Identities and Freedom

Abstract

I want to begin by thanking Margaret McLaren and Johanna Meehan for their very thoughtful and generous responses to my book, Identities and Freedom. These papers were originally presented at our book panel at the SPEP conference in October 2015, where we engaged in some very spirited and challenging discussion. I am grateful to all of the participants in that session for their questions and contributions, to Amy Allen for facilitating, and to Peg Birmingham for asking us to contribute the panel papers to Philosophy Today. In my response, I will clarify some of the arguments in the book, addressing Johanna's and Margaret's criticisms as I go along.This book is an argument for the importance of identities-of particular kinds of identities-as sources of freedom, in a context where arguments for identities are unpopular. I'm addressing a long tradition in Western liberal thought that is carried through poststructuralism, and through contemporary feminist and queer theories: a profound ambivalence about identities, both individual and collective. Identities are understood to be both sources and ends of freedom, and identities are the shackles that imprison us. Identity politics are seen as misguided affirmations of the very identities that colonize us, not a politics of freedom but a politics of balkanization and closure based on constitutive exclusions and a policing of borders.I attempt to unravel the knot of identity to develop a more complex and relational understanding of identities in relation to freedom. I understand identities as effects of multiple contesting relations-of power, but not only of power. Contesting relations of power and resistance, I argue, interact with contesting relations of love, mutuality, and solidarity, to produce identities in diverse locations that change through time.I'm making a conceptual argument about what identities are. And I'm making an ethical-political argument about how we can engage with and through our complex identities in practices of freedom and resistance. I argue for a conception of identities not as sameness, but as relational, and I argue for an understanding of freedom as a relational practice.So, in response to Johanna, I'm not saying that we can escape the monolithic ascription of identity. I argue that we are not wholly determined by monolithic ascriptions of identity, because identities are not monolithic; they are multiply and complexly constituted. This is a conceptual argument about what identities are, and how they are constituted. I guess you could say that it's a metaphysics. But my point is that we are constituted by politics and history and agency, not just by abstract laws or norms.I'm also making an ethical-political argument about how we negotiate conflicts among our identities, and identity-narratives. I don't think I ever use the term choose but I do talk about interpretations. And I don't think we ever get definitive answers to the questions who am I? and who are we? we get are interpretations, and these vary according to contexts and change over time. I don't think the conflicts among identities and identity-narratives force us to choose, but I do, as Johanna notes, think that these conflicts open a space for negotiating our identities, and that is a space of freedom. I argue that this space is created not just through the existence of conflicting concepts of identity, but through contesting relations: we negotiate our identities through identifications and disidentifications with multiple given and potential defining communities.With this focus on complexity, I criticize binary conceptions of identity as paradox: as the paradox of subjection. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler writes: As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. And that is because What 'one' is, one's very formation as a subject, is dependent on . . . a power external to oneself. Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency. …