Identity is not an answer to our existential doubts, quite the contrary (2016)

What haven’t we already read and heard about identity—the one sometimes called unfortunate, at other times fortunate, or even national, depending on the mood and stakes of the moment? More importantly, what will we hear in the upcoming election campaign in political, social, cultural, sexual, and religious registers, reflecting the identity wars that are brewing?

Identity makes us sad, angry, or jealous, because it only partially supports us in our attempt to rationalize our experience as living beings. When identity is sexual or gender-based, it does not fully resolve the enigma of sexuality. When identity is religious, it does not completely address the necessity of God. Similarly, political identity does not exhaust the normative battle that torments the partisan. A part always escapes, it agitates us. We struggle to maintain a shoddy coherence under the guise of identity, even if it means shedding blood to achieve it, discriminating or excluding to guarantee it.

Identities are sometimes claimed, often denounced, or increasingly accused as if one of them was worth more than the others, or worse, deserved to outlive them. We always hear that one must defend itself against the others, and always according to the same pattern: an egocentric conception of universalism against what would be foreign to it.

In this profusion, various identity phenomena have appeared, fascinating and worrying. They concern social as well as political, cultural, national, religious, or sexual identities. These identities have become murky surfaces, objects of covetousness or controversy.

We no longer rely on the knowledge that emerged after the Second World War, which Levi-Strauss explained so well in 1975: “[…] identity is a kind of virtual focal point to which it is essential for us to refer to explain a certain number of things, but without it ever having any real existence. […] a limit to which no experience actually corresponds.” Instead, identity is treated as a debatable, evaluable, comparable object… a supposedly cultural product, but fundamentally terribly liberal. We quickly forget, we are tempted to forget that identity is first and foremost a philosophical fable, as Ali Benmaklouf points out.

What happened? The current situation is as if we have come to believe in identity as a figure and mark of a possible subjective homogenization. As if identity could resolve, or reduce, existential fluctuations and uncertainties. This neoliberal conception of identity appeared in the mid-20th century to substitute simplification for the crisis that lies at the heart of identity, with all the risks that entails, particularly on the political front: fascism under the guise of a promise of stability tinged with nostalgic pastiche.

It is because we still do not know how to deal with the knowledge that past identity crises in History have repeatedly given us to gather, those of Colonization, those of genocides, the Shoah, the Algerian War, the discrimination against sexual minorities (women, trans, homosexuals, …). We are tempted to reject this knowledge until its inevitable and uncontrollable returns in the terrorist/jihadist uproar, migrant despair, the rise of individualism, and the decay of collective thought, to name but a few.

The renewed attempts to ban psychoanalysis in the treatment of autism, the illegal prohibitions of HIV prevention posters for gays and homosexuals by certain mayors struck by initiatives, the desire to create a genetic file of canine fecal matter in Béziers, and other current events still expose, in an equivalence that we must confront, that the worst is already at work: the refusal of knowledge. All are motivated by the defense of an identity desired to be solid, coherent, and perennial (ideological, heteronormative, or canine identity), even though daily experience constantly teaches us that identity imposes upon us a division of ourselves that never ends.

What to do? Shall we dare to build beyond identity to criticize identitarianism? And what if instead of building on worm-eaten crossbeams and scraps of phantom armor, we followed the path opened by the poet Édouard Glissant, on the evolving traces of the unknown to be discovered, abandoning a little of this imaginary consolation prize, the deadly stability of a fearful Western identity that is all-out: “The claim of identity is mere pronouncement when it is not also a measure of a saying. When, on the contrary, we designate the forms of our saying and inform them, our identity no longer founds an essence, it leads to Relation.”

Vincent Bourseul