Identical, alike, equal, or incomparable?

Sylvia Ostrowetsky

In the nineteen-sixties, without one’s really knowing which preceded the other, reality or discourse, a new term invaded the media: that of identity.

Certain sociologists interpreted it as a symptom of contemporary societies in want of a true social project1. Others as a reaction occasioned by mass production, the anonymous development of the Grands Ensembles [large-scale public-housing estates], a consequence of the so-called consumer society.

A resurgence of national, ethnic, or individual sentiment.

Like Ionesco’s rhinoceros, regressive or reactive, the term and the thing have not ceased to flourish since, not only in advertising and in newspaper commentary but, more dramatically, in Chechnya and in the cellars of Sarajevo or of Grozny2. How could this resurgence of national, ethnic, or individual sentiment have come about? It shows clearly, in any case, that the universal values which attempted to surpass it did not measure up.

The Indian-style race

From a more general angle, whether the term be used or not, it appears at first glance logical to consider that identity and the gestures that accompany it are part of all social life. After all, it is identity that presides over the enthronement of the child within his community. With baptism, the child acquires a name that will accompany his deeds and gestures throughout his life within his group of belonging.

Yet, when the social organization of a people derives more from the sexual division of tasks than from production, and translates into intangible cultural behaviors and norms, the question, save in exceptional cases, does not pose itself with this gravity, because it is managed collectively. Thus, faced with the natural ambivalence3 which would have it that men bear in miniature, on the very body, the trace of a possible femininity, such as the foreskin, that women conceal an excrescence recalling another, the so-called savage or ancient societies set things straight: excision, circumcision. By aligning, thanks to the scalpel, nature and culture, they reduce the temptations of a confusion of roles and, consequently, the very question of sexual identity. Feminine or masculine, this incision draws forever the body, its protuberances and its depths, into a myth of origins. Adherence to a sex,

adherence to a God, adherence to a group, these rites in reality often kill two birds with one stone, making it possible to assign each one symbolically to his place at the same time as to society.

In this same “savage” line, one even finds attitudes particularly negative toward what gives itself out as a modern and contemporary imperative. It is known, for example, that in many tribes the name varies, as does the social hierarchy, according to age. Who does not recall those tests that the psychologists of the United States once administered to measure the capacities of integration into the “American way of life” of the Indian populations. They lined the children up and asked them to race. After a certain time the first one turned around and, seeing that his fellows were not following him, slowed his pace so that they should all arrive, “as one man,” at the finish line. Another exemplary way of seeing the world, another form of strictly collective identity, which would have it that each one, beyond or short of his own capacities, exists only through the group and its capacity to ensure cohesion.

Only the body and the language, the cultic and cultural objects in circulation, defined symbolic belonging to the collectivity.

The promised land

If identity constitutes, at the first level, the substratum of all human existence, one sees that its forms are multiple and vary with the epochs and the cultures. One will consequently set oneself, in the lines that follow, to describe it as so many processes in act. Useless, then, to attempt any global definition that would suggest there is a way of making a concept of it. The basis of the relation to alterity, whether individual or collective, internal or external — all that can be said at the outset is that it is at the heart of languages and of naming, at the heart of recognition and of legitimation.

When, as the Pentateuch attests even for the Jewish people, only the rights of war reigned, when the sons of Abraham could conquer the land of Canaan without anyone’s being able — since such was the general rule of peoples more or less warlike or recognized as such — to reproach them morally for their conquest, only the body and the language, the cultic and cultural objects in circulation, defined symbolic belonging to the collectivity. The land was a reservoir of food, a means of production, a dowry for peoples who built their history essentially from the corridors of transhumance, from the oases, or from the power of their cities.

Yet, in the West this time, with the end of the great barbarian invasions, it was no longer so much the body marked by belonging (circumcision but also the tattoo) or the language, but the land that took on value for the lineage as for the individual. One can clearly follow this progression in the transformations of the vassalic relation, from its barbarian origin of an exchange of services and of protection, through its chivalric inscription in feudalism, its constitution into a territorial order, then, with absolute royalty, its curial subjection.

From a collective point of view too, things change radically with the progressive accession of royalty, then of empire, and later of the republic. Territory as the grip of power is at the base of the institutional legitimacy of the State. In this phase, which everyone knows and which varies according to the regions and the continents, developing over centuries at times, the dominant discourse is transformed.

