Thinking identity with difference: Society and theory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.2298/FID1701136KKeywords:
identity, difference, sameness, otherness, social theory, philosophyAbstract
The first part of the article notes the sudden and conspicuous interest for the problem of identity at the turn of the 21st century. It presents Modern and postmodern conceptualizations of collective identity of social theorists. In the second part, the text draws on the legacy of philosophical speculation of the same period. The article aims to show that many of the dilemmas faced by latterday humanities in their efforts to articulate their thinking of identity as well as difference still have a relevant “pre-game” in the structural and dialectical
interrelatedness thematized by philosophers of classical German idealism and the “philosophers of difference.” The text concludes that such “metaphysical” reflection comprises an unavoidable element, which can only be ignored by social theory at its own peril, even if it is not bound by the reflection’s findings.
References
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Beer, David (2014), The Biopolitics of Biometrics: An Interview with Btihaj Ajana, Theory, Culture & Society 31 (7–8): 329–36.
Benhabib, Seyla (1992), Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, New York: Routledge.
Benhabib, Seyla (1999), “Sexual Defference and Collective Identities: The New Global Constellation”, Signs 24 (2): 335-62.
Bermudez, Jose Luis (1998), The Paradox of Self-Consciousness, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bradley, Harriet (1997), Fractured Identities. Changing Patterns of Inequality, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Braidotti, Rosi (1991), Patterns of Dissonance, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Carver, Terrell (1996), Gender Is Not a Synonym for Women, Boulder: Lynne Rienner.
Castañeda, Hector-Neri (1989), “Persons, Egos, and I’s,” in: Manfred Spitzer and, Brendan A. Maher (eds.), Psychopathology and Philosophy, Berlin: Springer, pp. 210-34.
Cixous, Hélène (1989), “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks / Ways Out / Forays,” in: Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (eds.), The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, London: Macmillan, pp. 101-16.
Connolly, William (1991), Identity/Difference. Democratic Negotiations, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Cook, Debirah (2007), “Thought Thinking Itself”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 38 (3): 229-47.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1973), “Speech and Phenomena” and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
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Derrida, Jacques (1994), The Gift of Death, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1998), Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Giddens, Anthony (2010), Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giesen, Bernhard and Robert Seyfert (2016), “Collective Identities, Empty Signifiers and Solvable Secrets,” European Journal of Social Theory 19 (1): 111-26.
Gilroy, Paul (1997), “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity,” in: Kathryn Woodward (ed,), Identity and Difference, London: SAGE, pp. 299-343.
Gilroy, Paul (2005), After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press.
Hall, Stuart (1992), “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in: Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew (eds.), Modernity and its Futures, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 274-316.
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Henrich, Dieter (1970), “Selbsbewußtsein. Kritische Einletung in eine Theorie,” in: Rüdiger Bubner, Cramer Konrad and Wiehl Reiner (eds.), Hermeneutik und Dialektik. Hans-Georg Gadamer zum 70. Geburtstag, Bd. 1, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, pp. 257-84.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (1997), Dialektik der Aufklärung, Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Irigaray, Luce (1985), This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Jaggar, Alison M. (1992), “Feminist Ethics,” in: Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (eds.), Encyclopedia of Ethics, Vol 1, New York: Garland, pp. 361-70.
Jenkins, Richard (1996), Social Identity, London: Routledge.
Jenkins, Richard (2008), Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations, London: SAGE.
Kapitan Tomis (1999), “The Ubiquity of Self-Awareness,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 57: 17-44.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1982), New Essays on Human Understanding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lemke, Jay L. (2008), “Identity, Development, and Desire: Critical Questions,” in: Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Rick Iedema (eds.), Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contestations of Identification, London: Palgrave, pp. 17-42.
Levinas, Emmanuel (2011a), Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel (2011b), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Levinson, Natasha (1997), “Unsettling Identities: Conceptualizing Contingency,” Philosophy of Education: 61-70.
Lonzi, Carla (1974), Sputiamo su Hegel, Milano: Rivolta Femminile.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1988), The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Maalouf, Amin (2001), In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, New York: Arcade.
Mandle, Joan D. (2004), “How Political is the Personal?: Identity Politics, Feminism and Social Change”, WMST-L, available at: https://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/identity_pol.html (accessed 1 May 2014).
Mercer Kobena (1990), “Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics”, in: Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 43-71.
