics, even though this is not how the distinction is commonly understood. My

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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 opposition 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 particular revolt. Instead, Haiti revolted in the name of universal freedom, 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 revolutionaries 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 universality 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 universality 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 contended 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 pronounced the word slave in one of your decrees, you have pronounced your dishonor and—”5 Robespierre’s speech breaks off because the Convention erupted with contrasting hissing and applause, revealing how contentious Robespierre’s emancipatory 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 theoretical 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, Napoleon 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 continent. His emphasis on French particularity also produced a dramatically different attitude toward Haiti than that of Robespierre 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, Napoleon 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 trajectory from Robespierre to Napoleon is a trajectory from universal 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 Robespierre. 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 particular over the universal. An empire cannot be universal, and an emperor cannot be a figure of universality. Universality promulgates 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 Dessalines’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 universality. 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, Napoleon 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 particular, 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 particularity and universality. At times, the Right seems to make universalist 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 conservative. 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 shooting, 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 conservative 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 politics, 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 starting 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 knowledge and political orientations, even if those embodying the political orientation don’t recognize it. Conservatism depends on beginning with a series of particulars and then forming universals from the intersections of those particulars. The same holds for liberalism, which is why liberalism 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 universal, if we do, through the assembly of particulars. The genuine 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 intervention of universality. Given the individual point of departure, conservatism necessarily has an inherent suspicion of the collective. Since the individual comes first, the collective necessarily performs some violence on the individual when it subsumes the individual, unless that collective has its basis in a particular identity, like that of

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the nation or the religious group. Conservatives have no problems 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 recognizes that particulars have their existence through the universal. There is a fundamental bond that provides the basis for commitment 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 precedes 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 Aristotle, this distinction between leftism and rightism becomes clear in a way that defies our expectations. This contrast also explicates the connection between epistemology and politics. The current 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

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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 particular is to narrow our political possibilities and to demand one way for all. As one might imagine, this critique is in no way confined to Deleuze. It represents the theoretical doxa in the last half-century concerning the political implications of Plato’s philosophical project. Unlike Deleuze, Plato requires us to think beyond our commonsensical 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 universal, 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.

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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 content 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 apparently 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 genuinely 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 beautiful 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 existence. His point is not that philosophers actually see what lovers

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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 isolation. 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 support 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 progressive 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 system 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 universal’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

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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 conservative 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 ideals 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 disconnection. 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

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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), freedom from necessity in the realm of politics is impossible. Aristotle’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 rhetorically, “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 asking Frederick Douglass the same question in 1860. What Aristotle shows, unlike the slaveholder, is the connection between this political position and how we know. Aristotle cannot imagine a conception of politics that involves an appeal to universality 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 economy because he recognizes the necessity of universality in politics. 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 Aristotle, due to his decision to instantiate the universal, subsequently obscures. Universality is the lack in every particular.16 It is the insubstantiality of the particular, the dependence of the particular on

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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 noticeable. The lack that forges this connectivity is the site of universality. 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 particulars. The lack that makes such collisions possible is a universal 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 Aristotle does). This is the case not just with conservatism but also with liberalism, which always shares the conservative epistemological starting point.

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If the particular is the unassailable beginning of our thinking, as conservative and liberal thought have it, we must do everything 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 particulars safe. The sole point of any social organization would be maximizing the security of the particular, as it is for Thomas Hobbes. One might imagine the epistemology of the particular producing 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 perspective, 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 intrinsic relation to the other. Beginning with the particular leaves both conservatives (like Thomas Hobbes) and liberals (like John Locke) with an impoverished image of the state, one that provides the ideological basis for capitalist relations of production. Particularity cannot provide the basis for the kind of connection that would forge equality 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.

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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 version 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 emancipation, this marriage must be forged through universality rather than through particularity. There is no emancipation starting 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 perspective of this starting point, universality could only be a totality 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 recognition of differences in the United States aims at arriving at total inclusivity. Authorities at the U.S. Census Bureau create

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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 Including 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 universal 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

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whole. Adding up particular identities to create a representative whole is a failed political strategy. Each new addition only testifies to the fact that more are needed. When we start with particulars, 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 universality while at the same time avoiding the trap of inevitably leaving a particular out of the all. Conceiving of universality as total inclusion fails to consider how the structure of belonging depends on a necessary nonbelonging. 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 particular 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 difference between universality and belonging. It is only universality, 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 universality. There is no universalist racism, just as there is no

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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

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opium of the people.”22 Turner’s brand of Christianity functions 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 Christian 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 protocol 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

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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 envisions 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 rebels 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 universality in a way that Turner can recognize that he turns to revolt.24 Universality in Birth of a Nation becomes apparent when Samuel 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.

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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 conservative 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 discomfort 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 particulars. They are, to put it in the terms from above, disciples of Aristotle 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 ‘universal’ is never an independent entity, but only the set of ‘names’ corresponding to an always infinite and reversible relation

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between particularities.”27 Here, Laclau advances a nominalist philosophy that assumes that particulars exist and that universals do not. By reducing the universal to a name or set of names that indicates how particulars relate to each other, Laclau eliminates the universal’s epistemological priority, which is the foundation for any sustainable claim to collective responsibility. If the only bond between others and myself is our tenuous relationship, 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 universal. 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 assertion 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 avoiding 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 particularity as the starting point. Although the idea of beginning with particulars and focusing 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

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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 commences. 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 acceptance of the transgendered, the ongoing environmental catastrophe, 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 situation of immigrants, the transgendered, people of color, the working 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

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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 epistemology. 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 particulars without recourse to the universal, the individual endures the violence of constantly recognizing itself in isolation. Without 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 contingent 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 constructed rather than constitutive. As a result, conservatives constantly try to secure it through appeals to national or ethnic identity 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 collective 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 situation is altogether different. Universality is the condition of

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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 particular 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 particularity. They think of universality as what constrains particular identities to conform to its dictates. According to this view, universality 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 determines everything’s place within the structure rather than in what doesn’t fit in the structure. Universality stems from the failure of social determination, not its success. When people align universality with a force of domination, conceiving it like a popular clique, they assume that structures can be whole and that

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their determinations of the particulars within them are completely 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 structure 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 universality. 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 prejudiced against them, the league commissioner unjustly penalizing them, new rule enforcements designed to block their continued 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

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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 Patriots 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 driving force of universality. The Patriots, unfortunately, don’t recognize 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 Patriots’ 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 nonbelonging, which is the internal limit to any group. This nonbelonging is what a focus on particular struggles misses. Particulars 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 understand universality and particularity in this way, we don’t need to form a collectivity by adding up individual elements together.

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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 awareness 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 society 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 nonbelonging, it cannot assimilate nonbelonging as such. Mastery strives toward becoming total, but as it comes closer to eliminating 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 mastery by giving it something to act on and thus a reason for being. But despite the power exercised on it, the barrier proves unyielding 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.

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We can see this even in the case of the actions of the relatively nondespotic global capitalist order after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This event signaled the end of what was an intractable barrier for the capitalist order: the Iron Curtain. For a brief interlude in the early 1990s, it seemed as if this order would eliminate 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 capitalism’s totalization, a limit not just for capitalism but one that renders 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 constitutive absence for the structure. Nonbelonging is universal. No society can include us without simultaneously alienating 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

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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 supplement 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 unconscious. 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. Unfortunately, my will to diet is not an act of freedom, but the sabotage is. Freedom emerges out of an unconscious desire that doesn’t jibe with social demands, not in our free will. Acts of freedom

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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 paradox 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 perfectly, 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 obedience to it. This gap is necessary for both obedience and revolt. It enables me to invest in obedience through an act of identification 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 dramatic as a fantasy of murder. It could be as simple as the enjoyment 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 nonbelonging, not just corporations (which actually have incentives in place to produce belonging, like employment itself and

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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 differentiate 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 belonging 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 substantial 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 releasing 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.