Identity is drawn from the soil and from its more or less anthropomorphized forms 4. It is the permanence of occupation that will then justify the character of a people, indeed of a “race” (root).

There again, between culture and nature, a fairly reassuring symbiosis of character, which makes each one son and daughter of a place more than of a sex or a blood, of a stability more than of a movement, takes charge of this process. The right to social existence is henceforth measured by that identification: no longer only a name, a first name, but a country and a nationality. And, beware the stateless, the nomads, those peoples scattered in diaspora. Gypsies borrowing their melodies from the countries visited, from Romania to Andalusia. Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Jews forever on the point of departure and settling for centuries in the grimy quarters of the great cities as in the country towns. Neither first name nor surname 5 was at first necessary to identify these beings, whom one can describe, in the manner of Buffon, like birds or animals, as species: a community of language, similitudes of bearing, of dress, the same marking of the body; alleged identities of blood and of physical characteristics — these criteria of an earlier age have become signs of indignity for these people in territorial dereliction.

The land is the true “quarter” of nobility of this second type of identity 6. All circulation, whether of men or of capital, is ignoble.

Identity or class consciousness

But, one will think, this act of allegiance to a history enclosed within borders 7, this truth on a single side of the Pyrenees, are a pledge of peace. Perhaps. At the price of fighting endlessly for the security of the edges, the standard of living of one’s own, with no clandestine invasion. The paranoid filter is always firmly in place, between trench warfare and Schengen.

It is the great lesson of the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century to have shown us that the fraternities drawn by territory were lures, that money, in the crudity of its visceral workings, was a passer-through-walls and had no odor. To capitalist cosmopolitanism, one opposed in vain an international without territory of the proletarians. This identity of the third type, without land, based on the division and the internal hierarchization within one and the same social formation, the scale of status within one and the same organization, has subjugated us perhaps more intimately still than the preceding ones. It was to liberate us forever from the appropriation of bodies, that of the reproductive womb of women 8, of slaves, of serfs liable to forced labor at will. Democratically, it has made each one the all-categories champion of competition, of the sale of the labor force, and of the frenzied desire for social ascent.

No doubt, one will think, the emulation by merit that communism or advanced democracy promised us

Dossier: Jewish Identities and Modernity

was well worth, after all, the carving-up of limbs and the shredded lint of the trenches.

Thus, each of these identity modalities engages individual existence on the basis of adherence to the norms of the group; only the norm changes, and consequently the form of the process.

The appearance, then, of the term identity in contemporary discourse, which one situates in France in the sixties, must not mislead us. It is the index, not of a process constitutive of all individual or collective life, but of a crisis of the self-evidence of the thing. To say it straightaway, it is these forms of identification — those of the body, of the soil, of labor — that become problematic at the dawn of a world that for the moment remains unnameable.

If the texts now refer to it so often, the plurality of its significations indeed indicates that this is not because the subject is self-evident but, on the contrary, because it no longer is. One will cite for the record this introductory phrase of the seminar directed by C. Lévi-Strauss and published in ’60 on the subject: “to believe some, the crisis of identity would be the new malady of the century. When secular habits collapse, when ways of life disappear, when old solidarities crumble, it is indeed frequent that a crisis of identity should occur”9. Identity, from the moment it names itself, demands itself, at the top of its voice as they say, would be the symptom of the crisis of its foundation.

The term identity covers diverse realities that lead to the ultimate obsessions of the average individual: to be someone.

Listen to my difference

One sees that the present term of identity10 covers, in any case, realities as diverse as the claims to statutory recognition, the oppositions to the roundabout means of neocolonialism, of racist minoritizations, of aesthetic and more private ones of feminine inferiorization, and finally the ultimate obsessions of the average individual: to be someone11.

One understands, once again, that this term should be difficult to define. It is no longer made to describe a well-delimited fact inscribed in the succession of clear claims, economic or of right. It wants to express something that can be said neither exactly in terms of class consciousness, nor in terms of nineteenth-century-style nationalism, nor solely in terms of a position of power within the chain of the hierarchies of labor. The vogue of the term “difference” corresponds well to this new operation. Entirely abstract, since it says nothing of its nature, difference makes it possible to pinpoint the very locus of the contemporary identity operation. An empty form, but on which nonetheless rests the essential of what is at work in this process of recognition at the foundation of this last type of claim, which derives neither from the body, nor from the territory, nor from labor, and still less from that egalitarianism represented by our little Indians of America.

