Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity

Abstract

There is a lot of talk today about social, national, and political identities. The of the subject, proudly proclaimed everywhere not so long ago, has been succeeded by a new and widespread interest in the multiple identities proliferating in our contemporary world. These two movements are not, however, in such a complete and dramatic contrast as one might first believe. Perhaps the death of the Subject has been the precondition of this renewed interest in the question of subjectivity. It is perhaps the very impossibility of referring a multifarious subjectivity to a transcendental center that concentrates our attention on the multiplicity itself. In short, the founding gestures of the 1960s are still with us, enabling the political and theoretical explanations in which we are today engaged. If there was a temporal gap between the theoretically thinkable and the actually achieved, it was because a second, more subtle temptation haunted the intellectual imaginary of the left: that of replacing the transcendental with its symmetrical other, of reinscribing the multifarious forms of undomesticated subjectivities in an objective totality. From this temptation derived a concept that enjoyed great currency in our immediate prehistory: that of subject positions. But this, of course, did not transcend the problematic of a transcendental subjectivity (that which haunts us as an absence is still very much present). History is a process without a subject. Perhaps-but how do we know? Doesn't the very possibility of such an assertion require what it wants to avoid? If history as a totality is a possible object of experience, who could be the of such an experience but the of an absolute knowledge? Now, if we try to avoid this pitfall, what becomes problematic is the very notion of subject position. What could such a position be but a special location within a totality, and what could this totality be but the object of experience of an absolute subject? At the very moment when the terrain of absolute subjectivity collapses, the possibility of an absolute object collapses as well. There is no real alternative between Spinoza and Hegel. But this locates us in a very different terrain: one in which the possibility of the subject/object destination results from

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