THINKING AND IDENTIFICATION
I want to respond to Hugh's great question about the nature of identification by elucidating this concept in relation to two interrelated concepts, identity and thinking.
In his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” the philosopher Immanuel Kant gives a simple answer to the question posed in the title:
Enlightenment is the capacity to think for oneself, or in Kant’s words it is to practice the “duty of all men to think for themselves”
Yet what precisely does this thinking for oneself mean? we might want to ask, how can it be that someone does not think for him/herself, who is
thinking if not him/her? If we are to be able to answer such a question we need to be able to understand the relations between the two key
terms in the above given proposition, “think” and “oneself”. The first term
denotes a fundamental activity the
second denotes an identity. What Kant
seems to imply then in his dictum is that having an identity, being oneself, is
no guarantee for thinking, for it can happen that one does not think for
oneself. Thinking and identity are thus not the same
In order to explain this disjunction between identity
and thinking, I would like to introduce another concept, which was not yet
available to Kant, but which is nevertheless already implied in his way of
thinking. This concept comes from the domain of psychoanalysis, and it is the
concept of “identification”. One of the main contributions of the
psychoanalytic interpretation of human life, is to have helped us understand
the human as that creature who, unlike other creatures, does not have a
ready-made identity, nor ever has a fully formed identity, but is someone who
constantly, because s/he does not have an identity, has to assume one, to an
extent always in a temporary manner. It is thus that psychoanalysis sees the
human not as a creature that has an
identity, but as a creature that
identifies, and through this identification becomes who s/he is. But if one is not originally an identity but
someone who identifies, who is it that, precisely, performs this activity of
identification, if it is not an already fully formed identity? This is the
function of what psychoanalysis understands as the unconscious. The unconscious
is an activity, and an activity that searches for identity, and therefore
identifies. Now, any achieved identity, psychoanalysis says, is never complete,
never fully formed, and as such, the unconscious is something that always
remains operating, unnoticeably, at the heart of every identity, looking
further for an answer to its quest for identity, an answer that can never be
fully achieved. It is in this difference between the activity of the
unconscious that identifies, and the formed identity that is never fully
achieved, that we can locate also the Kantian difference between thinking and
being oneself. The unconscious is that activity which thinks, and thinking
means occupying a dimension where identity is in suspense, where one does not
have an identity, is thus not fully oneself, but is in a process of becoming.
If unconscious/thinking and being oneself (having an identity) never fully
coincide, what can it be that Kant means by saying that one has the duty to
think for oneself, for it seems that the oneself is that which doesn’t think
but rather the not-oneself, the non-identity which is the unconscious, that
does the thinking? The answer lies in
the conjunction “thinking for…”. To think
for oneself does not mean to be
oneself, but to occupy the space of suspension of identity, the suspension of a
formed self, in order to occupy the “space” of becoming, being in the movement
towards…towards oneself. Thus, paradoxically, to think for oneself does not
imply a oneself, an identity, that, after being fully formed, performs the act
of thinking, but rather the reverse, it is the thinking that is in the process
of becoming that precedes the oneself, and thinks for…in the sense of a movement towards it. Yet, there is another
crucial significance to this Kantian demand to think for oneself, which has to
do with the relation of this dictum to the question of freedom. Freedom is the freedom to think for oneself. To think for
oneself is to be understood as opposed to the possibility of being subjected to
others; not to the thinking of others (for thinking is something that by
definition does not subject), but to the identity that others might want to
impose on you, and through this imposition, subject you to them. What the
concept of “oneself” means now, from the perspective of the question of
freedom, is not an identity, but being an autonomous source whose decisions and
acts do not derive from others. Again, this demand for freedom against the
possibility of being subjected to others can be elucidated from the point of
view of the psychoanalytic explanation of identification. If the human is the
creature that doesn’t have an identity but that identifies this would mean that
s/he has to receive his/her identity
from others, with whom s/he identifies. If one is not originally oneself, one
receives oneself, psychoanalysis says, from others. Yet, if this were the whole
picture, there would not be a place for a “oneself” understood this time not as
an identity but as an autonomous source of freedom that is independent from
others, since one would be fully subjected to others and formed by them. It is
here that the unconscious/thinking activity proves to be a source of freedom.
One is never fully formed by others, never fully subjected to this or that
identity that one receives, since there always remains the resource of the
non-identity, the unconscious activity of becoming. To be free is thus to
activate the unconscious, to think, suspending any identity one receives from
others, and being open to becoming something new. In relation to identification, to be free would mean to keep the process of identification open, never allowing it to fully be closed by an identity that would as if give a final answer to its quest.
