You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This piece is part of a longer presentation given at the conference, “Is War Inevitable? An Interdisciplinary Conference” held in NYC, Feb. 25, 2012.-Eds.
In “Why War?” Freud presents us with the idea that “anything that encourages the growth of emotional ties between men must operate against war” (1933, p. 212), and that such ties are often formed by identification. Through identification, we are inevitably “implicate[d] in lives that are not our own,” (Butler, 2003, p. 14), our “singularity…always inscribed with a multitude” (Grand, 2010, p. 181). The American socialist Eugene Debs gave voice to an expansive sense of the possibilities of identification as a basis for social action at his trial for sedition near the end of World War I: “While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison I am not free” (cited in Bartlett, 2002, p. 606). Conscientious objectors are often motivated by their identification with those they are being asked to fight or exercise authority over. For instance, many of the Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories are moved by their identification with the suffering of Palestinians. As refisenik Ramie Kaplan expresses it, “I couldn't remain indifferent to the Palestinians' suffering and degraded living conditions. I didn't feel good manning a checkpoint where I'd detain or interrogate poor Palestinians heading to work at 4 in the morning” (quoted in Chacham, 2003, p. 38).
But in exploring the possibilities of identification as a basis for the prevention of war we quickly encounter a problem, one that inheres in the structure of identification itself. As Judith Butler points out, any identification is assumed “through a set of constitutive and formative exclusions” (cited in Fuss, 1995, p. 9). Any identification implies a disidentification: if I am this, I must not be that. Patriotism is one malign manifestation of this structure, as it at least implicitly