El yo soberano

The phenomenon of "identity assignment" has been gaining strength in the last twenty years, to the point of involving society as a whole. This is attested to by the evolution of the notion of gender and the metamorphoses of the idea of race. What has happened so that the emancipatory commitments of the past, in particular the anti-colonial and feminist struggles, have turned in on themselves in such a way? The demolition of statues in the name of anti-racism is disconcerting, and the violence with which hatred of men is manifested within the feminist struggle raises questions. In recent decades, rich and highly refined instruments of thought -from the works of Sartre, Beauvoir, Lacan, Césaire, Foucault, Deleuze or Derrida- have been reinterpreted to the point of sustaining new ideals whose priority is not to achieve a more fair. In parallel, the notion of national identity returns in the discourses of the extreme right, inhabited by terror. These value what the identitarians on the other side reject: the white, masculine, virile, colonialist, Western identity. Identity against identity, therefore. In this courageous and daring reflection on the pitfalls of identity politics, key to understanding today's world, Élisabeth Roudinesco offers some clues to escape from the labyrinth of the essentialization of difference and the universal.