Identified Gravediggers of Identity, Radicality Suits Identity Burials Well (2020)

Identified Gravediggers of Identity, Radicality Suits Burials Well

Online publication, August 2020

By persistently ignoring the substance of identity, preferring instead reified identity—more strongly each day—the spokespersons, exclaiming in all directions, both for and against, sometimes about their freedom, sometimes about their pain, indiscriminately assert the legitimacy of their discourse of tribute or celebration, blinded by their revisionism. This is flagrant in the recent media and political agitations concerning the abominable miscarriages of justice that sexual, cultural, and racial discriminations drag along as proof of their authenticity, and no less evident in the seismic aftershock that traverses them at the moment of their discursive emancipation.

To base oneself on the harm received is certainly an undeniable foundation for human becoming, for the subject. Not moving beyond this to approach the firmer ground of an expression free from subjectivation ultimately reveals, without admitting it, the neurotic and jouissant fixation of an adherence to the discourse of the Other. Children say no to mean yes, then risk the reinforced yes of the foundational withdrawal that engaged them among subjective beings on the most precious possible bases: those that escape clairvoyance; one refuses in order to affirm.

This is then the mark of a deliberate choice, one that contests by asserting the kinetics of received attacks to use them, rightfully, like others. But what are these others, so quickly denounced for their misdeeds, so swiftly stripped of their shared weapons in the name of egalitarian radicality? Where one can easily discern the refusal to refuse to enjoy, beyond the pain received, the opportunity to turn against the aggressor, confused with the self, so sure of no longer being children—if they ever were, they do not remember, they refuse it, they deny it.

What turn was missed? What understanding refuses to be shared? Perhaps, and this is a proposition, it is that of a consented abandonment, without fanfare or bright lights, before that factor, dear to Freud, where the living inspiring the biological acts as a barrier to the living, and a source for the imaginary that we know is so competent at covering the impossible of the real with a poorly woven veil, effective in denying what always returns in reality with the brilliance of radicality—have we already forgotten the acts of liquidation of radicalizations still ongoing around the planet? Identified Gravediggers of Identity, demanding that justice, which seems to elude you—wherever you may be, on one side or the other of the line you cherish—and vengeance, so thinly veiled, guaranteeing the liquidation of unsatisfied expectations fallen into the bed of your currents, look or go see in your reflections if there is still a little distance between you and what you take for your mirrors.

Vincent Bourseul