Political identity derives from difference, never from an undivided self

Evidence

The paradox I have been describing is not something unique to colonial or modern politics. On the contrary, the indigenous modes of order that I tried to describe in chapter 2 illustrated the same paradox. In Pierre Bourdieu’s ethnography of the Kabyle house we found oppositions such as interior/exterior and male/female that tended continually to reverse and to collapse upon themselves. So-called segmentary political systems could be explained in terms of the same paradox: the identity of a political group is not fixed as a rigid boundary containing those inside. The inside is contingent upon the designation of an exterior, and exists only in relation to particular exteriors. Political identity, therefore, never exists in the form of an absolute, interior self or community, but always as an already-divided relation of self/other. Political identity, this means to say, is no more singular or absolute than the identity of words in a system of writing. Just as the particularity of words, as we saw, is merely an effect of the differences that give rise to language, so difference gives rise to political identity and existence. There are no political ‘units’, no atomistic, undivided selves; only relations or forces of difference, out of which identities are formed as something always self-divided and contingent. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 521

Categorization

• DEFINE: Recasts ‘political identity’ as an effect of difference (Saussurean) rather than a bounded unit.
• XREF: Bridges Bourdieu’s Kabyle house and segmentary systems theory into Mitchell’s broader linguistic-difference framework. — connects to: Whether negational party identity is ideologically anchored remains untested — Sabrina J. Mayer and Luana Russo, What one is not: a new scale to measure…, 119