What is "identity politics" (Kristeva)

As much as the Right accuses the Left of "identity politics," leftists also accuses the Left of identity politics whenever anyone suggests that tensions in society are not limited to and complicate that one between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Any seriousness I ever lent to these accusations had entirely escaped me after I watched this video by Todd McGowan. He argues that it's the right-wing defense of the white man that can be more accurately called identity politics, beginning with the premise, "identity depends on nonidentity." For there to be a white man, there must be a non-white, non-man other, and so he effectively "enjoys" those who don't share his identity. It is the paradox of making another identity your enemy but only existing through your distinction from them.

A similar paradox is addressed by Kristeva in her Powers of Horror, which I already wrote about. What is biblically deemed "pure" is whatever has been separated from the impure. These separations begin from the simple vegetarian dietary restriction (vegetables are pure, meat is impure) until the prohibitions become as elaborate as wearing clothes made only of wool over blended fabrics, and eating animals with cloven hooves rather than whole ones. The Bible establishes a taxonomy, a system of classifications; what can be differentiated, identified, is pure, and what disturbs these distinctions are impure. However, something cannot be identifiable without first separating itself from the unidentifiable, and so it will never serve purity to destroy all that is impure. Identity depends on nonidentity.

Todd McGowan says that identity politics can never win. In this blog, I show what happens when the logic of identity is brought to its conclusion, when a communist propaganda poster appropriates Christian iconography that appropriates pagan legend:

"The contradiction of othering is that the aggressor's identity depends on the other, as identity is essentially differentiation. Only when the other is defeated is this relation recognized, so much so that they will be absorbed into the victor's origin mythologies. A return to tradition is only possible when that 'tradition' was once defeated as an exterior enemy and then made interior to the dominant historical chronology."

We see it in all the Christian art that references pagan myth and all the Christian theologians that admire the Greeks as the founders of the West. After the other really is destroyed, they are mourned as a lost heritage that must be preserved through cultural memory, a lost civilization that suddenly had all this influence on the dominant Identity which once treated it as a threat. Identity depends on nonidentity.

This article on biracials in America is a good support for why identity politics is a right-wing movement. If anyone is obsessed with labels, it's those that fear interracial relationships the most:

"This is why the melting pot metaphor has always frightened people more than they admit. Melting implies loss. Transformation. The destruction of clear borders. And Americans, regardless of politics, remain deeply attached to categories. We sort one another obsessively. White. Black. Asian. Latino. Lightskin. Wasian. Blasian. Half this. Quarter that. We need to know who belongs where, and why." (All Biracials Are Equal, But some Biracials Are More Equal Than Others)

When the Right did accept miscegenation, it was Colonial Spain attempting to make the next generation of Indigenous South Americans white, but it only resulted in panic when all these biracial children threatened the solidity of white supremacy. The compromise was to produce innumerable "casta paintings" that invented a label for every sort of mixed-race family based on racial regression, elevation, or suspension.

A Spanish father and a Torna atrás mother produce a child that is "floating in mid air." (source)

I have already written too many times on this blog about my disillusionment with men that call themselves leftists but are deeply uninterested in women's liberation. When they do not entirely plug their fingers in their ears about it, they will say that feminism is just "idpol" that distracts from higher and more noble concerns. Of course, women will never be free as long as capitalism exists. Prostitution will exist as long as money is more necessary to a woman's livelihood than her bodily autonomy, and the patriarchy will exist as long as capital necessitates the dominance of some people over others. But communist revolution will not magically liberate women from their oppression that predates capitalism and has survived every new organization of production up until now. If your revolution is threatened when women speak up against misogyny, then that says more about your own faith in its strength and its so-called "historical inevitability."