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As Spacey’s demise indicates, social status based on belonging 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 difficulty of imagining such an event contrasts with the actual historical incidences of money losing all its value in economic crashes. These incidences are moments when the society’s collective 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 equality 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 discern. 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 impossible 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 transcends 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

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capitalist society that ideologically privileges an atomistic identity, 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 nonetheless exists universally. The moments when universal solidarity becomes clearly articulated are times when a shared failure to belong becomes apparent. This is why we experience solidarity during a crisis. Whenever 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 themselves 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 solidarity with those who don’t belong formed through the universality 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 targets of our charity. But these factors do not mitigate the universality 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

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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 confronts 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 participation in universal solidarity. At any point in our history, we can recognize our solidarity in nonbelonging and assert that universal values cannot exclude anyone, not even those who don’t belong.

FREEDOM IN FAILING If we examine the predominant universal deployed in the contemporary 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 determinants of our existence disappears, which is why so many people continue to invoke it. And yet, the widespread invocation 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

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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 imposition 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 illustrates 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 particularity of American capitalist freedom, which is the freedom to

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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 structures 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 missing. We discover the universal through what cannot be said, even as we name this absence as an absence. Every authentic universal refers to a lack. Universals bring us together not by imposing a common structure 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 emancipatory 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. Paradoxically, 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

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freedom on the Iraqis. There was a gap between Bush’s intention 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 opposing 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 despot that imposes an empty form on every particular content, the universal is what disturbs all despotism. This disturbance of mastery 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 harmonious 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 particularity, 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 universal, 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

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we cannot articulate it directly because it emerges as an absence. We access the universal through what doesn’t belong to a grouping, 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 saying, 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 proclaims. 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

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absence. By making evident the failure to constitute the universal, they articulate it in its true form. Because the universal is an absence, its appears where we assume it will not. It is the province 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 champion in universal terms. They articulate the universal in the challenge that the colonized or the proletariat poses to the hidden 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 universal inclusion that includes colonized peoples as those who don’t belong. In order to formulate its purportedly universal values 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 European universality, which is why he enjoins the colonized to abandon Europe. He doesn’t want to make Europe more expansive 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 universality but for the rejection of European false universality that

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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 distorts 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 statement about the unimportance of race but through the recognition 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 Enlightenment 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 illusion 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 discusses the link between the colonized recognizing their participation 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

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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 universal fight, a fight on behalf of universality. In contrast, colonial Europe’s expressions of universal equality betray authentic universality 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 receding. Europe can promise it because it will never arrive. This universality 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 nonbelonging 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

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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 exclusion 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 accommodate equality. That said, capitalism does depend on the principle 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 something additional in the bargain not paid for. This extra is the result of the capitalist’s initial advantage that resounds throughout 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.

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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 universal class insofar as its fight touches on the failure of the capitalist 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 universality 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 nonbelonging. 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

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universality because it is the result of mastery’s failure. The universal 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 outside that limits its pretension to universality. It is surely the case that the universal cannot include an enemy and remain universal. Even though universality involves struggle against an oppressive 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 identity. This is the case, for example, with the Confederacy in the American Civil War. The Confederacy did not fight for any universality 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

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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 particular 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 trying to turn authentic universality into a structure of universal belonging. The promise of belonging is the betrayal of the universal 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 inclusivity turned the revolutionary dream into the nightmare of the Reign of Terror. Terror is the attempt to force universal inclusion, 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

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must move from the universality of nonbelonging to the attempt to instantiate universality as a completed structure where everyone 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 everyone’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 nonbelonging 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 create 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, freedom requires despotic efforts to ensure its full realization for

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all—to forge total belonging—but it is just this commitment that betrays universal freedom. Despite Robespierre’s vehement opposition to the death penalty expressed in a speech before the Constituent Assembly on June 22, 1791, two years later Robespierre would become a leading 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 structure to which everyone might belong. The goal of universal belonging that overtook the French Revolution is the abandonment of the universal because there is universality only in nonbelonging. 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 realizable 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 figure 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 universality for the Revolution. Saint-Just argued against treating Louis XVI as a king or even as a fellow citizen. In this speech, he proclaimed, “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

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Saint-Just implicitly says by casting the king as an enemy combatant. 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 Terror arose because of the transformation that universality underwent during the course of the Revolution.20 The danger did not lie in insisting on universal freedom but in transforming universal 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 Jacobins 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 Revolution. 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 moderate 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 Revolution would lose its universality. Eventually, Robespierre’s fears about war proved prescient, as it provided Napoleon an opportunity to transform the revolutionary government into an empire.

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We gravitate to the idea that the universal promises total belonging because this simplifies our dealings with it. But believing 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 common with the Jacobins in France—that we can engage in politics. Without the universal, there is no politics. Universality provides 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 universal. 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 subject 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.

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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 disjunctiveness 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 apparently 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 coming 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 considerable distance from each other. What both share is not the murder but the blankness within, the times in which they completely lose touch with any sense of their identity. It is this internal blank space that Murakami’s narrative structure brings to

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light as the source of our universality. The blankness goes unexplained 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 emancipatory 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 presence of a universal absence. As Murakami shows in each of his novels, universality is freeing, 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

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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 universality” 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 subjects 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 twentieth century. The contemporary theoretical suspicion of universality 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 Stalinism as universalist movements—and locate their horrors in universalizing—they had the effect of fundamentally distorting our political landscape. The opprobrium that surrounds universality gained dominance through the theoretical reception of Nazism and Stalinism, a reception that hewed too closely to how

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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 twentieth 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 victim 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 understanding 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 deciphering 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 longlasting. Rather than seeing Nazism and Stalinism as particular crimes stemming from an abandonment or distortion of

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universality, the common interpretations of these phenomena characterized them as instances of the universal’s inhuman barbarism. 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 Stalinism). The deleterious effect of the predominant interpretation reverberates through the theorization of politics up to the present. We continue to exist in the wake of the fundamental misinterpretation of the horrors of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno is perhaps the exemplary figure of this widespread 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 theoretical energy on Nazism.) His analysis of Nazism links its eradication of difference in the figure of the Jew to the history of universalizing 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 particular into particularity follows the practice of a society that tolerates 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.

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Although Hegel is not to blame for the rise of Nazism, a philosophy that ceaselessly champions the “supremacy of the universal” 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 supremacy 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 universality. If universality is to blame for Auschwitz, then we must call universality into question. This type of theoretical judgment about Nazism as an exaggerated 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 otherwise 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 distortion, emancipatory politics becomes the assertion of particular identity rather than the striving for universality—which means that emancipatory politics ceases to be emancipatory politics,

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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 adherents 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 sensible response turns out to be an ethical rather than a political one: one must respect particular difference. We must take refuge in the ethical treatment of the other in order to avoid political violence toward this other.6 To a large extent, the prosecution of this ethical demand replaces politics.7 The ethics that replaces politics is not a Kantian ethic that foregrounds its universality 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 Stalinism was guilty of exhibiting too much respect for particular difference. 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 twentieth century treated them, they were political rather than ethical horrors, horrors that arose directly from the turn away from universalist politics. The misinterpretation of these movements

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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, secondarily, Gypsies and gay men.10 While the common understanding 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 political enemies of the Reich and communists.11 The initial attack on political enemies and communists bespeaks the political project of Nazism. But communists do not figure in the most widely disseminated depictions of the Holocaust. It is only as an afterthought, 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

