Todd McGowan - The Universal Cut in Communities

The liberal dream of community is to establish a community wide and inclusive enough that it will become universal. But universality is not a whole. It is what divides every whole from itself, the hole within the whole. This talk will explore the ramifications of the conception of universality for the development of community.

Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Enjoyment Right and Left, The Racist Fantasy, Emancipation After Hegel, Capitalism and Desire, Only a Joke Can Save Us, and other works. He is the editor of the Film Theory in Practice series at Bloomsbury and the coeditor (with Slavoj Zižek and Adrian Johnston) of the Diaeresis series at Northwestern University Press. He is the cohost of the Why Theory podcast with Ryan Engley.