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A striking, unsettling feature of the contemporary world order is the falling and rising of separation barriers—walls and defensive fences, material and virtual, and political and symbolic borders. A permanent phenomenon in world history displays today some hitherto unknown characters. Indeed, the present epoch, while priding itself on seeing its inception in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall, and of bearing witness to the dissolution of the apartheid regime in South Africa, thrives in the fluid geography in which yet and again new barriers rise, new boundaries are drawn, and borders are increasingly fortified. The latest manifestations of such strategies are the ongoing erection of the Israeli-Palestinian wall and the progressive closing of the U.S. border to “aliens” of all origin-ultimately, the project of a “virtual” wall enclosing the U.S. territory.The politics of fortifying borders reveals that identity in our world has become a threatening and precarious entity—that it indicates indeed a somehow new problem. The process of drawing boundary lines is, in general, an attempt to establish identity. It is one of the ways in which individuals and peoples seek to affirm their identity, positioning themselves within a territory that without borders would appear indeterminate and hence easily threatened. Identity seems to need separation; it seems to require the creation of difference.1 This is why barriers and walls and limits and borders are there—material or symbolic marks of difference for the sake of identity. And yet another common experience of our present time reminds us that separation ultimately kills identity, that it underscores the lack of any determinate identity other than the separation line itself. The very need to be enclosed by visible or at least recognizable boundaries betrays the fact that identity itself is not there, 131 Chapter 6 Changing Identities: Dialectical Separations and Resisting Barriers Angelica Nuzzo that identity is not itself visible or recognizable or felt, and that it is threatened or lost or maybe has simply never existed. Moreover, history teaches us that boundaries, as more or less arbitrary political or social constructions, are there to be crossed, to be moved, to be constantly challenged and redesigned. To be sure, boundaries do not enclose a pre-existing fixed identity; they attempt to create one for the first time.The tale often told about the defensive function of borders is only a retroactive ideological construction—there is no preexisting identity to be defended before the dividing line is drawn.The border is created in order to attain identity; only afterward does the precariousness of such identity seem to justify the ascription of a defensive function to the border. And yet building walls is not the only strategy through which identity can be established. Culture—that, which the Germans since the Enlightenment have called first Bildung and then Kultur—is another, essentially different way of pursuing identity for peoples and individuals. In general, the cultural way to identity ignores material or political borders, is inclusive of difference instead of exclusive, and appeals to the value of “freedom” instead of self-defense. Given these two alternative models of identity construction, some of the questions that our contemporary world poses to us philosophers are: What is the logic underlying the process of building walls and erecting fences—separation barriers between individuals and peoples meant to assert, in the first place, the existence, the value, or the right of individuals or peoples within in opposition to those without? And what is, on the other hand, the logic followed by the cultural way to identity aiming at overcoming borders and separations and establishing an identity inclusive of difference? How do the concepts of identity and difference relate, more precisely, to these processes? And, more pointedly, has Hegel’s speculative logic anything to offer to our attempts at a philosophical understanding of this contemporary engineering of identity, one of the most salient traits of the present global age? This is the background and these are the questions that will be discussed in this chapter in their purely logical and abstract form. I will use the analysis of three crucial moments of Hegel’s Science of Logic, taken, respectively, from the Logic of Being, the Logic of Essence, and the Logic of the Concept, to indicate three alternative models or strategies through which identity (in relation to difference) can be achieved. The progression instituted by the dialectical movement of Hegel’s logic will allow us to assess the limits and flaws of...

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