On identity
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 24, 2025
Kojève once expressed, in the form of a warning, a critique of identity that is worth reflecting upon: “Be what you can never become”. The mistake of those who seek an identity is to want to become what they already are. What we simply are is not an identity, but a source experience always ongoing, that continually slips through our fingers, and that’s why we can never become. And yet, the society we live in does nothing but ascribe to us an identity that, with more or less conviction, we end up assuming. This identity — we know it perfectly after all — is necessarily fake and anyone who truly wants to become who they are is at risk — as happened to Nietzsche and, albeit less obviously, to almost everyone — to fall into madness. Wise, i.e. without identity, is the one who always is without ever becoming: but this is just what the so-called civilised societies now regard as alien and reject to the margins, while they purely and simply try to eliminate it.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 24, 2025
Kojève once expressed, in the form of a warning, a critique of identity that is worth reflecting upon: “Be what you can never become”. The mistake of those who seek an identity is to want to become what they already are. What we simply are is not an identity, but a source experience always ongoing, that continually slips through our fingers, and that’s why we can never become. And yet, the society we live in does nothing but ascribe to us an identity that, with more or less conviction, we end up assuming. This identity — we know it perfectly after all — is necessarily fake and anyone who truly wants to become who they are is at risk — as happened to Nietzsche and, albeit less obviously, to almost everyone — to fall into madness. Wise, i.e. without identity, is the one who always is without ever becoming: but this is just what the so-called civilised societies now regard as alien and reject to the margins, while they purely and simply try to eliminate it.
(English translation by I, Robot)
张向明 (Zhāng Xiàngmíng), Woman and Elephant, 2013. Courtesy of Artsy. |
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