1.
If identity, as the Dictionary of Logic says, means “the equality of an object or appearance with itself,” then there is no such thing as identity: at least, there is no absolute identity. Not even a crab, as we know, can get into the same river twice, because neither the crab nor the river can remain absolutely identical to itself. Changes in everything and everyone are inevitable, as are losses of identity; and even that is an oblique expression, for eternal self-sameness can hardly be called a good thing. Bertolt Brecht’s Herr K. “turned pale” when it was said that he had not changed. On the other hand, of course, identity changes do not have to be positive. The transformation of curly-haired, dreamy Botticelli youths into bald, vicious insurance salesmen, for example, cannot be called either aesthetic or moral progress. And when former social critics become zealous statesmen and patriots, it is hard to call this change of identity a turn for the better. Nevertheless, we should not give up hope for improvement, because, according to all probability calculations, the general law of change and transformation cannot always lead us astray.
In any case, it is quite clear that, in the logical and philosophical sense, a fixed identity is not possible in the real world. Certainly, there is such a thing as personal continuity, represented by what we call memory; however, the unreliability of memory has been proven even in ordinary matters (a fact that, apart from Marcel Proust, every detective knows all too well). In this respect, one cannot even speak of a real “identity” on the level of the “person.” The question of what the relative identitarian moment actually is at the various levels of manifestation of nature and human experience of the world is indeed an interesting and, in some respects, speculative problem, but one that should have no significance for practical life, and certainly not for political life. This makes it all the more urgent to explain the fact that the “question” of identity keeps cropping up in contexts where it does not belong. And since no concept has ever become the object of ideological and socio-political skirmishes, battles and wars beyond the rather narrow circles of logicians and specialist philosophers for logical or specialist philosophical reasons, the so-called question of identity must above all arouse suspicion. Not even identity itself, as such, is identical with itself; for having fallen into the hands of ideologues and interest fighters, it must, in all probability, fall victim to the worst possible changes of meaning.
2.
Since the fleeting journey on earth is not possible for man as an individual being, but only as the famous Zoon Politikon, something like a (just as uncertain) collective or cultural continuity is superimposed on the uncertain personal continuity. But living together with other people, loving or hating them, being in a larger historical context, etc., has as little to do with “identity” in the logical sense as the personal memory tape. When someone says of himself, “I am German,” this is true only in a relative, non-identitarian sense, in the sense of a copula, as one of an almost infinite number of relative, ephemeral qualities. To have grown up speaking a certain (e.g. German) language, which in turn has a history, i.e. is ephemeral, or even to possess a certain passport, even if one is not a passport enthusiast: who would deny this?
On the other hand, if someone says: “I am German” in an absolute, identitary sense, in the existential or essential sense of “being,” then it can only be a kind of mad cow disease. He could just as well claim that he “is” Napoleon or a hippopotamus. But where does this bovine madness of essential national, regional, cultural or other political “identity” come from? Perhaps there is some confusion here too, perhaps it is originally a matter of some other desire, such as for security. Even in order to be able to argue terribly as a Zoon Politicon, one needs a frame of reference, a presupposed common ground, because in complete institutional emptiness and relativization, it would no longer be possible to argue at all.
The fact that this historical, cultural, institutional commonality, which “contains” the human individual, at the same time influences relationships of a completely different and more immediate nature, extending, for example, into the bedroom, keeping an eagle eye on even the most personal desires (or, as Deleuze/Guattari say, suppressing the “desire machines” of the unconscious), already points to the fundamental inadequacy of all hitherto known varieties of historical-cultural commonality. If this connection is redefined as a false essential “identity,” then its coercive character is fully revealed. Whoever has (or thinks he has) a fixed political or cultural “identity” is poor. He carries around with him an identity prison that makes any open perception of the world impossible.
Now it must be said in favor of all pre-modern forms of society, however horrible they may sometimes have been in detail, that at least they did not give rise to the “question” of (political, cultural, national, etc.) “identity.” Their traditions, customs and behaviors were simply too natural to them. If, in the process of modernization, the problems of social coherence have been glossed over with the false label of “identity,” then this can only be the overcompensation of a new and additional deficiency. The change in the form of historical-cultural commonality meant that it began to lose its “salvaging” function, without losing its coercive character; and for this very reason, out of anxiety over this change, it had to be immediately absolutized into “identity.” The so-called question of identity is thus linked to the loss of the self-evident, even within the (unabated) coercive nature of society.
