How difference precedes identity - the fiction of identity politics

            According to Slavoj Zizek, times in which we need philosophy are hard times, and right now we need philosophy more than ever¹. Philosophical debates that were merely fun or interesting to have in the past are actually becoming relevant to understanding reality now that technology is progressing so much – hence why trivial everyday political debates are getting more and more philosophical. “What is consciousness?” is a relevant question whenever someone discusses abortion. The mind-body problem is becoming relevant in our era of virtual reality and the extension of the cyberspace: if a person were to spend all their lives online, are they liberating their soul/spirit from the confines of the body or are they losing an essential aspect of themselves? “What is human?” is also relevant more than ever before with the rise of AI: what is that unique thing that humans have that makes us able to develop intimate connections with them, that would make falling in love with an AI “wrong”?

            The same is true of questions regarding ontology (what something “is”) and identity (what someone “is”). According to Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio in their new book “You and your profile: identity after authenticity”, pre-modernity was marked by a regime of what they call sincerity: roles were given to people from society and your ability to be ‘sincere’ was marked by how well you conformed to those pre-determined roles that society gave you – how a man should behave, how a woman should behave, how a child should be, how a priest should be like, how a peasant should be, etc. The world was not so fast-paced and changing and identities were, for the most part, fixed and stable.

            Times have changed. Postmodernity is marked by the constant blurring of boundaries and contrasts, of borders that separate an “inside” from an “outside”, creating that illusion of a fixed identity (of a person, of a country, etc.). The loss of privacy in the transparent regime of social media, for example, gives rise to what I call “the private-public self”² (or what Moeller and Ambrosio call “profilicity”), when our private lives become a public performance. But identity politics is not saved from this rapidly-changing world of flexible, short-term identities either, so ontology is more relevant than ever as well.

            The Ancient Greeks still hung onto an essentialist view of identities – the idea that each thing has an essence without which it wouldn’t be that thing anymore. When Plato tried to define man as “a featherless biped”, Diogenes took a chicken, ripped its feathers and re-entered the room and famously said “Behold, a man!”. Plato had to update his definition again – but the lesson is clear, we can recognize an object as part of a category without being able to precisely define that category, and those definitions that constitute our identities are harder to pin down than they seem (after all, after millennia, we still don’t know exactly what mathematics is, but everyone can recognize it once they see it).

            So, what is identity? We usually think that identity precedes difference: first we have a set of “things” that we can clearly observe, pin down and define, and only after we have examined each of those things, we can compare them and find out the difference between them. But what if difference comes first? First we have constant difference, a chaotic, unstable world that is impossible to pin down, and only after that we actualize that difference by “freezing” a moment in time and space in order to draw imaginary borders around this reality and categorize aspects of it as parts of identities for strict practical purposes? This was close to the view of Deleuze, who claimed that the only being is that of constant becoming, and interpreted Nietzsche’s eternal return as “the eternal return of difference”³: so the summary is that a chair is not simply a thing that is, it is more alike an event that ‘constantly happens’.

            If we take the Hegelian route, we might push it even further and say that all identities are self-negating and ultimately lead to their own self-destruction through their inner contradictions. The problem with conceptualizing an ontology of identity in this way is that identity is always an illusion, always a "freezing", a "snapshot in time" of a process that is chaotic, flexible and fluctuating. The inner reality of the body is chaotic, inconsistent and constantly changing. The only being is that of becoming. By trying to "freeze" the reality of the body in time, we will ultimately lead to contradictions. And this is one of the big problems with identity politics, questions trying to pin down and define the essence of identities (“What is a true American?”, “What does it mean to be a real man?”, “What is a woman?”, “What is whiteness?”) will inevitably fail, any definition will have some sort of exception or contradiction inscribed in it.

            If we take the route of the ontology of objects, this becomes more obvious. If I have a wooden chair and I want to turn it into a wooden table by slowly picking apart its parts and gluing other pieces of wood to it, at which point does it make the ‘transition’ from a chair to a table? This is a trick question, because it has no answer: the stable categories of “chair” and “table” are only practical categories that are useful for communication in certain contexts, but there is no stable category that does not allow for exception.

