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Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism
Indifference to Difference organizes around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that, in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and practice of being indifferent to difference. Such a politics would be based on the superabundance of desire and its inability to settle into identity. Madhavi Menon shows that if we turn to another kind of universalism—not one that insists we are all different but one that recognizes we are all similar in our powerlessness to contain desire—then difference no longer becomes the focus of our identity. Instead, we enter the worlds of desire. Following up on ideas of sameness and difference that have animated queer theory, Menon argues that what is most queer about indifference is not that it gives us queerness as an identity but that it is able to change queerness into a resistance of ontology. Firmly committed to the detours of desire, queer universalism evades identity. This polemical book demonstrates that queerness is the condition within which we labor. Our desires are not ours to be owned; they are indifferent to our differences.
- GenresQueer
176 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2015
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About the author
Madhavi Menon
6 books29 followersMadhavi Menon is Associate Professor of Literature at American University. She is the author of Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film and Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama and editor of Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare.
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January 11, 2017
"Universalism is the realm in which the fact of social, cultural, religious, and sexual difference does not take away from the reality that we are all different even from our "own" differences."
In Indifference to Difference, Menon flirts wonderfully through the various registers of difference, indifference, and universalism to offer a concrete articulation of what is at stake in modern identity politics, the way it opposes (or, in her view, actually does not oppose) Enlightenment thinking. Menon's claims, at their core, are quite simple. In short, Menon argues that there are no particularities that are self-identical. To put it another way, whatever ways a person is particular, their class status, gender, race, ethnicity, none of those particularities are indicative of who the person is. In a sense, this seems quite simple. After all, one of the hallmarks of liberalism is the argument that one should not be unduly prejudiced against various individuals based on their "group membership," based on these various particularities. And yet, liberalism also incites the thought process that the truth about an individual, at their core, is revealed through these particularities. Women are women because they possess some unique quality of womanness. So on, and so forth. Menon argues this is not so by way of queer universalism.
Her articulation of queer universalism is founded on the Badiousian notion of universalism in opposition to Enlightenment Universalism with a capital U. She deftly weaves notions of Badiou's universal and event with Lee Edelman's notion of queerness as something other than the identity categories Menon so disparages.
Menon's argument turns on the notion of desire. Her talent is the weaving of psychoanalytic thinking (through her references to desire), Marxism, and literary analysis. This is a text that attests to its indebtedness to Badiou and Edelman, but leaves the core assumptions it shares with Marx, Freud, and Lacan to be picked up by the reader. She turns to Marx in her introduction for the powerful example of the classless revolution. The proletariat, in Marx's view, must abolish all classes and thus itself for a true revolution. This type of praxis is how Menon argues any kind of project with a feminist or racial justice agenda should proceed; questioning the very assumptions about these classificatory mechanisms rather than simply asking to be granted better representation or more institutional power.
Menon's argument can be largely distilled from her introduction and her coda, but she takes great pains in showing rather than telling in her main three chapters. Going through the work of Yinka Shonibare, Shakespeare, and analyzing Dastongi, the b-side to Menon's argument is that concerns about identity's fluidity transcend time and place. Each example she pulls supports aspects of her argument with precision.
The virtuoso readings of the various texts at issue here are complimented by a capacious understanding of various types of political ideology. In her incisive takedown of liberalism Menon writes, "indifference must not be watered down to an anodyne liberalism that insists one can be whatever one 'chooses' to be. Instead, theorizing the queer event allows us to foreground the structural nature of indifference rather than making it only an option for individuals either to accept or decline" (22). Menon points out that liberal-humanist identity politics (that endorse a knowable truth based on an individual's socially legible particularities) are actually compatible with the Enlightenment Universalism they claim to reject. Menon writes, "The current triumph of partitioned particularity is Universalist in the Enlightenment sense of the term—it is one difference pretending to be absolute. Indeed, it believes completely that the idea of identitarian difference itself is universal. Such a notion of universalism is entirely compatible with our current obsession with particularity, since both assume that a particular can be made into an ontological whole. However, universalism in the Badiousian sense focuses on the inability of any particularity to ascend to the level of a universal. Instead, universalism names the impossibility of having any particular assume ontological wholeness" (126). What is clever about Menon's citing of sources is the unstated argumentative point she makes — that there is empirical evidence that suggests that desire in its un/predictable movement (always moving, never knowing where it will end up) is a universal that obliterates the possibility of a fundamental identity formation from anywhere, let alone one's socially legible particularities.