3.
No sooner has modern man begun to settle into some semblance of a home than everything is swept away again by a new whirlwind of “modernization” – one that isn’t even called “Anna” or “Angelica,” but has such strange names such as “war of liberation,” “construction,” “automation,” “creative destruction,” “location competition,” “market correction,” and so on. This life of endless impositions and disruptions, which, to make matters worse, does not take place within a reliable frame of reference to which one could become accustomed, seems to produce the strange desire for a fixed “identity.” There is, after all, a difference between engaging in reasoning about such a speculative question calmly over a cup of tea or a glass of wine on a long summer evening, and those reasoning – poor, naked, and on the run, habitually in the process of drowning – who are clutching at straws.
Modernization, that is, the total marketization of everything tangible and intangible, thinkable and unthinkable, born and unborn, is in a new potency inhuman precisely because of its accelerated dynamic character. While all previous institutional abominations were at least characterized by stasis, the modernized world, which continues to modernize in a mad tour de force, is, on the contrary, characterized by the institutionalization of change. This change, however, is not one that originates from within, springing from the direct human-nature process, constituted by independent experience – which might even make the shift in identity pleasurable – but rather an imposed, unmediated for the individual, blind and frenzied change that follows the fetish laws of capital. This is precisely what gives rise to the strange reciprocity of institutionalized change and permanent identity rupture on the one hand, and an “identity” ideology as a search for stability in the endlessly unleashed process of the crazy social fetish on the other.
But modernization also means emptying, namely an increasing loss of meaning. The structure that is unleashed and becomes a permanent whirlwind is, to make matters worse, contentless, the complete void; precisely the nirvana of money, but not as finally coming to rest, but as senselessly and restlessly plowing the world. Money not only has no meaning or purpose except the end in itself of its self-valorization as capital; it is also the paradox of a form without content. Emptied of even the last sensuous remnant of precious metals, which was itself already a decaying content, capitalized money becomes a tangible nothingness, a hard appearance, an eerily dynamic zero. Everything becomes attainable, an infinite world of things and possibilities becomes accessible, in contrast to the silly limitations of pre-modernity with its dress codes and elaborate special rights; but these infinite possibilities of things and relations can, in modernity, only be attained as commodities, in the form of total commodity production, i.e. stamped by the zero and thus provided with the sign of meaninglessness. In this form, however, their content decays, they become endless arbitrariness, in which no meaning whatsoever can be retained.
It is therefore not merely the institutionalization of external, blind, imposed change per se, but something far worse: an incessant change that historically increasingly unleashes contentlessness, meaninglessness, pointlessness, and absolute arbitrariness to the same extent that it forces all things and relationships into the commodity form and thus hands them over to the absurd self-valorization process of money. In the form of capitalized money, a voracious black hole opens up, swallowing up matter, sensation, the world and reality with increasing speed. The world is de-sensualized and de-aestheticized (a glance out of the window is enough), nature is destroyed. In modernization as a self-unfolding crisis, people squirm under the double assault of alienated change and growing lack of content; and with it, the identity problem produced by this structure itself intensifies.
For even an imposed change of identity might still be bearable if it were meaningful in content; but the progress towards total lack of content is unbearable. This state of meaninglessness – which is constantly emerging anew and intensified from the process –becomes, as the process continues, the inner state of the individuals and subjects themselves: their adaptation to this dynamic structure establishes them as total money-subjects. In other words, their identity now consists in having none. They find themselves in the form of an emptied, contentless subject: ready and able, even compelled, to absorb anything and everything, but only ever in this form of their own arbitrariness, as an appropriation to their own zero position of “hard nothingness”: eternally separated from sensual content and its enjoyment (Midas).