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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 communists, 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 communists. They must be wiped out in order to get rid of their inherent 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 communists). 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 universality. Their inherent universality makes them disconnected from the soil and the identity that rootedness provides. It renders them incapable of being German. This universality is what the camps serve to extirpate. For Nazism, the stain of Jewishness is the hidden connection to the universal. Many interpreters—and all popular accounts— of the Holocaust ignore this Nazi fantasy, just as they ignore the communist victims. The elision of communists as the initial targets of Nazi suppression and the failure to mention the Nazism’s fantasy 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

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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 ferociousness that has not abated to this day. In Shoah, Claude Lanzmann heroically highlights the complicity of ordinary Germans and Eastern Europeans with the extermination, but he nonetheless 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 distortion have in common. Both films downplay Nazism’s political struggle against universality and the role that this struggle plays in the Holocaust. They transform Nazism from a rightwing 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 contemporary populist leaders and their disciples, this is directly attributable to an education about the Holocaust that excludes any analysis 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

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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 cellar, Goeth tries to share an intimate moment with his Jewish servant 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, relations 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 surroundings, 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

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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 antiuniversalist political one. The villains in Shoah whom Lanzmann secretly records are those who participated in the mass extermination without any ethical compunction. For instance, Lanzmann 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 recognize exactly what happened, gain an outsized importance relative to an interpretation of the anti-universalist politics underlying 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 complete 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

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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 specific identitiarian political philosophy.14 It was the result of identity 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 proclivity or Germany’s long history of anti-Semitism (though this history undoubtedly makes it easier to convince everyday Germans to participate). It targets the Jews because, in the Nazi fantasy, 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, confirmation 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 thoroughly 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 history of Christian anti-Semitic violence that, as he sees it, establishes the paradigm for the Holocaust. Hilberg identifies an unbroken through-line from the antiSemitism of someone like Martin Luther to that of Hitler. After

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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 historical 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 fundamentally 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 Holocaust, Hilberg’s assimilation of Nazism to the history of antiSemitic 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 privileged 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

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going on inside the camp testifies to the role that modern industrialism 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 capitalist 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 misplacing 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 follow from modernity. It is the effect of a reactionary identitarian response to modernity, which is what the shorthand term Auschwitz elides. Theodor Adorno is one of the great popularizers of this shorthand, especially through his famous dictum, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”21 By proffering Auschwitz as a synecdoche for the entire Holocaust, Adorno and others categorize the Holocaust as an industrialized annihilation. This is a miscategorization. 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.

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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 separate 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 particular 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 particularity 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 Holocaust is the most notable reaction to that revolution. It is a reactionary 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 politics, we cede too much ground to Nazism. The fundamental aim of Nazism was the elimination of any reference to the universal 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.

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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 theoretical 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 categorization of Nazism as a biopolitical rather than a traditionally political regime has won many adherents, in part because Agamben 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.

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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 status 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 annihilation of their fellow lice. The killing of Jews aimed at eliminating a je ne sais quoi that no one supposes animals to have, certainly not lice. But Agamben doesn’t see this. Agamben sees the Nazi crime as the universal’s destruction of Jewish particularity 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 misunderstand 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 universal 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

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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 conclusion 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 archaeologist 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 reactionary 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 indifferent to Nazi identity politics. They have the status of a universal evil. Spielberg goes so far in the third Indiana Jones film as to naturalize 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

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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 ideological victory. Echoes of Nazism remain threats because the appeal of identity resonates even louder today as the capitalist evacuation of identity has proceeded apace. For many thinkers, Nazism provides 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 threatens to engulf the whole world but because it refuses to think universally. Its efforts at world conquest stem from its lack of universality, 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.

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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 conception of universality, a belief that universal equality was an end to be fully realized through invention rather than a value discovered 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 Stalinism. As with Nazism, most interpreters of the Stalinist phenomenon take it as a primary exhibit for the lethal danger of insisting on universality to the exclusion of the particular. Stalinism is what leads François Furet to conclude that communism represents “a pathology of the universal.”25 Although Furet, a conservative, dismisses all communism because of the rise of Stalinism, his belief that Stalinism’s guilt lies in its excessive universality pervades the leftist analysis of the phenomenon as well. According 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 problem 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 Foundations 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 discipline. It scarcely needs proof that the existence of factions leads

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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 deviations must disappear within the Party’s universal mission. Although Stalin himself misunderstands Stalinism, it remains necessary to identify precisely how Stalin betrayed the universal. 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 abandon communist universality. It was just a strategic step toward the future universalization of communism that many other communist 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 universality. Stalin adds to this misconception by believing in his own ability to inaugurate the revolution and bring everyone within

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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 proletarian 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 collectivization on the peasants. When he enacted forced collectivization, what resulted was not total belonging but mass resistance and brutal famine. Because Stalin believed that he had ended nonbelonging through collectivization (which is the realization of what Marx foresees), he also had to find an explanation for why nonbelonging persisted in the form of recalcitrant peasants who would rather destroy their livestock than contribute 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, allinclusive universal. The fact that Stalin’s universality depends on enemies indicates that it is something less than genuine universality. Universality cannot have enemies and remain universality. The kulaks became the enemy that the revolution must eliminate in order to realize total belonging. But they could not have

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subverted the revolution on their own. Enemies among the Soviet leadership, primarily Trotsky, must have sabotaged the revolution from within and blocked the revolutionary end to all nonbelonging. Otherwise, it would have come about. The mass killings of peasants and the purges of the party leadership during the 1930s (highlighted by show trials) resulted from Stalin doubling down on Marx’s initial wager. Marx believed that the proletarian 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 Holocaust. 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 nonuniversalizing 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 Stalinism is, along with Nazism, its overinvestment in universality, few other theorists take up her lead explicitly when it comes to Stalinism. 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 explanation about what goes wrong with Stalinism, Maurice MerleauPonty, also wrote the major defense of Stalin’s Show Trials,

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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. Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes.”28 Here, Merleau-Ponty sees Marxism’s descent into Stalinism as a commentary on the fate of all revolutionary activity. But at least Merleau-Ponty remains committed to the necessity of the universal, 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 exception of Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and a few others, theorists 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

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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, “Deconstruction 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 without any longer being a Marxist in order to avoid any complicity with Stalin. Others take a similar path as they turn away from

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Marxism’s universal struggle toward a series of particular struggles. 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 overinvestment 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 thinkers 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 figure 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 program to particular political interventions. The ultimate practical result of Foucault’s particularism is the emergence of the critique 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 Friedrich 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

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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 characterizes the latter half of the twentieth century more than Foucault. 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 thinking 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 epistemological 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 movements 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 Foucault, his approach nonetheless establishes a pattern that predominates 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 identified 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

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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 landscape. Like other thinkers of his age, Sartre not only felt comfortable weighing in on a variety of political questions but did so with universal proclamations. Sartre established himself as a universal 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 factory, 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 differentiates between what he labels the universal intellectual and the specific intellectual. The former category clearly applies to JeanPaul 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 speaking 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 intellectual 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 specific local situations without recourse to universal proclamations,

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without doing what intellectuals from Immanuel Kant to JeanPaul 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 particulars 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 history of madness or medicine or punishment, for example, Foucault 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 particular as concrete reflects Foucault’s belief that practice has a priority 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

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starting with universals as an obligatory grid of intelligibility for certain concrete practices, I would like to start with these concrete 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 concerned 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 linking 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 domination. 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 universality 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,

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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 unwittingly 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 inherent 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 revolutionary 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 commodity 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 society as long as one submits to the commodity form, which means treating everything as a commodity to be exchanged and accumulated. This form dictates not just economic relations but every way in which people interact and even how they think about

