The Sovereign Self

The toppling of statues in the name of anti-racism is disconcerting, as is the violence sometimes displayed towards others in the name of gender equality.  The emancipation movements of the past seem to have undergone a subtle transformation: the struggle now is not so much to bring about progress but rather to denounce offenses, express indignation and assert identities, sometimes in order to demand recognition.  The individual’s commitment to self-definition and self-appreciation, understood as the exercise of a sovereign right, has become a distinctive sign of our time.

The phenomenon of identity attribution has been on the rise over the last twenty years and has been increasingly conflated with belonging.  This is particularly the case in relation to the concept of gender and the metamorphoses of the idea of race.  In both cases, the rich intellectual tools bequeathed by some of the great thinkers of the last half-century – Sartre, Beauvoir, Lacan, Said, Fanon, Foucault, Derrida – have been reinterpreted in order to shore up the ideals of a new conformism.  Roudinesco takes us into the darker corners of identity thinking, where conspiracy theories, rejection of the other and incitement to violence are often part of the mix.  But she also points to several paths that could lead us away from despair and toward a possible world in which everyone can adhere to the principle according to which ‘I am myself, that’s all there is to it’ without denying the diversity of human communities or essentializing either universality or difference.

This bold and courageous interrogation of identity politics will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the state of our world today.