Identity

A seed alive is lonesome; a dead seed generates abundance

“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”

St. Paul, Galatians 2.20.

In Western cultures, and certain Western-influenced cultures, it is taken as self-evident that everyone should seek out an identity. It is standard to hear people talk about personal branding, personal identity, gender identity, and identity politics. Even the idea that people can experience an identity crisis is common. Given all of this, you might assume that identity has always been the sort of issue that it is today. But that’s not true.

The first Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, published in 1936, did not refer to identity. Only the 1968 edition notes the idea, probably thanks largely to Erik Erikson’s popularisation of the notions of identity and identity politics in the 1950s. The 1978 edition of the Dictionary of the History of Ideas has no reference to identity either, while the more recent 2005 edition makes up for this with multiple references. The first Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the famous 1953 DSM, does not refer to Gender Identity Disorder. That shows up for the first time only in the third edition, published in 1980. Then, in the fourth edition of the DSM, published in 1994, we find the first references to Multiple Personality Disorder and Personality Identity Disorder. Later, it turned out that having a few entries on identity scattered about in various books was not enough. In 2010, much closer to where we are now, an entire Encyclopedia of Identity was published. Identity never used to be so much about self-expression and self-assertion but that’s changed.

None of this means that the question of who we are was unimportant until the mid-twentieth century. It just means people think differently about who they are now than they used to. Some might be grateful that identity has finally received such widespread recognition. But my reading of the situation is different. It’s because identity has become increasingly unimportant that we talk about it so much, often without really getting anywhere. We are quieter on sacred things and the fact that identity-talk has grown so loud is a sign that it has been profaned. People who don’t know who they are will talk about themselves all the time. People who know who they are will talk about anything else except themselves. People with identities reveal who they are by hiding. People without a stable sense of self will have pronouns in their bios.

This profanation of identity means that the profound mystery of each human being, as a unique manifestation of humanity, has been given over to the principle of WYSIATI: what you see is all there is. Identity has become confused, perhaps fused, with its mere appearance. I won’t go into a genealogy of how and why this became so immediately plausible. That’s a topic for a book, not a blog. I want to focus instead on a much more pressing concern, namely: the meaning of the severed connection between identity and universality. This may sound abstract, although its real-world consequences have been far-reaching.

As an aside, here I am employing the Augustinian idea of ‘plundering the Egyptians’ (i.e. leftists). In the Exodus story, the newly freed Israelites plundered the Egyptians by carrying away large quantities of gold and other wealth. St. Augustine, in On Christian Doctrine (2.40.60) has this to say about the idea: 

“If those, however, who are called philosophers, have said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith, they should not be feared; rather, what they have said should be taken from them as from unjust possessors and converted to our use. Just as the Egyptians had not only idols and grave burdens which the people of Israel detested and avoided, so they also had vases and ornaments of gold and silver and clothing which the Israelites took with them secretly when they fled, as if to put them to better use.” 

Well, here, the Egyptian in question is Alain Badiou, an atheistic French philosopher. I want to reclaim something Badiou stole to support his communist agenda. Badiou at least has the virtue of not hiding his intentions, so we don’t have to wonder about his motives. In his book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (2003), he refers to that great apostle to address the contemporary problem of identity. He does this in a lot of detail, much of which I neglect to mention below. Hopefully, by hacking away at all that detail, I have recovered something of the essence of the relevance of his argument for us.

For Badiou, the central opposition—the core friend-enemy distinction, if you want to mess with his categories—is between communism and identity politics. If Badiou’s communism holds to a universal and undifferentiated conception of people as human beings with rights, identitarianism focuses only on minority groups. If we want to be radical in our politics, suggests Badiou, we should look at figures like Lenin and Mao. This is like saying that if we want to be radical in our ethics, we need to look at figures like Jack the Ripper and the Maquis de Sade. Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather drink my politics and ethics neat from as uncorrupted a source as I can find. I will read Badiou as he reads St. Paul; that is, badly. This is not a commentary or an appraisal. This is hermeneutical violence for the sake of an insight or two.

Still, what Badiou gets right, in addition to framing Paul as a renegade militant anti-philosopher of the Christ-event, is that identity politics is at its heart a problem of having a reductionist posture towards the question of truth. Arguably, the technologisation of the world has resulted in decidedly shrunken views on pretty much everything. This has supported identity politics. Truth is first straight-jacketed and then locked up somewhere far away to scream about whatever it wants without being heard.

