2

Identity
Esperança Bielsa

The ideas live in the cavities between what things claim to be and what they are. Utopia
would be above identity and above contradiction; it would be a togetherness of diversity.
— Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Introduction
It is appropriate to start a reflection on identity by reinstating the notorious paradox that Stuart
Hall remarked on two decades ago when he pointed to a discursive explosion around the
concept of identity and a simultaneous searching critique of the very same concept (1996, 1).
Thus, while issues of sexual, ethnic, cultural or national identity are seen to be central in
the social construction of individuals and groups, the very concept is also deemed so highly
problematic not to merit its use as a category of analysis in scientific research (Alasuutari
2004; Brubaker and Cooper 2000). Nevertheless, the continued relevance of identity in aca-
demic discourse, as well as in political mobilisation and in common popular usage, bears
witness to its connection with significant elements of the lived experience of our times. In
particular, the contemporary salience of identity points to how modern life is perceived as
a reflexive project of self-construction. Its profuse and sometimes highly contradictory use
is also associated, on the other hand, with the marked polysemy of the term. While identity
used to designate, in the most general sense, absolute sameness and the specificity or unique-
ness of a person or thing, pointing to a defining unchanging property throughout existence, it
is precisely this meaning that has been denounced as essentialist in the attempt to foreground
the socially constructed, changing nature of individual and collective identities in the con-
temporary context.

Historical perspectives
Identity has been a fundamental term in philosophical thought since Greek antiquity, but
the present use of the concept first appeared in the 1950s and is associated with the work of
psychologist Erik Erikson. During the second half of the twentieth century, the term identity
rapidly expanded throughout the social sciences, the humanities, the medical and natural

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sciences, and beyond academic discourse in journalistic, political and everyday usage
(Brubaker and Cooper 2000, 2–4; Moran 2015, 18–20). According to Brubaker and Cooper,
from the late 1960s concerns with and assertions of individual identity were readily trans-
posed to the group level with the emergence of identity politics (2000, 3). What the ‘Black
Power’ movement and the ‘Women’s Liberation’ movement, as well as a variety of other
groups which mobilised around ethnic, sexual, religious or national claims, had in common
was an explicit focus on issues of identity as a basic defining characteristic of its members.
And whereas previous struggles were fought in terms of vindicating universal human rights
on the part of marginalised groups (civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, etc.),
identity claims were now made in order to articulate a politics of difference which not only
positively reframed the meaning of the very identity categories that had previously marked
these groups as inferior, but also pursued a new focus on group specific problems. Thus, as
Linda Nicholson has argued, ‘“identity politics” was a politics emerging out of a group’s
distinctive experiences and expressed the needs it saw as following from those experiences’
(2008, 2). Particularistic demands centred around (cultural) recognition thus came to chal-
lenge an older class-based politics centred around (economic) redistribution and the defence
of equality on universalistic grounds.
The present use of identity in terms of self-construction in a given social setting through
which individuals acquire certain defining characteristics marks identity as an explicitly
modern phenomenon. What is alluded to as the pre-history of identity (Nicholson 2008;
Moran 2015), prior to the ‘discursive explosion’ that took place in the second half of the
twentieth century, reveals a questioning of the divinely ordered and later naturally grounded
understanding of differences between individuals and groups by key authors such as George
Herbert Mead, Sigmund Freud, and cultural anthropologists like Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict
and Margaret Mead. In very different ways, their work challenged naturalistic conceptions
and promoted a reconceptualisation of individual selves and cultural groups in terms of
the intersubjective processes that constitute them in a given environment. Central to the
doubleness of identity as signifying both particular characteristics of persons (personal or
individual identity) and membership to culturally defined groups (collective identity) is the
fact that, as George Herbert Mead showed, communication with others is at the very core of
the self, that social location or positioning produces and defines a sense of individual self.
Thus, identity becomes a category of belonging that marks individuals, as members of par-
ticular social groups, with specific personal attributes.
Identity could emerge as a concern only when the rock-solid certainties of traditional
societies had been relativised and one no longer knew for sure where one belonged. Thus,
as Zygmunt Bauman maintains, identity ‘was born as a problem (that is, as something one
needs do something about – as a task)’ (1996, 19; 2009, 3). However, Bauman also points
to a historical transformation of the ‘problem of identity’, from a modern context in which
it was defined in terms of how to construct an identity and keep it stable, to a postmodern
one in which the real problem became not how to build identity, but the avoidance of fixa-
tion (1996, 23–26). This increasingly fluid conception of identity is mirrored in a new focus
on lifestyle and consumption, which became a key aspect of what has come to be known as
flexible capitalism. The fact that the acquisition and conservation of identity is fraught with
difficulties in a world that is becoming increasingly devoid of solid or lasting frames is also
evidenced in the proliferation of fragmented and discontinuous biographical trajectories and
of social types like the vagabond, which Bauman opposes to the pilgrim (1996; 2009, 7), as
well as in the more general process which the author analyses in terms of the universalisation
of strangerhood (1991).