Thus, in a manner as perverse as it is paradoxical, absolute identity is ultimately achieved; the logical impossibility has truly come to pass – albeit at the price of an absolute zero-identity. The unbearable nature of this subject form gives rise all the more strongly to a desire for a substantive, significant, and meaningful identity that is simultaneously meant to escape the mad and ceaseless form of change or remain independent of it; but since one’s own zero-identity as a monetary subject must nevertheless remain unquestioned, from now on it can only ever be a matter of synthetic pseudo-identities – in themselves and a priori untrue, laboriously propped up, and then evaporated once again by the restless nirvana of money, by the actual zero-identity.
4.
Yet, in contrast to the infiniteness of the commodity world, the synthetic plastic identities of modernization neither simply dissolve into total arbitrariness nor are they merely desperate acts of self-defense by subjects who have become meaningless. On the one hand, it is a matter of a historical process of assertion of dynamic nothingness against the static, pre-modern structures of the social imposition of generality. In this history of assertion, the black hole of money, of the “automatic subject” (Marx), was at first small and its process slow; only gradually did it enlarge and increase its process speed, eating and digesting faster and faster. t is only today that the black hole has, in a certain sense, become all-encompassing, and we find ourselves in it, skin and hair, i.e., our own interior has itself become a black hole, in which the dynamic nothingness again and again senselessly plows up sensual matter, eats it, digests it, and excretes it again.
In this history of the assertion of the insane end in itself, various synthetic transitional identities were formed that suggested ideological solidity reaching down into the unconscious, without really possessing it. Foremost among these is the nation, organized in the form of the modern nation-state. The ideologists, the historical sciences and the humanities have worked hard to ontologize this equally young and (in the historical process of the “automatic subject”) short-lived phenomenon, to give it a false beard, to endow it with a false ancestral passport, and so on. In fact, the nation, too, was only a kind of loincloth or foot rag of the “hard nothing” that kept working its way through the meager “identitarian” disguises of its history.
The nation was not arbitrary or random; that is why it seemed to possess significance. Yet it possessed this significance only as a function within the process of its own emerging total insignificance, a process in which it was bound to decay once more, so as to allow the naked, empty money subjectivity to emerge as the final stage. This transformation ultimately even led to the nation – though nothing more than a historical function of capitalism’s self-assertion, that is, a synthetic identity in this and no other sense – being ideologically mobilized as an identity against capitalism itself, which was growing out of it. In general, it seems to be a peculiarity of this structure that the respective past transit identities are invoked as synthetic “content,” because the “hard nothing” that becomes visible as the actual zero-content of the entire process of modernization plunges the subjects, who nevertheless “are” this meaninglessness themselves, into horror and despair.
On the other hand, a synthetic identity had to be formed vis-à-vis the non-European or non-Western structures, cultures, etc., that were not, or not yet, in the mill of money. Just as the identity construct of the nation mediated the competition between the emerging money subjects for a certain transitional period, so the construct of the “West” served to represent the common demarcation of the money subjects from the non-money subjects. And just as with regard to the nation, so with regard to the “West,” all the humanities, social sciences, and history worked as a collective forgery workshop to give this identity construct a semblance of plausibility and a false “uniqueness,” identitarian solidity, and self-importance. Begun in the 18th century, the 19th century saw the completion of a historical image that was racist and anti-Semitic in its foundations, spun out with ever greater subtlety and sophistication, still “valid” today, and dragged through the textbooks. For example, the black African origins of Greek antiquity were systematically erased (Martin Bemal, Black Athena), in order to cover the overall identity of the “hard nothing” with a false white skin of “noble simplicity, quiet grandeur” (Winckelmann), whitewashed like the once garishly painted Greek statues.
Falsified as identitary content and as cultural coherence from A to Z, the synthetic construct of the “West” became capitalistically functional in three ways. First, it served to dress up the European absolute zero-identity, the terrible shame of the West, in a grandiose theatrical costume. Second, Western European self-hatred, all too justified by self-submission to the fetish of the dynamic “hard nothing,” could be projected outward in the form of a false identitarian self-aggrandizement: as the construction of “races,” of “Blacks,” “savages,” “primitives,” etc., of allegedly foreign “identities,” in other words, whereby the shame of one’s own zero-identity became presentable as the inferiority of other people and cultures not yet participating in this zero-identity. Thirdly, the global campaign of destruction and annihilation resulting from the fetishistic worship of the zero-god of money-valorization could be given a missionary appearance: the senseless misery of capitalism, marketization, and “valorization” as a Promethean bringing of light (indeed: Lucifer).
