Return to authentic origins is impossible for modern subjects

Evidence

We can never go Home, return to the primal scene, to the forgotten moment of our beginnings and “authenticity,” for there is always something else between. We cannot return to a bygone unity, for we can only know the past, memory, the unconscious through its effects, that is when it is brought into language and from there embark on an (interminable) analysis. In front of the “forest of signs” (Baudelaire) we find ourselves always at the crossroads, holding our stories and memories (“secularized reliques,” as Benjamin, the collector, describes them) while scanning the constellation full of tension that lies before us, seeking the language, the style, that will dominate movement and give it form. Perhaps it is now a question of seeking to be at home here, in the only time and context we have. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 822

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dense theoretical synthesis — the impossibility of authentic return, knowledge only through effects in language, and the ethical reorientation toward being at home in the present — distills a whole post-structuralist position in one paragraph.
• XREF: Core anti-essentialism statement; underpins how the field rejects authetic homogeneous ‘Muslim’ or ‘Western’ identities before its own arguments. — connects to: Ethics abolishes itself when authenticity is found to depend on history — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 551; Modern history makes sustained reconciliation of object and spirit impossible, forcing allegory — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 159; Historical purity is unrecoverable through backward projection of an invented origin. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 300 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the impossibility-of-return thesis that grounds all later diasporic and hybrid-identity theory.