Interpreting the play Romeo and Juliet, Jacques Derrida suggests the role of the name without a referent, that is, its survival after the death of its carrier, but, unlike his own theses on contingency and temporary stabilization of meaning, Derrida underscores the name as the essence of the individual being, inseparable from its carrier, and only casually points to the possibility of separating the subject from the name of an identity. One might, in fact, say that neither Juliet nor Romeo are certain as to where they belong, that is, that their tragedy results from a search for identity. Actually, it is quite obvious that both of them never succeed in positioning themselves among the various styles and models of behaviour. In that sense, those claiming that identity is a label signifying an escape from uncertainty are right. The identity crisis is, after all, mostly connected to an uncertainty causing confusion and anxiety. Even though it is most often associated with the dysfunctionality of social institutions in general, the identity crisis is even more deeply rooted in the upheavals within the culture itself, which results in changes of the paradigms and the models of social communication and social behaviour. Wendell Bell in his texts relates the crisis of values (and the creation of anomias) with the rapid changes of the models in culture, accompanied by the much more important phenomenon of disintegration factors. I find that one could openly apply Theodore Roszak’s conclusion about the dramatic changes in contemporary civilization, which he describes as a time ‘when the very private experience of having a personal destiny to fulfill has become a subversive political force of major proportions’ on the time in Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet.
The act of naming, therefore, contains the relationship between whoever gives the name and whoever answers to it, but also involves the relations to kinship, culture and history, which in a way permeate that name. Thus it is once again confirmed that in every act of naming there is an ethical aspect, so that it becomes perfectly clear that the name – that is, the fight for the name, as is the case of Macedonia – results in social involvement and ethical obligations as well. It is perfectly clear that any change of the name is always part of a certain political action! But these actions are most often constructs of the view of the Other, its projection of how something is supposed to look or be called. Hence, in every act of naming the act of violence becomes immanent!
Questions such as ‘Who am I?’, ‘Who are we?’ or ‘Who is the other?’ are often asked. One should not see anything unusual in them since the notion of identity is a fundamental feature of human existence. The question of ‘Who am I?’ inevitably provokes the answer to another question: ‘Where do I belong?’ Man is not alone in the universe, neither is the individual in the group, nor the society (however it may be) exists for itself alone. In everyday live we disrupt these continuums of a particular we – my family, my class, my community. But, one should note that the individual defines this I in different ways, considering the affiliation to a certain ethnic or civic nation. In the former case, the ethnic affiliation is considered fundamental for the self-determination of identity – according to Herder’s formula – so the individual primarily experiences this self-identification as an ethnic identification – assuming some of the attributes belonging to the nation (such as diligence, or honesty), that is, of its national character that is drawing them into its personal structure – and secondary, as a collective identity, when the issues are viewed above all through the category of affiliation, but also though constituting an idea of the concept us as an expression of a particular (ethnic) community. Thereby a firm bond is established between the notions of I and we in a specific, ethnic context. But the relation between I and we might also be constituted through homogenizing the concept of our and excluding the notion of otherness. In this case I becomes subordinate to we, to an ethnic group in which national authority assumes the role of a primary super-ego.
Notes:
(1) Primarily interesting here is Staten’s reading of Philosophical Investigation! This author has, in fact, read them as a deconstruction of the traditional view of the sign, referring also to the naming process, the relation between the name and the named as a ‘strange connection between a word and an object’. In his further interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, as well as Derrida’s, Staten concludes that the word is a transitive, temporary essence. Each new context inherently carries its own aspect of meaning, which becomes unpredictable until its activation in a future context.
In contemporary theoretical studies the boundaries of identity are often defined by using concepts or systems of rules, and according to Wittgenstein, rules are nothing but ‘standards of comparison’. Both standards and boundaries could be defined, but neither rules nor boundaries have to be defined. As per Henry Staten:
Because any social practice is carried on by different persons who will vary from each other in their sense of how to apply any given rule, any form of life is always transacted by diverging lines of possible practice: a form is a transitive essence always in process of essential variation from itself. On this view a form of life has no self-identical and unitary form, nor does a rule, nor do we (1984, 134).
The question that results from the above formulation would be: how to understand the others, how to live with the Others in such circumstances? The theoreticians of radical democracy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, ask a similar question when on the basis of Wittgenstein’s and Derrida’s hypotheses – which, in turn, concern the problem of responsibility of political action – they attempt to establish a new concept of thought on democracy that is essentially different than the rationalist, and the shift is seen in the fact that, apart from advocating equality, radicals also advocate the existence of difference. Thus radicals promote the postmodernist approach to identity with the stress on the dilemma itself of choosing identity, that is, a generalized affirmation of pluralism and heterogeneity, of the politics of differences, which, in turn, represents a blow to dogmatic universalism. And it is in such an ambiance that the civic (cultural/political) identity is seen as a community that is not based on the myth of a common origin of blood and soil, but is historically formed though the state and the culture as a symbolic universe offering individuals general guidelines of orientation in a given political community. In such conditions the individuals are not blood-related to their community, but are part of it since they live and act in it, as citizens who have acquired citizenship to that political community and thus acquired a civic status. This does not require a homogenization in ethnic terms since in a nationality there is no complete identification between I and we, and individuals may at the same time belong to their ethnic groups and the more broadly seen (civic) nation, leaving room for building other kinds of collective identity as well. Since a national we does not involve reduction of the ethnic/national identity – as one of the features of a cultural/political community – national identification is not exclusive, in the sense of inclusion/exclusion, and does not generate ethnic/national antagonisms.