The Limits of Identity

In the final analysis, no identity is completely fixed or "organic." Nobody's "positionality" is sufficient to explain every thing they say or do, let alone to explain them as a human being, not because we're all special snowflakes, but because such facts — even if there were a measurably accurate way of ascertaining them — can never completely delimit the sorts of people you may happen to meet, or hear about, or fall in love with. They cannot predict — nobody can — what book you may happen upon one day and chance to read, or what conversation you might chance to overhear. Intersecting identities do not serve as transparent proxies for where and how a person gets their information. I have never met a single soul that could be accounted for in terms of identity or positionality, no matter how intersecting. "Basically" as Sloterdijk put it "no life has a name."

No comments:

Post a Comment