To claim to qualify, indeed, the particular (different from) by the general (difference) is no small matter; it generalizes the exception and seems to ignore all that men have in common. With this formula — “listen to my difference” — it is the whole humanist project that topples. To be human is no longer only to belong to human nature, to a culture more or less savage, to a territory more or less well delimited, to a game of the “more or less” of merit, to the similitude of those who consider themselves the parts of a whole that subsumes them, but henceforth, once again, to defy its common series.

To the humanism that wished to surpass the particularities of sex, of race, or of culture in the name of generic Man,

is given way a definition exactly inverse, which renders men irreducible to one another. This project situates itself well beyond the egalitarianism of right of the bourgeoisie, or the more concrete one of our little Indians, as one sees; it engages a new relation of man to himself12.

The identity claim acts, in a sense, as if the stigma had acquired its letters of nobility.

The identity claim acts, in a sense, as if the stigma had acquired its letters of nobility. To the social norm, to massification, to mass production, this discourse opposes a kind of demand for the freedom of the city for generalized deviance.

For a long time, then, one considered that the stigmatization of poverty, or racism, were only masks of the crisis: of class unconsciousness, in a sense. This simplistic reasoning, in the form of a fig leaf, forbade all true analysis, since the answer was furnished a priori and gave itself in a repetitive and obligatory manner as the mask, precisely, of the only possible truth, inevitably veiled, of the economy. Until the day when one had to face the evidence: beneath the mask there was nothing that held in so permanent and homogeneous a manner. To the full subject, if not conscious, of the nation or of the class, has given way an individual who no longer believes in History13 and who claims only an identity, individual or collective, but above all singular, and its “particular signs.”

Even if it legitimates itself through the past, through tradition, identity is indeed a new idea, and no longer only in Europe. It figures the symbolic necessity of the name, of recognition. In it one finds all the groups and individuals in want of existence: women, cripples, the fat, peoples modernized by blows of the knout, proletarians Sovietized by the lash, peoples force-fed and other groups with names so unseemly that one euphemizes them as “black” or “beur” [colloquial term for a French-born person of North African descent] in an attempt to designate them kindly.

In the end, one has the impression that the identity movements lie not so much on the side of “infantile disorder” or of senility, as of a very positive mistrust toward the universalist systems.

Senile or infantile?

On the one hand, after the manner of the Frenchy self-satisfaction in the face of the superiority of Boche ideas and the bluish flesh of their Valkyries — a conflict that straddles the century — ethnic cleansing and its combats, all the more unbearable as one believed them done with, at least in Europe.

What indecent immaturity (or senility??), indeed, not to understand that culture, language, food, songs, and refrains make the bed of conflicts whose cruelty has no equal but their stupidity; not to see that identity inflames above all the good conscience of the mafias and other plagues more or less brown.

Elsewhere, it is no longer the territory but religion that serves as the identity standard-bearer. It is not so much for Allah, however, that one kills, in Algiers, the enlightened men and women, but for the hateful maintenance of a culture anchored in bodies and in the divisions of sex — a culture that contemporary individualism, more ready to vaunt singular virtues, more ready to promote the freedom to think, even manipulated, than obedience to a tradition, puts in danger.

On the other hand — proof that they are not so taken in as one would like to think by the absolute value of their contents (and beyond these extremes) — one sees movements emanating from developing countries above all, deploying themselves under

the more open form of cultural right 14. There is no regression in accepting the plurality of cultures and recognizing the essential role of symbolic condensations and of languages. Maturity, on the contrary, which consists in wishing that the world should not reduce itself in the uniformization of the conditions of life, in considering that differential processes are at the base of knowledge and, more socially, of recognition.

In a reflexive manner, identity puts individual or group narcissism in the public square — there, it seems to me, is the content of its “modernity.” Some will perhaps find this distressing, but the identity movements are inevitable in these times of disappointment.

Identity is an infantile or senile malady — who knows — in that it insists, to the point of unbearableness, on this world that has known how to build itself only on having and accumulation. It is, it would like to be, a reaffirmation of being. We must cease to judge it in the name of a progressive history: it goes on and on invading the world. Universal man has had his day; the time has come for singular man.