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Since the postmodernism of the 1990s and the crisis of multiculturalism of the 2000s,
there has been an increasing sense that identity politics might be a thing of the past, or
at least no longer able to mobilise political action to the same extent as before. There has
arguably been a deep transformation of the socio-economic realities that made possible the
emergence of identity in the first place, making visible the proliferation of global inter-
dependencies and transnational connections and leading to new perceptions of diversity
and hybridity. Nevertheless, the notion of identity remains strong in academic as well as in
everyday discourse, although there is a certain tendency to more historicising and contex-
tualising accounts of identity in recent scholarship (Nicholson 2008; Moran 2015), or even
arguments to replace identity for a more dynamic concept like identification on the part of
authors who are considered key theorists of identity but who have sought to nuance their
arguments about the contemporary significance of the term (Bauman 2009, 11).

Critical issues and topics

A number of key issues have accompanied the upsurge of identity as a way to define basic
characteristics of individuals and groups. In what follows, three of these key debates are
examined in some detail: the attempt to rebuke essentialism and the problems that a social
constructivist notion of identity involves; the relationship between positioning and identity;
and the nature of particularistic claims for recognition, as opposed to other more universally
defined demands for economic redistribution or for inclusion of the other.

Essentialism
The modern conception of identity as a problem and a task emphasised the social con-
struction of what was previously seen as a given, whether divinely ordered or naturally
determined. Constructivism thus became a way to challenge the essentialism of previous
beliefs about the social characteristics of individuals and groups. However, social construc-
tivism was also explicitly used, at the same time, to respond to the essentialism of the new
identitarian thinking and claim-making, by affirming that identities are not invariable and
fixed, but rather fluid and multiple. In this way, a deconstruction of the notion of identity
was proposed which sought to redefine the basic connotations of the concept as a category of
being, such as sameness or unity, and which resulted in the softening of the very categories
that defined identity as such. Above all, it was emphasised that identity emanated not from
the inherent characteristics of subjects as such, conceived as stable, self-identical selves, but
from the social instances that discursively constituted them. Consider, by way of example,
Stuart Hall’s influential definition of identity:

I use ‘identity’ to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand
the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak to us or hail us into
place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes
which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’.
Identities are thus points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discur-
sive practices construct for us.
(Hall 1996, 5–6)

The complexity of this conception that establishes identity as a fleeting and unstable point
of contact between socially produced subjectivities and historical discourses about them

