ABSTRACT
The cartoonist Berkeley Breathed agrees with Bill Connolly’s observations on the pressures and ambiguities afflicting identity politics, especially Connolly’s recognition of the struggles between officially certified identities and the individual’s attempts at self-fashioning. In one of his strips, Breathed’s penguin, Opus, reports to the ‘U.S. Dept. of Groups’ to respond to a summons requiring him to change his ‘official hue’. When asked about his preferred new color he tries ‘mostly black … plus white and peach trim’, to which the clerk responds, ‘I need a govt-sanctioned pigment.’ After several trials and errors, during which Opus is informed that ‘it’s all about color now’, he and the clerk agree that his new designation will be ‘Dude of Color’, which the clerk affirms is ‘both officially and socially legitimate’. The ironic stance in Breathed’s strip is echoed in much of Connolly’s
corpus, where he strives to oppose a micropolitics to state-engendered political forms, to undo, as Jacques Rancière (2006: 65) puts it ‘the formatting of reality produced by state controlled media’. In what follows, I draw inspiration from Connolly’s many excursions into the vagaries and political struggles involving identity\difference in general and in particular his appreciation of the contribution of Milan Kundera’s fiction to think those vagaries and struggles. And ultimately, I treat mobile philosophical and ethical frames – a mobility that for Connolly is cinematically and erotically animated – to engage the implications he derives from his analyses.
