This book develops a new conception of universality that helps us rethink political thought and action. Through a wide range of examples in contemporary politics, film, and history, Universality and Identity Politics offers an antidote to the impasses of identity and an inspiring vision of twenty-first-century collective struggle.

Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont. His previous Columbia University Press books are The Impossible David Lynch (2007), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), and Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019). He is the coeditor of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston.

Robert Pfaller, author of On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners:
In calm, level-headed formulations that are as elegant as they are clear, Todd McGowan presents a crucial insight into all emancipatory political efforts. Those who want to liberate themselves without at the same time aiming at liberating all others do not lead an emancipatory struggle. As a result, they do not even liberate themselves.

Anna Kornbluh, author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space:
What is universality? With his signature exactitude, Todd McGowan radiantly argues that universality is what we lack in common, the absent foundation for a nonetheless necessary sociality. Against the many theories conflating universality with positive content and violent oppression, Universality and Identity Politics illustrates how movements beyond the particular are indispensable for solidarity. Ceaseless catastrophes now rain down; McGowan boldly underwrites new political imaginings of equality and freedom.

Joan Copjec, author of Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation:
Passionately yet patiently argued, Universality and Identity Politics looks back at earlier debates surrounding the universal and mounts fresh defenses of it. More than timely, this book writes to the moment.

Mari Ruti, author of Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life:
I used to be among those left-leaning academics who believe that universalism is problematic and that particularism represents a corrective to false universalism. Not anymore. McGowan shows that a genuinely emancipatory politics is intrinsically universalist, and he reveals the various ways in which identity politics inevitably serves the conservative establishment and traps us into a conception of politics as a struggle of one identity against others. Universality and Identity Politics is a groundbreaking book.