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emanates from its anti-essentialist move. Similarly, Judith Butler pointed out that ‘[t]here is
no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively consti-
tuted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its result’ (1999, 34). Butler insisted on the
difference between a notion of personal identity which ‘centers on the question of what inter-
nal feature of the person establishes the continuity or self-identity of the person through time’
and one which focuses on the regulatory practices that constitute identity, the internal coher-
ence of the subject, so that ‘the “coherence” and “continuity” of “the person” are not logical or
analytic features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained forms of intel-
ligibility’ (1999, 23). In this way, Butler sought to displace an essentialist ‘metaphysics of
substance’ which assumes a substantive person with various attributes, a self-identical being.
Nevertheless, essentialism has continued to haunt identity, even when it is explicitly con-
ceived as ‘constructed within, not outside, discourse’ (Hall 1996, 4), or as ‘an effect of
discursive practices’ (Butler 1999, 24). Thus, Brubaker and Cooper refer to identity as ‘an
uneasy amalgam of constructivist language and essentialist argumentation’ (2000, 6) and
argue that the prevailing constructivist stance on identity ‘leaves us without a rationale for
talking about “identities” at all’ (2000, 1). Marie Moran maintains that ‘it is the idea itself,
rather than the groups or individuals to which it refers, that is inescapably essentialist in its
operation as a classificatory device’ (2015, 6). As such, identity construes experiences of
selfhood and of group membership specifically in an essentialist way, by emphasising either
the uniqueness of a set of characteristics that remain the same through time, in the case of
personal identity, or that there is a set of characteristics that is the same for members of a
particular group (Moran 2015, 50).
Implicit essentialism is reproduced most clearly in the notion of collective identity, which
must inescapably be based on an assumed degree of sameness of group members and of the
distinctiveness of groups that presupposes the very existence of the bounded groups that it des-
ignates. Thus, identity building works by defining a fundamental sameness which allows the
specification of who belongs and who does not, so that othering and bordering is at the source
of every identity. Identity ‘is an excess of self, an appropriative positioning, and one that needs
to construct alterity in order to build itself’ (Ivekovic 2005, 5). As Rada Ivekovic maintains,
‘under this guise, culture becomes naturalised, essentialised, instrumental’ (2005, 5).

Positioning
An effect of the growing emphasis on the social construction of identities has been to bring
attention to positioning as a major determining aspect of the very identities produced.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Hall’s discursive notion of identity, which he explic-
itly refers to as ‘not essentialist but strategic and positional’ (1996, 3). Positioning, in terms
of history and culture, but also in terms of the power relations that define a given field, is
thus an inherent part of how identity is constructed. Indeed, according to Hall, ‘identities are
the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within,
the narratives of the past’ (1990, 225). Thus, identity is ‘Not an essence but a positioning’
(1990, 226).
Similarly, Iris Marion Young nuanced earlier arguments for a politics of difference
(1990), particularly references to the distinct cultural identity of oppressed groups, through
a new emphasis on relationality and positioning, pointing to fluid, interdependent social
location (rather than to the logic of identity) as its defining mark (2000). In this view, cat-
egories such as gender, race and sexuality refer not to notions of identity, but to the subaltern
structural positioning of groups, and in this sense are similar to class divisions. People who

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are differently positioned in social structures have different experiences and understandings,
derived from the structural inequalities that privilege some in detriment of others. From this
perspective, the relationship of an individual to a group is not one of identity, but is defined
by a relational logic. As Young maintains, ‘social groups do indeed position individuals,
but a person’s identity is her own, formed in active relation to social positions, among other
things, rather than constituted by them’ (2000: 99). Moreover, these groups and movements
respond to structural differences that are not reducible to cultural differences of gender,
ethnicity or religion (2000: 86).
The idea that position in social space determines a person or a group’s social and politi-
cal action is not exclusive of those who theorise identity politics or a politics of difference
but is also widespread in more universalistically orientated accounts of the social. However,
as Brubaker and Cooper point out, ‘social location’ means something quite different in the
two cases: ‘For identitarian theorizing, it means position in a multidimensional space defined
by particularistic categorical attributes (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation). For
instrumentalist theorizing, it means position in a universalistically conceived social structure
(for example, position in the market, the occupational structure, or the mode of production)’
(2000, 7). Here, Brubaker and Cooper also distinguish an emphasis on non-instrumental modes
of social behaviour, based on particularistic self-understandings or identifications rather than
on putatively universal self-interest, that the idea of identity foregrounds. It is important to
attend to this very particular meaning of positioning that is presupposed by conceptions of
identity because, by referring to a fundamental condition of which one is not always necessar-
ily aware, it replicates the underlying essentialism of identity as a category of being. Perhaps
this is more clearly revealed if one considers, for instance, modern nationalism as a conception
of collective identity centred on the customs, rituals and ways of life of a people. What Richard
Sennett described as an anthropological, as opposed to a political view of the nation, based
on spontaneity and authenticity rather than self-consciousness reveals a very similar view of
social location. As Sennett points out, ‘Nineteenth-century nationalism established what we
might call the modern ground-rule for having an identity. You have the strongest identity when
you aren’t aware you “have” it; you just are it’ (2011, 61). This conception naturalises identity
and problematises the condition of being a foreigner, a significant issue that will be analysed
in some detail below.
In social psychology, positioning has been used as a category that allows for a more
dynamic understanding of the discursive production of selves, which the concept of role
was seen to prevent (Davies and Harre 1990). Emphasising actual conversations between
particular people on particular occasions, positioning lends itself particularly well to a pro-
ductive use in translation studies. In her narrative account of Translation and Conflict, Mona
Baker devoted some attention to the notion of positioning in the reframing of narratives in
translation (2006). Thus, she analysed the repositioning of participants as a key strategy for
mediating the narratives of a source text or utterance in translation and interpreting. This
refers to how the translator or interpreter’s subtle choices in the linguistic management of
time, space, deixis, dialect, register, use of epithets, and various means of self- and other
identification reposition participants within the source narrative in relation to each other and
to the reader, reconfiguring the relationship between here and there, now and then, them
and us, reader and narrator, reader and translator, hearer and interpreter (2006, 132).
Repositioning of participants in translation can in fact point to a dynamics of translation
as transformation that is potentially at odds with even a socially constructivist stance on
identity, implicitly more dependent on being than on doing, as will be argued in this chapter.