            But there is a deeper point to be learned here: the transition from one identity to another shows how difference always preceded identity. Not only does difference precede identity, but after identity arises out of difference, it retroactively gives the illusion that it came before it. The idea is this: “chair” and “table” were always unstable, poorly defined categories, but we didn’t realize it until we saw the exception, actualizing the very difference-in-itself into reality. The viewpoint of reactionary identity politics (on both the mainstream left and right) is ultimately an immunological reaction: the idea that identities were fixed and stable ‘back in our day’ but then an exception came in from the outside and “crashed the system” and now we can no longer distinguish between man and woman, between American and immigrant, between white and black. In reality – the situation is quite the reversed: those fixed and stable categories were never fixed and stable to begin with, and the inner chaos of the “intruder” retroactively demonstrates the inner chaos of the people who more easily conformed to the categories before as well.

            Doesn’t this apply equally as well to both multiculturalism and the transgender culture wars? When a person biologically transitions from male to female, or vice-versa, not only is it useless to ask at which specific point did they turn from one identity into another, but more than that: the very failure to answer the question demonstrates the shaky ground upon which ‘cisgender’ or traditional identities were based upon in the first place. This is why Slavoj Zizek says, in “Hegel in a wired brain”, that: “Therein resides the lesson of transgender: we have the masculine, the feminine, and their antagonism (difference) as such. Transgender individuals are different (from the established difference) and, as such, they are the difference itself – the difference from the established difference is the difference itself. (...) they stand for universality precisely insofar as they are radically different, i.e., insofar as they do not have a proper place in the established order.”⁴. Here lies the fundamental lesson of Hegelian dialectics: identities hide their own negation/opposite inscribed within them, and only through the very failure to actualize the identities, can the full potential of those identities flourish. A similar example of this “actualization through failure” given by Slavoj Zizek in the same book is that of a successful love-confession actualizing itself through its very failure: by the fact that the person in love stumbles upon their words when expressing their feelings: “Recall the already mentioned “Hugh-Grant-paradox”: the hero tries to articulate his love to the beloved, he gets caught in stumbling and confused repetitions, and it is this very failure to deliver his message of love in a perfect way that bears witness to its authenticity … Subject is thus not just caught in the reflexivity of absolute recoil, it is nothing but this reflexivity.”⁵

                    Jacques Lacan, being a Hegelian, went further in his affirmation of difference-in-itself in his formulas of sexuation: he also knew very well that difference precedes identity, hence why he almost never mentions gender identity or sexual identity, but instead talks about sexual difference (or “sexual division”, depending on the translation): his infamous statement that “there is no relationship between the sexes” shouldn’t be interpreted as “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”, that would imply that there would be a relationship between the sexes, a relationship of contradiction. But Lacan’s point was precisely that the relationship of contradiction is not between the sexes, but within each sex. So we shouldn’t take the modern-day liberal-centrist neo-Jungian view of gender identity that “10% of men are a bit more feminine, 10% of women are a bit more masculine, everyone is a mix of both”: if gender was on a spectrum, then the sexes would be inversely proportional – the more of a man I am, the less of a woman I am and vice-versa, so there would be a relationship between the sexes (one of contradiction). But for the relationship of contradiction to be within each sex would imply that the sexual difference, the inner contradiction is already inscribed within the sexes as such: the more masculine I am, the less masculine I am, and the more feminine I am, the less feminine I am, and there is no relationship between how masculine and how feminine I am (i.e.: “there is no sexual relationship”) – in society I have to choose between multiple types of contradictory types of manhood and womanhood, and if I choose one, I sacrifice the other, but the reality of manhood and womanhood was already fragmented and chaotic from the very beginning.

