identities. The word ‘identity’ as used in identity politics is the most blatant
example confirming Humpty Dumpty’s oft-quoted assertion that a word ‘means
just what I choose it to mean’.
On the individual level, identities have become a matter of negotiating and, as
the need to do so arises, renegotiating your place, your purpose, and your
presentation in everyday life. On the collective level, identities are fuzzy sets
rather than clearly delineated groups. What is a European, a Bosnian, a Catalan,
a woman, a Muslim, a homosexual, a dead person? Notwithstanding the
impossibility of answering these questions categorically, the historical
contingency of identity is widely ignored when it comes to defending that which
is ‘genuinely’ Hungarian, Polish, German, French, or Christian.
Yet, the assertion of, search for, and preoccupation with, identity not just
continues unabated, but keeps growing and invading ever more spheres of life.
There are no indications that the identity wave is flattening. Not just
psychologists emphasize that an identity is indispensable for a normal life. This
is true in more than one sense. In the age of mass surveillance that takes shape
equally in India’s Aadhaar scheme, China’s Social Credit System, and the
databases of US secret services, every earthling has to be identifiable
unambiguously and before long will be localizable with precision, night and day.
At the same time, identities in the material world dissolved into fluidity. Since
Einstein taught us that there is no such thing as matter, objects have become
‘space-time paths’. Common sense tells us exactly what an object is, but unity
and identity of an object is not the same for theoretical physics and in everyday
life.
The paradox of identity, then, is that it is not what it professes to be, true to itself.
Or perhaps it is, like a chameleon, displaying different colours at different times,
depending on the environment. Time is crucial. The duration of our stay on this
earth is not very long. Since Socrates, this has changed only marginally.
Although all those who dream of and support the preservation, ‘forever’, of
various identities refer to the dim and distant past, the real measure of their
projections may not extend beyond their lifetime.
Over the past half century or so, there has been a shift in our understanding from
essence to construction and from discreteness to fuzziness of the identity of such