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PARTISAN REVIEW
The sea rch for identity which we have described is an impulse to
deny time, to ignore the sweep of hi story. It must be limited as an
ideology because the facticity of the external world cannot be denied.
We are not just born into some free fl oa ting balloon of identity-but
in to a spec ific time and place. To base a res istance plan aga inst
everyday life on the individual se lf must fail because of the ways that
self is loca ted in time and history and roo ted to specific sets of social
relationships.
To refu se to accept those roots, they continue, is a classic symptom of
" bourgeois individua lism " and its cult "of the unique individual
identity, a self-consciousness which our society has deve lo ped a lmost
to
the po int of the patholog ical. " They then confess that they too are
irrevocably and unabashedly infec ted with this same soc ia l disease:
"We would prefer to see the self as a construct which only becomes
a live by being wary, elusive, mobile, keeping some distance from social
rea li ty . 'I escape, therefo re I am ,' is ultima tely the onl y ontological
message we can manage."
Does the self stand a lone, then , o r is it an appendage of the
externa l world? So long as Cohen and T ay lo r pose the issue in such
terms they will rema in trapped in bourgeo is individua lism regardless
of the outcome, since in either case the ques tio n is how to d efine the
bounda ries of a substantia l entity ca ll ed " the self. " T o evade this
dil emma, one must shift to a perspec tive like Julia· Kri steva's, wherein
the "self" is not ha lf o f an opposition , but a rela tionship between
primordia l subj ec tivity, o n one side, and on the o ther a ll soc ia l and
impersonal structures (especiall y tha t of language). This rela tionship
must be mutua lly determined , since subj ect canno t be thought outside
o f struc ture and vice versa. When such a perspec tive is extended to
society as a whole, " paramount rea lity" is no longer seen as a mere
dead weight of facticity, but ra ther as a
resultant
of ongoing human
in terests and struggles. In Nie tzsche's wo rds,
" It
is our needs that
interpre t the world; our drives and the ir For and Aga inst. Every drive is
a kind of lust to rule; each o ne has its perspec tive tha t it would like to
compel a ll the other drives to accept as a no rm ." There will a lways be a
paramount rea lity, and we ignore it a t our peril ; but it is local and
cha ngeable, not monolithic. Throug h our "escape a ttempts" we try
out our world-crea ting powers, and a lso discover their limits. These
limits, however, a re not eternal verities, but humanly constituted and
contested; their nature is revea led in Engels's famo us comment on the
historica l process: " what each individual wills is o bstructed by every-