In other words, what both the cultural left and right today miss is not that transgender men/women are “less” of a man/woman than the cisgender, biological ones (the conservative position), or that they are “just as much” of a real man/woman (the progressive position) – both of them engage in the lie of identity politics, the illusion of a fixed and stable identity. If we go the Lacanian route, we might say that, for instance, a transgender woman is more of a woman and less of a woman at the same time – she is more of a woman, not ‘in spite of’, but because she is less of a woman: there was an inner contradiction inscribed in womanhood as such, and this contradiction is amplified. The transition from one sex into another, like in the “chair-table” example, demonstrates how the so-called ‘cisgender’ identities were chaotic and contradictory to begin with: hence why the struggle of transgender people is not one that is different from the one of cisgender people, quite the opposite, they are amplifying a struggle that cisgender people already went through, but times 100 (Hegel’s “concrete universal” – universal struggle). We might say, with a little exaggeration, that the very existence of transgender people demonstrates retroactively the inner “transgenderism” of all cisgender identities – the fundamental lesson of Lacanian psychoanalysis is that no identification comes without a little doubt (“I am X… but am I really?”). Struggling to maintain your identity, being told that you are not a real man or a real woman, or that you are not enough of a man/woman – this is already something that cisgender people go through, so when (for instance) a transgender man is told that they not a real man, they are, paradoxically speaking, being more of a man and less of a man than cisgender men at the same time: having to prove your masculinity is already the fundamental deadlock of masculinity par excellence. Hence why being trans is akin to being “cisgender++” – the identities were never fixed and stable to begin with: the difference not only between but also within those identities is actualized in reality, but it was always there.

            An analogy with programming can suffice: in a programming language, you may write a function that works well only for some inputs, but that crashes the program for another set of inputs. If you don’t unit-test your code, you might not catch those exceptions, so when an edge-case finally arrives, it does not “ruin your code”, instead it demonstrates that your code was poorly written to begin with. For example: I can write a function that takes as input two numbers (x and y) and outputs the first number divided by the second number by simply ending the function with “return x/y;” – but we know that you can’t divide by 0. So when I finally substitute b with zero, it retroactively demonstrates the shaky ground upon which the code was built in the first place.

            And don’t we notice the same thing with multiculturalism? What if we push the logic to the extreme and say that the difference between two cultures precedes their existence, and that cultures are formed only to actualize that difference, retroactively giving the illusion that the identities preceded it? When immigrants cross the borders of a country en-masse, a view of identity politics would posit a stable essence of that country’s identity (ex: What is means to be a “real” American) that multiculturalism destroys – but if we prioritize difference, we notice that the situation is actually the opposite: the foundation of a “true American” was never on stable grounds in the first place, and that inevitable self-destruction of all identities is only accelerated through multiculturalism: the very fact that we have a stable identity is already a ticking time-bomb doomed to lead to its own self-destruction, an “intruder in the system” only demonstrates the inner contradictions in the very essence of that country’s identity in the first place. Yet the paradox of the Hegelian sublation (“aufhebung”) here is that only by actualizing this inner difference/contradiction we get at the true (non-)essence of what it means to be a ‘real’ American/German/Hungarian/etc.

            The lesson of quantum physics is the same – the more we zoom in onto one particular object in order to find its “true essence”, the more we encounter contradictions: a particle is in two places at once, when you observe a particle, it changes its position, you can measure either a particle’s position or velocity but not both, etc.

            Hence why Slavoj Zizek insists that the most important character in the “LGBT+” acronym is the last one, the “+” – it stands in perfectly well for what Lacan called the object-cause of desire. The “+” shouldn’t be interpreted in this strict nominalist sense, as an “etc.”, that there are more sexual identities but we didn’t have space to list them all so we just add the “+” to show that one day we will discover them all. The “+” instead stands for the very antagonism at the core of sexuality itself – the lesson here should be that there will always be more, you will never be satisfied, there will always be some exception at the core of every identity, there will always be a piece that doesn’t fit, so adding more and more letters to the ‘alphabet soup’ only temporarily fixes the symptoms, not the cause, since there will always be a “+”. So why can’t the “+” be a category in of itself? (I am a ‘+’)

