DemCP Interdisciplinary Marxism Group (IMG) Research Seminar SAMIR GANDESHA: Adorno’s (Non-)Identity Politics

Adorno can help us to articulate an immanent and therefore sympathetic critique of the increasingly influential position on the left that has come to be known as identity politics. While there are several different iterations, identity politics can be succinctly defined as the idea that the interests of persons are tightly indexed to: collective historical experiences of suffering, exclusion and marginalization; the epistemic claims these experiences generate; and the notion that the articulation of such claims transforms objects of historical processes into subjects with the agency to make history rather than be made by it, if not fully under the conditions of their own choosing. Identity politics is to be understood as a manifestation of what Adorno calls non-identity as a “different way of thinking.” Non- identity thinking is grounded in the experience of suffering and therefore as a form of resistance. Adorno’s “non-identity thinking,” however, can also prove surprisingly helpful in clarifying and pointing to some of the considerable blind spots and weaknesses of contemporary identity politics. Without a utopian dimension, identity politics tends to reify identities and therefore subvert its own stated aspirations towards emancipation.

This Research Seminar will be open for all members of DemCP and AiS, and for interested researchers from the Faculty of Philosophy.