Meyers, Diana (2010), “Feminist Perspectives on the Self,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-self/index.html (accessed 7 January 2015).
Moore, Henrietta (1994), “’Divided we stand’:. Sex, gender and sexual difference,” Feminist Review 47: 78-95.
Morin, Edgar (1990), Kako misliti Evropu? [Thinking Europe], Sarajevo: Svjetlost.
Morin, Edgar (2001), L’humanité de l’humanité - L’identité humaine. La Méthode, Vol. 5, Paris: Seuil.
Rorty, Richard (1980), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, Richard (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Seidman, Steven (1991), “The End of Sociological Theory: The Postmodern Hope”, Sociological Theory 9 (2): 131-46.
Shoemaker, Sidney (1968), “Self-Reference and Self-Awareness,” The Journal of Philosophy 65 (19): 555-67.
Sloterdijk, Peter (1988), Kopernikanska mobilizacija i ptolomejsko razoružanje [Copernican Mobilisation and Ptolemaic Disarmament], Novi Sad: Bratstvo-Jedinstvo.
Spasić, Ivana (2003) “Društveni pokreti [Social Movements],” in: Đorđe Vukadinović and Predrag Krstić (eds.), Kritički pojmovnik civilnog društva I [A Critical Dictionary of Civil Society I], Beograd: Grupa 484, pp. 273-309.
Weeks, Jeffrey (1994), The Lesser Evil and the Greater Good. The Theory and Politics of Social Diversity, London: Rivers Oram Press.
Woodward, Kathryn (1997). “Concepts of Identity and Difference,” in: Kathryn Woodward
Adorno, Theodor W. (1997b), Negative Dialektik, in: Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialektik / Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 6, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Alexander, Jeffrey (1995), Fin-de-Siécle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason, London: Verso.
Ameriks, Karl and Dieter Sturma (eds.) (1995), The Modern Subject. Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy, Albany: SUNY Press.
Balibar, Etienne (2003), Mi, građani Evrope? Granice, država, narod [We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship], Beograd: Beogradski krug.
Bauman, Zygmunt (1995), Life in Fragments. Essays in Postmodern Morality, Oxford: Blackwell.
Bauman, Zygmunt (1996), “From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity,” in: Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity, London: SAGE, pp. 18-38.
Beer, David (2014), The Biopolitics of Biometrics: An Interview with Btihaj Ajana, Theory, Culture & Society 31 (7–8): 329–36.
Benhabib, Seyla (1992), Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics, New York: Routledge.
Benhabib, Seyla (1999), “Sexual Defference and Collective Identities: The New Global Constellation”, Signs 24 (2): 335-62.
Bermudez, Jose Luis (1998), The Paradox of Self-Consciousness, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bradley, Harriet (1997), Fractured Identities. Changing Patterns of Inequality, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Braidotti, Rosi (1991), Patterns of Dissonance, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Carver, Terrell (1996), Gender Is Not a Synonym for Women, Boulder: Lynne Rienner.
Castañeda, Hector-Neri (1989), “Persons, Egos, and I’s,” in: Manfred Spitzer and, Brendan A. Maher (eds.), Psychopathology and Philosophy, Berlin: Springer, pp. 210-34.
Cixous, Hélène (1989), “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks / Ways Out / Forays,” in: Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (eds.), The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, London: Macmillan, pp. 101-16.
Connolly, William (1991), Identity/Difference. Democratic Negotiations, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Cook, Debirah (2007), “Thought Thinking Itself”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 38 (3): 229-47.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994), Difference and Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1973), “Speech and Phenomena” and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1982a), “Différance,” in: Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy, Brighton: Harvester, pp. 1-28.
Derrida, Jacques (1982b), “The Ends of Man,” in: Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy, Brighton: Harvester, pp. 109-36.
Derrida, Jacques (1994), The Gift of Death, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1998), Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Foucault, Michel (1971), The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Pantheon Books.
Frank, Manfred (1991), Selfstbewußtsein und Selbsterkenntnis, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam.
Giddens, Anthony (2010), Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giesen, Bernhard and Robert Seyfert (2016), “Collective Identities, Empty Signifiers and Solvable Secrets,” European Journal of Social Theory 19 (1): 111-26.
Gilroy, Paul (1997), “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity,” in: Kathryn Woodward (ed,), Identity and Difference, London: SAGE, pp. 299-343.
