Deaf Identity Revisited 163
clarity” (McDonald, 2014a, p. 84). Indeed, Cavarero (2000, p. 2) views life stories as
“anecdotes of destiny”: “That is also why life stories are told and listened to with in-
terest; because they are similar and yet new, unsubstitutable and unexpected, from
beginning to end” (Cavarero, 2000, p. 2).
In this chapter, I continue where McDonald ends, laying the finger on another
aspect of identity. Looking at the common sense of desire that is present in biog-
raphy and autobiography, Cavarero (2000) wonders “what exactly is desired by this
desire?... Obviously, this tale is desired—but, above all the unity, in the form of
story, which the tale confers to identity” (p. 37).
The terms uniqueness and unity have the same etymological root: “From the
beginning, uniqueness announces and promises to identify a unity that the self
is not likely to renounce. This is a promise that springs from the elementary
reality of an existent being” (pp. 37–38). Perhaps the anxiety of storytelling ex-
perienced by Agnes and Donna McDonald touches on the vulnerability of this
“naked uniqueness”: “The tale of her beginning, the story of her birth, never-
theless can only come to the existent in the form of a narration told by others.
The beginning of the narratable self and the beginning of her story are always a
tale told by others” (Caverero, 2000, p. 39). The narratives of Agnes and Donna
are being told in relation to their childhood deaf stories, stories of deaf heroes
and heroines, collective deaf community resources, myths of origin, and familiar
forms of thought.
Braidotti (2011) takes into account the difficulties and pain that may go with
transformations and consciousness raising, as well as the uprooting and loss of fa-
miliar forms of identity and representation that may be experienced by diasporic
subjects, accompanied by emotions of “fear, anxiety and nostalgia”:
becoming-nomadic marks the process of positive transformation of the pain
of loss into the active production of multiple forms of belonging and complex
allegiances. What is lost in the sense of fixed origins is gained in an increased
desire to belong, in a multiple rhizomic manner that transcends the classical
bilateralism of binary identity formations. (Braidotti, 2011, p. 322)
She challenges the contemporary dominant ideology of melancholia, alternatively
drawing on Spinoza’s ontology of desire, which is a concept “that is not built on lack
but rather constitutes a powerful force in itself: vitalism as ‘the politics of life itself’
(Rose 2001)” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 21).
This position does not minimize or ignore pain, and neither is it a naïve stance
that stays away from negativity: “ethics is about the transformation of negative into
affirmative passions” (p. 21). As such, Braidotti views the starting point of desire as
a shift in values and an ethical stance that enables citizens to “construct social hori-
zons of hope and sustainable futures.”
In the next section, drawing on Lacan’s theory of mirroring in identity formation,
I look at some of these mirrors in deaf community heritage. Driven by the desire to
tell one’s story, the generation of alternative forms of representation has cracked
these mirrors, which is necessary for nomadic deaf trajectories and multiple forms
of belonging, as well as for sustainable futures.