Personal identity theory parallels the language of property and ownership

Evidence

In fact, James himself provides the mediation that allows us to shift gears away from the psychological (or even the psychoanalytic) to the categories of property rights. By way of a remarkable passage in which James compares the persistence of personal identity among our various memories of the past to the branding of cattle with our own distinctive “mark,” we reach a more satisfactory formulation, in which the language of production has been replaced by the language of juridical right: Our mistake, James thinks, has been to imagine the [present] thought as establishing ownership over past thoughts; instead, we should think of it as already owning them. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 444

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the recent work on legal personhood and property-as-subject — James’s framing of the self via branding/ownership echoes how property law constitutes identity, relevant to the reader’s cognitive map of self-in-world. — connects to: Personal possessions and surroundings concretely express one’s fundamental self-choice.; Self-alienation in property explains ownership’s intensity beyond mere utility. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 146; Identity logic grounded in exchange society constrains the thinking subject — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1227 (+4 more)