            The “+” in LGBT+ is like the Balkans – this finish line that is always postponed, the closer you get to it, the further it gets away from you. The paradox of the Balkans is that no matter where you are on the globe, you never are in the Balkans, the Balkans are always “the others”. If you ask a Romanian, they will tell you that they are Central Europeans, and the Balkans start from Bulgaria down south. A Slovene nationalist will tell you the same, the Balkans start with Croatia and onto the East. But if you ask a Croat, they will tell you that they are normal and civilized Catholic central Europeans, and those Balkan Orthodox scum start with Serbia. The paradox is that if you go too much south, the Balkans are suddenly in the north: a person in the south of Greece will tell you that they are not Balkans – they are the foundation of Europe, inventors of democracy, the Balkans are up there in Serbia and Albania! Now if you go too much west, the Balkans are in the east! The Austrians will tell you that Slovenes are not part of central Europe, that the Balkans start with them. If you ask a German, they will tell you that ‘normal civilization’ starts with them, that they keep the EU alive, and the dirty Austrians are also Balkanized since they were part of the Austrian-Hungarian empire. A person in France will tell you that even Germany is Balkanized. And finally now, after Brexit, if you ask a person in the UK “Where are the Balkans?” they will tell you that they are the only normal and civilized ones, and all of Europe is one big Balkan, with Brussels as the new Constantinople!

            Hence, this is the paradox of all identities, including sexual identities – any definition will be ontologically incomplete, there will be some exceptions that are excluded from it, a “+”, a Balkan. The incompleteness of the binaries of sex to account for exceptions created a new category: gender. But gender itself had many contradictions – so it was split up into gender identity (how one feels inside) and gender expression (socially constructed). But this also doesn’t account for all exceptions – notice how all definitions of biological sex keep getting changed in order to account for an unconscious emotional investment in a secret belief in “male and female souls”: hence the ‘belief in biology’ of conservatives being usually a fake. If science advances such that you can take hormones, then a woman is no longer a person with high levels of estrogen, but a person with a vagina. On one hand, now that we can surgically construct vaginas, a woman is no longer someone with a vagina, but a person with XX chromosomes. If science evolves in the future such that you will also be able to change your chromosomes somehow, conservatives will probably change the definition again to some other immutable thing. On the other hand, their own definitions allow for exceptions: a woman is someone with a vagina, but if a woman loses her vagina in an accident, we still call her ‘woman’, even ‘biological female’, etc. So like in the Balkan joke, the woman itself is always somewhere else, we keep asking what a woman is, but we never get the answer (from this perspective, Jacques Lacan was a prophet, he predicted the transgender culture wars half a century before they happened, he knew very well that the question had no answer). The problem is not to keep adding 56 gender identities in order to account and include everyone, or to keep adding more types of identity (biological sex, gender identity, gender expression) for the same reason – the very fact that we start from identity and not difference will lead to exceptions and contradictions (the problem is in asking what something “is”). Ontology is incomplete, any definition of a real object: chair, car, airplane, table, is only a temporary band-aid to help us convey information to each other but will always allow for exception.

            So, what is the relation of identities with time? The deadlock of identity politics is ‘freezing’ either the past (right-wing idPol: “Things weren’t how they used to be before, we need to return to normality, in order to find our true nature we need to look into the past, to see how things were back when they were ‘normal’”) or freezing the present (left-wing idPol, the fantasy of the end of history: “Things were always like how they are in the present but because of social repression we just didn’t realize it – people were always depressed as much today, there were just as many LGBT people, etc. but because of stigma we talked about it less so it gives the statistical illusion that the numbers increased”). The latter, the left-wing identity politics, is only a faux progressivism, since, by “freezing the present”, it is stating that things were always like this but we just didn’t realize it because of the stigma of talking about it, and hence quite paradoxically, the progressive is stating that identities do not change, that the world is not in constant motion (hence, not a real progressive, who would actually think that the world changes). The solution is to find the third way, where we look into the future: to find the inner contradiction at the heart of every identity, what would happen if we were to accelerate its own self-destruction? Deleuze puts quite nicely this task of philosophy here:

 

“This is why philosophy has an essential relation to time: it is always against its time, critique of the present world. The philosopher creates concepts that are neither eternal nor historical but untimely and not of the present. The opposition in terms of which philosophy is realised is that of present and non-present, of our time and the untimely. And in the untimely there are truths that are more durable than all historical and eternal truths put together: truths of times to come. Thinking actively is "acting in a non-present fashion, therefore against time and even on time, in favour (I hope) of a time to come".”⁶

 

            So, in order to find out what a (non)-real man/woman is (not) – we would accelerate the self-destruction of them, we would look at the truths of a time to come. If the advancements in medicine and science that allows people to transition from one sex to another are already retroactively showing part of the shaky identity upon which ‘traditional’ identities are built – what will this look like in the future, when transhumanism evolves even more?