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Recognition
According to Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, identity politics turned recognition into a
‘keyword of our time’, giving new currency to the old Hegelian motive of ‘the struggle for
recognition’ in the context of globalising capitalism and the acceleration of transcultural
contacts, as opposed to claims for universal redistribution whose national bases were taken
for granted (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 1–2). The fundamental link between recognition and
identity was most clearly formulated by Charles Taylor (1994), who maintained that ‘our
identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others,
and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or
society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture
of themselves’ (1994, 25). Taylor addressed the problems that derive from the pursuit of
a politics of difference based on the recognition of particularity arising from demands for
‘equal respect to actually evolved cultures’ (1994, 42), most notably in the context of multi-
cultural Canada. These relate to the clashing between universal individual rights and certain
measures in pursuit of collective goals on behalf of a national group, for instance, with refer-
ence to Quebec’s language legislation, which prescribes the type of school that children can
attend (1994, 53–55).
An argument for a politics of recognition explicitly points to the significance of a notion
of collective identity. However, it is interesting how, at least in Taylor’s classic formulation,
recognition is in fact related to a notion of individual identity, particularly to Mead’s empha-
sis on continuous communication and dialogue with others in the intersubjective constitution
of the self. But cultures are not individuals, in the most immediate sense that they are not
indivisible organisms, and it is precisely because of this that problems emerge. The notion
that ‘actually evolved cultures’ should be accorded equal respect and references to ‘cultural
survival’ or to the ‘integrity of cultures’ as valid collective goals are inherently problematic
because of the very concept of culture that they imply. Cultures are not homogeneous groups
of people, islands of sameness, a contention that becomes even more problematic in the
context of globalisation and the increasing porosity of borders. This is precisely the claim of
Seyla Benhabib, who proposes to interrogate the meaning of culture so as to avoid a reifica-
tion of given group identities (2002). Rather than recognition as a key for the preservation of
cultural distinctiveness, critics who put forward the constructed and contradictory character
of cultures and groups have sought to argue for democratic inclusion instead (Benhabib
2002; Habermas 1998; Aguilera 2015; see also Young 2000).
In his argument about the significance of recognition in fostering and preserving distinct
collective identities, Taylor uses the term culture as a synonym of community. As with the
concept of culture, an idea of community that emphasises boundedness and distinctiveness
is inherently problematic. In the sociological tradition, community (Gemeinschaft) emerged,
as it were, retrospectively at a moment when it was perceived to have been dissolved by the
social processes that gave origin to modern society (Gesellschaft). However, the myth of a
closely connected community retained a powerful appeal in modernity, often leading to nos-
talgia and to the development of what Sennett has referred to as ‘destructive gemeinschaft’,
self-absorbed communities as defensive mechanisms against otherness (1978, 220–223).
Moreover, the history of identity reveals an interesting connection with that of community:
the emergence of identity itself has been seen as an expression of the demise of community
in modernity. As Bauman maintains, ‘“Identity” owes the attention it attracts and the pas-
sions it begets to being a surrogate of community: of that allegedly “natural home” which
is no longer available in the rapidly privatized and individualized, fast globalizing world’

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(2009, 10). From this perspective, identity claim-making and the politics of recognition can
be seen as an expression of a falsified notion of the collective that in fact emanates from a
vision of the individual and the personal. Thus, Bauman refers to identity as ‘a phantom of
the self-same community which it has come to replace’ (2009, 10). This is also what Sennett
had in mind when he pointed to the relationship that exists between the phenomenon of
community as projected collective personality and the loss of group interest (1978, 223).
Identity then both expresses the social concerns of an epoch in which all certainties have
been relativised and gives them misguided form, thus contributing to the loss of meaning it
sought to offer a response for in the first place.

