That Strange Thing Called ‘Identifying’

Abstract

Is the act of looking unavoidably accompanied by an act of identification (identifying), firstly in the sense of identifying a subject, and secondly of identifying objects as enduring? Identification of objects is here understood as the (unconscious) attribution of enduring identity or substantial sameness to objects in the human world, and of subjects as the experience or awareness of a relatively enduring identity or selfhood on the part of a human being. The exploration is taken in the direction of the structural dynamics of the ‘act of identifying’. Here the work of mainly Lacan, Nancy, Kant, Silverman and Kierkegaard (and to a lesser extent, that of Husserl and Deleuze) is employed to clarify the various aspects of ‘identifying’ with someone or something. This includes Lacan's ‘mirror stage’ in conjunction with his early elaboration on aggressivity, as well as his register of the symbolic as the repository of ethical norms, Nancy's phenomenology of the image, Kant's notions of apperception, of the empirical and the transcendental self, Silverman's understanding of desire, and Kierkegaard's different models of the self, namely, the aesthetic and the ethical. Employing the theoretical lenses referred to above, the focus is shifted towards an illuminating instance of visual and linguistic (imaginary and symbolic) viewer identification in cinema to be able to elaborate on the theoretical work in question, namely, Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley. An interpretive analysis of this film reveals that the reason why identifying visually and symbolically with a protagonist in a cinematic narrative becomes painfully and uncomfortably apparent to a viewer when such protagonists unexpectedly perform unconscionable actions, is related to the primary and secondary identifications at the imaginary and symbolic levels, especially regarding the ethical import of the latter.