            A few months ago, TikTok released a hyper-realistic filter that makes you more beautiful on camera, with the use of AI⁷ – I can look into my front camera and see myself live as looking way better. There is also AI that can turn pictures of males to look like females and vice-versa – how long until those two technologies merge and I can see myself as the opposite sex live, just by looking into the front camera of my phone? And how long until those technologies are added on a pair of smart glasses such that I can put the glasses on, look in the mirror, and see myself as a woman? Will this increase gender dysphoria? Decrease it? Will it stay the same – or will it reveal that everyone was ‘a little trans’ to begin with? And the opposite can be done too: when I will wear those glasses, I will be able to alter the way I see other people, so what will remain of sexual orientation? I will put the glasses on, and I will be able to see my male friend as a woman, so if we are both straight, there is no problem: we put the glasses on, and we see each other as females. Will this confirm Freud’s hypothesis that we are all a little bisexual unconsciously?

            In 2021, a study using virtual reality already started testing similar hypotheses⁸:

 

In the study, participants reclined in a chair as they wore an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. They passively observed from a first person perspective as a male or female virtual avatar delivered caresses to their foot, knee, pelvis, chest, head, and hand. The participants were not physically touched. Instead, the caresses were only delivered to the participants’ virtual body. (…) Both women and men preferred touch from opposite-sex avatars. But Mello and his colleagues found that embodying an opposite-sex virtual body shifted the participants’ perceptions of virtual touches. Women rated caresses on intimate body areas from a female avatar as more pleasant and more erogenous when they embodied a male (compared to when they embodied a female), while men rated caresses on intimate body areas from a male avatar as more pleasant and more erogenous when they embodied a female (compared to when they embodied a male).

Importantly, these shifts in preferences were associated with feelings of body ownership, particularly among men. They were also associated with changes in skin conductance response and heart rate.

(…) The researchers also found evidence that men were more susceptible to sex-related body swap illusions. Male participants tended to report greater feelings of body ownership, comfortableness, and identification when embodying a opposite-sex virtual body compared to their female counterparts.

Among women, embodying a male virtual body tended to decrease the illusion of being touched for caresses delivered by both male and female avatars. Among men, on the other hand, embodying a female virtual body tended to increase the illusion of being touched for caresses delivered by a male avatar.

 

            So what we notice here is that heterosexuality is not simply preference for a certain sex, it may also be preference for the other sex: hence a straight man, when inhabiting the body of a woman, will start preferring men, and vice-versa.

            If Marx was right, and capitalism atomizes all boundaries, ending up in a disconnected, context-less society in which parts of a whole are consumed separately from each other – then is our predicament today simply the disintegration of all identities that were prescribed to us in feudalism? If the middle ages formed what Melanie Klein may have called “whole-objects”, then is the trajectory of capitalism simply their disintegration into further “part-objects”? Lacan disagreed with Klein on the possibility of the existence of whole-objects in the first place, claiming that all that there could be is a conglomeration of part-objects that are given the illusion of wholeness and unity when the child first recognizes themselves in the mirror. Before the mirror-stage, the child feels like a bunch of “organs without a body”: I am a heart, a liver, four limbs, but that imaginary border that separates my organs from the outside world that we call “the body” is not formed.

            The way Lacan viewed the inherent (mis)recognition of all identities is by using an optical illusion with a double-mirror device, as seen in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmsFv24LaDg

            The schema is this: I recognize myself as being recognized, I see myself being seen (hence the double-reflection of two mirrors), and in this organization, a double illusion is formed. The chaotic, dismembered nature of my body (the vase and flowers on the left) is first reflected into the Other’s perception of me (in the concave mirror x-y), this perception being observed by my own perception of it (the normal mirror, A) that is then reflected onto my eye. What is on the right side of the diagram is the illusory nature of identification, the virtual plane that my eye effectively “sees”, denoted by i’(a).