One consequence of this is the collapse of any access to the universal, which, among other things, causes the already radical relativism pervasive in our time to get progressively worse. The arrival on the scene of obsessions with facts and data reflects a shattering of reality. The intelligibility of the world has become questionable. The idea of a real universal, like that of human being gives way to false universals, mere “monetary” abstractions, like gay or disabled or black or white or nationalist, and so on. A feature of a person, a sometimes invisible feature of a person—as if said invisible feature is always totally transparent in its meaning to the person in question—is taken up as defining the person as a whole. Metonymy becomes a substitute for truth.

I’ve kept Badiou’s idea of ‘monetary abstraction’ here, not because I mean it as Badiou does, but because it highlights something unique about these supposedly new identities. Like money, they don’t have any specific content; they are accidental features of people that have been regarded, backed by propagandistic manipulation and mimetic escalation, as sufficient to claim status as (significant) identities. As shallow signals rather than meaningful indications of the depths of individual personhood, they are incidental to who they are. And yet, as incidental as they are, they have been rendered as absolutes, as essential. Just how incidental they are would, of course, be up for debate. I’ll leave this up to you to think about on your own, given that there are relativities here that can be discerned with more careful analysis.

I do think it’s important to notice here that, by setting identity up as a kaleidoscopic interest in false universals, identity politics is doomed to be forever collapsing in on itself. It is certain that identity politics as we see it now cannot last, which is not to say, sadly, that we won’t see other forms of identity politics further down the line. At every level, the attempt to raise trivial markers of identity to the status of real universals can only ever result in disharmony and failure. We see this all the time. No one is cancelled faster than a member of the in-group who isn’t playing the same bureaucratic game as the majority. 

If it is so weak, how does any false universal gain a foothold as an identity? The short answer is that it doesn’t, at least not in any ultimate sense. The longer answer is that the illusion of a sustainable identity can be maintained for a time if you make enough noise about it and set up artificial legal structures to protect it. This artificial system relies on focusing on one issue at a time, crediting one so-called identity and then another, without staying too long in one place lest someone notice how much hot air is swirling around them. Names are robbed of being. The word and the world are divorced. And the dust cloud thrown up by all the hot air gets into everyone’s eyes. In other words, the support is not a better foundation but a more impenetrable artifice. The surface demands obedience. This obedience is more radical and more barbaric than the alliance owed to the truth because the truth can stand on its own without manufactured support.

But it is here that St. Paul is such an astonishing figure. He is a reminder of what happens when an event intrudes and instantly destroys some flimsy identity. In an instant, confronted with the unforeseen, unimagined event, a person’s subjectivity, far from needing to generate enough energy to simulate a real universal, suddenly reconnects with the truth. St. Paul was once thoroughly, devoutly, pharisaically Jewish, and merrily persecuted those Christians who to his mind were blasphemers. And then he met Jesus, the living Christ. In a moment, on that road to Damascus, his puny image of himself was shattered. Truth, says Badiou, is “evental” and “hazardous.” Yes, indeed. Truth can even hurt. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,” Paul later writes, “The old has gone, the new has come” (Corinthians 1.5.17). We might say it this way: if anyone is in Christ, he is no longer equal to the flags and the pronouns he put into his bio. He has been transformed from being a mere parader of bumper stickers into a person.

Badiou reads this Christ event as a fable. I don’t. Anyone who takes it only as a fabulous fabrication has not bothered to understand history. Still, Badiou rightly notes that the notion of identity becomes more than complicated in the aftermath of an event. Most notably, the event is pure, undiluted grace. The artificial legal structures that get set up to contain the grace can be, and perhaps sometimes should be, deconstructed. Even if the law was the evental site where grace happened, it is grace (universality) that ultimately has more saw. When Paul argues with the so-called Judaisers, who see the Christ-event as a mere extension of their Jewishness, Paul makes a point of saying that it is, at the very least, the other way around. Christ is the centre. All else is peripheral. In our context, if Christianity merely becomes the technological extension of identitarianism, it would be fair to say that what you have is not Christianity but just more legalistic tyranny.

In the aftermath of the Christ-event, identity becomes what it properly is rather than remaining merely akin to our representations of identity. Without a doubt, our world is hostile to the truth when it adopts tiny identity markers as its guides. This hostility is revealed, Badiou writes, “through nominal occlusions: where the name of a procedure should obtain, another, which represses it, holds sway. The name ‘culture’ comes to obliterate ‘art.’ The word ‘technology’ obliterates the word ‘science.’ The word ‘management’ obliterates ‘politics.’ The word ‘sexuality’ obliterates love.” But then, there is the arrival of the event, which shatters the facade. Real love shows up and frees people from the prison of sexuality, and so also brings about a return to politics, science, art, and—I’ll say it, although Badiou does not—faith.

