political points to ponder....

i have been re-reading some really great texts lately in my preparation for preparing for comps...i have also been reading alot of blogs that deal primarily on politics and i ran across a couple of quotes that really resonate with me and that i think are extremely important.

Politcized identity formation(s)

An identity is established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognized. These differences are essential to its being. If they did not coexist as differences it would also not exist in its distinctness and solidarity [….] Identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty.(64)

William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

The tension between particularistic “I’s” and a universal “we” in liberalism is sustainable as long as the constituent terms of the “I” remain unpolicitized:indeed, as long as the “I” itself remains unpoliticized on one hand, and the state (as the expression of the ideal of political universality) remains
unpolicitized on the other. Thus, the latent conflict in liberalism between universal representation and individualism remains latent, remains unpoliticized, as long as differential powers in civil society remain naturalized, as long as the “I” remains politically unarticulated, as long as it is willing to have its freedom represented abstractly—in effect, subordinating its “I-ness” to the abstract “we” represented by the universal community of the state. This subordination is achieved by the “I” either abstracting from itself in its political representation, thus trivializing its “difference” so as to remain part of the “we” (as in homosexuals who are “just like everyone else except for who we sleep with”), or accepting its construction as supplement,complement, or partial outsider to the “we” (as in homosexuals who are just“different,” or Jews whose communal affiliations lie partly or wholly outside their national identity). The history of liberalism’s management of
its inherited and constructed others could be read as a history of variations on and vacillations between these two strategies. (56)

What if it were possible to incite a slight shift in the character of political expression and political claims common to much politicized identity? What if we sought to supplant the language of “I am”—with it defensive closure on identity,its insistence on the fixity of position, its equations of social and moral positioning—with the language of “I want this for us”? (75)

Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.