Identity, Politics, Desire

Alenka Zupančič poses the question of whether current identitarianism jeopardizes the very core of any emancipatory movement—its genuine political dimension. She argues that true political universality does not arise from viewing the social field as a neutral container of competing interests struggling for recognition. Rather, it comes from addressing the antagonism and exclusions that are constitutive of that social space itself. When we truly include what has been excluded and repressed, we no longer find ourselves in the same social space. Zupančič suggests that real emancipatory struggles always involve a short circuit between the universal and the particular, which is what makes them so explosive. As an example, she discusses the Iranian uprising, which she understands as both a feminist and a general struggle for emancipation and political change. She also critiques the perspective of the Western left, which often misses this singular political dimension and dismisses the uprising as yet another example of the ideological triumph of “Western imperialism.”