St. Paul has much to say about identity that is, perhaps, confusing. He says more than I will mention here. He talks about being all things to all people, freely adopting that aspect of his own identity most appropriate to each specific context (Corinthians 1.9.22). He hates idolatry but merrily points to an idol as indicating the Unknown God who transcends the gods (Acts 17). He also talks about how, in Christ, there is “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, neither male nor female” (Galatians 3.28). But this is not some sort of identity-fluidity. There is no crisis of identity here. The point is that the higher identity, being in Christ, takes precedence over all other ways of conceiving of identity. Christ de-reifies the self. St. Paul demonstrates, again and again, what it means to lose your life to find it (Matthew 10.39); to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Christ (Matthew 16.24-25). Truth is, whatever you believe, whatever course you elect to follow, you will be sacrificing something for its sake. Truth creates obligations. Even lies mistaken for truth generate obligations. If you recognise the truth, you will find yourself submitting to it.

What is crucial here, in Paul’s writings and life, is that recognising the truth is precisely what ensures genuine subjectivity. To submit to the truth is to be subject to it. And this subjectivity is rich, wide, and deep. The identitarian, in contrast, who would be like Paul before his conversion, is a flat sign of a larger ideological demand. She is no subject but a project. She is a project of the ossified legal-bureaucratic scheme. The self, in the grip of an ideology, is projectile. It is a weaponised image, usually of a self-proclaimed victim, who projects her sense that she is oppressed by her own laws onto those who would free her from those laws. The demand of this projectile self and this weaponising of identity is simple: cling to your life and you will lose it. Cling to your minuscule identity—or that sign that you have mistaken for your identity—and then you will be freed from the gift of your being and delivered up to the hell of nonbeing. Commit to the ideological surface and you will be reduced to your bio. The identitarian hallucinates identity. The Christian, having at last lost himself, is fully human for the first time.

The Christian, in the Pauline sense, claims true identity precisely because he does not cling. “For me to live is Christ,” says Paul; “to die is gain” (Philippians 1.21). Paul’s idea of finding his life in Christ is echoed no less than 160 times in his small collection of writings. He was more fully himself because he wasn’t too bothered about who he was. And yet, where he needed to be, he was comfortable with being a Jew to Jews and a Roman to the Romans. He became an adventurer who changed the face of the earth and whose writings have had a greater impact than the writings of any other thinker, all because he lost himself. It was as if he’d been ‘bonsaied’ before—planted in a shallow container that prevented his roots from growing and limited the heights he could reach. Finally, having been planted in a field, connected to reality in both intimate and ultimate sense, he became one of the tallest trees we have ever seen. “I am the worst of sinners,” St. Paul told a friend in one letter (Timothy 1.1.15). It’s the sort of thing a great man might say.

There’s much to think about here that I have not said. Identity is not easy to talk about without succumbing to the curse of reductionism. But the larger point suggested by Badiou, or perhaps by my reading of him (while trying to better understand Paul), is that it is less about what we identify with in the simplistic sense of naming our profession, role, or allegiances. It is ultimately a question of what or who we belong to. It’s about what or who we worship. Certainly, we belong to our families, our friends, and even to the world. Certainly, we have roles to play as professionals, parents, and members of communities. St. Paul suggests that this anti-universality is mad; we belong ultimately to God and will get our lives back if we recognise this.

But what is fascinating is how identitarianism flattens everything into a false universal, destroying all intimate relationships as well as all ultimate relationships. Everything becomes an extension of a code. It becomes a mere construction. Its underlings and ideologues believe that in claiming whichever signifier is most relevant to them, they will be able to rebirth themselves. 

That’s the lie. They think they’ll be born again by submitting themselves to the anti-cultural-managerial-sexual regime. They think they’re taking the red pill to get out of the Matrix when they’re getting hooked on blue pills. Still, I take St. Paul’s pre-conversional rigidity as an encouraging sign. Paul, back when he was known to the people around him as Saul, held to his rigid frame as tightly as he could. He tried his very best to make it stick. He inflicted it on others without mercy. He was a zealot. He was cruel in his devotion to his idea. Still, I wonder. Sometimes I think that his fanaticism fell away so quickly, like scales from his eyes, because it was, as so many identitarian rules are, too simple to accommodate the inescapably ‘eventally’ real. Fanaticism is a brittle thing. It doesn’t bend. And maybe thank God it doesn’t bend. That very fact makes it so much easier to break. The fanatical viewpoint offers a clear framework that promises to make reality intelligible. But because it is based on lies, a higher intelligibility is likely to show up and make the fanatic finally see her blindness.