Identity and belonging  Who belongs?

Sigmund Freud famously said that the "ego" is not master of its own home. He made this assertion in the context of his theory that unconscious drives and desires control the self, the house of the ego.

A few years later, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan explained that the ego develops in early childhood, specifically in the mirror stage between the sixth and 18th month of a child’s life. According to Lacan, the child recognises itself for the first time as a coherent subject by seeing itself as an image in the mirror. He argued that the ego, or the subject, forms with the help of something that is not itself: the mirror image. From this phase onwards, the subject shapes itself on the basis of imaginations and symbolisations of itself. It desires (one of Lacan’s favourite words) to exist as a whole, coherent, consistent and real ego, but it can only achieve this through the use of symbolisations, reflections and imaginations. In other words, the ego is not real. The subject does not exist.

The cult of difference

Freud and Lacan faced significant criticism, the relevance and validity of which will not be addressed here. However, in an era dominated by identity politics, it is unsurprising that the idea of identity as a fragmented construct, constantly patched together with fictions, is unpopular. Today’s fascists and identitarians, much like their left-wing, emancipatory and decolonialist counterparts from almost 70 years ago, seem to have a clear sense of exactly who they are. Consequently, they also have a clear sense of exactly who is not like them and who, as a result, should be excluded or remigrated. And the current left’s political strategy of fetishising identity is also responsible for the lack of a solution for rising xenophobia.

People find pleasure in narcissistic identity talk, dismantling anything that could hold society together in favour of a cult of difference – a cult that degrades into arrogance when someone speaks out in favour of someone who is not like themselves, someone with a different social, cultural or linguistic background, or who for some other reason, does not “belong”: the foreigner. Yet if, as Freud suggested, I am a stranger to myself, how can I be so certain that the person I identify as a stranger is not simply another version of myself? Or that I am not their mirror image? We don’t even need grandiose rhetoric to explain that those who desire to belong have to be admitted.

A philosophy of recognition

It is somewhat depressing that 300 years after Kant, irrationality still seems to be the most convenient response for a politics that is driven by outrage rather than tact, by emotion rather than reason. Every 30 minutes, or so it seems, someone finds something intolerable or outrageous. Terms like "decency" and "Leitkultur" are dragged out of terminological mothballs and misused against immigrants who are denounced as “asylum tourists” – not to mention even worse expressions. Kant wrote two simple things that are more pertinent in today’s globalised world than they ever were in his time: injustices committed against any individual can be felt universally, and violating the dignity of any human being violates one’s own humanity.

Philosophers such as Fichte and Hegel expanded on these concepts to develop a philosophy of recognition. The key message is that the subject is constituted through the act of acknowledging others. We ensure we are worthy of recognition by seeing ourselves reflected as worthy in others. Therefore, denying the dignity of others correlates with denying my own dignity, which I inflict on myself.

Right-wing identitarians and fascists probably despise this philosophy of recognition as much as the left (if it still exists) ignores or simply abandons it, even though this philosophy could underpin a politics not of fragmentation and tribalism but of solidarity and alliances. If – to recall Freud again – I am a stranger to myself, but at the same time I only experience my selfhood in the mirror image of the other, and I can only be sure of my humanity by respecting the dignity of the other, which is simultaneously my dignity, then there is no basis for a politics of xenophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia or other mental aberrations. Solidarity is not about aligning ourselves with those we consider to be like us. Solidarity should be about aligning with strangers in societies where strangers are alike because they all share the same strangeness. Difference, being different is something we all share, and therefore everyone belongs.