Since the 1960s, the intellectual landscape of the humanities has been overshadowed by the question of identity and difference – political and national identity, ethnic and racial identity, gender identity and, in philosophy, the question of the identity of the self and of the knowing, acting and desiring subject. This is partly due to the social, cultural and political upheavals experienced in different parts of the globe at the time, for example, the movement of decolonization in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Civil Rights Movement in the USA, or second-wave feminism. It is also due to the emergence of a new intellectual orientation in French philosophy in the 1960s. Suspicious, on the one hand, of the claim made by the philosophies of the subject (particularly by existentialism and phenomenology) that the identity of the subject, although not given or natural, is self-constituted, and of the claim made by structuralism in linguistics, anthropology and psychoanalysis that there are invariable structures that govern human life, on the other, a certain unity of perspective or commonality of outlook emerged among various French thinkers such as Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault, to name but a few, which overturned one of the most long-standing beliefs in Western thought. This is that difference (or variation) is not to be derived from or understood on the basis of a prior identity (or structure) but, rather, that identity – whether the identity of a singular or collective subject, of the self or of a people – is a product of differential relations.
The contributions collected in this issue reflect recent discussions on this relation between identity and difference. Two basic, intersecting groups of discussions can be distinguished. The papers by Simon Beck, Ioannis Trisokkas and Miguel de Beistegui address issues of a metaphysical nature, whereas those by Tracy B. Strong, Benda Hofmeyr and Babette Babich address issues of a moral and political nature.
In his article “Hegelian Identity”, Trisokkas examines the dialectic of identity and difference in the second chapter of Section One of Book Two of Hegel's Science of Logic, “The Determinations of Reflection”. Trisokkas initially shows that Hegel understands identity as having its truth in contradiction. He then explains that Hegel understands contradiction in two ways. Ordinarily, a contradiction occurs when a quality or quantity (F) and its contradictory (not F) are predicated of the same thing (A). However, for Hegel, contradiction has a more fundamental sense. It is a structure where the very thing (A) is in its own minimal self continuously both affirmed (A) and denied (not A). It is thereby shown that Hegelian identity is not merely the thing's distinguishing from another thing but also, and more fundamentally, a process of self-negation and self-unification within the thing itself. As such a process, the identity of a thing is equally its non-identity.
In his paper “Technological Fictions and Personal Identity: On Ricoeur, Schechtman and analytic thought-experiments”, Beck offers a critical appraisal of Schechtman and Ricoeur's arguments against Parfit's theory of personal identity and particularly his use of thought experiments. Beck contends that an account like Parfit's is not guilty of ignoring deep metaphysical facts about identity as the two contend, and that thought experiments can raise serious difficulties for both of their favoured theories of personal identity.
Since the publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks, the focus has been less on who Heidegger identified with than who he ignored, what Babich in “Heidegger's Jews” calls the game of names, who's in and who's out, included and excluded. She starts her paper with a quote from François Vezin, the 1986 French translator of Heidegger's Being and Time: “[Heidegger] doesn't merely ignore Moses Mendelssohn or Max Liebermann but [he also] ‘ignores’ that six million were murdered in abominable fashion.” Babich argues that Heidegger was guilty less of personal or vulgar anti-Semitism than the kind of anti-Semitism that works on the level of world history, the kind that leads to pogroms and to a conception of and a physically protracted execution of final solutions. This is the horrific point that resides in Heidegger's indictment of “the emigrants allowed out of Germany”. However, against the usual reading that Heidegger subscribed to the clichéd anti-Semitism of his day, Babich shows that Heidegger would also seem to have had his “own schema”. The problem, one underlined by Adorno in ways that echo Heidegger, is far from being Heidegger's failure to name Jewish philosophers by name. The problem is the Shoah, the Holocaust, genocide as the destruction of a people, that is, the Semites, the Others. Babich argues that Heidegger's definition of machination as “the destruction indeed, the godlessness, the dehumanisation of the human, the using up of the earth, the calculation of the world”, parallels Adorno's description of genocide. Heidegger's notorious statements in the Notebooks rightly deserves condemnation, but if read in the context of his critique of technology and science then Heidegger can be read in a different way, as it were, against his own text.
Strong's paper “Heidegger and the pólis” examines Heidegger's understanding of the relation between philosophy and the pólis. The pólis does not name the politics of the state. It is the space of history, the dislosure of the world, what is called the political. The pólis is the event of the ontological, the being of beings. Strong argues that this ontological understanding of the political is not incompatible with Nazism, that Heidegger's involvement with Nazism is part of this understanding, and yet that this is, given a certain reading, ironically a strength of his work. The question is whether the step out of his ontological understanding of the political is the anti-democratic one that he took, and if that which is democratic is as problematic as he asserts. Strong does not think that Heidegger's involvement with Nazism is a “political misadventure”. He argues that Heidegger's political positions have a clear relation to his philosophical understanding. If his understanding of the political is linked to his politics then there are grounds for rejecting it. If the steps Heidegger takes open paths he did not travel on, then that thought is of great import.
In “Levinas and the Possibility of Dialogue with Strangers”, Hofmeyr raises the question of whether a productive encounter between Levinas' thought and non-Western and postcolonial ethical frameworks is possible. Such an encounter is necessary given the fact that Levinas' philosophical labours have been dedicated to uncovering the violence at the heart of Western philosophy – the tendency of the self to reduce the alterity of the other to the same. However, Hofmeyr argues that one immediately runs up against a number of challenges. First, thinking Levinas in an African or postcolonial context is problematic: he has been guilty of a number of racist remarks; his work is undeniably Eurocentric and his Eurocentrism is premised on a narrow conception of Europe (the Bible and the Greeks). Moreover, alterity for Levinas does not follow from differences; differences issue from alterity. What scope, then, is there for a productive interchange between ethical metaphysics and postcolonial celebrations of differences (e.g. Negritude, Black consciousness; the facticity of blackness, etc.)? This question is further complicated by the fact that these discourses and the entire postcolonial “oeuvre” as such are political discourses expressly concerned with the politics of difference and, more specifically, oppression, and there remains a recalcitrant gap between ethics and politics in Levinas' thought. She concludes by suggesting that a productive encounter with postcolonial thought might be found in Levinas' critique of ontology.
In “The Government of Desire: A Genealogical Perspective”, de Beistegui explores Foucault's work from the mid to late 1970s, and argues that the lecture courses and books from that period lay the ground for a genealogy of the Western subject as a subject of desire. He undertakes a genealogy of two rationalities – that of the sexual instinct and of economic interest – which overlap and intersect in ways that are at times complex. de Beistegui attempts to show how Foucault intended to lay the foundations of such a broader genealogy by arguing that his history of sexuality, presented in Abnormal (1975) and the first volume of History of Sexuality (1976), provides key insights in the inscription of desire within psychiatric discourse and bourgeois power via the concept of sexual instinct, while his genealogy of political economy, offered in Security, Territory, Population (1977) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978), reveals the connection between desire and economic self-interest. Going beyond Foucault's own genealogy, de Beistegui asks about the connections and tensions between those two rationalities, between the sexual instinct and economic interest, and suggests that they require a third rationality, a third sense of desire, which involves the law and the symbolic order, the significance of which Foucault recognized, but did not explore.