Abstract
In the following lines, various traditions and models of identity and citizenship will be presented: classical, modern, postnational, and postmodern. These various traditions will be examined and presented as dynamic and still alive within both European identity and European citizenship, which are multilayered concepts. It will be argued that concepts of both European identity and citizenship cannot completely be understood without reference to these various identity and citizenship traditions.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Like most seventeenth-century thinkers, however, Descartes does not elaborate on the notion of consciousness, and in his case it seems difficult to determine precisely, on the basis of his writings, what kind of self-relation consciousness is. After Descartes, consciousness continued to be understood as a form of relating to one’s own thoughts, but for the most part the concept itself was left unexplained’ (Thiel 2011, pp. 48–49).
- 2.
‘Grand narrative’ is a totalizing explanation of historical, social, scientific, political, and other concepts and events.
- 3.
See Chapter 3.
- 4.
‘“Cartesian moment” takes on its position and meaning at this point, without in any way my wanting to say that it is the question of Descartes, that he was its inventor or that he was the first to do this. I think the modern age of the history of truth begins when knowledge itself and knowledge alone gives access to the truth. That is to say, it is when the philosopher (or the scientist, or simply someone who seeks the truth) can recognize the truth and have access to it in himself and solely through this activity of knowing, without anything else being demanded of him and without him having to change or alter his being or subject.’ (Foucault 2001, p. 17)
- 5.
These two hermeneutic approaches (gnōthi seauton and epimeleia heautou) represent the origin of two ethics—ethics of justice and ethics of care. The ethics of justice is the origin of policies that characterize the citizen as an independent, disembodied subject (Kittay et al. 2005). The ethics of justice based on modern hermeneutics of the subject presumes a self-sufficient, independent, atomistic individual (Sevenhuijsen 1998).
- 6.
This argument starts with a premise that if someone really knows that Y, then he can rule out the possibility that there is a powerful evil genius deceiving him about Y.
- 7.
‘For example, many very different people are slotted into the category of woman and their differences across the other identity categories—race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, wellness, and so on, are subsumed under the essence of a single identity category, gender, in an attempt to produce order and regularity’ (St. Pierre 2000, p. 481).
- 8.
Descartes concludes: Cogito ergo sum!
- 9.
‘By the term conscious experience (cogitationis) Descartes understands “everything that takes place within ourselves so that we are aware of it” (Ricoeur 1974a, p. 101).
- 10.
However, Descartes expresses the belief that body and soul are linked: ‘I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined, and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit’ (The Philosophical 1984, p. 56).
- 11.
This point of view was common throughout the seventeenth century, and it is derived from the Scholastic tradition.
- 12.
‘For we never finding, nor conceiving it possible, that two things of the same kind should exist in the same place at the same time, we rightly conclude, that, whatever exists anywhere at any time, excludes all of the same kind, and is there itself alone. (…) That, therefore, that had one beginning, is the same thing; and that which had a different beginning in time and place from that, is not the same, but diverse’ (Locke 1836, p. 220).
- 13.
However, it should be emphasized that the unconscious aspect of the self was not discovered until the twentieth century and Freud’s theory.
- 14.
The unconscious mind includes affects, memories, and other thoughtful process that are not controlled by reason. The unconscious phenomena include: subliminal perceptions, repressed feelings, complexes, hidden desires, and phobias. The unconscious processes are manifested in dreams, vision, imagination, jokes, slips of tongue, and so forth.
- 15.
The quest for objectivity dominates Western thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well. Positivism was found by Auguste Comte in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its main characteristic is methodological monism. The proponents of positivism argue about the universality of the method employed in natural sciences. Consequently, they claim that this method should be applied to humanities as well. The philosophers and historians who accept this idea argue about the unity of scientific method. They ignore the subjective experience and argue that scientific explanation is a ‘causal’ explanation. Logical positivism of 1920s and 1930s advocates ideas different from positivism. Nevertheless, logical positivism has been in the spirit of positivism. The contributors of analytical philosophy argue that the whole human knowledge can be reduced to logical or scientific explanations. They argue about the elimination of metaphysics and subjective experience and advocate methodological monism.
- 16.
This term is polyphonic. It does not have fixed meaning, but it includes a range of theoretical positions, presented in the work of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and so on. Although there are different forms of poststructuralism, they share certain assumptions about subjectivity, meaning, and language.
- 17.
Although originating from classical philosophy, the concept of ‘essentialism’ is used in the multicultural and postmodern theories as a signifier of uniform, monocultural, and homogenous visions of identity.
- 18.
The example of the oppositional riddle includes: ‘I am rough, I am smooth; I am wet, I am dry; my station is low, my title high; my king my lawful master is; I’m used by all, though only his. (Highway)’ (Dundes 1997, p. 47).
