One of the most relevant insights to today’s political climate from recent philosophy: that the process of identification in all its forms, including both the desire to identify and be identified runs counter to the creative process of true individuation.
This has ramifications not only in the political sphere, but across the board in culture—most notably in the medical field, where the titanic efforts administered in the identification of disease variants give the illusion of a sophisticated attention to novel circumstances.
As the categories proliferate, however, the true individual and the singularity of each situation’s circumstances are left further and further behind, and with them any hope of understanding the real factors of their formative problems, or of finding solutions that don’t simply cover them over with the differentiating disease of discrete identity.
The causes of illness are limited. They are basically variations on the relatively few general categories of stressors which condition human life, which themselves are basically variations on the same generic event: an organism’s often traumatic encounter with life’s destabilizing novelty.
Yet each person’s wounds cannot help but reflect that novelty and singularity, which is inherent in the very event that is life itself, and which leads to the seemingly expanding diversity of disease and distress on our rapidly changing planet. Yet, by turning over our wounds—and the incipient individuation process they portend—to the clinical gaze of a technocratic bureaucracy, which renders the sufferings of each fledgling soul’s emergence into a dangerous variant to be sanitized, the novel bearing we might have embodied becomes merely a resource of profitable problems for the expansion of monolithic power’s faux-solutions. And when there becomes no choice but to surrender to this power-logic of technocratic capitalism, the future of our collective evolution is in question.
