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.
Rightfully nonplussed by current reversions to identity politics, McGowan calls on us to lay down our Occam's razors. For, by cutting off what is in us more than ourselves, what is inalienably universal, we spite any chance of an emancipatory politics. Passionately, yet patiently, argued, Universality and Identity Politics looks back at earlier debates surrounding the universal and mounts fresh defenses of it. More than timely, this book writes to the moment. -- Joan Copjec, Brown University 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 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 genuinely groundbreaking book. -- Mari Ruti, author of <i>Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life</i>