Identity/Politics

In his 1986 novel The Counterlife, Philip Roth’s recurring character, author Nathan Zuckerman, is told by his British wife Maria, who will soon reject the book she fears he is writing about her by fleeing from it, in frustration that “‘identity’ is just where you decide to stop thinking.” She is half-right but for the wrong reasons. Those who have read the book will recall that Nathan, inveterately secular and heretofore never one to claim common cause with his supposed coreligionists, here finds himself—in England, with a gentile wife, and facing fatherhood—aggressively asserting his Jewish identity. Maria, meanwhile, securely and comfortably British, admits to feeling uncomfortable when in parts of London populated by people Nathan suspects she’s coding as non-British, people who insist on their “identity”—an insistence she deems to be irrational, even as she reveals her own entitled sense of feeling at home in England. What frustrates Nathan is that she marks only non-British identity, refusing to see the differentiating forces circulating through her own hegemonic sense of belonging. While Maria believes that identity is what happens when we stop thinking sufficiently—only when we give up on rationality are we seduced by the disruptive compensations of identity, always only visible as a challenge to dominant English coherence—the book ironically suggests that it is, instead, her unwillingness to think about the normative power of her own identification that is most dangerous. Part of the power of Roth’s novel is that, if we are left uncertain of what we should to think about identity, we are nonetheless sure that we must think about it.

Jean-Luc Nancy’s Identity: Fragments, Frankness (2014) subjects identity to a good deal of thinking. It’s an odd little pamphlet—a scant sixty-four pages in English—made more odd, at least for its probable American reader, by the itinerary of its publication: released first in France in 2010 in response to the particular circumstance of President Nicholas Sarkozy’s 2009 neo-fascist proposal for a public “debate” on French identity, it has just—in early 2015—been published here in the US, distanced from that nationally specific xenophobic moment, but remarkably relevant to our own national preoccupation with multiculturalism and identity-based practices whose hegemony so often relies on the same theoretical machinery underlying Sarkozy’s neo-fascism.

The danger in Sarkozy’s proposal, of course, was that his “debate,” in fact, coded a regulation. The conversation he expected to engender relied on the presumed self-evidence of a French identity articulated as a property of, as proper to, French people; it was meant to restrict French identity much the same as Roth’s Maria assumed British identity was restricted—that is, along lines that unequivocally French people didn’t have to think about. There was a brutally simple logic to it: it was meant to exclude those—such as immigrants—who weren’t really French anyway. This is the kind of reactionary thinking about identity Nancy wants to make more difficult.

Fascism is an important specter in this text; as the book’s historical occasion, fascism is also the name of the fundamental epistemological maneuver—not limited to the political moment of the book’s genesis—that Nancy investigates. It is fascism’s anxiety about endangered national identity that, in a sense, set the concept of identity circulating as the over-determined operator it has become in current social, cultural, and political thinking. Nancy writes that since its emergence into our instrumental vocabulary, identity has “never ceased to be wounded, bruised, or simply transformed, displaced, disfigured, or transfigured.” Social roles, family roles, expectations about community belonging, and nationality have always been doubly articulated with their perceived abuse; if “identity” was rarely used before being modified by “national,” it entered our vocabulary coincident with perceived threats to that nationality. But if national identity began as a machine for “emancipation from foreign tyrannies,” it has “ended up in imaginary or even mythological fixations.” It’s this...