the United States is already a territory secured for freedom, but other parts of the world need to be appropriated for the sake of this freedom.
It is important to recognize that both territory and identity are part of the same process: the subjection to language. A discussion of language is therefore crucial to the understanding of identity and territory: it is through language that “characteristics,” or properties that belong to the world (even abstract ones), are perceived as organically part of the process of acquiring an identity. Identity is, in a way, the ability of a human being to maintain the same characteristics (i.e. territories, ideologies, social and historic attributes, and so on). The problem at hand comes from the fact that territory, even in its most abstract embodiment, is closely related to identity, to the point that it becomes identity. In order to elaborate on the survival of the destructive nature of territory and identity, the next chapters are organized as follows:
Chapter Two will offer an explanation of the reason why the concept of the fall is extremely important in understanding not only the processes of identity formation, but also the violence of identity. Chapter Two also explains why I am referring to three “falls” as related to identity and to language. After this clarification, I will pursue three main avenues (related to the three “falls”) in the chapters focused on literary analysis (Chapters Three, Four, and Five) and used for the purpose of exemplification. In attempting to demonstrate how language creates subjects devoted to their identity (often to the death, of themselves or others), I offer three ways to study fall and identity, to show how each of them is in its own way destructive. There may be other kinds of fall, but history tends to revolve around three main perspectives: 1) The emphasis on social identity, to which the individual has to sacrifice either an object (which can be abstract), or other individuals, to acquire identity; this sacrifice will be explained as the mythical fall from—and toward—innocence; 2) The emphasis on individual identity, to which something from the social system, or the connection to the community as a whole, is sacrificed for the sake of “authentic,” personalized, identity; this sacrifice will be explained as the fall from—and toward—authenticity; 3) the emphasis on non-identity, to which social and individual meaning are sacrificed for the sake of the negative of identity, explained as the fall from—and toward a different kind of—meaning.
The first “fall,” or mode that determines the formation of identity, is what I will refer to as the mythical fall, or the fall from innocence. More traditionally present in different societies and particularly in the history of the West, the mythical or social identity relies on a notion that there is a perfect social structure that needs to be recreated on earth (shaped after its initial lost model, which is mythical or religious, and essentially utopian). We could say that this identity mode is based on three assumptions: that something (ideal identity) actually existed in the past, that it was lost at some point due to some form of impurity interfering with the social/mythical world, and that this identity is retrievable. In other words, what has been lost in the fall from a perfect world can be, in this first perspective, recreated, brought back into actuality, if only all the imperfections or corrupting elements in the social system can be eliminated. In the Old Testament, the people of Israel, for instance, are punished by God because “Israel has brought defilement on himself./ Their misdeeds have barred the way back to their God.” There is always the promise that “He has torn us, but he will heal us,/ he has wounded us, but he will bind up our wounds …. Let us strive to know the Lord,/ whose coming is as sure as sunrise.”16 This is the fall that haunts social organizations, even in their most atheistic forms (atheism itself can be, functionally, a religion), such as the communist utopia. For instance, communist doctrine is modeled on the basic taboos and rules of the Christian Ten Commandments, replacing God with an abstract collective god of the proletariat.
Any social structure that places emphasis on the rules of interaction, also creating a hierarchy of interaction, will likely deem individual life disposable. Rousseau transfers the power of God to the power of the social collective, “founded on convention.”17 Friedrich Nietzsche sees in Rousseau a seducer who, in advocating “society” as a new god, continues the momentum of Christianity into the French Revolution.18 It is very clear that the power to dismiss individuality in view of the promise of social perfection remains as strong as in Christianity: the social contract is sacred; to transgress it, “To violate the contract by which [the body politic] exists would be to annihilate itself; and that which is nothing can produce nothing.” There are huge implications in this statement: there is a threat to individuality to be “nothing” rather than something; to be able to remain something, a transgressing individual has to accept death because “it is to secure himself from being the victim of assassins that a man consents to die if he becomes an assassin.”19 It appears that it is against the chaos of an “other,” even the Other within the self, that the individual has to inscribe himself or herself within a system that brings order to human interaction. From the notion of protection derives the notion of restriction, since there is no protection without the definition of what and whom (what territory) is to be protected, and against what intruder. That is why the “citizen,” the inhabitant of a territory, is protected by an act such as the American Constitution. At the same time, the Constitution dictates that the individual will accept punishment in case of transgression, so that the Constitution can continue to protect its citizens. In the name of order, dictated by a law—whether it is the law of God, or human law—individual life becomes irrelevant to the pursuit of social/moral perfection, in the Western mythical momentum.
As Rousseau suggests, this promise of perfection is always under threat. There is always an enemy that stands in the way of achieving social perfection, whether it is another community (race, nation, continent), a class that interferes with the order imposed by the dominant class, or certain individuals who are excluded or exclude themselves from within a community (the barbarian, the diseased, the abnormal). There is a very obvious opposition between members who aspire to perfection, in a community, and those who stand in the way of that perfection, and who need to be either subdued or eliminated. Yet this opposition is contained in the notion of identity: identity would not be perfectible without the element that contaminates it.
Derrida explains that a structural tendency such as Rousseau’s is prompted by the fear that the contaminating element is already inside: “just as Rousseau and Saussure will do in response to the same necessity, yet without discovering other relations between the intimate and the alien, Plato maintains both the exteriority of writing and its power of maleficent penetration, its ability to affect or infect what lies deepest inside.”20 In other words, the idea that constructs the identity (all the way from Plato) is infected by the fear of its own corruptibility, which at the same time is the only way that identity can be conceived: as potentially uncorrupted.
The pagan god, the demon, the possessed, the cultural Other, the Jew, the American, the terrorist: all are different modes of perceiving what is not redeemable toward order, depending on what defines the community whose order has been infected and whose purity needs to be retrieved. Rothstein identifies the Middle Eastern “reluctant” nations as “the beast,” bringing back the binary of civilization versus wilderness that has informed most colonizing and imperialistic acts.21 In one of his State of the Union Addresses, President Bush was drawing precisely on this tradition of hierarchical identity that divides the civilized (Western and Westernized) world from the threat of whatever “territory” is left outside of this civilization. He notoriously called this corrupting territory the “axis of evil,” the “terrorist parasites” (intruding elements), that endangered the civilized world in unprecedented ways. President
