Diana Fuss, Identification Papers. New York:  Routledge, 1994.

To follow the metaphoricity of Diana Fuss' Identification Papers, this book is about traveling with the documentation to prove who you are when the border patrol glares at you and asks: “Where are you going, and how long do you intend to stay?” Even when you feel most certain about your destination, the risk is always that you might get lost or detained. Identification Papers is about the subject's route through identification toward identity, and what gets taken in along the way. As Fuss writes, “identification is the detour through the other that defines a self,” a detour that “follows no predetermined path, nor does it travel outside history and culture” (2-3).

The central contention of Identification Papers is that identification is the subject's cannibalistic, infectious, and failing attempt to recover a lost object—or, as in Lacanian psychoanalysis, to overcome lack which cannot be overcome—through an incorporation, assimilation, and colonization of the other. That is, “internal to the work of identification” is a metaphoric exchange and displacement, “the substitution of one for the other,” or self for other (5). Yet, because identifications are unpredictable and surprising, identity is always at risk of being disrupted by new identifications. An identity may seem to have unity and coherence because some identifications are continually re-enacted, but identifications are always being formed and replaced. As a “detour through the other,” through which the subject arrives at identity, identification is also a metaphoric journey in which the subject constantly loses its way.

Fuss begins to trace the origins and development of Freud's work on identification by arguing that mourning takes a central role in