ABSTRACT
I suggest that the spectacular rise of the “identity discourse” can tell us more about the present-day state of human society than its conceptual and analytical results have told us thus far. And so, rather than composing another “career report” of contentions and controversies which combine into that discourse, I intend to focus on the tracing of the experiential grounds, and through them the structural roots, of that remarkable shift in intellectual concerns of which the new centrality of the “identity discourse” is a most salient symptom.
