LITMIR.BIZ

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prevent schools from becoming more and more the ground where violence is perpetuated.

      It appears that, although social structures, along with the terminology used to describe them, have changed on the surface, some kind of center has been preserved in a more subtle way. This is why, years after Eagleton’s angry criticism has made itself heard, it became obvious that much of the world was all too eager to return to the reliable, old fashioned good and evil rhetoric, instead of hiding behind politically correct words. Take, for instance, the support that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq found in 2002 and 2003; fast forward to 2016–17 and note the enthusiasm with parts of the population are cheering the attacks on political correctness and are taking off the gloves in relation to other cultures. It appears that, in the 21st Century, advocating for the destruction of an evil Other has brought back the lost joy to those who were feeling deprived of meaning by having to accept too much “diversity.” Such frustration explains why a large number of Americans are so eager to see the return of “telling it like it is,” or speaking freely against the pesky Other.

      The loss of meaning is a problem created by diverse, complex, deconstructive thought, though such a problem was never the intention of poststructuralism or deconstruction. It was, true enough, an unavoidable byproduct of these thinkers’ efforts: how could one expect, or even conceive, that everyone would feel comfortable not having the grounding that cultural and social spaces had always offered? That is why the voices that protested the loss, or fall from meaning have been loud and persistent to this day, and now and then have been known to win elections. To them, theory is just the emperor’s new clothes and has nothing useful to offer.

      When the desire for the lost meaning is coupled with the discourses of power, it becomes all the more dangerous. To reiterate, following the attack on the United States in 2001, identity (as “freedom”) gained new ground; meaning reasserted itself as a powerful stake in the social system. Let us look again at the shockingly loud and bold proposition in that New York Times article by Rothstein. Rothstein was expressing relief when he imagined that postmodern thinking had taken a serious blow, and “Empire” had returned. He was crying out for a return to a transcendent ethical perspective, since “differences, say, between democracies and absolutist societies or between types of armed conflict are essential now.”30 Based on Rothstein’s example, it looks as though there is a perception that someone is denying us the right to meaning, which leads to a revival of the need for meaning and the return to the violence of the system, by making meaning as a stake. This stake in itself can become destructive.

      If loss of meaning is perceived as a void, this void is the new space where identity will be forged. Non-meaning can become oppressive and subvert any attempt to reconcile with previous perspectives, leaving little room for relationality and interaction. Satya Mohanty is an adherent to the idea that postmodern thought is pure relativism, and for this reason he argues that postmodernism obscures the very real social contexts in which people relate, where “otherness appears not as insular or merely contiguous but as a complex historical phenomenon.”31

      Other thinkers, such as Lyotard or Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, try to find, and believe to have found, an outside of language where they envision a new identity in the pagan, in art, in the schizophrenic flow, and so on. These alternatives can create a new type of violence: the one that, in the name of non-identity, is directed toward any identity that is conceived inside of language. For example, as atheism is, functionally, a religion (it works by elimination or by creating outsiders of its boundaries), so is non-identity still an identity, still a delimitation that closes off communication. I hope this idea will become clearer in Chapter Five, where I examine Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and I show how the void of meaninglessness estranges people from each other and even from themselves; in effect, despite the positive critiques of structure, the emphasis on meaninglessness undermines poststructuralism’s extremely important steps against traditionalist thought, and at the same time it hinders human interaction. To stay true to the non-finite “event” that Derrida wanted deconstruction to be, there is a need for a new way to communicate that does not become re-inscribed in binary extremes, in this case those of identity and non-identity.

      Identity can allow for non-competitive, non-destructive relationality only if we understand it as necessarily contaminated at every step by living with others. The main purpose of offering a new approach to theory in this book is to show that our identities do not have to be spoken or reified (read: fought for at our expense and at the expense of others). We would be better off seeing it as the secret that we keep from the others and from ourselves until it can reveal itself in a harmless way. The energy employed in self-definition can be redirected toward living and relating to others. If the multiplicity of identities that we encounter and that we allow inside keep the secret alive and growing, it will allow us to grow too, within the social world. To arrive at this conclusion, I look at a few theoretical approaches in Chapter Six, and then analyze Rudolfo Anaya’s Tortuga and Toni Morrison’s Beloved to demonstrate how identity can be understood as an open, not even necessary concept, once the individual (Anaya’s sick boy nicknamed Tortuga and Morrison’s Sethe) overcomes stagnation and allows others to contribute to his or her becoming.

      CHAPTER TWO

      A CLOSER LOOK AT THE THREE MODES OF IDENTITY AND FALLENNESS

      Before giving some detail in relation to the specifics of each “fall” or understanding of identity and before showing how the falls revolve around the same flaw in conceiving this identity, I have to explain in more depth why identity is perceived as fallen. For purposes of deconstructing the concept of identity, I define it as that which functions within language to create the illusion that individuals can reach the wholeness that they have lost. This is, as many will recognize, a very basic concept in Lacan’s psychoanalysis; I will offer a refresher for Lacan’s theory, to help me explain why subjects of language identify with signifiers that, they believe, confer identity to them.

      Identity is a territory to be defended. Any territory becomes a signifier and can therefore be appropriated toward identity. Along with the fact that identity is never reached in actuality, identity’s fallenness accounts for the violence of its pursuit. To return to the notion of a territory to be defended, humans have long exceeded the spatial territory as what they need to defend and what gives them security.

      As “owning” a territory equals in many ways having an identity, the defense of this territory (which can be land, or a more abstract object) goes beyond purposes of survival. The origins of the desire to defend the territory are not as important as the degree of abstraction exceeding the biological necessities prompting its defense. If, initially, social identity may have been given by the common belonging to a piece of land and carrying out basic activities in a communal setting, the territory on which the community functions is perceived as property and as the place of social integration only when the absence of this territory becomes a possibility or is actualized, by threats from another tribe, another nation, another religion, and so on. As with any concept formation (to follow structuralist and poststructuralist explanations of meaning emerging from opposition or absence), the meaning of territory and the identification with it derive from conceiving of not being in its possession, or not belonging to it. Migration and conquest are two of the most important factors in making territory abstract and creating the grounds for the formation of the concept of identity as internalized territory.

      Human communities have evolved in such a way that there is no community that has remained in possession (or in sole possession) of the territory that it remembers as its cradle. It is enough to recall the controversy surrounding the term “African American,” which identifies a community with a concrete territory that they do not physically belong to (Africa). Every community also functions by remembering, which makes the concept of identity strictly related to what the community remembers as having lost. The loss is either total, as in the case of entire populations driven away from their land (Jewish people, Native Americans, African slaves), or partial, as in the case of being conquered and occupied by a different community and assimilated into it (Roman infiltrations into

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