Today, another century later, total, naked money subjectivity as a global system has become so entrenched that even its own identity constructs can no longer be taken seriously. The costumes, fake beards, and fake teeth have become so ridiculously obvious that no one really “believes” in them anymore. Just as capitalism has outgrown itself in its powerful nothingness, just as it has stepped out of its industrial form and out of itself as “modernity,” so it has also destroyed the nation and the “West” and, in general, every conceivable synthetic identity. What remains, however, is the impossibility of sublating (or overcoming) the unresolved absolute zero-identity, which today is more obvious than ever. And what also remains is the competition of the money monads in the ongoing process of the “hard nothing”; in its globalized form, more total and inexorable than ever.
So the completely worn-out, decrepit costumes of false identity are brought out again and again; and the hopelessly worn-out, thousand-fold resurrected, ghostly money subjectivity strives to continue “pretending” (simulation) in an endless loop. If there is talk of a “post-industrial society” and of “post-modernity,” then the fake, synthetic, shriveled identity that is always brought up with a wry grin should now be called “post-identity.” And this is perhaps the worst of all, because the increasingly infantile Indian Game of identities becomes the bloody seriousness of the “molecular civil war” (Enzensberger) at the historical end of the absolute zero-identity.
5.
The question of identity also has another aspect that pertains to the “how” of the systemic, procedural nature of the system. The false identity – which is, in truth, the absolute zero-identity of money – also implies a certain way of perceiving the world, one that is a moment of permanent capitalist “world-transformation” and its dynamic meaninglessness. As Sohn-Rethel and others have shown, along with money came theoretical, “conceptual” thought, which, unlike mythological, poetic thought, no longer has anything flowery about it. This double-edged progress brought advances in knowledge, but at the price of submission to the secularized meta-myth, to money’s “metaphysics of reality.” Only with its totalization since the 17th century has society been transformed into a machine of valorization, which is at the same time a conceptual “identification machine.”
The money-born “concept,” the scientific consciousness, which, after a long incubation period, only began its flight of fancy with the onset of the modernization process, does not give the world its proper names, in whatever fantastic form, but “identifies” it according to a grid that does not reproduce the world’s manifold peculiarities, but subjects it to an alien and external abstraction. Kant has shown that this abstract space-time grid, which makes natural science possible in the first place, is not something inherent in things, but the perceptual form of cognizant human consciousness. If this insight is not ontologized, as in Kant, but historicized, then it becomes clear that the abstract space-time continuum and the concepts emanating from it originate from the dynamic social form of money, the “hard nothing,” and thus did not become an object of reflection by chance, but only together with the unleashing of the capitalist mode of production. It is not a matter of Kant’s discovery of the “finally revealed” truth about human cognition per se, as he himself assumed in good Enlightenment fashion, but rather of the involuntary early revelation of the connection between the totalized commodity form and modernity’s thought-form.
Modern science, specifically natural science, contains at its most basic level the empty, contentless law of money. Its false objectivity corresponds to the false objectivity of money, which has become an apparent fact of nature. What is at stake in the simultaneity of the emergence of the total money economy (capital) and (natural) science is not a mere external parallel, but the common zero-identity that also belongs to the subjects of money and natural science. The restless impetus, according to the abstract spatio-temporal pattern, “to measure everything that is measurable and to make measurable everything that is not measurable” (Galileo) corresponds to money’s equally restless and abstract compulsion to valorize. The de-sensualization and de-aestheticization of the world occurs equally through money and natural science: they are two sides of the same coin. Scientific and commodity-based thinking “identifies” objects and phenomena according to its own zero-identity, stamps them with its abstraction, and leaves nothing in them that does not merge into that identity. Perhaps we are also dealing with two successive levels of “real abstraction” (Sohn-Rethel), which, according to Hegel, is “world-destroying”: scientific abstraction precedes the transformation of things into commodities, prepares them, as it were, for their entry into the infinite arbitrariness of the commodity world.
