Against Identity Politics: Spectres, Joylessness & The Contours of Ressentiment

Texts from back cover:

“What is being criticized here is a particular political style, rather than a theoretical orientation – a style which labels as oppressive any deviation from a particular political line, which resorts almost immediately to public denunciation and exclusion, and which entails analytical and categorical rigidity […]”

“Structural oppressions are sociologically real, but their roots can be traced deeper, to the structures of statism and representation. If we must theorize a primary contradiction, then let it be the contradiction between ourselves – as unique ones, forces of becoming, irreducible and unrepresentable beings – and the entire regime of spectres and alienation.”

Against Identity Politics pdf

An Obituary for Identity Politics

From back cover:

“Rather than taking aim at identity itself and the apparatus maintaining this paradigm, energy is spent tearing one another down, ignoring the complexity of individual uniqueness, and playing the State’s role of defining each other based on membership to identity categories. Embracing a particular identity only reaffirms that identity’s existence as a ‘universal truth’ – and therefore, by the colonial intentions of assigned identity, the servitude and enslavement of some to others as a universal truth as well…

…I refuse to participate in upholding enslavement as a condition of my existence, and therefore these ‘truths’ are nothing more than political works of fiction…

…These ‘truths’ are the social constructs of control, keeping the life of rebellion shackled in a cold well of reform.”

An Obituary for Identity Politics pdf