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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 contradictions 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 commodity. Once one understands the dominance of the commodity form, one understands why capitalism works so well despite not giving individuals an explicit master with whom to passionately 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 structuring principle. Individuals display their devotion to capitalism not by openly proclaiming it but by retreating into their isolated particularity. This paradoxical structure gives capitalism its uniqueness 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 capitalism. 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. Blindness 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

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without any relatively consistent sense of identity. All individuals under capitalism are empty particulars bent on accumulating, 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 selfdivision of the subject with an image of wholeness, it is nonetheless unavoidable. By emptying out identity through reducing subjects to a pure particularity, capitalism puts them in an untenable 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 capitalist universe and thus a phenomenon as new as capitalist modernity 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

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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 evident 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 prevailing socioeconomic structure— capitalism— constantly undermines. Even when they are not explicitly anti-capitalist, fundamentalist movements such as these engage in an unending struggle to create what the global system itself renders impossible, 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 capitalist 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 inevitable 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 identity enables one to endure the prison of one’s isolated particularity without calling this particularity itself into question. As long as one can believe that one is one’s identity, one need not challenge the capitalist structuring principle. One need not call into question the commodity form. The commodity form continues

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to impose itself without disruption when we retreat into an identity. 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 functioning 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 commodity 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 reducible 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 consciously 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 capitalism destroys all traditional limits on production and consumption. A telling example of capitalism’s ability to blow through traditional limits on the accumulation of capital is the elimination

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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 history 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 tradition when a store opens an hour later on Sunday than on weekdays, 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 structure 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 champions 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 subjects 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.

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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 necessary ones. They speak to the basic way that capitalism mystifies how it works for those most involved in it. Self-deception about the structuring principle is the sine qua non for the functioning 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 people submit their particularity to the dictates of the ruling authority. Even though the authority can use deceptions like promising an eternal reward for obedience, people can obey straightforwardly 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 emperor’s dictates indicate the authority to which subjects must conform. In a theocratic society, the commands of the priest serve the same function. The content of this authority can be

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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 traditional 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 domination 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 eliminate the act of submission to a structure of mastery. Individuals continue to participate in a structure that guides their existence, but they cease to experience it as a structure of mastery. In other words, with capitalism, the society’s structuring principle 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 principle 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 subjects 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.

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This is clearest in the case of stock market traders. These figures 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 without 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 ideological illusion designed to suck unsuspecting labor into these areas of the economy. But it is at least possible to consider the alternative 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

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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 occupation as a way of finding satisfaction through making money. But what really happens in their trading is something else altogether. 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 soldiers 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 soldiers of the capitalist demand. Unlike conscious soldiers, they never hesitate between their particular interest and that of the

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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 invisible. It must remain invisible. Capitalism’s destruction of the public world and the commons is integral to its survival. By eliminating 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

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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 capital 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 understanding the relationship between the particular and the structuring 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. According to Smith, subjects seek out the most “advantageous employment” 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 seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations) Smith explains how the belief that accumulation is advantageous is a necessary deception 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

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Smith, is the path to ensuring one’s perpetual sense of dissatisfaction. 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 deception plays in the perpetuation of capitalism. He adds that this false belief that accumulation brings real satisfaction is the driving 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 fundamental axiom of endless accumulation demands. Accumulation 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 dissatisfaction. 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 Manuscripts of 1844, Marx details the choice that confronts the subject within the capitalist system. One can either invest oneself in the project of accumulation, or one can recognize that no additional number of commodities can deliver an ultimate satisfaction. Satisfaction is never total, despite what capital promises.

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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 accumulation 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 possibility of recognizing our satisfaction in order to satisfy the capitalist structuring principle. Individuals who spend their time accumulating continue to do so because they accept the dictate of the capitalist structuring 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

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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 capitalist 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 outcast. 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 individuals 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 employment, 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 minimum 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

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economy. But almost all economists accept that there exists what is called the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” (or NAIRU). If unemployment passes beneath this threshold, a crisis will ensue. The health of capitalism as a system 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 capitalist economy doesn’t determine which individuals don’t have jobs, it does require that at least some individuals are in this position. In this sense, even if the unemployed are lazy and unambitious, 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 numerous 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 graduates 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

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nothing but force those who succeed to work even harder themselves. 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 underemployed as long as the market demands it. Full employment would be just as destructive for the contemporary university system as it would be for the capitalist system at large. Universities would lose their ability to exploit contingent 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 academy by and large accept the notion that merit will be rewarded. Even when one knows full well that the unemployment is structural, 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 necessity. Examining the activities of particular unemployed individuals 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 college, 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

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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 currently 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 incapable 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 capitalist 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 particularity of capitalist subjectivity establishes the structuring principle as foreign. The capitalist subject cannot adopt the perspective of the capitalist system—with its requisite amount of unemployment—while remaining a capitalist subject. One perpetuates the capitalist system only when one doesn’t occupy oneself with its perpetuation. The contempt for the requisite unemployed is just one more indication of this inherent blindness.19

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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, nothing else. Capitalism provides commodities for individuals to enjoy, but it doesn’t offer any type of identity, which differentiates it from all other socioeconomic systems. It remains completely 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. Capitalism does not invent the general equivalent—there was money prior to the rise of capitalism—but it undergoes a radical transformation 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 equivalent 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 leveller, it extinguishes all distinctions. . . . Ancient society therefore 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

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innermost principle of life.”20 Traditional society rightly fears the leveling power of the general equivalent, but modern capitalist 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 particulars 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 particular identity makes us unable to simply take identity for granted, as traditional societies allow.21 Identity doesn’t disappear 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 annihilation is part of the emancipatory role that capitalism plays in human history. But it also renders all my choices of identity contingent 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. Capitalism produces a generalized identity crisis.

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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 society. But this type of identity vanished as soon as corporations recognized that it stands in the way of maximizing accumulation. 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 identity 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 relation, in the developed system of exchange (and this semblance seduces the democrats), the ties of personal dependence, the distinctions of blood, education, etc. are in fact exploded, ripped up.”22 In the wake of the general equivalent’s dominance, distinctions of identity cease to matter. Who I am becomes insignificant, despite the fact that capitalist ideology insists that all I have is my own particular interests. Capitalism gives me individuality while simultaneously making it worthless. This becomes apparent when we look at how the market operates. 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

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the capitalist employer than the middle-aged white man in Chicago, 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 particularity, 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 couples might find no one willing to make them wedding cakes. But in this case, the prejudice is external to the demands of capitalism, 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 identity 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

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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 executives at Wal-Mart didn’t exploit the possibility of underselling local retailers, other executives would. They act as capitalist subjects devoted to the commodity form that structures their existence. Their particular motivations are unimportant. The same logic applies to those at the other end of the spectrum. Workers who have jobs at Wal-Mart participate in the decimation of local retailers and the immiseration of those producing 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

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emptying out of identity and creation of individuals with no sense of belonging, capitalism paves the way for its own historical demise, which is exactly what Marx anticipated. But something 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 commodities. 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 confronts workers who attempt to follow the path of the capitalists toward accumulation, which is what all the apologists for capitalism 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

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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 industriousness, they would decrease the value of their commodity—labor power—so that it would earn less for all of us. Too much collective 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 interests 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 consumption, the more firmly will the underlying population be tied to various ruling bureaucracies.”26 Marcuse’s belief that the availability of consumer goods on a mass scale diluted the revolutionary impetus of the working class is not an isolated view. Most Marxists accept it because it seems almost self-evident. If workers can accumulate some goods (though they still cannot accumulate capital), they find enough satisfaction within the capitalist 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

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revolutionary potential. Twentieth-century capitalism discovered a solution to the problem of the emptiness of working-class subjectivity, a solution that kept this subjectivity from attacking capitalism. As tempting as it is to follow Marcuse in the direction of consumption, we should nevertheless reject this possible answer. Clearly, it does not go completely astray. The availability of consumer 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 capitalist 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, projects of identity politics arise in order to provide what capitalist subjectivity lacks. These projects have either a nationalist, religious, or ethnic hue—and some, like Nazism, manage to combine 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, capitalism would not be able to keep the working class at bay. In democracies, 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 capitalism, it continues to function in concert with these projects, even in their most extreme form.