The only concession of the dynamic “hard nothing” to the sensual character of the world is the socio-historical construction of “femininity,” which has been made “responsible” for everything that falls outside the logic of abstraction of money/science; admittedly, only insofar as this dissociated, incomprehensible “rest” of the world is unfortunately functionally necessary for the process of valorization itself and cannot be substituted or adjusted in a scientific commodity-like manner. The construct of “femininity” is thus itself a system function, albeit in paradoxical entanglement; a flanking measure for the process of commodified-scientific “identification,” from which things are stretched onto the Procrustean bed of the “hard nothing.”
In this process, “femininity” is “identified” in its compensatory function as an object, just as, by the way, the “Black person” is, while, conversely, the dependent, itself fetish-constituted actor of the process identifies itself as a “subject” (and thus, correspondingly, destroys itself). The “identifying” thinking in the empty money-science form does not identify the “to-be” of identities, but it is “identical” with the construction of these identities; this thinking and the action corresponding to it represent a reality grid in which things and relations compulsively first appear as (synthetic, set out of the absolute zero-identity of the grid) identities without having been so before.
Here, the synthetic “identities” show themselves in their functional garb, preparing themselves and “the others” as juicy roasts for the ravenous black hole of the litigating, subjectless money. This applies equally to subject and object identity, to gender identity, national identity, and all the other synthetic identities of modernization: “identifying” thought establishes an alignment with the logic of zero, with the absolute zero-identity, always anew and at an ever higher level of development, by relegating the various functional, subject, and object identities (which at the same time feign content or something similar to content) to their places: the “woman,” the “Black person,” the “worker,” the “scientist,” and so on. Just as natural science “identifies” and presents the world as a kind of uniform white powder with different modes of reaction, so social science “identifies” human beings as carriers, subjects and objects of the commodity-producing system, uniform in money subjectivity but functionally and ideologically different. In both cases, there always a “residue” left behind that must be treated as waste.
Adorno and Horkheimer criticized this “identifying” thinking – and thus Hegel’s philosophy of identity – because they saw that in this process the world spirit of the concept by no means comes to itself through mere comprehension, but rather that this identifying comprehension must be understood quite literally: as a brutal shaping of the world according to the real-abstract essence of the concept, i.e., according to the totalitarian zero-identity of dynamic money. It is this actual context that makes conceptual thinking, as money-born and belonging to the process of money, the rape of things and relations; for this thinking can never remain mere thinking, its abstraction is immodest and murderous. Conceptual thinking, the only form of reflection achieved to date, should not, according to Adorno, simply be discarded (for instance, in an unreal, itself synthetic return to myth), but rather transformed together with its socio-historical foundation.
But how? Critical theory no longer saw an open possibility here, but only the self-contained system of “doom.” Frozen in the absolute zero-identity and then set in endless motion by it as mechanical pseudo-identities like wound-up dolls, people would remain trapped in the mental derangement of their identity mania, driving the capitalist process on ad infinitum. In his desperation, Adorno suggested fishing in the garbage (of the artistic, for example, paying attention to the “residue” of the unusable, and seeking out the hidden little territories of the last no-man’s land, where the prison of identity has not yet been completely closed. Today, however, it is becoming clear that the identitarian process of the “hard nothing” can also negatively cancel itself out, i.e. that it does not at all continue to move endlessly, but rather burns out catastrophically. Since the black hole of total money valorization is not physical but rather social in nature, it must, with the destruction of society and its bio-physical basis, also destroy itself. The other concern is whether the resulting pressure of suffering creates a possibility of escape from the prison of identity, even if its walls are not broken through from the inside in a well-considered way, but burst like in an earthquake.
6.
Especially at the catastrophic end of modernization, the state of social criticism is admittedly a deplorable one. And this is only due to misunderstandings. Insofar as the (left or radical left) critique of society in the form of the various Marxisms, anarchisms, etc. was itself an “identity,” was perceived and presented as such, it was always also its own secret denial. If the reference to something that one wants to abolish or overcome appears as a positive identity, then this is a logical self-contradiction. This means that together with the carefully hated (or rather, love-hated) object, the equally carefully built up, cherished, and cultivated positive identity and one’s own identitarian self-confidence (as a critic, left-wing radical, know-it-all, and troublemaker) would come to an end. Of course, that cannot be allowed to happen, and that is precisely why evil capitalism must live forever, so that one can eternally criticize and fight against it with full self-confidence as a good person, revolutionary, tribune, theoretical expert, elitist cultural critic, etc. (in this respect, not entirely unlike the vampiric relationship between Christian charity and the misery of the world, as already exposed by Nietzsche).
