UC Berkeley

This project examines the question of identity-production in the work of French syndicalist Georges Sorel, black psychiatrist-turned-revolutionary Frantz Fanon, and exiled Argentinean philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel. Against predominant philosophical claims of universality and totality and their practical counterparts in the politics of unity and essentialist understandings of identity, I seek to excavate in these thinkers a counterdiscourse which privileges both the centrality of the moment of rupture and conflict in generating and consolidating political identities, as well as the broader process within which this rupture is situated.

To do this, I turn first to Sorel's analysis of class, a markedly non-orthodox account which rejects both the class essentialism Sorel perceived in some contemporary Marxists as well as the politics of unity that such Marxists frequently advocated. Instead, Sorel proposes a politics geared toward the construction of an absolute class identity, forged through conflict, as the first step in his reformulated Marxist dialectic. I then turn to Fanon, for whom the relevant identities--first race and later nation--differ from those of Sorel, but in whose work we can nevertheless perceive a structural similarity. Both race and nation are, in Fanon's thought, explicitly non-essentialist concepts which rather than merely existing must be constructed, and this construction occurs, as it did for Sorel, through a process of rupture and conflict.

Finally, in my discussion of Dussel, I turn to popular identity, or "the people," demonstrating that in contrast to some prevailing caricatures, many formulations of the concept of the people in contemporary Latin America are neither totalizing nor essentializing, but rather represent a conflictual identity which shares much with the model of Sorel and Fanon. However, whereas Sorel and Fanon framed their discussions in explicitly dialectical terms (albeit heavily reformulated dialectics), I analyze Dussel's fusion of dialectics with an "analectics" inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, a fusion which embeds itself at the heart of his concept of the people as an alliance of the excluded and the oppressed.