Abstract
This paper will focus on one element of the pushback against the massive influx of immigrants taken in for humanitarian purposes, namely, an identity-based chauvinism which uses identity as the point of resistance to the perceived dilution of that identity, brought about by the transformation of culture induced by the incorporation of a foreign other. The solution to this perceived dilution is a simultaneous defence of that culture and a demand for a conformity to it. While those in the critical tradition have encouraged a counter-position of revolutionary transformation by the other through ethics, dialogue, or the multitude, such a transformation is arguably impeded by what is ultimately a repetition of the metaphysics of conformity. Drawing on the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and the Eucharistic theology of Creston Davis and Aaron Riches, this paper submits an alternative identity politics position that completes the revolutionary impulse. Identity here is not the flashpoint of a self-serving conflict, but the launch-point of politics of self-emptying, whose hallmarks include, on the one hand, a never-ending reception of transformation by the other, and on the other hand, an anchoring in the Body of Christ that is at once ever-changing and never-changing.
Highlights
Introduction and the EucharistReligions 12: 380.This article will focus on the pushback on a form of state-sponsored identity politics, which pits itself against migrant others in the name of maintaining an ostensible Christian identity
The focus of this article’s response would be a claim put forward by political leaders and entrepreneurs that accepting non-Christian asylum seekers will undermine the institutions and values shaped by the Christian faith, which in turn justifies restricting their migration into the polis (Reuters 2015)
The revolution in identity emerging from the Event is not anarchic
Summary
One of the ironies of modern discourses about the invocation of identity at a corporate level is that their most foundational premise is that of a person that is autonomous, selfsufficient, and self-enclosed—what Charles Taylor might call a “bounded” or “buffered”. If the self is Mittsein, an orientation to another, the self is solidified by Zusein, what Mounier calls a “self bestowal” of one’s own subjectivity to another, a “giving without measure and without hope for reward” There is a threefold movement necessary for a person in Mounier, a need for the recollection of self, a dispossessory reconstitution by another, before a final recentring. Such a constitution of a person is always in union with others; this is the duty of one person, but a duty of a community of persons. In light of Mounier’s observations, a protectionist move to indefinitely block the polis off in the face of cultural other in the name of identity—this includes the closing off of the polis in the face of a great movement of non-Christian asylum seekers—constitutes a denial of identity, rather than an affirmation of it
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