Refusing to be neutralized, to render the differences inconsequential, to be depoliticized as "lifestyles", "diversity", or "persons like any other", we have lately reformulated our historical exclusion as a matter of historically produced and politically rich
alterity. Insisting that we are mot merely positioned but fabricated by this history, we have at the same time insisted that our very production as marginal, deviant, or subhuman is itself constitutive of the centrality and legitimacy of the center, is itself what paves the center's streets with semiotic, political, and psychic gold. Just when polite liberal (not to mention correct leftist) discourse ceased speaking of us as dykes, faggots, colored girls, or natives, we began speaking of ourselves this way. Refusing the invitation to absorption, we insisted instead upon politicizing and working into cultural critique the very constructions that a liberal humanism increasingly exposed in its tacit operations of racial, sexual, and gender privilege was seeking to bring to a formal close.
Wendy Brown, 'Wounded Attachments' in
States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) at p 53
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 its defensive closure on identity, its insistence on the fixity of position, its equation of social with moral positioning - with the language of "I want this for us"? (This is an "I want" that distinguishes itself from a liberal expression of self-interest by virtue of its figuring of a political or collective good as its desire.) What if we were to rehabilitate the memory of desire within identificatory processes, the moment in desire - either "to have" or "to be" - prior to its wounding? What if "wanting to be" or "wanting to have" were taken up as modes of political speech that could destabilize the formulation of identity as fixed position, as entrenchment by history, and as having necessary moral entailments, even as they affirm "position" and "history" as that which makes the speaking subject intelligible and locatable, as that which contributes to a hermeneutics for adjudicating desires? If every "I am" is something of a resolution of the movement of desire into fixed and sovereign identity, then this project might involve not only learning to speak but to
read "I am" this way: as potentially in motion, as temporal, as not-I, as deconstructable according to a genealogy of want rather than as fixed interests or experiences. The subject understood as an effect of an (ongoing) genealogy of desire, including the social processes constitutive of, fulfilling, or frustrating desire, is in this way revealed as neither sovereign nor conclusive even as it is affirmed as an "I". In short, if framed in a political language, this deconstruction could be that which reopens a desire for futurity where Nietzsche saw it foreclosed by the logics of rancor and
ressentiment.
Ibid, at 75.
