beliefs are untouchable. Even in a democratic state, such as France, ideas behind actions are expected to be off the table, while people should feel free to criticize violent actions. But how is it not obvious that ideas, too, should come under scrutiny? What makes idealist thinking superior to the more complex thought that comes from a questioning mind?
In 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires became Pope Francis, and he has been challenging Catholic idealism ever since. Not to say that he is not a “good Catholic,” but he redefines what that actually means, and he ties it less to coherent (Catholic) identity and more to how one relates to others in the world. It is an impressive transformation of approach for the Catholic Church, and some people are even retracting their support in protest, as if the Pope were a politician. The practice, again, threatens the idea.
In one of his most famous speeches on the Vatican Radio at the conclusion of the Synod, the Pope explains in eerily deconstructive fashion that doctrine is what threatens Christian practice, and some of the moments of desolation and tension he has encountered in his Synod journey had to do with “a temptation to hostile inflexibility, that is, wanting to close oneself within the written word (the letter) and not allowing oneself to be surprised by God, by the God of surprises (the spirit) …. The temptation to a destructive tendency to goodness, that in the name of a deceptive mercy binds the wounds without first curing them and treating them.”10 This Pope is an inheritor of the deconstructive age, and with his new focus on society as a living thing, where relationality matters more than identity, he has been able to embrace people of other faiths, and even people without religious faith. He has come closest to the Other and farthest from the self-identical than any Pope in history. But there’s a long way to go before his flock follows in his path.
This brings me to my main purpose in writing this book: to seek to understand why the self-identical thought pattern is still so persistent and prevalent in our world—however globalized the world may have become—that it is still so tempting to perceive identity as perfectible and unique; this is a deeply engrained choice that places identity above relationality, creating tensions between potential identities. For the sake of what one believes in (be it one’s religious faith—Islamic, Judeo-Christian, Buddhist or a derivative, let’s say, of the major religions—or be it one’s national identity—American or Iraqi, Greek or German, Iranian or Kurdish, Hungarian or Romanian), other identities are disputed, fought, and even entirely suppressed.
It should not be, therefore, so bewildering that there is always something left to defend even after history has been shattered by dictators and after we appeared to have learned from these moments enough to make us wish to leave behind imperialism and totalitarianism. Even though Nazism or Eastern European communism are now seen as extremes of social violence, the cruelty of such systems can easily be repeated in today’s world, when bombs still kill hundreds of people in one strike. Something persists; we are very eager to forget the lessons of history, and the same mistakes are repeated over and over. This is due to the fact that there is always a territory that we want to define and defend.
To clarify my use of the term “territory,” I need to explain first why it is connected to “identity.” Animals tend to approximate the borders of their (spatial) territory and defend it against others of the same species, or against another species. Humans, too, continue to mark and defend something that is still called territory, although for us the notion of territory has become increasingly more complex. If we consider its etymology (derived from Latin terra = land), a narrow definition is that of a space enclosed within boundaries. Gradually, the definition has included any conceivable object within the notion of territory. Defending the territory has also gradually become more and more connected to the notion of owning (it is defended because it is possessed), which has led to an identification of territory with property. Property is a word that is more abstract and encompasses more than the initial territory (land), and derives from Latin proprietatem, signifying “characteristic” but also acquiring the meaning “possession.” The convergence of “territory” and “property” has inscribed the notion of territory under a much broader spectrum of meanings, so that much more than land can be owned and therefore defended.
We have seen throughout history an array of troubling eras when women, slaves, or other marginalized groups were considered possessions (and let’s not forget that human trafficking is still massively taking place even now). In this day and age, animals are still not considered independent and sentient enough for us to abandon the horrible ways in which we “own” them (and exploit them); there are many other outrageous items we lay claim on: even human genes can become both individual property and capital (as in disputes between some American scientists),11 and today people can buy Moon property and stars, as well as virtual property. In a country such as Romania, the state includes rainwater as taxable property.12 Indeed, the notion of territory has long been more than land and has increasingly included elements without physicality, even the most abstract elements imaginable, such as freedom. Sometimes a number of these elements, or even one only, are what defines the territory. These elements give rise to the stake to be defended, often to the death. The stake, therefore, can be the territory occupied by an individual, group or community defined either by language, system of beliefs, lifestyle, or any other factors that confer identity through possession.
In a Lacanian sense, in the example of post-9/11 wars, freedom is the ultimate signifier for the identity that is necessary in order to justify the “desire” for war against the cultural Other. In the discourse of power (in the quote I used before from George W. Bush), freedom is the signifier that Americans are expected to identify with, in order to cope with the threat of the Other. The abstract concept “freedom” is spatialized and reified, since back in 2003, the most captivating metaphor that legitimized the US attacks on other nations was that of the Twin Towers representing freedom under attack. In President Bush’s first address about September 11th, 2001, he established this metaphor that would later guide and justify all subsequent acts of destruction: “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.”13 Being American is equated with being free, which has constituted American identity since its inception (and there is always a claim that freedom is under attack). This identity gave momentum to expanding the “American” territory first westward, within spatial boundaries, and then toward any spatial or abstract territory that could be “Westernized.”
One of the explanations for what territory constitutes, which still affects the way we perceive our identity within a territory and allows for such wars to occur, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s separation between territory (what he calls property) and “natural” rights. All that needs to happen, according to Rousseau, is the reconciliation of social laws with the natural needs of “free” individuals. For the purpose of “eternal concord” and mutual protection, Rousseau suggests that the law is an addition over nature, or natural identity, which prevents conflict.14 Unfortunately, he observes, the law has not been efficient in preventing oppression because it forgets, in the process of distributing property, the natural rights of some to the detriment of others, so that the social structure “irretrievably destroyed natural liberty.”15 What seems to happen is that, somehow, territory becomes secondary to something that is supposed to exist prior to it and outside of it (a natural, free identity), which allows people to envision a redistribution of physical territory according to something that would define this natural identity (in my example, “freedom”). What Rousseau overlooked (perhaps not informed, as thinkers today, by an awareness of language determinacy) is the close connectedness that exists between the territory whose origins he traces back to a time when people started working the land and living together, and the concepts that he sees as part of identity. For him, this identity is independent of and overrules the physicality of territory. In the name of