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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 accumulation 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 enterprises accommodated themselves to the extermination and even made use of it. The most celebrated example of capitalist accumulation working in concert with the Nazi assertion of Aryan identity is the behavior of the company I. G. Farben at Auschwitz. 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 communism. This is also why Nazism had support among prominent conservatives throughout the world prior to the war.28

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Identity politics is not necessary for capitalist enterprises. Outside of I. G. Farben and a few others, they do just fine without it. However, identity politics is an absolute necessity for capitalism 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 passkey 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 fundamentalist 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 capitalist 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 identity 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 structure. 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

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or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”29 While Obama’s analysis undoubtedly 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 available 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 identity 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, nationalists such as Donald Trump, and purveyors of ethnic purity like the Nazis all supplement the denuded particularity of capitalist 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 enthusiasm 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 immediacy. 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 identity 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 leaders 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 different 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

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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 religious identification is most often not the result of a conscious choice but is rather what I’ve been born into or turned unconsciously 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 political 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 identity 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,

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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 singularity 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 interpellation. 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 liberal 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 identity (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 constitutes the subject as part of the social order. The primal form

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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 interactions 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 Jewishness informing the very possibilities that they can see. If they are strict in their identity, they will not see those who aren’t Jewish as possible romantic partners. If they identify as Jewish in a looser, cultural sense, perhaps they will just look at every situation 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 masculinity is manifest even when subjects appear to enjoy its limitations. The fact that a subject might enjoy mansplaining does not

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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 suspect. The problem with identity is that my capitulation to the demand that occurs when I take it up doesn’t feel like capitulation. 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, identity has the ideological effect of obscuring the fundamental alienation that constitutes politics as such. This is what makes identity 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 unconscious support for the identity.

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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, activities, and countless other ways. A subject might later opt to change its gender identity, but initially the Other gives this identity 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 identity itself is conscious even if our investment in it is not. I can always say what my identity is. Its association with consciousness creates the impression that we can have a mutual understanding 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 struggle against each other, a community in which Irish and Germans live alongside Saudis and Congolese, where the identities of

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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 togetherness of diversity sounds great, but it quickly runs into an intractable barrier. The barrier is enjoyment. Ideology imposes identity on us, but we do not invest ourselves in identity because ideology has fooled us into doing so. Our investment in identity derives from the enjoyment that identity provides for us. We enjoy our identities. This is why ideological 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 identity. Without this enjoyment, no one would find anything at all appealing about adopting or insisting on an identity. The enjoyment derives from the sense of belonging that the identity exudes, the belonging that emerges when the Other recognizes us as having 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 enjoyment is tied to the ostracism of those who don’t share this identity. This becomes most readily apparent in the case of nationalist 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

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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 international 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 unmeasurable. But in contrast, no one enjoys national identity while watching 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 humanity can never function as a point of identification unless we posit someone ostracized from it. When animal rights activists

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propose extending human rights to animals, all of a sudden it becomes easy to identify with all humanity (by opposing ourselves 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 category that includes all. We need to have at hand another identity 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 utopia 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 identitarian in its aims. To see how the logic of identity politics works, one must look elsewhere. As conservative identity politics proliferates through the political landscape today, a glimpse back into the past century offers a clearer understanding of this phenomenon.

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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 identity 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 revelatory 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 politics because it makes explicit what other identitarian projects obfuscate. But Nazism does require interpretation because its superficial form is misleading. It is not surprising that so many theorists of the twentieth century misdiagnosed its structure.

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Nazism’s drive to global conquest creates the impression that it is a totalizing universalist political project. The universalist aspirations of Nazism seem self-evident. Hitler’s dream of a thousandyear 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 anathema to Nazism. Nazism demands total conquest not for the sake of universality but for the sake of German identity. The survival and advancement 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 movement may look nothing like the Nazi project. What separates Nazism from Italian fascism, the America First movement, Afrikaner nationalism, and Islamic fundamentalism is that it expresses openly the hidden logic of every version 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 subordination 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.

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Due to its commitment to the global domination of German identity, Nazism reveals the ultimate contradiction that undermines 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 eliminate 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 annihilation 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 ultimately 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.

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EVERY DAY A STRUGGLE No identity is ever secure. The proponent of identity politics constantly 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 struggle 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 targeting 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 dividing the attention of a people, but in concentrating it upon a single 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.

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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 simply 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 counterpart 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 unbridled 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 nationalist 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

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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 undergirds 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 alternative 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

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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 Universality 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 particular identities that can define themselves through opposing particular identities. For Schmitt and the project of identity politics, the act of recognizing and struggling against the enemy gives existence a worth beyond the meaningless cycle of production and consumption that characterizes the capitalist epoch. The division into friend and enemy creates a value for which one can sacrifice oneself. 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 better 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.

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THE UNIVERSAL ANATHEMA The great fear that runs through Nazi rhetoric is that of the universal. This is the fear underlying every project of identity politics. 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 universality. 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 Jewishness 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 perspective, is their shared investment in universal claims for freedom and equality combined with a desire to eliminate the particularity of race, nation, and religion. Communism, especially in its Bolshevist incarnation, is up-front about its universal pretensions. As Marx insists, the working class as a revolutionary entity has no nation and no ethnic identity. To attempt to confine 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

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the vehicle through which Jews propagate the universality that threatens German identity. Though many consider Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union (“Operation Barbarossa”) a great strategic blunder that cost Germany any chance at victory, its political 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 extirpate the paired icons of universality. From Adolf Hitler to Alfred Rosenberg to Joseph Goebbels, Nazi thinkers make clear the link that they see between Jewishness 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 twentieth 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, Bolshevism 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 selfevident in the case of Jews. Historically, anti-Semitism has targeted Jews because their insistence on remaining ensconced within their particular identity posed a threat to Christian universality. Jewish refusal to intermarry and insistence on preserving 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.

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Instead, one hated them, ironically, in the name of Christian universality. 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 universal, 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 identity 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 identity 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, Hitler 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 earlier Christian anti-Semites, did not target their hated at Judaism 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 wanting 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

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that this race has no proper identity. Nazis do not hate Jews because of their Jewish identity but because Jews lack any particular identity. This is an absolutely crucial point that we misunderstand 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 farmers, 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 undoubtedly 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 attachment 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 antiSemite 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.

