ABSTRACT

But even more alarming than the descent into individualism that identity politics entails is the absolute narrowing of focus of feminist concerns. To the extent that feminist theory focuses on questions of the subject or identity, it leaves questions about the rest of existence, outside of and beyond or bigger than the subject, untouched. Feminism abdicates the right to speak about the real, about the world, about matter, about forces both social and material, and in exchange cages itself in the reign of the ‘I’: who am I, who recognizes me, what can I become? How does the other constrain and limit me, and how can the other be forced to address me more adequately?, a realm of the subject that is increasingly defined, ironically, through the right to access the world of consumption: one becomes a free subject, a self-defining subject to the extent that one can buy the goods and services that one wants or needs. The subject comes to have the right to own, and through owning, the right to be identified and recognized. I believe that this focus on the primacy of the subject (whether the subject is

understood as a desiring subject, a speaking subject, a labouring subject, or an excluded, abjected or marginalized subject) has obscured two sorts of issues: the one relates to what constitutes the subject that the subject cannot know about itself (the limits of the subject’s subjectivity, the content and nature of the agency or agencies that we can attribute to a subject) – an inhuman secreted within the human, a beyond-the-human lodged within all identity. The other relates to what is beyond the subject, bigger than the subject, outside the subject’s control or possibly even comprehension – an inhuman that surrounds the human and pushes it to surpass itself, to itself become inhuman. The subject does not make itself; the subject does not know itself. The subject seeks to be known and to be recognized only through its reliance on others, including the very others who function to collectively subjugate the subject. We need to ask with more urgency now than in the past: if the subject strives to be recognized as a subject of value in a culture that does not value that subject in the terms it seeks, what is such recognition worth? And once the subject is recognized as such, what is created through this recognition? Who is it that is required for the recognition to have some effect, to make some difference, for the subject thus recognized? In focusing on the subject instead of on the forces that make up the world,

the forces that the world and the subject share, we lose the capacity to see beyond ourselves, to engage with the world, to contest and remake the real. We wait to be recognized instead of making something, inventing something that will enable us to recognize ourselves or, more interestingly, to eschew recognition altogether. I am not what others see in me, but what I do, what I make, what I make of myself, but also what I make of the world, how I make the inhuman part of my self-overcoming. (This was even that master of recognition, Hegel’s, way out of the impasse of the ruses of recognition that result in a life and death struggle between subjects who mutually seek recognition of their value through the other: for Hegel, it is only the slave who develops an identity, eventually, in the long run, without self-delusion, because it is only through labour, through making the world that one also

makes oneself!) I become according to what I do, not who I am or who recognizes me. This is not to ignore the very real differences between subjects and their various social positions; only to suggest that these differences, and not the subjectivities or identities supporting them, are the vehicles for the invention of the new. Thus, I am interested in an understanding of difference as the generative force of the world itself, the force that enacts materiality itself (and not just its representation), the movement of difference that marks the very energies of existence before and beyond identity. In this chapter I deal with the notion of difference, not as an affirmation of

the unique particularity through what I call ‘diversity’ – that is to say, the ways in which recognizable and mappable characteristics are distributed through a population to render its members comparable and thus ultimately analyzable. Instead I’m more concerned with destabilizing identity altogether, and of addressing social and political problems, not with the (poor) resources of the past and present, but with the most underdeveloped and immanent concepts, concepts addressing the future and presenting a new horizon in which to dissolve identity into difference. What philosophy offers, in this age of answers and actions, responses and solutions, is the capacity to reflect, to step back from the immediacy of the present to see what virtualities – what possibilities of being otherwise – exist in the present; what it offers is an opening up of the present to the forces of the future.