The Scofield, Spring 2016 Issue 1.4 - Max Frisch, Identity

Выходные данные неизвестны. — 272 с. (на англ. яз.)Philosopher Simon Critchley, who I interviewed for this issue, wrote the following statement in two of his books, On Humour and ABC of Impossibility: “Does not our identity precisely consist in a lack of self-identity, in the fact that identity is always a question for us—a quest, indeed—that we might vigorously pursue, but it is not something I actually possess?”
There is some sort of irony in the fact that this exact statement appears twice in Critchley’s oeurve and, therefore, has some identity with itself, resonating from one text to the other, an echo. For our purposes, though, the more compelling thing to notice about Critchley’s statement on identity is that it is not actually a statement at all—it is a question, and so doubles back on itself, interrogating its own ponderance. But the question mark which sits at the sentence’s conclusion also perfectly fuels the claim itself: we do seem to have within us a question, a lack, a “chronic divisiveness,” as Critchley calls it. My introduction for our previous issue—the Dambudzo Marechera & The Doppelgänger Issue—attempted to get at a similar proposition about identity through our Whitmanian multitudes, contradictions, largeness. The beauty of segueing from the doppelgänger as the theme for that issue to identity as the theme for this issue is that the doppelgänger is merely a literary trope through which one can examine the larger problem, the ultimate question of identity—a question we are quite excited to end our first year exploring.