 

            If the rise of transhumanism disintegrates the formations of identity (what is a human, what is a man, what is a woman) and the rise of globalization, the identities of cultures, then is society as a whole going through a ‘reversed’ mirror stage, where we are undoing the process, returning back into a state of part-objects, of “organs without bodies”?

 

“There are those who will maintain that the schizo is incapable of uttering the word I, and that we must restore his ability to pronounce this hallowed word. All of which the schizo sums up by saying: they're fucking me over again. "I won't say / any more, I'll never utter the word again; it's just too damn stupid. Every time I hear it, I'll use the third person instead, if I happen to remember to. If it amuses them. And it won't make one bit of difference." And if he does chance to utter the word I again, that won't make any difference either. He is too far removed from these problems, too far past them.”⁹

 

EDIT: 

    I just thought of another very good example of Hegelian sublation in regards to transgender identities right now. Think of this very popular debate right now in American politics - should transgender women (male-to-female) compete in women's Olympic sports? Your typical conservative-reactionary attitude would diagnose the problem as this: we knew what men and women were 'in the past' but now transgender people are like a 'virus in the system' that's causing chaos in an established order. But it's the exact opposite! The existence of transgender people just better highlights an inconsistency that already existed in the system already.

    Ignoring the existence of trans and intersex people for a moment - why don't both sexes compete in the same sports anyway? The argument is usually this: since women are weaker than men on many standards on average, men would almost always outcompete women in physical sports and thus, women would never win. Hence, there has been a separate category made for women. But this division was never perfect to begin with, it always allowed for exception. The weakest men are weaker than the strongest women in many regards. But no one sparked a debate about what should we do with the women who are by nature so strong that they can outcompete the weakest men. Should we have three divisions - one for most men, one for most women, and one for the weakest men and strongest women? Should we try to divide people not by sex but instead by weight and height, and find some formula of conversion between the male and female sexes? But that causes other problems. So the idea is that there was never any 'perfect' solution to begin with - all systems of categorization allow for some exception or flaw.

    So now that transgender people also want to compete in sports, nothing fundamentally changed, they are just making visible an imperfection/inconsistency that already existed with Olympic sports for cisgender people. Hence why difference precedes identity: like Lacan said, each sex is marked by some contradiction, and transgender people are just amplifying the contradictions that already existed in each of the biological sexes, highlighting the inconsistencies at the very core of sexual division itself that we just avoided talking about. This is also a very good example of why Hegelian sublation is not like Johan Ficthe interpreted it: it is not "thesis-antithesis-synthesis". Quite the opposite: the contradictions never resolve into a synthesis, the more we advance into a system, the more accentuated and obvious the contradictions become, those contradictions that already existed before but only 'in virtuality' - the contradictions were a ticking time bomb ready to explode.

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NOTES:

1: “How philosophy got lost” | Slavoj Zizek interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06KiOj6gjbs&ab_channel=TheInstituteofArtandIdeas

2: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-private-public-self-inside-out.html

3: Gilles Deleuze, “Nietzsche and Philosophy”, p.48: “The synthetic relation of the moment to itself as present, past and future grounds its relation to other moments. The eternal return is thus an answer to the problem of passage. And in this sense it must not be interpreted as the return of something that is, that is "one" or the "same". We misinterpret the expression "eternal return" if we understand it as "return of the same". It is not being that returns but rather the returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes. It is not some one thing which returns but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. This is why the eternal return must be thought of as a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions, a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of becoming and the being which is affirmed in becoming, a synthesis of double affirmation.”

4: Slavoj Zizek, “Hegel in a wired brain”, Chapter 2: The idea of a wired brain and its limitations

5: ibid., Chapter 5: The fall that makes us like God

6: Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.107

7: https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/11dbj31/tiktok_releases_new_filter_reality_no_longer/

8: https://www.psypost.org/2021/12/embodying-an-opposite-sex-virtual-reality-avatar-appears-to-alter-perceptions-of-touch-62254

9: Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p.23