Enigmas of Identity PDF
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| Enigmas of Identity Enigmas of Identity | Peter Brooks PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford Frontispiece and jacket. Paul Cézanne, The Garden at Les Lauves (Le Jardin des Lauves), c. 1906. Oil on canvas, 25-3/4 x 31-7/8 in. (65.405 x 80.9625 cm.). Acquired 1955. Courtesy of The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brooks, Peter, 1938– Enigmas of identity / Peter Brooks. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-15158-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Group identity. I. Title. HM753.B76 2011 305—dc22 2011005722 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 | Contents To Begin 1 1 Marks of Identity 10 2 Egotisms 35 3 The “Outcast of the Universe”? 60 4 Discovering the Self in Self-Pleasuring 92 5 “Inevitable Discovery”: Searches, Narrative, Identity 117 6 The Derealization of Self 147 7 The Madness of Art 170 Epilogue: The Identity Paradigm 195 Acknowledgments 199 Notes 201 Index 217 This page intentionally left blank | Enigmas of Identity This page intentionally left blank | To Begin Take a nightmare situation evoked by Jean-Paul Sartre to image his childhood sense that he was a fraud, lacking all authenticity. He has sneaked onto a train from Paris to Dijon and fallen asleep, and when the conductor comes to ask for his ticket, he has to admit he doesn’t have one. Nor the money to pay for one. Yet he makes the grandiose claim that he needs to be in Dijon for important and secret reasons, “reasons that concerned France and perhaps all mankind.”1 This sce- nario—in which the conductor remained mute, unconvinced, and the boy talked on and on—could never reach an ending. The higher call- ing—the salvation of mankind—remained an apology for his ticket- less train trip, but not one he could really explain. Somehow the train ride had to continue, but without any certain point of arrival—or justification. Such, we might say, is life, or at least our sense of personal identity within the world, at once unjustified and, to us, crucially important. That is more or less the question I want to work toward in this book. It was not quite my starting point; it took me some time to understand that “identity” was the concept I was after. In essence, the book had its 1
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