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The level of legitimate difference

2022-09-19T10:44:00.177Z


When you want to build a strong identity, difference is not enough. In the construction of one's own identity, first someone who is different is sought, then an opposite, and finally an enemy.


We all seek to build our identity, our community belonging;

for this, it is necessary to stand in front of the others, to establish lines of demarcation.

Perhaps we are nothing but an empty whole, watched over and produced by those hirsute faces that lie in wait for us to strengthen us as individuals or as groups.

Immersed in these banal and accelerated times, have we ever had a lonely moment for transcendent questions: who am I, what is it to be Spanish, European, man, woman, son, father...?

Perhaps not with that somewhat metaphysical formulation, but with the more colloquial one: am I enterprising enough, virile, audacious, a good daughter, a good mother, independent, empathetic...? What am I? What do I really want? Which are my friends, which are my family, my people, my community, my country...?

Basically, this brings us back, in an ordinary way,

That vital anguish, in which existentialism deepened so much, we usually resolve, in what refers to our belonging, with a trap that is not entirely founded neither intellectually nor morally: the postulation of what I have called "the level of legitimate difference ”.

We place ourselves —our group— at that level, we demonize what is above and nullify what is below.

In his political reading: those above are perverse imperialists, those next door are enemies, and those who are different from within do not exist.

That is the usual mechanism of nationalism.

Let us think of the anti-European far-right parties: the level of legitimate difference is Hungary, Poland, France, the United Kingdom…, Europe will be demonized, but any internal linguistic difference will be disregarded,

cultural… The construction of a strong identity requires an illusory fiction, which consists in creating an adversary that we oppose and a false internal homogeneity.

I leave it to the reader to make the translation to any other nationalism.

Vladimir Putin renounces that Europe, to which he geographically, historically and culturally belongs, to recreate a visionary lost unity, the USSR —his level of legitimate difference—, and to recover his fictitious homogeneity he will not hesitate to invade and incorporate the old States that they integrated it.

Latin America builds its level of legitimate difference in nations that shy away from the term Hispanic America, but at the same time generally make the indigenous minorities invisible within it.

Indigenous minorities that, however, consider themselves the level of legitimate difference and denounce a State that plunders their roots.

Or what would we say about Islamic countries?

Let us think of Afghanistan, which, in order to achieve its level of legitimate difference, that social homogeneity that they attribute to a perfect Koranic reading, annuls women,

as unwanted internal difference.

However, not only in the political field do we find this conceptual trick, since it also works in any sphere of society.

Thus, in the now much claimed gender identity (the subjective feeling of perceiving oneself as a man or a woman regardless of the sex one has), this is intended as the level of legitimate difference in the face of an alleged heteropatriarchal dictatorship of sexual difference (man/woman). woman), which would now become one more of the options within a fluid sex trans reality.

When you want to build a strong identity, difference is not enough, because, as the philosopher Victoria Sendón de León says, identity is the opposite of difference.

In the construction of one's own identity, first someone who is different is sought, then an opposite, and finally an enemy.

The ultimate conceptual structure will be the theoretical formulation of that egocentric level of legitimate difference that I have been commenting on, excluding above and below.

Does this mean that we have to abandon all pretense of seeking an identity of our own?

In no way, what it means is that we must be aware of when the sought-after identity is built against another, and makes us hostage to that violence, to that bellicosity of the tribe, which carries within it the germ of lynching .

Faced with the fanatical imposition of the arbitrary and dictatorial levels of legitimate difference, we must accept the legitimacy of all differences, and the careful and critical analysis of the level of each one, since not all of them are totalitarian and some are not.

Surely there must be a way to be a free Afghan woman;

Russian and European;

Mapuche and Chilean;

male or female with the desired gender identification variable.

There are many totalitarian pretensions that annul us;

let us know how to denounce them, because facing them is the inalienable right to build and defend our self.

Rosa María Rodríguez Magda

is a philosopher and writer, author of 

La mujer molesta.

Post-gender feminisms and sexual transidentity 

(Maenads)

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Source: elparis

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