Menon's text is a wonder and precisely needed in this moment. I can only hope its wisdom expands beyond academic circulation.
In Indifference to Difference, Menon flirts wonderfully through the various registers of difference, indifference, and universalism to offer a concrete articulation of what is at stake in modern identity politics, the way it opposes (or, in her view, actually does not oppose) Enlightenment thinking. Menon's claims, at their core, are quite simple. In short, Menon argues that there are no particularities that are self-identical. To put it another way, whatever ways a person is particular, their class status, gender, race, ethnicity, none of those particularities are indicative of who the person is. In a sense, this seems quite simple. After all, one of the hallmarks of liberalism is the argument that one should not be unduly prejudiced against various individuals based on their "group membership," based on these various particularities. And yet, liberalism also incites the thought process that the truth about an individual, at their core, is revealed through these particularities. Women are women because they possess some unique quality of womanness. So on, and so forth. Menon argues this is not so by way of queer universalism.
Her articulation of queer universalism is founded on the Badiousian notion of universalism in opposition to Enlightenment Universalism with a capital U. She deftly weaves notions of Badiou's universal and event with Lee Edelman's notion of queerness as something other than the identity categories Menon so disparages.
Menon's argument turns on the notion of desire. Her talent is the weaving of psychoanalytic thinking (through her references to desire), Marxism, and literary analysis. This is a text that attests to its indebtedness to Badiou and Edelman, but leaves the core assumptions it shares with Marx, Freud, and Lacan to be picked up by the reader. She turns to Marx in her introduction for the powerful example of the classless revolution. The proletariat, in Marx's view, must abolish all classes and thus itself for a true revolution. This type of praxis is how Menon argues any kind of project with a feminist or racial justice agenda should proceed; questioning the very assumptions about these classificatory mechanisms rather than simply asking to be granted better representation or more institutional power.
Menon's argument can be largely distilled from her introduction and her coda, but she takes great pains in showing rather than telling in her main three chapters. Going through the work of Yinka Shonibare, Shakespeare, and analyzing Dastongi, the b-side to Menon's argument is that concerns about identity's fluidity transcend time and place. Each example she pulls supports aspects of her argument with precision.
The virtuoso readings of the various texts at issue here are complimented by a capacious understanding of various types of political ideology. In her incisive takedown of liberalism Menon writes, "indifference must not be watered down to an anodyne liberalism that insists one can be whatever one 'chooses' to be. Instead, theorizing the queer event allows us to foreground the structural nature of indifference rather than making it only an option for individuals either to accept or decline" (22). Menon points out that liberal-humanist identity politics (that endorse a knowable truth based on an individual's socially legible particularities) are actually compatible with the Enlightenment Universalism they claim to reject. Menon writes, "The current triumph of partitioned particularity is Universalist in the Enlightenment sense of the term—it is one difference pretending to be absolute. Indeed, it believes completely that the idea of identitarian difference itself is universal. Such a notion of universalism is entirely compatible with our current obsession with particularity, since both assume that a particular can be made into an ontological whole. However, universalism in the Badiousian sense focuses on the inability of any particularity to ascend to the level of a universal. Instead, universalism names the impossibility of having any particular assume ontological wholeness" (126). What is clever about Menon's citing of sources is the unstated argumentative point she makes — that there is empirical evidence that suggests that desire in its un/predictable movement (always moving, never knowing where it will end up) is a universal that obliterates the possibility of a fundamental identity formation from anywhere, let alone one's socially legible particularities.
Menon's text is a wonder and precisely needed in this moment. I can only hope its wisdom expands beyond academic circulation.
Displaying 1 of 1 review