Identity is a quite particular form of social fact, a contemporary process that animates and sets in motion individuals as well as collectivities, not around a determined content but around its own expression. An ipseity that makes of every being an entity distinct from every other, identity claims essentially to be taken up in the chain of recognitions — nominal, visual, cultural. Culture was a quasi-natural given of historical societies; like a commodity on display, it must henceforth recite its attractions and exhibit itself. But — and this is its whole ambiguity — in the midst of a crisis that shakes all our foundations, it is also the stubborn affirmation of a good will to be. Between having and being, the object wants to be subject, and the subject covers itself with amulets bought at the supermarket of feelings.

It may be that, in the past too, certain “resistances” 15 had only that as their objective; otherwise how to understand that, apart from all interest, in scorn of their lives and without promise of reward, so many men held to principles so unprofitable as did, in their time, the Albigensians, the Protestants, the Jews, or the Gypsies. As if, when one has an origin, even a marginal one, when one lives within a community, even one reproved by all, one were ready for anything rather than to abandon it. This is measured neither in dollars nor in advantages of power. Capital, whether symbolic or not, is not essential in this affair; the retribution is affective: it gives itself as a right to existence and a feeling of one’s own presence in the world.

The singular identity is therefore not so much a substantial reality, since it suffices to affirm one’s difference to see it justified. It is a process of socialization by language or by designation. A “speech act,” it is produced through an operation that is similar, in its distanced play, to all cognitive processes. This is why one can encounter it at the intellectual level as well as the collective, in a highly elaborated locus of thought or, on the contrary, in the insistent one of childhood 16.

The identity square

This “feeling” is therefore at the base of a particular type of action which can, as one has seen, only be shared if it expresses itself as such first. I do not have to manifest my quality of worker in order to join the Party that is supposed to defend my interests. Here, not only the identity declaration but the

manifestation of its reality is, on the contrary, indispensable to its existence. More than that, the manner in which it operates for this demonstration also governs the way in which the group or the individual feels its existence. Identity is therefore not only the display, the affirmation, and the confirmation of a past; its manifestation also actualizes the proof of it. And this proof, it is not so much to others as to oneself that one furnishes it. In this sense, not only does it show and demonstrate itself, but it experiences itself as an internal emotion. The speech act exceeds simple expression; it makes [the thing] exist.

I will here rapidly give four forms to the manifestation of this vast process, which goes from the most traditional positions to the most contemporary17:

Analogy

It binds man to the body or to the land whose characters it assimilates. Mother-earth, or, according to that astonishing term already remarked by E. Morin, “motherland” [mère-patrie]. Autochthony is the city of God for the angels or the ambivalent beings, half-human, half-rock, half-animal, who govern our origins. A relation of analogy between a soil and a social body. The same character, the same qualities, the same defects. The compactness of the group in its native localization. No rupture between nature and culture: an

elementary continuum. If one is willing to grant it the omnipotence of destiny, the love of the land is without disappointment.

Similitude

Like the religion whose relay it takes up, identity links. All Jews thanks to the Brith-mila [circumcision, the covenant of Abraham] which seals the eternal alliance with God. All alike in the body of Christ marked in his flesh in the place of men. Despite our anatomical and social differences, all human because capable of providing for our own life through labor. All French despite our divisions because subject to the laws of one and the same soil.

One finds here again the feeling that animates every community and for which our individualist societies feel a nostalgia, unconscious, by the by, of the rigorous obligations it entails.

Evaluation

On one and the same social or professional scale, here we all are comparable, from the smallest to the greatest, playing the game of “distinction” that makes it possible to occupy a place, our place. All in solidarity, embarked in the same boat of solidarities that are organic but above all hierarchized within equality-as-right itself. The comfort and pride of the post acquired through hard struggle against clumsy or unlucky competitors. It governs the turns of speech, the table manners, the orders and the obediences. To hold one’s place well — is this not also to merit one’s existence? An identity very individual this time, compared, gauged, identified, identifiable. On this slope, in its internal hierarchies, society is queen, recognized as such; without question. This identity is made of the division of masculine, feminine, childish roles, of the specializations of the profession, of rank in the order of merit, of distinctions on the baccalauréat and successes on the stock exchange.

