Identity discourse signals shattered certainties and suppressed fear, not ethnic rediscovery

Evidence

The general preoccupation in the social sciences with the idea of identity dates from after the Second World War. It marks a new sense of the word, highlighting the individual’s social locations and psychological crises in an increasingly uncertain world. “This is my name,” we now declare, “I need you to recognize me by that name.” More than ever before identity now depends on the other’s recognition of the self. Previously the more common meaning of identity was “sameness,” as in the statement that all Muslims do not have “identical interests,” and attributively, as in “identity card.” In Europe the newer twist in the sense of the word is almost certainly more recent than in America. Perhaps in both places the discourse of identity indicates not the rediscovery of ethnic loyalties so much as the undermining of old certainties. The site of that discourse is suppressed fear. The idea of European identity, I say, is not merely a matter of how legal rights and obligations can be reformulated. Nor is it simply a matter of how a more inclusive name can be made to claim loyalties that are attached to national or local ones. It concerns exclusions and the desire that those excluded recognize what is included in the name one has chosen for onself. The discourse of European identity is a symptom of anxieties about non- Europeans. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 778

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precise redating and semantic shift of ‘identity’ from ‘sameness’ to ‘recognition by others’ since WWII — a definitional anchor.
• XREF: The claim that identity discourse marks ‘suppressed fear’ and ‘the undermining of old certainties’ parallels the Frankfurt School reading of authoritarian anxiety as symptom, already in the vault.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that the discourse of European identity is a symptom of anxiety about non-Europeans — identity talk as demand that the excluded recognize what inclusion they are refused — is a dense, reusable analytic lens.