Dolar on identity politics

Hamza, A., & Ruda, F. (2020). Interview with Mladen Dolar: Dialectic at a Standstill? Hegel at the Times of COVID. Crisis and Critique, 7(3), 480-497.

Identification entails a contradictory process full of tension and with uncertain results. It’s a process, not a state of identity that one would have to protect and perpetuate.

Thus any sexual position is ridden with the impossibility of coming to terms with the sexual difference, which is not the difference masculine/feminine (if the sexual difference were reducible to this simple binary, there would be no need for psychoanalysis). There is a real of sexual difference irreducible to a binary opposition.

Of course one should fully endorse the struggle of all sexual ‘identities’, their right for full recognition, but this is not enough – one should show fidelity to a kernel of antagonism that they all have at their core and which prevents us from ever simply inhabiting any sexual identity.

The sexual politics that psychoanalysis proposes is far more troubling, it doesn’t aim only at the external proponents of oppression, but at the inner rift implied by sexuality. (I cannot do better but to refer to Alenka Zupančič’s book What is sex?)