Incomparable

Individual or collective, identity is here grasped through its unique, singular character. It is the one that has all the favors of the contemporary media discourses on difference. One is not different in substance; one displays,

as for the phoneme in linguistics, “its” “distinctive trait.” At the juncture of the cultural and the social, of the political and of anthropology, of the individual and the collective, it can develop infinitely, as long as differences can be claimed, can emerge to consciousness. Like Narcissus, it lives in the capture of its own image.

Application exercise:

From this typology, one can show that the Jewish identity claim has not ceased, throughout its history, to use one or another of these definitions.

Similitude:

Like all societies preceding the formation of the State, it privileges first the marking of bodies (circumcision) as a bond to Elohim, certainly, but also to the group. A chosen people, but also a people that, beyond the diversity of the cultures and the lands traversed and of the experiences, of the levels of wealth and of birth, affirms itself as a linked, quasi-fusional ensemble, on the basis of a religion all the more demanding as communal life implies the permanent control of mores.

Analogy:

The departure from Egypt, the crossing of the desert, and the death of Moses, who cannot reach the Promised Land, set into narrative the historical quest for the passage to territorial identity and the institution of another right to social existence, of a more political type. As if they were the myth of History itself, the vicissitudes of the History of Israel figure this quest for the land which, like the labor of Sisyphus, seems always to be begun again. Only a tenacity of the origins (manifested by the marking of the body, by fidelity to a language which, like men, circulates beyond borders, by a life marked by an emphatic ritualization of food) makes it possible to triumph over adversity in the midst of peoples better inscribed in the territorial order. An identity of dark streets and of margins so unbearable to live that the beginning of the nineteenth century sees develop, in Poland and Russia, two parallel identity movements. The one with an internationalist base — the Bund — centered on language and on the recognition of the rights of minorities. The other, with a territorial base — Zionism — centered on the creation of a national state. Like the others.

Evaluative:

Despite the communal feeling and beyond it (since one finds it in every society, whether or not it says itself egalitarian), hierarchization regularly reconstructs itself in a manner internal to the collectivity. One can in this regard distinguish several scales: sex, always and again, the place of origin, property, labor, consumption.

Despite the passage to a modern society (which moreover claims to be one of the most democratic in the world), the hierarchy of the sexes in Israel remains manifest through, notably, the weak political representation of women — the figures are practically as low in the Knesset as in the French Chamber of Deputies.

As remains strong the division between Sephardim and Ashkenazim, which has as its base an almost reciprocal contempt between two territories or territorial cultures of origin. A division that appears all the less acceptable as it emanates from populations that have undergone, each in their own way, over millennia, the same ostracism on the part of the host countries.

The categorial scale of labor, finally, which one finds in all the developed countries, or in all the modernized sectors of the developing countries.

This generation seeks itself in the reassuring blur of memory and of History, in order to enunciate its belonging.

Incomparable:

But History does not stop there, and the Jewish experience makes it possible for us to describe a last form of identity, of which it holds — doubtless because of the very character of its unique historical experience —

the most manifest form, that of singular identity.

Less preoccupied with national recognition, the West proposes a singular recognition, eccentric within the anonymity of the dominant “urban society.” In our days less centered on the values of labor, mass production has known how to assimilate, in its apparent forms, the struggle against the quantitative homogenization that characterizes it, and finally to propose itself a distinctive and distinguished consumption of the signs of identity expression 18.

One will recognize this same attitude in this will, characteristic of our days, of the adolescents of the third generation, to reconnect with their origins, in France notably. More “Jewish” in cultural knowledge and in the signification of the rites, more affirmed in its manifestations, identity deploys itself as a self-referential will of affirmation for affirmation’s sake. This generation no longer has to adapt, like the grandparents, to the host population; it no longer has to integrate, like the parents, nor even to oppose itself to a culture liable to make it disappear through assimilation. It seeks itself in the reassuring flux of memory and of History, in order to enunciate the ineffable concreteness of a belonging. A veritable amorous quest for the self. Less symbolic and linked to communal fusion than imaginary and public.

Roll on the forgetting of this cracked self, in want of being, one will think. Roll on the end of this social narcissism, of this “fall of public man,” to reuse the English title of R. Sennett’s work cited above, which psychologizes and “naturalizes” the member of society to the detriment of a positive action open toward the future. Roll on the end of self-centering for the benefit of a humanism without borders. Spaces that would cease to enclose themselves in private places and their televisual display, in order to rejoin in the street the vitality of new welcoming architectures. If one is to believe the analyses formed by Louis Marin, utopia, unfortunately, is nothing other than a critical form of reality, a kind of negative image of the present 19. It is not tomorrow that we will all know how to conduct ourselves like the little Indians of America.