Is this merely dialectical sophistry? Yet there is indeed an intrinsic, objective reason for this self-contradictory, identity-based characterization of social critique, one that cannot be reduced to purely psychological factors. This reason lies in the fact that the previous critique of society was not yet a transformative critique of dynamic money as such, but rather was itself a driving moment of modernization; be it in the form of the internal system development of the West, or in the form of the recuperative modernization of the East and the South. Involuntarily, then, as long as permanent modernization had not yet exhausted itself, social critique was itself part of the whirlwind whose respective destructive force it deplored. Thus, it ultimately belonged to the systemic process of the “hard nothing.” It was involved (under the names of enlightenment, democracy, etc.) in the shaping of the absolute zero-identity, in the totalization of money-subjectivity; and in this respect, at the end of the overall process, its identity also turns out to be a real plastic identity, a synthetic illusory content under the sign of zero and its dynamic meaninglessness. In this sense, the attribution of an “identity” to leftist consciousness is quite fundamentally correct.
And in this respect, the transformation of the plastic identities of the left within the absolute zero-identity in the last ten or fifteen years also becomes understandable, because it points to the end of modernization. The transformation of the old left identity into a trembling post-identity was almost inevitable in this process. To the same extent that the process of modernization began to exhaust itself without the underlying social form being questioned in the slightest, it follows that leftist consciousness also became extinct. Since “creative destruction” has finally lost the attribute assigned to it by Joseph Schumpeter and is now only linearly destructive, there is no longer a “left wing” to occupy within this process in terms of social and development policy. In the great structural crisis at the end of modernity, the left is merely staging a ghostly farewell ball.
The dissolution of leftist consciousness as an identitarian critique of society began with a change of identity in parts of the alternative and ecological movements. Some of its protagonists began to wrap the decaying leftist identity in a bearskin and to want to save the forest only because it was “German.” Far from giving the critique of society a different (reactionary) justification, the critique as such was thus completely withdrawn. Not even a consistent anti-modernism can be attributed to this embarrassing construct. For the “identifying” thinking of modernity even appears particularly transparent in the neo-German identity maniacs as a kind of travesty of the Hegelian concept: it has never occurred to the forest itself to be “German,” any more than it has to dogs and cats; only in the identifying grid of the identity mania is it given such an attribute. For the forest, this does not mean salvation, but rather a death sentence; for its transformation into a component of a synthetic, plastic identity can only mean that the factual-sensual problem of preserving trees, ecological systems, etc. is not at stake at all. The fact that the forest is once again being sung about as “German” at the end of the 20th century is its funeral song from the mouths of maddening money subjects of the absolute zero-identity, who are always already destroying the ecosystem by “making money.”
Parallel to this deep-rooted regression, an initially seemingly contrary dissolution of leftist consciousness into affirmative theorems and attitudes of “postmodernism” developed. Outwardly, the foolish postmodern hustle and bustle was fun, and it continues to this day. With the onset of the secular crisis, many formerly identitarian leftists discovered that not everything was to be taken so seriously, and that capitalism was not so bad after all, but rather fashionable, urban, and fun. Identity was criticized, but in the guise of an identity of social criticism, that is, in an affirmative way. Thus, the postmodern left criticized identitarian thought only in the context of becoming largely uncritical. The pseudo-content of plastic identities was not overcome either, but merely relativized and dumbed down. Identity turned out not to be a skin at all, but merely a costume; and this was not a cause for horror and reflection, but for hooting jokes. Today a little dialectical materialism, tomorrow a little rain dance; today a family man, tomorrow a little gay; today exercises in sensuality, tomorrow a craving for theory again; today a cashmere scarf, tomorrow a traditional jacket and a chamois tuft on the hat: damn, how identity-less we are.