Current contributions and research: identity in the age of strangeness

Dispensing with identity, as some critics have suggested, does not contribute to an expla-
nation of its widespread significance or to an understanding of why identity emerged at a
particular moment as a central social concern. As Stuart Hall maintained, identity is ‘an idea
which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot
be thought at all’ (Hall 1996, 2). Identity has contributed to a positive reconceptualisation
of the social particularity of individuals and groups in complex, heterogeneous societies.
Identity and identity politics introduced a new understanding of social difference, so that ‘[o]
ne legacy of identity politics has been, in fact, a very extensive recognition in social think-
ing about the importance of societal differences in affecting people’s attitudes and people’s
lives’ (Nicholson 2008, 7). Identity exposed the exclusions associated with seemingly uni-
versal categories such as ‘worker’ or ‘citizen’, signalling the insufficiency of a universalism
proclaimed on the assumption of homogenising assimilation and contributing to the renewal
of democracy in multicultural societies. Even the most fervent critics of identity, such as
Brubaker and Cooper (2000), recognise the importance of particularistic claims and of their
conceptualisation, although they would argue against the way in which particularity is con-
strued in identitarian terms.
Nevertheless, the shortcomings of identity, most notably the assumption of group bound-
edness and the ready match between individual and group which underpin it, are even more
problematic today in the context of what has been approached in terms of the globalisation of
strangeness. This refers to the realisation that globalisation is leading not just to the intensi-
fied consciousness of a smaller, highly interconnected world, but also to an increased sense
of strangeness. Thus, Chris Rumford examined the proliferation of unfamiliar spaces in a
world which is increasingly perceived as uncertain and threatening, and the blurring and
reconfiguration of borders on a national as well as on a global scale (Rumford 2008). More
recently, Rumford has characterised strangeness as a more general experience of globalisa-
tion in the following terms:

Strangeness is encountered when there exists the realization that the social world is unrec-
ognizable in many ways, and where familiar reference points no longer exist (or are far
from reliable). In more everyday terms we can say that strangeness occurs when we rec-
ognize that we have lost our collective bearings and our social compass is giving strange
readings. In other words, strangeness is a type of social disorientation (resulting from an
experience of globalization) as a result of which we are no longer sure who ‘we’ are, and
we find it difficult to say who belongs to ‘our’ group and who comes from outside.
(2013, xi–xii)

