Identity

Fragments, Frankness

Jean-Luc Nancy, François Raffoul

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780823256136
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Decostruzione in filosofia

Identity: Fragments, Frankness is a rich and powerful essay on the notion of identity and on how it operates in our contemporary world. In contrast to the various attempts to cling to established identities or to associate identity with dubious agendas, Nancy shows that an identity is always open to alterity and its transformations.Against cynical initiatives that seek to instrumentalize the question of identity in an attempt to manipulate sentiment against immigration, Nancy problematizes anew the notions of identity, nation, and national identity. He seeks to show that there is never a given identity but always an open process of identification that retains an exposure to difference. Thus identity can never operate as a self-identical subject, such as "the French."Ultimately, for Nancy, one does not have an identity but has to become one. One can never return to a self-same identity but can only seek to locate oneself within difference and singularity. Nancy shows the impasse of a certain conception of identity that he calls the "identity of the identifiable, " which refers to some permanent, given, substantial identity. In opposition to such identity, Nancy offers the identity of whatever or whoever invents itself in an open process of exposure to others and internal difference. Hence, an identity is never given but "makes itself by seeking and inventing itself." One does not have an identity, but is an identity.
Identity is an act, not a state.This important book will provide much-needed philosophical clarification of a complex and strategic notion at the center of many current events and discussions.

1

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

We must first make a strong and clear statement, even a violent one if necessary, regarding the perpetual oscillation of causes and effects between assertions from the Right (these people¹ do not want to let themselves be integrated into the national identity) and arguments from the Left (the conditions they are faced with do not even allow them to claim an identity).

We must first make a clear and unequivocal statement, by refusing arguments that deny the most visible causality: Yes, without work, without good places to live, but only those subproducts of an urbanization without urbanity, with no development other than that conceived by patching together obsolete models, it is impossible even to consider a horizon of “identity,” even when one desires precisely that. It is thus normal that one finds refuge in small separated identities, overidentified through their separation, hardened, and exacerbated.

It is not a question here of humanitarian compassion or of dissolution into psychosociological relativism, which have rightly been questioned in the conformism of the beautiful souls on the Left. We are not in the beautiful soul, but instead in the damaged body: a body damaged by unemployment and urban ghettos, by drugs and alcohol, by mindless television, and dull-witted preachers.

Let us be deliberately simplistic: Either there is work, or there isn’t. If there is a structural necessity making it such that there is no work—or very little—one must say so and give an account of what the structure produces. If, on the contrary, there can be work—but in a reformed, if not transformed, structure (organization of capital, meaning or direction of “growth,” energy needs)—then one must make it happen. But either way, it will be necessary to make room for what is irreducible: not work, nor capital, but people, all of us together.

Then one must further take a stand and refuse the notion that what comes from structure can be imputed to “cultures” or to “mentalities,” not to mention racial stereotypes. For effects of structure take place everywhere and affect everyone. Probably more than other European countries, France is sensitive to the ongoing mutation of European civilization, because for a long time it has claimed to be, within Europe, one of its better defined figures—if not the very figure of the realized “nation” (the Republic). It thus suffers more, also, from this movement regarding which one does not fully know whether it is in the process of ripping out all the barriers that still held back the flood or whether it will reverse or divert the inundation.

In short, it is not “national identity”—whether French or not—that is threatened by other identities, but all “identities” that are undergoing a general disidentification of what we used to call “civilization.”

Of course, there are here and today, as elsewhere and as always, people who do not want to work or who seek profits more advantageous than those of paid labor. Nonetheless, for drugs or arms dealing to take on the dimensions that we are seeing today, they must be not only accepted but also called for by an entire social, cultural, moral, even international context. It is not the dealers who create the appetite for what they deal, but the other way around. It is not the gangs and the mafias that destabilize a society: It is a destabilized society that gives them an open space in which to operate.

2

GROS ROUGE

The better-informed newspapers reported a statement from the president to his cabinet ministers, in the context of the presentation of the main goals of the two programs for the regional elections of March 2010 and for the great debate on “national identity” that was about to be launched (in November 2009): “What I want is some gros rouge¹ that leaves a stain.”²

One could not state it any better. The gros rouge that leaves a stain, the overripe camembert, and the supposedly Gallic coq standing on so many bell towers do indeed constitute undeniable markers of identity of the French nation. Or at least of that French nation that for a good century has been resting in cartons full of images irremediably threatened with disintegration and mold. (One will object that the gros rouge—adapted, for a great quantity was needed—was the wine of the trenches. Precisely: Nations destroyed each other while destroying the stomachs of their soldiers.)

In 1957, Roland Barthes could write: “To believe in wine is a coercive collective act. A Frenchman who kept this myth at arm’s length would expose himself to minor but definite problems of integration, the first of which, precisely, would be that of having to explain his attitude.”³ This is why anyone who calls for a gros rouge identity does not have to explain himself and makes himself understood perfectly well.

Unfortunately for the president, French winegrowers have managed in the last twenty years to bring about quite a remarkable transformation of the most ordinary products. Under the twofold pressure of foreign competition and evolving taste (globalization, socialization within consumer society, everything is contained in this microcosm), the gros rouge has actually disappeared. Or at least it has disappeared from view, since it still exists for people who have no money and who know how to find it on the bottom shelves where it is hidden.

If the gros rouge that leaves a stain is still a feature of French identity, it is thus at best a past identity, belonging to the past, and at worst it is the identity of the most impoverished.

But there is better, or worse: The gros rouge that leaves a stain does indeed stain, as its name indicates, and these stains can be washed out only with difficulty, if at all. But we must also recall that the stain it leaves—or used to leave—is never really red, or even any shade of red one might imagine. Its stains are a purplish blue, or a dark purple, with almost brown flecks—in short, its stains are of such a peculiar determination that a specific word is often associated with it, the word vinasse, or plonk. This word designates a very bad wine, of course, but it has also been used to indicate a color or an odor.

What remains of that presidential intention? Some vinasse stains on a shirt, on a table, and perhaps—why not?—a few drunks on the floor or stumbling out of the bar.

3

IDENTITY IS NOT A FIGURE

The project of having the population of a country hold an official debate about its own identity is one that initiates a deadly process. The inevitable result will be—in truth, it already is from its very announcement—a mark of obsolescence, if not of death properly speaking, with respect to the country in question, to this “identity” whose nature was sought. For other results, one would need to imagine a radicality and a breadth to this debate such that its very terms can be put into question, displaced, or subverted: “identity,” then, and “French.” This is impossible, it will be said: One would then exit the limits of the project’s designs.

And what is the design of this project? It is the schema of an identity that would in some sense be given, received, recognizable, and subject to analysis. One does not ask whether it is appropriate, and to what extent, and how, to speak of a French identity; one asks in what it consists, what it is made of, what it can demand—and consequently also what it has the right to demand for someone to be integrated into it, to be assimilated into it, to become a subject of it (to become a “subject” of French sovereignty in both senses of t...