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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 historian Timothy Snyder puts it in Black Earth, “Any nonracist attitude was Jewish, thought Hitler, and any universal idea a mechanism 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 Jewishness, 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 Hitler and the Nazis, Jews represent the same threat as the communists, 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 universality. Communism is not just another enemy that the Nazis posit but the basis for Nazism as a particular identity. Communism 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 universalism eradicates. Communism, for its part, is a fundamentally

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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 communism 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 universality as he can in order to appeal to the particularity of German identity. Even the criterion of truth itself bears the stain of

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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 reactionary 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 neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).19 Where identity politics would recognize an opponent (Jew against Greek), Saint Paul’s universalism sees only a potential 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

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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 particularity. 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 values 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 universalist 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 confronting 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 potential partisan of the universal even in those it struggles against. At first blush, this seems to paint too rosy a picture of universality, which is why Freud refuses precisely this distinction. He doesn’t grant the fundamental difference between the

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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 communism. For Freud, there is no difference between identitarian projects that require an enemy in order to constitute the privileged identity and universalist projects that claim not to need an enemy. It’s all the same because the problem is not so much constituting the identity as dealing with the excess aggressiveness at play within the group. Appealing to the universal doesn’t eliminate aggressiveness but actually provides a more compelling justification for the violence that it produces. Universality, as Freud sees it, is a fiction. Thus, the universality 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 skepticism 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 intolerance 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 worlddominion called for anti-semitism as its complement; and it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution 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

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have historically created enemies to annihilate, in Freud’s view, is not a contingent development but a necessary one, a development 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 selfdelusion. 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 caution 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 Civilization 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 attributes and mental capacities, has introduced injustices against which there is no remedy.”24 Here, Freud has recourse to the classic 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 inequality 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

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equality in relation to capitalism and capitalist ideology. Against the ideological claim about capitalism simply reflecting natural 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 arrangement in which each must depend on the other. In the Grundrisse, 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, however, 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 rescue 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 psychoanalysis to this question. Psychoanalysis emerges out of the fundamental disjunction between the subject’s natural being

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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 unconscious 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 equality among subjects. Desire uproots the subject from its natural and cultural being. The natural or cultural tendencies of the subject 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 eliminate 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 equality. 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. According to this line of critique, rather than advocating justice for everyone, the proponents of so-called identity politics want justice 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 universality are conservative or reactionary, today we associate the term identity politics with leftist groups. This association of identity politics with the Left rather than the Right marks a

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significant conservative political victory, since the label instantly produces a misunderstanding of the nature of these political projects. 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 particular. 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 nostalgic 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 fantasy of unity is opposed to the universal hole. If we look at the critiques of identity politics, the predominance of this fantasy of unity— and the particularism that it hides—becomes clear. From this starting point, we can investigate 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 question of identity, we can clarify the real political battle lines. The first substantive critique of contemporary identity politics 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

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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 universality. He is just calling for a different form of identity politics 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 identitarians, “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 hierarchies mirror animal hierarchies and allow us to flourish as a civilization. What Peterson doesn’t admit is that any investment in hierarchy 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 consideration 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.

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Peterson claims to be advocating a critique of identity while he smuggles his own identitarian project in under this cover, following 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 critics 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 cannot 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 universality 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 identity politics, but they do this, like Jordan Peterson, for the sake of identity politics. The privileged vehicle for contemporary identity 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

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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 criticism 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 victims 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 assumption 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

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remains potent. In short, colorblindness presupposes a world without an unconscious and without ideologically tainted social structures—a world that cannot exist. Nonetheless, the ideology of colorblindness wins many adherents. The ideology of colorblindness is in some sense more insidious 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 Without Racists, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls this contemporary racism “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 rhetoric surrounding the fight to combat police violence against black subjects.6 The Black Lives Matter movement focuses on shootings 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 acquittal 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 Missouri and Eric Garner in New York, Black Lives Matter gained a national visibility. As nonthreatening black individuals continued 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 colorblindness training. Instead, it contends that we as a society must become aware of the racism that underlies policing in the United

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States and work to eliminate it. Colorblindness cannot be a feasible 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 presence leads sun-gazing individuals to think that they are protected. 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 including all in a colorblind identity but by fighting inequality. The logic of Black Lives Matter is not inclusionist but universalist. 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

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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 critique, 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 people 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 taking place between competing particular identities, despite the fact that he attacks Black Lives Matter for not being universalist enough. Though most often what passes as identity politics on the Left is actually part of a universal struggle, conservative commentators 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

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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 ideology 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 conservatives 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 apparent, 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 Matter 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 universality 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 collapsing the entire social order. The fundamental confusion that surrounds universality is that we often mistake the adding up of all particulars, which is what

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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 assembled together.10 It is not a combination. It is what remains absent from a complete collection of particulars. It is what all the particulars 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 nonbelonging 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 Matter isn’t about all lives but about countering the universalist

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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 universalism. By pointing out the lives that don’t matter, this movement 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 triumph of particularism in the face of the latter’s universality. But many on the Left have also failed to recognize the universality 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 universal. 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 elimination 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

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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 impossible. 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 recognizing the universal. By forcing everyone into their bare particularity, 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 solidarity 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 struggle contains. If we understand the struggle against racism as a case of identity 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

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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 recognition 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 violence that those trapped in the French suburbs endure or the suffering of children mining cobalt in the Congo or the situation of displaced mine workers in West Virginia, there is nonetheless a coherence between all these struggles that the universality 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

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initially presents for the spectator. But Zootopia quickly introduces 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 triggered 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 barrier 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

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diverse identities in Zootopia—an antagonism between predators and prey. Judy finds that Dawn Bellwether (Jenny Slate), a sheep and assistant mayor of Zootopia, conspired to drug a number 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 political 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 discovers 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 important 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 subjectivity. 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 subjectivity. As long as we are invested in identity in the way that Judy

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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 investment in it. The film reveals the impossibility of a community in which diverse identities can coexist side by side in a state of mutual tolerance. In this sense, the point of the film is not what conservative 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 conservative 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 champion equality that undermines identity rather than propping it up. The fight for equality in the film requires subjects to abandon their investment in identity because this investment ultimately 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 equality 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 cannot 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

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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. Universality 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 marriage. 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. Obviously, marriage remained involved in questions of social reproduction, 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 pushing 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 institution cannot have a fully realized universality because universals are always only absent, not present in the form of social institutions. No amount of effort can make public institutions universal

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since universality is based in what doesn’t belong. We can nonetheless 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 important, 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 cannot 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 actually 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 trying 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

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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 necessary 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 associated 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 recognition. As a result, rather than reinterpreting movements for recognition as unacknowledged expressions of universality, we should simply abandon them. This is the case with the most

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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 critique of racism and sexism, these efforts themselves have nothing to do with emancipatory politics. Diversity is not a leftist project.17 The push for diversity is an attempt to eliminate discussion 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 representation 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 shibboleths of difference and diversity replace words like slavery, injustice, 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 zerosum 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 struggle disappears entirely beneath the logic of inclusion. But the

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logic of inclusion can never do anything more than changing the composition of those who belong and those who don’t. Inclusion can never transpire without throwing someone else out. The Fields sisters conclude, for those committed to diverse representation and inclusion, “the most radical goal . . . remains the reallocation of unemployment, poverty, and injustice rather than their abolition.”19 The project of including presently excluded groups or ensuring representation for the currently underrepresented 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 representational 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, Sandberg proclaims the importance of women aspiring to lead, to occupy the spots formerly reserved only for men in the corporate 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.

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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 dangers of her particularist feminism were apparent with the publication 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 universality, 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 feminist hero, Sandberg’s feminism was from the beginning thoroughly immersed in the particular, allowing it to fit so well with the functioning of global capitalism. This kind of feminism 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 particularist 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 thoroughgoing 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 struggle 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

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or discover. This is because diversity itself is not a universal value like freedom or equality. Diversity derives not from my individual 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 identity, 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 starting point is too often the various disturbances that we link together to form the idea of climate change. We encounter climate change in particular manifestations like shifting weather patterns, more intense storms, higher water levels, increased temperatures, 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, particularist 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

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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 knowing. 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 particular individual, there are a limited number of resources available that the society must distribute in some way. The economic division of resources takes place against the background of a fundamental scarcity. But as the capitalist system hurtles us closer and closer to a global catastrophe, it is important to avoid thinking 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 universalism. 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.