But the more clearly the Medusa head of the absolute zero-identity, i.e. of the mature and aged money subject, appeared in the mirror, the faster and more loudly the permanent costume change had to be carried out. “Masquerade ball” is what this is called in military drill: lining up every five minutes in a different outfit – tracksuit, work suit, evening suit; and most recently, by the way, combat suit. The old ‘68er demand for “strong ego identity,” at that time still meant as a condition for the liberation struggle, but even then rather unreflective in its implications, mutated via “politics in the first person” into the narcissism of the competitive subjects in the party fun of the casino capitalism of the 80s and 90s.
In the 1990s, however, the crisis of the commodity-producing system also reached global proportions. The salon lions of the postmodern costume parties in the Western metropolises must now gradually fear for their own material existence and life in the unresolved fetish form. The fun is over, even if it is still being simulated. Under the impression of crisis and secret existential fear, the identity costume has to be hallucinated again as a veritable skin, as an essential being, even if the functionalism of crude competitive interests peeps out of every buttonhole. From leftist identity to postmodern costume identity to infernal neo-patriotic post-identity: the delirious fetish-consciousness trapped in the nothingness of money finishes its St. Vitus dance. It is as if adults were taking a grim Rütli oath to believe in the Easter Bunny again from now on. And since there are no new plastic identities, pseudo-meanings, and illusory contents to be found, we have to reach for the old ones.
It was certainly suspicious that at the costume party of casino capitalism, the majority of men dressed up as men and the women as women (or even continued to play out the same “identities” within the same gender); under the false impression that these were “just” costumes. Underneath the carnival mask lay the old accrued gender mask. To lift this would have meant to show the bloody facelessness of the money subject; something like how in the movie “Planet of the Apes” the last humans take off their human face masks and show their eerily deformed, eyeless “selves” as they worship the atomic bomb. The unresolved gender masks, as a shell of the absolute zero-identity – which were once again post-identitarily painted over in the revival of the eroticism of the “strong man” and “beautiful woman” (e.g., “Carmen”) – already pointed, however, to the return of the old national uniforms, which were meant to complete the renewed identity mania.
Nevertheless, the errant post-identities do not merge with the old plastic identities. The prefix indicates that once again a historical level of self-evidence and apparent naturalness has broken away; that more subtle and downright ludicrous derivations become necessary in order to be able to play the game once again as mutual deception and self-deception. The empty abstractions of the “difference” discourse are meant to point to identitarian contents that, as plastic identities of past modernization, exist only in faint outlines – like the echo of life in the realm of the dead. But the mad compulsion toward competition and self-assertion in the crumbling civilization of money compels identitarian occupation even in a postmortem sense.
In the discourse of “difference,” postmodern reflection unites with the earthy stammering of inane bearskin patriots. Adorno’s critical theory is turned into its opposite. It is not what is “different” about things and people themselves from what the “identifying thinking” of the money-born concept stamps them as that becomes the topic, but exactly the opposite: the reciprocal “difference” between their false plastic identities, which “identifying thinking” stamps on them, is once again invoked. Not only in the cultural racism of the New Right, even the identity constructs of the oppressed and offended, which were created in self-defense, are instrumentalized for the prevailing identity mania. The “Black person” is to uphold his false identity “as a Black person,” the gay man his false identity “as a gay man” (possibly even genetically fixed by the new biologism), the “Russian” his false identity “as a Russian,” the woman her false identity “as a feminine being,” and so on. They uphold these pseudo-emancipatory constructs for no other purpose than to allow the “White” and Westerner, the forced heterosexual, the “German,” and the man to once again lead his most false of all false identities onto the battlefield of total competition in a post-identitarian manner.
Post-identities are needed so that people can attack one another. Of course, the “post-metaphysical age,” which has emerged from post-structuralist drivel, no longer permits any substantive or pseudo-substantive objectives of devout self-evidence. Now it’s time to grit one’s teeth and, in all seriousness, march into the “molecular civil war” for the constructivist-revived Easter Bunny. “There is no alternative!” scream the ex-leftists, the identity-obsessed, post-postmodern, defensive late democrats, who in truth no longer want to hear anything about an alternative. But excuse me, who is going to take the global civil war of absolute zero-identity so seriously; after all, it’s all just nothing, even if it is pretty hard.
Originally published in EXIT! no. 10 in 2012.
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