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From this perspective, the continued insistence on identity can also be seen as a response
to the erosion of familiar reference points in a world that has become increasingly strange,
where the notion of a clearly defined, cohesive community is dissolved.
Under these circumstances, identity can easily devolve into an experience of globalisation
that leads to disconnection and closure rather than openness. In his book, Rumford identi-
fies cosmopolitanism—a ‘strategy for sociality under the constraints imposed by strangeness’
(Rumford 2013, 107)—as offering an alternative response. From a different perspective,
Ulrich Beck has also explicitly referred to the cosmopolitan outlook as an alternative to what
he calls the ‘prison error’ of identity, arguing that ‘[i]t is not necessary to isolate and organ-
ize human beings into antagonistic groups, not even within the broad expanses of the nation,
for them to become self-aware and capable of political action’ (2006, 6). Beck contrasts ‘the
social image of frozen, separate worlds and identities that dominated the first modernity of
separate nationally organized societies’ (2006, 6) to the increasing transnationalisation pro-
moted, for instance, by the mass media and the both/and identities that proliferate in an age of
place polygamy and multiple belonging (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, 25). These hybrid
identities, if they can be so approached, refer not to enduring sameness and distinctiveness as
the constituting characteristic of the self, but rather to the internal contradictions and conflicts
to which individuals and groups must permanently face up to. They result from what Beck has
approached as ‘the clash of cultures within one’s own life’, a cosmopolitan experience derived
from ‘the internalization of difference, the co-presence and coexistence of rival lifestyles, con-
tradictory certainties in the experiential space of individuals and societies’ (Beck 2006: 89).
This section seeks to formulate an account of identity in an age of strangeness that
productively engages with the changed conditions for living together both locally and on
a planetary scale. It argues that the significant shortcomings of identity can be overcome
through an emphasis on non-identity, a focus on what identity leaves out, rather than on
what is affirmed. Such a strategy allows us to preserve identity as a concept without which
certain ideas cannot be thought, but escapes from identity’s essentialising mechanisms,
from its ‘appropriative positioning’ (Ivekovic 2005, 5). Moreover, as will be shown in what
follows, translation plays in this account a fundamental role by helping to conceptualise a
view of intercultural relations based on contradiction and transformation, not on unity and
sameness, and by contributing to an alternative view of particularity that does not preclude
universalistic claims.
The most ambitious and thorough critique of identity is contained in Theodor Adorno’s
Negative Dialectics (2004 [1966]). The book makes clear the pervasiveness of identity
not merely as a concept but as a basic mode of thought: ‘We can see through the identity
principle, but we cannot think without identifying. Any definition is identification’ (2004
[1966], 149). However, identifying thought is exposed as a basic mechanism through
which contradiction is eliminated and a false unity between word and thing is proclaimed.
This unity that we construct in our consciousness is also the source of what appears diver-
gent, dissonant and negative. For Adorno, non-identity is precisely ‘the secret telos of
identification. It is the part that can be salvaged’ (2004 [1966], 149). This is because
non-identity contains a utopian element—‘the pledge that there should be no contradic-
tion, no antagonism’ (2004 [1966], 149)—which would be lost if the ideal of identity was
discarded. Rather than identity, our goal should thus be non-identity. As Adorno explicitly
maintained, his philosophical critique of identity transcends philosophy (2004 [1966], 11).
In this context, a conception of identity based on non-identity will be pursued through
a consideration of the figure of the foreigner, on the one hand, and of translation as the
experience of the foreign, on the other.

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The foreigner’s experience of displacement can be examined as an instance that forces indi-
viduals to face up to the essential discontinuity between the self and the outside world. In this
light, Sennett has referred to the exile, who does not inherit any identity and is obliged to tran-
scend dreams of home and to turn outward in order to find the conditions for living with others,
as the emblematic urbanite (1990, 134). But it is in his essay on ‘The Foreigner’ (1995, repub-
lished in 2011 in a book of the same title) where Sennett has more fully formulated his account
of the foreigner’s experience of displacement as an experience beyond identity. Foreigners are
forced to seek conditions for living with others who do not understand them, thus incorporating
incompletion and doubt instead of seeking self-assertion through a mirror image of sameness.
They are obliged to respond creatively to their displacement, to ‘deal with the materials of
identity the way an artist has to deal with the dumb facts which are things to be painted’ (2011,
69). For Sennett, the foreigner confronts the passions of modern nationalism, based upon ‘its
emphasis on sharing, among similar people, the dignity of everyday life, the value of identity’,
with a passion for displacement (2011, 75–76). Thus, foreigners can attempt to turn disloca-
tion into something positive, turning away from a society of self-referential identities. In the
search of Russian exile Alexander Herzen, Sennett finds an exemplary instance of ‘the vivid
consciousness of oneself as a foreigner which is necessary to defeat this pluralist self-enclosure
in ethnicity’ (2011, 82; see also Bielsa 2016, 30–31), pointing to a way out of the segregating
game of pluralism in which our contemporary politics of identity threaten to entrap us all.
But the foreigner’s experience of displacement can be radicalised through a self-
conscious search that takes language and translation as its primary materials. This is precisely
how Teresa Caneda explores the work of Modernist authors like T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad,
James Joyce and Ezra Pound, foreigners and polyglots, who undertook to defamiliarise their
medium of expression through the search for a new language beyond identity (2008; 2015).
As Caneda maintains, translation, understood as an experience of the foreign premised on
the trespassing of boundaries, was for Modernists much more than an implicit practice: ‘it
conformed to a whole array of aesthetic experiments through which they challenge estab-
lished concepts of self and otherness’ (2008: 58). Translation came in fact to embody this
new language that makes it possible to abandon the familiar and well-trodden paths and to
view oneself as foreign. Modernist writers, as it were, translate themselves, they ‘abandon
the conventional lexicon and syntax, and even violate the principles of standard grammar as
if they were writing under the pressure of having to translate from a different tongue’ (2008,
58). As a result of this, their productions ‘self-reflexively reveal themselves as multilingual
modernist texts marking the speakers’ position as strangers, always being somewhere else,
always translating themselves into someone else and thus standing in opposition to clearly
defined identities speaking in the “original” language’ (2008, 59).
Caneda perceptively notes that translation always reveals the gaps between world and
word (2008, 65). Herein lies its utopian potential, in Adorno’s sense, because it exposes the
contradiction that is hidden by an identifying thought that presumes their unity. The utopian
idiom of the translated writer is also expressed in Joyce’s dismantling of monolithic English
linguistic structures and their imaginary translation into a non-existent ‘autonomous’ lan-
guage, a language ‘simultaneously unique and multiple, original and derivative’ (2008, 66).
Thus, Joyce’s translational poetics of hospitality contains a lesson for us all:

