ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critique of postmodern identity that lays bare what is at stake for contemporary society. Beginning with an overview of Freitag dialectical approach, emphasising the organic basis of subjective synthetic identity and its symbolic overall nature, this chapter outlines the historical figures of individual and collective identity and arrives at the modern notion of identity that stresses its transcendental character in line with the abstract-universalism of modern societies. This analysis frames the critique of a contemporary postmodern identity characterised by a break from this transcendental constitution of identity: when social unity dissolves in the reliance on piecemeal systemic integration, the unity of the subject follows suit, resulting in anxious individuals that tend to conceive of themselves through an assemblage of particularisms and disparate experiences without reference to a common world.