S.O.

SURVEY

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  1. Alain Touraine, “Les deux faces de l’identité” (The Two Faces of Identity) in Identités collectives et changements sociaux (Collective Identities and Social Changes), ed. Pierre Tap, Privat, 1980.↩︎

  2. Difficult to speak of Rwanda or of other countries of this type when one knows the manipulations of which this identity has been the object in the service of the vilest interests. This would tend to show, it is true, that even in this case, it possesses a formidable efficacy.↩︎

  3. S. Ostrowetsky, “ah! fou qui croit que je ne suis pas toi” (ah! fool who believes that I am not you), in Identité individuelle et personnalisation (Individual Identity and Personalization), Privat, Toulouse, 1980.↩︎

  4. S. Ostrowetsky, “Visages, paysages : esthétique et lien social” (Faces, Landscapes: Aesthetics and Social Bond), Lecture at the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles in 1994, taken up in homage to Jean Rémy, professor at Louvain-la-Neuve, forthcoming.↩︎

  5. Everyone knows how the place of origin, the activity, the tribe of origin, the nickname later served them as a family name…↩︎

  6. Israel is there to demonstrate to us that almost no people — and this is not for us to rejoice over — has been able, save by paying very dearly for it, to this day, to escape this necessity.↩︎

  7. To say nothing of its colonial expansions, which make the ancestors of our overseas compatriots into Gauls.↩︎

  8. The initiatory rite consists in a passage, often accompanied by the mime of a new childbirth of the little male into the society of men, depriving the mothers of the right of oversight and of access to a language and to rites become secret.↩︎

  9. L’identité (Identity), Grasset, 1960.↩︎

  10. This article takes up, in the typology that follows, a part of the paper given at the Study Days of 25–26 November ’93 at the University of Picardy on Le paradigme identitaire : “Les voies de l’identité” (The Identity Paradigm: “The Ways of Identity”). Under the direction of N. Marouf, Identité-Communauté (Identity-Community), L’Harmattan, 1995.↩︎

  11. S. Ostrowetsky, Quelqu’un ou le livre de Moïshe (Someone, or the Book of Moïshe), Kimé, 1995.↩︎

  12. For the more extended analysis of this alternation between universalism and particularism, one will refer to the work of P. A. Taguieff, La force du préjugé (The Force of Prejudice), La Découverte, 1988.↩︎

  13. Which does not necessarily mean that it is finished. “Communism” has perhaps not said its last word, nor liberalism lived its last great crisis…↩︎

  14. cf. our forthcoming intervention at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Éthique, IRESCO, 1994: “l’identité des droits” (the identity of rights).↩︎

  15. It is known that one owes the meaning of this word to a Protestant prisoner of the Cévennes at the time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.↩︎

  16. J. P. Codol, “La quête de la similitude et de la différenciation sociale” (The Quest for Similitude and Social Differentiation), “a cognitive approach to the feeling of identity” in Identité individuelle et personnalisation (Individual Identity and Personalization), ed. Pierre Tap, Toulouse, Privat, 1980.↩︎

  17. The “identity square” that I recall here briefly, adapting it to the general reflection presented here, has been the object of several publications: the first in Langages et Sociétés (Languages and Societies), No. 28 in 1984, then slightly modified and developed (in collaboration) above all with respect to the media at the colloquium of the Association Internationale de Sémiotique in Palermo (Mouton 84). In La théorie de l’espace humain (The Theory of Human Space) (Unesco 1986), it is taken up with respect to urban dynamics. In a thesis on “Negritude,” Franck Taniféani used it for an analysis of texts by African and Caribbean writers. Finally, in June 1994, with respect to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, during a lecture given at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Éthique (IRESCO), cited above, I had occasion to develop what concerns singular identity through the work of Max Stirner: “The Unique and Its Property.”↩︎

  18. cf. Le néo-style régional (The Neo-Regional Style), op. cit.↩︎

  19. Louis Marin, Utopiques, jeux d’espaces (Utopics: Spatial Play), Paris, Minuit, 1973.↩︎

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