Gilroy, Paul (2005), After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press.
Hall, Stuart (1992), “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in: Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew (eds.), Modernity and its Futures, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 274-316.
Hall, Stuart (1996), “Introduction. Who needs ‘Identity’?”, in: Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity, London: SAGE, pp. 2-17.
Hall, Stuart (1997a). “The Work of Representation,” in: Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London: SAGE, pp. 13-74.
Hall, Stuart (1997b), “The Spectacle of ‘the Other’,” in: Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London: SAGE, pp. 223-90.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1970), Die Wissenschaft der Logik, Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden, Bd. 6, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. / (English translation:) Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2010), The Science of Logic, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Henrich, Dieter (1970), “Selbsbewußtsein. Kritische Einletung in eine Theorie,” in: Rüdiger Bubner, Cramer Konrad and Wiehl Reiner (eds.), Hermeneutik und Dialektik. Hans-Georg Gadamer zum 70. Geburtstag, Bd. 1, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, pp. 257-84.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (1997), Dialektik der Aufklärung, Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Irigaray, Luce (1985), This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Jaggar, Alison M. (1992), “Feminist Ethics,” in: Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (eds.), Encyclopedia of Ethics, Vol 1, New York: Garland, pp. 361-70.
Jenkins, Richard (1996), Social Identity, London: Routledge.
Jenkins, Richard (2008), Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and Explorations, London: SAGE.
Kapitan Tomis (1999), “The Ubiquity of Self-Awareness,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 57: 17-44.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1982), New Essays on Human Understanding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lemke, Jay L. (2008), “Identity, Development, and Desire: Critical Questions,” in: Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Rick Iedema (eds.), Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contestations of Identification, London: Palgrave, pp. 17-42.
Levinas, Emmanuel (2011a), Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel (2011b), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Levinson, Natasha (1997), “Unsettling Identities: Conceptualizing Contingency,” Philosophy of Education: 61-70.
Lonzi, Carla (1974), Sputiamo su Hegel, Milano: Rivolta Femminile.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984), The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1988), The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Maalouf, Amin (2001), In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, New York: Arcade.
Mandle, Joan D. (2004), “How Political is the Personal?: Identity Politics, Feminism and Social Change”, WMST-L, available at: https://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/identity_pol.html (accessed 1 May 2014).
Mercer Kobena (1990), “Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics”, in: Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 43-71.
Meyers, Diana (2010), “Feminist Perspectives on the Self,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-self/index.html (accessed 7 January 2015).
Moore, Henrietta (1994), “’Divided we stand’:. Sex, gender and sexual difference,” Feminist Review 47: 78-95.
Morin, Edgar (1990), Kako misliti Evropu? [Thinking Europe], Sarajevo: Svjetlost.
Morin, Edgar (2001), L’humanité de l’humanité - L’identité humaine. La Méthode, Vol. 5, Paris: Seuil.
Rorty, Richard (1980), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, Richard (1989), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Seidman, Steven (1991), “The End of Sociological Theory: The Postmodern Hope”, Sociological Theory 9 (2): 131-46.
Shoemaker, Sidney (1968), “Self-Reference and Self-Awareness,” The Journal of Philosophy 65 (19): 555-67.
Sloterdijk, Peter (1988), Kopernikanska mobilizacija i ptolomejsko razoružanje [Copernican Mobilisation and Ptolemaic Disarmament], Novi Sad: Bratstvo-Jedinstvo.
Spasić, Ivana (2003) “Društveni pokreti [Social Movements],” in: Đorđe Vukadinović and Predrag Krstić (eds.), Kritički pojmovnik civilnog društva I [A Critical Dictionary of Civil Society I], Beograd: Grupa 484, pp. 273-309.
Weeks, Jeffrey (1994), The Lesser Evil and the Greater Good. The Theory and Politics of Social Diversity, London: Rivers Oram Press.
Woodward, Kathryn (1997). “Concepts of Identity and Difference,” in: Kathryn Woodward
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Published
24.03.2017
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Krstić, P. (2017) “Thinking identity with difference: Society and theory”, Filozofija i društvo/Philosophy and Society. Belgrade, Serbia, 28(1), pp. 136–152. doi: 10.2298/FID1701136K.
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STUDIES AND ARTICLES
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Articles published in Philosophy and Society are open-access in accordance with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.
