Alternative and bottom-up peace indicators by Roger Mac Ginty

Author:Roger Mac Ginty [Ginty, Roger Mac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317644293
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Identity, Truth and Power

From a post-structuralist perspective, the notion of identity can be understood with reference to repertoires of competing discursive practices and identity projects. In this respect, identity arises only in relation to social action and it is processual or constructed (Benhabib 1994). The notion of a pre-given fully formed identity misses the overlapping, cross-cutting and co-existing character of identity and results in transcendental entities prior to the social and political realm. From a modernist perspective, there is a core set of structures that can be accessed and form our sense of self. It is assumed that our needs, characteristics, motivations are these fundamental structures that can be identified and categorized as the drives behind our actions and choices in life. The problematization of this position is easily manifested within the writings of Derrida (1982) and its critic on the Hegelian subject.

More specifically, an identity that is defined within the rationality of the ancient Greek philosophy and the Western modern philosophy of Hegel establish notions of identity that are self-referential. For example, the Greek logos and its legacy for justice are inextricably linked with the clarity and beauty of presence and sameness, of order and totality where the rule of reason excludes any other and only ever finds itself. Derrida follows this fundamental accusation from its origins to its accomplishments in the philosophical positions of Hegel. Within Hegel’s work, the dialectical notion of unity in difference is archeoteleological all the way. ‘The self-presence of absolute knowledge and the consciousness of Being-near-to-itself in logos, in the absolute concept, will have been distracted from themselves only for the time of detour’ (Derrida 1982, p. 71). The spirit loses itself only to better find itself again, it alters itself only to better identify itself. This way, the self reappropriates for itself any exterior strangeness thanks to an idealizing and sublimating interiorization which in the end leads everything back to peace, security and mastery of the ‘at home-with-itself’ that can never really lose itself. Thus, it never stops returning the other to the same, assimilating it, consuming it by taking it back to the self. Without definitive loss this reappropriation is absolute because it seems to be able to domesticate even this other absolute. In Hegel’s theory, it is striking; the aptitude to take up and to assimilate what is the most remote and strangest. In this vein, there is no excess without any reason in the calculated and autopoetic mastery; it is a universe that only has ‘for its destination or its determination’ (Derrida 1986, p. 234). In this respect, the Hegelian ‘logic’ performs an essential gesture of reduction and reappropriation which defines the Western logos throughout history. This is an understanding of identity that advances specific normative expectations and a call for the therapist to work on a ‘single-storied’ and ‘fixed’ identity. This sustains a professional position where the therapist is an expert with special knowledges, distinct from the person who is interacting and with a hierarchical position at play. There

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