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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 common. Here, Hollywood cinema, which so often leads us astray, offers an instructive example. The disaster film provides an occasion 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 destruction, the disaster film, at its best, shows us what few other mainstream 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 everyone 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 particularity and toward the universal. In the typical disaster film, the disaster makes everyone aware of a fundamental lack that harbors the universal. When the disaster strikes, characters immediately begin to concern themselves

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with others. The reintroduction of the structuring absence through the disaster is simultaneously the reintroduction of universality. 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 skyscraper 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 destruction of particularity that rejects any universality. The film underlines 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 universality 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 answering you.” Jaye answers Norman’s rebarbative particularity with

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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 universalism. 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 people differently. No one can escape, not even the wealthy individuals 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 universality to set them free. The absence of any viable escape for particular 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 contemporary capitalist universe. Capitalism’s inherent refusal of universality leaves it completely 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

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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 können 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 universal equality, the placard enjoins Berliners to see a direct opposition 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 jettisoning the egalitarian project of rent caps. This has the effect of particularizing the climate struggle. The inherent universality of the climate crisis transforms into a particular struggle when the exigencies of capitalism enter into the equation. But capitalism, 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 particular 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 universalist 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.

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Identitarians see in climate change a clear argument for the universality that they oppose. Accepting its existence entails admitting the universality that their political position denies. Universality is inherently dialectical. It lets us see what particular identity hides—connection in the midst of division. Universality allows for a response to a catastrophe like climate change that is equal to the magnitude of the event. Our particular 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 reactionary 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 particularism of this theoretical turn. The fact that right-wing populists 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 populists 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

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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 (himself a champion of the universal), acceding to this view of things “will be everyone for him or herself.” He adds, “This is the surest 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 universality, 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 universality 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 possibility of emancipation altogether. We must resist the impulse to label those killed at the behest of purportedly universalist regimes victims of the universal. 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,

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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 succumb to terror. This is the perversion that universalism must constantly be on guard against. Whenever people insist on their ability to create a world of complete equality, we should recognize this perversion at work. Even if the perversion of universality 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 confines 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 universal 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 ominous than the gulag. The dangers of particularity have the advantage, 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 capitalism’s unbridled particularity unleashes, we must nonetheless pay attention to them when tallying up corpses.

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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 banner of particularism. From children working in sweatshops to millions living in favelas to the reign of military warlords, particularism 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 particularity 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 identity rather than the political philosophy of particularism (or the capitalist structure that demands it). Our judgment on particular identities like that of the Nazis rather than identity as such enables identity to get off scot-free from the judgment of history. 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

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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 nothing 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 particular 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 possibility 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 universality as the fundamental stake in political contestation. The great leap forward consists in recognizing politics as the

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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 radicality 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 poverty, 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

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6.

7.

8.

9.

Günter Zöller, in Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 82– 97. 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 contemporary thinkers, Alain Badiou follows most clearly in Kant’s lineage, 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. There was a divide between modern European philosophy on the Continent and in Britain. On the Continent, the investment in the universal was almost universal, even among thinkers openly opposed to each other, like Descartes and Pascal or Spinoza and Leibniz. In contrast, British thinkers tended to be more sanguine about particular identity, a difference that stemmed from British empiricism and then bled into the political realm. 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 Jefferson failed to sustain the same type of commitment to universal emancipation. He owned slaves until the day that he died, despite recognizing the damage that slavery did the psyche of both the slave and slaveowner. In his speculative reading of the fall from paradise recounted in Genesis, Kant indicates that our violation of the law is the necessary condition 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 Beginning 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 contends 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 Publishers, 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 Friedlander 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:

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17.

18.

19.

20.

Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 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. There are prominent exceptions who continue to insist heroically on universality, chief among them, Alain Badiou. But in the name of universality, Badiou has a tendency to highlight the communist hypothesis as the one expression of universality at the expense of, say, the fight against sexism or homophobia. This becomes clearest near the conclusion of his book on Nicolas Sarkozy. He writes, “The communist hypothesis as such is generic, it is the basis of any emancipatory enunciation, 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. Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 213. 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 wideranging movements, in addition to those who wish to horizontalize relations with matter, replacing subjectivity, which is integral to universality, 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 capitalism and identity politics, but he sees a direct rather than an indirect relationship. He writes, “The politics of capital comes down to identity politics, while the politics of labour stands for non-identity politics.” 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 values, Ruti expresses the proper disdain for this sort of question. She writes, “When it comes to the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity, 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 anything, 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, Ethics, Affect (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 50. Ruti makes the perspicacious 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 controversy 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

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4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

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, putting aside the relationship to universality. If one watches Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989), one can see clearly how the figure of the Nurturing Parent, Charles Keating (Robyn Williams), can drive a child to suicide. See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1963). Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres de Maxmilien Robespierre, Tome VII: Discours Janvier-Septembre 1791, ed. Marc Bouloiseau, Georges Lefebvre, and Albert Soboul (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 362. Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres de Maxmilien Robespierre, Tome VII, 362. 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 particularity because it is itself the product of the same particularity. 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 explicitly 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 individual regardless of his mode of life.” Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, trans. Graham 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. 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

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Plato’s Republic, but he also constantly works to redeem Plato’s reputation 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. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 127. 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. Once again, Deleuze provides the paradigmatic statement on Aristotle’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. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1552–1728. 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. The need to exclude the economy from politics also marks a fundamental 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 economy as a separate realm that politics must keep to the side. In The Science of Logic, Hegel articulates his most sophisticated account of the relationship between universality and particularity, which provides 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

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17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

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. Slavoj Ýiĥek has gone further than anyone today to make clear the priority 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 contends 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. According to the liberal John Locke, “The great and chief end therefore, 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. US Census, “Race and Ethnicity,” https://www.census.gov/mso/www /training/pdf /race-ethnicity-onepager.pdf. 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. 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 particular vantage point on American history, one in which the Ku Klux Klan acts as a heroic force. Parker doesn’t counter with an alternative particular 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 separates 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 characterizes 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.” Richard 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 successful 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 responsibility and excuse his actions. Given how Parker acted, the criticism was merited. But this event did cause critics subsequently to misread factual 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 Aristotle’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 developed 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 societies. 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 individual’s readiness to particulate in [international] barbarism is the ultimate 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 Guattari) 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, AntiOedipus: 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 confront 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

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based entirely about what is known with certainty about another person, 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 Simmel, 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. At a recent talk where I was extolling the political necessity of freedom, one audience member suggested that its association with capitalist 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. 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. 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). Universality emerges out of the rupture that gives birth to the signifying structure, out of the cut of the signifier itself. A master signifier attempts to make sense of this cut and establish the system of signification 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 expression always comes up short and in this way attests to the irreducibility of the universal to any particular social form. The reason why the particular 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

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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. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 235. 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 Uniform, the Common, and Dialogue Between Cultures, trans. Michael Richardson 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. 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. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 8. 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. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 118. Fanon does not make Marx’s error because he is a Hegelian thinker before he is a Marxist. Unlike Marx, Hegel does not view emancipation as arriving at a future free from contradiction but rather recognizes the necessity of contradiction, which entails recognizing universality 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 American South—the “War of Northern Aggression.” It would be appropriate if educators in the American North took up Marx’s term, which is actually the properly universalist one, in contrast to the false neutrality 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 produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only a negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology 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 underemphasizes the philosophical error at work. Rather than conceiving freedom 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 complètes, 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 violence; and the moment has currently come to organize the despotism

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of freedom, to crush the despotism of kings.” Jean-Paul Marat, “Débats,” in Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: 1793 (April 6, 1793): 387. 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 opposition to this path. 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. Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, trans. Jay Rubin (New York: Vintage, 1997), 250. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 16.