By repositioning readers in their relationship to language, the polyglot Irish writer who
died in Zurich, held a British passport all his life and spoke Italian with his family, even
when they were settled in Paris, ultimately seems to remind us that we are all foreigners.
(Caneda 2015, 276)

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Today, the experience of estrangement, boundary trespassing and displacement from which
Modernist foreignising poetics emerged has become universalised. The cosmopolitan
condition of living in translation (Bielsa 2016, 12–13) finds in the artistic practice of the
Modernists, but also in the traumatic character of a colonial experience in which black people
were forced to see and experience themselves as ‘other’ (Hall 1990, 225; Fanon 2004; 2008),
a learning laboratory, not in terms of identity but with reference to what identity negates.
In the contemporary world, which we share with others who are different and whom we
do not understand, a politics of translation can provide a vital alternative to a politics of
identity. In this perspective, the key for living together in heterogeneous societies and on a
planetary scale does not lie in the recognition of identity and of cultural difference, but in the
practices of cultural translation, where openness to others leads to self-problematisation and
change, to the perception of one’s own limits and not to the reinforcement of an assumed
originary identity that emanates from old presuppositions about what cultures and individu-
als are. Thus, Rada Ivekovic maintains that,

The idea of ‘translating, between cultures’ as an open-ended relational and reciprocal

gesture of freedom putting into question the ‘translator’ and the ‘original’ itself can be
opposed to the somewhat limiting and communitarian (communalist) arrogant idea of
a ‘dialogue between cultures’ . . . often proposed by a benevolent yet limited multi-
culturalist approach.
(2005, 6)

Underlying this idea is precisely a view of translation as non-identity as an expression of its

imperfect success: ‘There is correspondence, approximation, comprehension even, resem-
blance but no identity. Difference is included or maintained in the translation. But perhaps
this is the price of its success, imperfect (and thus still necessary) as it may be’ (2006, 2). The
notion of transformation, of the incorporation of the perspective of the other into one’s own
culture, is diametrically opposed to what is behind that of identity, both with reference to
individual self-identity as well as to the concept of a community with well-defined borders
that is presupposed by the idea of a dialogue between cultures, which in reality serves to hide
existing differences and asymmetries between them. While the main source of identity is the
process of construction of alterity, translation points to the opposite process, that of a radical
and reciprocal exchange between different forms of being or existing (Ivekovic 2005, 2), a
questioning of self in light of the difference of the other that is at the basis of a cosmopolitan
notion of genuine openness to others.
A similar approach to the inherently destabilising effects of translation can be found in
Naoki Sakai’s critique of what he refers to as the metaphysics of communication embodied
in the conventional notion of translation as transfer and as the establishment of homog-
enising equivalence (2006). As Sakai maintains, this conception of translation is itself the
result of modernity’s projection of national/ethnic languages at the international level,
composed of basic national units with clearly defined borders. However, in the context of
the multiplication and, at the same time, increasing porosity of borders and of the prolifera-
tion of instances of supra-national governance, the binary opposition between same and
other that is established by a regime of translation based on monolingual address can no
longer be maintained. Instead, Sakai argues for a different attitude based on the transla-
tor’s ambiguous and unstable positioning as a subject in transit, or a form of heterolingual
address as ‘a situation in which one addresses oneself as a foreigner to another foreigner’
(2006, 75).

