ABSTRACT

Among the most marked characteristics of our late modern society is the emergence of a vast range of multicultural communities. Yet what marks this phenomenon is less the actual existence of these new communities or the enhanced meaning of community as such, but rather the experience, the phenomenology of their emergence. A powerful discourse of recognition and legitimization has come into play, linking identity and community on a number of levels, generating rights and privileges founded upon an experience of belonging that itself builds upon individual and group self-understanding as much as it does on the transformational politics of category: on who belongs to what, in the name of whom and in the service of what (Fiore and Nelson, 2003; Fraser, 2001; Haacke, 2005; Honneth, 1995b; Taylor et al., 1994). Ethnic, cultural, sexual, professional, aesthetic, religious identities, to

name a few, generate legitimacy effects by the force of collective rights and the logic of recognition. In late modern, liberal societies, minority communities find rights and privileges that even seem to defy principles of liberal individuality. To be a minority in a large number of cultural contexts is to enjoy a kind of status, an appreciation, an acknowledgement, a home and security. From the moment a selective community achieves conceptual standing based on a shared identity, it becomes the object of a certain kind of securitization. Its very existence sets in motion a dialectic of recognition, threat and defence. Identity is enabled through a logic, not of identity but of difference. The

‘we’ invoked by any assertion of identity draws not only its meaning and meaningfulness, but also its stability, strength, longevity and security from its opposition to, or even negation of, the other. The affirmation of the identity of a group is not only a categorical one, setting out the rules and terms under which something or someone belongs or does not belong to a group. It is also an assertion of the durability or temporality of that group or the collection and, by consequence, avowal of the possibility of its disappearance, the very source of its insecurity. FromHegel onward, a long line of canonical texts develops the dialectical counterparts of identity and difference, the unity of the self-understanding as inseparable from the opposition to the other.