ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author speaks about the doubleness of identity: he suggests that negotiated iterability of identity, its constant repetition, revision, relocation, so that no repetition is the same as the preceding one. Very often, the model for talking about multiple identities has been a spatial model, or a voluntaristic model: that it is possible to occupy a number of different nodal points. The essentialist model of identity seems, in some way, now passe: identities are much more performative, and people construct a sense of identity. Identities are formed through differential, non-equivalent structures of identification and it is through the borderlines of being that our social relations are articulated and established. The author's interest in psychoanalysis, and the way in which it talked about partial and ambivalent identifications, was also very central to him rethinking of the structures of power and authority.