- 19.
For example, ‘You should have lockjaw and seasickness at the same time’ (Dundes 1997, p. 47).
- 20.
According to Derrida, logocentrism is the main characteristic of Western thought. It associates philosophical discourse with logos (reason, law). Logocentrism gives priority to identity over difference and speech over the written word. Thus, logocentrism expresses priority of the signified over the signifier, which means priority of presence/speech over absence/writing.
- 21.
The hermeneutics of suspicion may be considered as hermeneutics of demystification.
- 22.
According to Ricoeur, ‘We still pay too much attention to their differences, i.e., to the limitations which are the prejudices of their time imposed on these three thinkers: and we are, above all, still victims of the scholasticism in which their epigones have enclosed him. Marx is thus relegated to Marxist economism and to the absurd theory of consciousness as reflex, while Nietzsche is associated with biologism if not with an apology of violence, and Freud is confined with psychiatry and dressed up with simplistic pansexualism’ (Ricoeur 1974b, p. 148).
- 23.
‘The equivocalness of identity concerns our title [Oneself as Another] through the partial synonymy, in French at least, between “same” (même) and “identical.” In its diverse uses, “same” (même) is used in the context of comparison; its contraries are “other”, “contrary”, “distinct”, “diverse”, “unequal”, “inverse”. The weight of this comparative use of the term “same” seems so great to me that I shall henceforth take sameness as synonymous with idem-identity and shall oppose to it selfhood (ipseity) understood as ipse-identity’ (Ricoeur 1992, pp. 2–3).
- 24.
Nietzsche gives the following example: ‘No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept “leaf” is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be “leaf”—some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form’ (Nietzsche 1873, p. 3).
- 25.
This term was originally coined to label an architectural movement associated with the eclectic style of Le Corbusier. The term developed a number of usages and meanings within the context of philosophy, art, sociology, literature, film, theatre, and political and legal studies.
- 26.
The idea of language games is introduced by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953).
- 27.
According to Butler, some characterizations ‘are variously imputed to postmodernism and poststructuralism, which are conflated with each other and sometimes conflated with deconstruction, and sometimes understood as an indiscriminate assemblage of French feminism, deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucauldian analysis, Rorty’s conversationalism and cultural studies. On this side of the Atlantic and in recent discourse, the terms ‘‘postmodernism’’ or ‘‘poststructuralism’’ settle the differences among those positions in a single stroke, providing a substantive, a noun, that includes those positions as so many of its modalities or permutations. It may come as a surprise to some purveyors of the Continental scene to learn that Lacanian psychoanalysis in France positions itself officially against post-structuralism, that Kristeva denounces postmodernism, that Foucauldians rarely relate to Derrideans, that Cixous and Irigaray are fundamentaly opposed, and that the only tenuous connection between French feminism and deconstruction exists between Cixous and Derrida, although a certain affinity in textual practices is to be found between Derrida and Irigaray’ (Butler 2001, p. 630).
- 28.
According to a number of authors, these two approaches are interchangeable, and authors such as Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault can be considered as both poststructuralist and postmodernist. This perspective was criticized by Judith Butler who argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis in France rejects poststructuralism, that Kristeva denounces postmodernist, that Foucault’s and Derrida’s theories are diverse, and so forth.
- 29.
‘Norris is particularly clear on the differences between Derrida and Foucault. Foucault’s extreme epistemological skepticism leads him to equate knowledge with power, and hence to regard all forms of enlightened progress (in psychiatry, sexual attitudes or penal reform) as signs of increasing social control. Derrida, by contrast, insists that there is no opting-out of that post-Kantian enlightenment tradition. It is only by working persistently within that tradition, but against some of its ruling ideas, that thought can muster the resistance required for an effective critique of existing institutions’ (Sarup 1988, p. 130).
- 30.
Foucault’s core idea is that all social relations are power relations.
- 31.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) describes his ideas regarding the polyphonic novel in his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.
- 32.
‘The dialogical self can be seen as a multiplicity of “I” positions or as possible selves. The difference, however, is that possible selves (e.g., what one would like to be or may be afraid of becoming) are assumed to constitute part of multifaced self-concept with one centralized “I” position, whereas the dialogical self has the character of a decentralized, polyphonic narrative with a multiplicity of “I” positions. This scene of dialogical relations, moreover, is intended to oppose the sharp self-nonself boundaries drawn by Western rationalistic thinking about the self’ (Hermans et al. 1992, p. 30).
- 33.
Constative describes what already exists. In a performative speech act the language performs the action it describes. It embraces promises, getting married, giving a gift, making a bet, and so on.
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Ivic, S. (2016). Modernist and Postmodernist Accounts of Identity. In: European Identity and Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57785-6_2
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