3. Universal Villains 1. In direct contrast to Adorno, Paul Eisenstein argues that Hegel’s universality offers us to the key to grappling with the trauma of the Holocaust. 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 present, 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 theoretical inspiration for the Nazi totalitarianism. But Popper doesn’t see Hegel’s universalism as the problem. Instead, it’s his Germanic

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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. Hegelianism 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. 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 Aftermath, one of the worst slanders of a philosopher in the rich history of philosophical slanders. Adorno states, “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365. 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. 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 University Press, 1998). 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 twentieth century also reveals itself as a total system that traps any particular that tries to escape its gravitational force. As the twentieth century advances and the communist alternative reveals its ultimate bankruptcy, 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 universality that admits of no exceptions, which makes it seem as if the clearest path of resistance must surely be through the insistence on particular differences and local economies, which is what many take up in response. But as is the case with Nazism and Stalinism, how capitalism appears is quite different from how it actually functions. Capitalism 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 eliminate Ernst Röhm and his SA (Sonderabteilung). Rather than allowing homosexuality to operate as a repressed source of group connection,

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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 unconscious status of the Nazi bond. Although the January 1942 Wahnsee Conference officially set the Final Solution in motion through the system of death camps, mass executions of Jews already occurred in 1941, most infamously at Babi Yar in September 1941. 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. 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, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war, died as a result of Nazi persecution and mass murder.” According to the logic of the museum, political killings were incidental to the Nazi project, which had Jewishness as its primary target. 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. 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 History (London: Verso, 2012), 234. 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

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Connecticut town, accidentally gives himself away to investigator Mr. Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) from the War Crimes Commission. 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. 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 Confrontations of Our Age, trans. Vivian Bird (Newport Beach, CA: Noontide Press, 1982), 300. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, rev. ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), 8– 9. 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 vigorously defend that particularity in the form of a nation. In 2005, the BBC created a six-part documentary history of the Holocaust titled Auschwitz: The Nazis and “The Final Solution”— a title that bespeaks the ubiquity of this shorthand. 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 Thinking, trans. Andrew  J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 27. While many have rightly assailed Heidegger for the

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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. Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34. Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 208. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 114. When Marxists defend Marxism against the crimes of Stalin by claiming 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 exculpating an emancipatory theory like Marxism, cuts against the foundation of the Marxist theory of history, which sees history as the terrain 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. François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 29. J.  V. Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, Marxists Internet Archive, https:// w w w . marxists . org /reference /archive /stalin / works / 1924 /foundations-leninism /ch08.htm. 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

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Stalin on the side of the universal, in the same way that Stalin envisions himself. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 207. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 75. 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 universality 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 suspicion 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). 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. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 126. 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. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Politics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 3. Foucault adds, “I start from the theoretical and methodological decision that consists in saying: Let’s suppose that universals do not exist.” Foucault, 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 particularized 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 maintains 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 universal. It is constantly seeking new subjects and new territory to transform through commodification, which universality doesn’t do. Universality is only promised, never attained under capitalism. Given the magnitude of this error, please don’t see Todd McGowan, “The Particularity 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 Seminar XVII, he provides a way of conceptualizing capitalism’s relationship to traditional society in terms of the type of social link it establishes. 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 existence 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 master 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 inevitably caught up in “the repetitive, immutable, immeasurable propulsion 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: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham

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University Press, 2014), 127. Kornbluh’s insightful analysis of the capitalist 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. 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 surplus labour.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976), 342. In order to function as the personification of capital in this way, individual capitalists have to believe in their own individual agency. 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 proponents of the commodity form are the ones who act unknowingly. 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, “Governments 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 capitalism, is how a focus on private interest can become the vehicle for the perpetuation of society as whole. 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 recognize 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 Angeles as the path to untold riches, the hit film Pretty Woman (Gary Marshall, 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 Capital. There, he says, “There develops in the breast of the capitalist a Faustian 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

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18. 19.

20.

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population yields. It requires for its unrestricted activity an industrial reserve army which is independent of these natural limits.” Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 788. This industrial reserve army depresses the wages that labor can earn and thus facilitates the accumulation of capital. 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. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 381. The contempt for those who necessarily fail in the capitalist system reveals its basic hostility to the project of Christianity. Whereas capitalism traps subjects in their particularity, Christianity highlights their participation in the universal like no other religion. Whereas capitalism 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. 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 personal and specific.” Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 2nd ed., trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (New York: Routledge, 1990), 345. 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 general 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. 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 conjunction 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 position 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 targets 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: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 213. 28. Nazism’s challenge to communist universality drove many conservative political leaders in Great Britain and the United States to see Hitler 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 universalist 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

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3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

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heterosexualizing them. Although they view identity as completely pliable, they nonetheless believe that it defines who one is. Most American universities now ask incoming students to choose what pronoun they would like to identify as their own. Typically, the universities 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. 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 controversy 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 argument did not find widespread acceptance. As a teenager, I once had a conversation with a fellow fervent fundamentalist 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. 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. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 76. The logic of universality works in precisely the opposite direction: for universality, to fail is to succeed. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 118. 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. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: 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. Perhaps 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 Socialism, ed. Randall L. Bytwerk (College Station: Texas A&M University 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 recalcitrant 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 Jewishness 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. Winston Churchill is here a representative figure. He fears Jewish communism 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 Bolshevism,” 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

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19.

20.

21.

22.

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. Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 5. 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. 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 universal.” 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. According to François Julien, “The uniform is the perverted double of that universal which is now being spread by globalization. As it saturates the world, it surreptitiously masquerades as the universal without 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. 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. Both fundamentalist Christianity and Islamism seem like exceptions to this characterization of identity politics. Both belong to a

6. This Is Not Identity Politics Z 243

23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

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 universality that they continue to harbor is only a remnant and no longer active. 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. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 113. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993), 242. 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 message of universal equality, which certainly predates the capitalist epoch. 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 Brendan O’Neill authors. He complains, “The politics of identity is strongest 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 encourages self-reflection over solidarity with others, sectionalism over universalism.” 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 Multicultural Society (New York: Norton, 1991), 18. 3. Jordan Peterson, “Identity Politics and the Marxist Lie of White Privilege,” 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 Combuhee River Collective Statement.” This collective made up of black feminists met in the 1970s. They use the term to define a political struggle that emanates from their own experience of oppression. But soon after they deploy the term identity politics in their statement, these feminists 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 socialist revolution, they contend that an economic revolution would not be sufficiently universal to be truly emancipatory if it were not also antiracist 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 original manifesto of identity politics is actually a universalist tract, every bit as much as, if not more than, the Communist Manifesto. The Collective states, “We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources

6. This Is Not Identity Politics Z 245

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

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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 liberation.” 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. 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. My thinking on the universality of the Black Lives Matter movement takes as its point of departure an excellent unpublished essay, “Mobilizing 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. Black Lives Matter, “In Response to the State of the Union,” February 14, 2018, https:// blacklivesmatter.com /pressroom /responsestate-of -the-union /. Rod Dreher, “The Moral Blindness of Identity Politics,” American Conservative, October  25, 2016, http://www.theamericanconservative .com /dreher/moral-blindness-of-identity-politics/. Rod Dreher, “The Moral Blindness of Identity Politics.” 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 outside the all. In this way, Lacan shows that the only possible universality is that of the not-all. The universality of the all is faked, just like masculine potency. 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 Identity 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 identity 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 objections and reveals just how compelling they are. She states, “Queer critics 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 nearunanimous 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, October 28, 2013, https://thefeministwire.com /2013 /10/17973 /.

Conclusion Z 247 22. The great depiction of the impasse that confronts the politics of recognition 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 definitive statement in this discussion on the inevitable failure of the project of recognition, the fact that several followers of Hegel advocate for mutual recognition as a political program is one of the great philosophical 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 opinion, 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 biological, 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