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Esperança Bielsa

A politics of translation can contribute to the shaping of a cosmopolitics that transcends

the limiting projects of modern nationalism and of multiculturalism and offers a more
realistic alternative in a deeply interconnected world. As Brubaker and Cooper maintained,
an identitarian emphasis on boundary formation rather than boundary crossing limits the
sociological and the political imagination: ‘it points away from a range of possibilities
for political action other than those rooted in putatively shared identity’ (Brubaker and
Cooper 2000, 35). A politics of translation is opposed to such an emphasis on what is. It is
moved by the utopian pursuit of that inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfilment of
languages that Walter Benjamin so powerfully described in ‘The Task of the Translator’
(1992). Perhaps more significantly, a politics of translation can never be confused with
an indefensible claim about the primacy of the universal over the particular. Rather, it
offers an alternative way of conceiving and approaching particularity, not in terms of
an imaginary self-sufficiency, but precisely in recognition of the necessity of others for
the formation of self, for a self-definition that is not self-contained, autoimmune, closed
off to renewal and regeneration through otherness. It thus explicitly helps to develop the
cosmopolitan imagination.
This argument for a politics of translation against a politics of identity does not
only refer to normative principles and philosophical issues, but also possesses an emi-
nently sociological and empirical aspect in the sense that Beck defended in his book
The Cosmopolitan Vision (2006). We live in a society that, in a certain sense, has been
cosmopolitanised. The cosmopolitan vision enables us to perceive an already existing
cosmopolitan reality, a reality of multiple belonging or cultural hybridity, of translated
lives, a reality that escapes and can no longer be grasped by traditional conceptions
of identity, which assume a natural correlation between the identity of individuals and
the place to which they belong. We can take as an example world families, a concept
through which Beck and Beck-Gernsheim analyse a growing and particularly relevant
case through which the contradictions caused by globalisation are manifested in the eve-
ryday and intimate life of families (2014). There is not a possible notion of identity that
defines these families that include strangers and distances, but a permanent struggle with
the contradiction and difference that characterises them, a translation that is always pro-
visional and therefore unfinished and infinite between different ways of existing. World
families question our most familiar assumptions about what families are; like foreigners,
they are ambivalent figures of non-identity. In a similar way, a cosmopolitan politics
of translation makes strangeness appear in the midst of what is most familiar to us, our
mother tongue. And only when identity disappears, when the unquestioned immediacy
of the circumstances that surround us vanishes, can we think ourselves, and openly relate
to others, in a world of strangers.

Further reading
Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. 2000. “Beyond ‘Identity’.” Theory and Society 29(1): 1–47.
A strong, wide-ranging and well-argued critique of identity which addresses the different uses of
identity and argues against both its underlying essentialism and the shortcomings of prevailing con-
structivist stances.

Cronin, Michael. 2006. Translation and Identity. London and New York: Routledge.
An analysis of the crucial role of translation in debates regarding identity and diversity in contempo-
rary society that explores key topics like migration and interpreting.

58
 Identity

Elliott, Anthony, and Paul du Gay, eds. 2009. Identity in Question. London: Sage.
This collected volume offers a multidisciplinary overview of identity at the beginning of the twenty-
first century in the context of significant new developments associated with increasing individualisation
and flexible capitalism.

Hall, Stuart, and Paul du Gay, eds. 1996. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage.
An influential collection on cultural identity that brings together research from a variety of fields in the
social sciences, cultural studies and the humanities in order to interrogate the increasing salience of
identity in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Moran, Marie. 2015. Identity and Capitalism. London: Sage.

This book offers a cultural-materialist analysis of identity, tracing the emergence and development of
the term as a keyword in contemporary society and exploring identity politics and personal identity in
the context of consumer capitalism.

Related topics
Defining culture, defining translation; translation history, knowledge and national building; transla-
tion, clashes and conflict; cultural resistance, female voices; translation, hybridity and borderlands.

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