The Beautiful Soul of Identity Politics

There's one more interesting political passage in this section on the relationship of difference to affirmation.

At this point, does the philosophy of difference not risk appearing as a new version of the beautiful soul? The beautiful soul is in effect the one who sees differences everywhere and appeals to them only as respectable, reconcilable or federative differences, while history continues to be made through bloody contradictions. The beautiful soul behaves like a justice of the peace thrown on to a field of battle, one who sees in the inexpiable struggles only simple 'differends' or perhaps misunderstandings. Conversely, however, it is not enough to harden oneself and invoke the well-known complementarities between affirmation and negation, life and death, creation and destruction (as if these were sufficient to ground a dialectic of negativity) in order to throw the taste for pure differences back at the beautiful soul, and to weld the fate of real differences to that of the negative and contradiction. For such complementarities as yet tell us nothing about the relation between one term and the other (does the determined affirmation result from an already negative and negating difference, or does the negative result from an already differential affirmation?).

Deleuze has actually already mentioned the "beautiful soul" in the preface.  It represents the danger that confronts a philosophy of difference.

There are certainly many dangers in invoking pure differences which have become independent of the negative and liberated from the identical. The greatest danger is that of lapsing into the representations of a beautiful soul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggles. The beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed ...

I think of the beautiful soul as akin to a certain strain of left wing politics that has grown over the past 30 years into our present idea of identity politics and political correctness.  I don't think it's a parody to say that this type of thinking is focused on creating a "safe space" where we can each express our story and affirm everyone's stories as equally valid and deserving.  Naturally, this space wouldn't have any conflict or opposition or hierarchy and all of our differences would be able to peacefully coexist in a LGBTQIA rainbow love-in.  

To be clear, I think there's a lot that's truly beautiful about the "beautiful soul", and it is presented here explicitly as a danger we might fall into when we've already had some success in the main task of liberating ourselves from the limiting and repressive negativity of identity.   So let's not come down too hard on the beautiful soul and mistakenly give the impression that the cure is worse than the disease.  At the same time, let's try to think all the way through the problems that come up when we try to completely replace a world of identities with one of pure difference.  

I think the main danger Deleuze has in mind here is that in emphasizing difference as primary and making identity secondary we may be tempted to conclude that identity is just illusory.  In our desire to affirm everything as possible we may see negation and contradiction as somehow not being real.  This is like the beautiful soul taken to its mystical extreme.  The world would be a pure flow of difference without border or boundary.  And without distinct entities, how could anything be opposed to anything else?  While Deleuze is clearly leading us in the direction of this vision, the beautiful soul jumps the shark by when it turns all opposition into mere illusion.  The point is not that there is no such thing as negation or opposition or identity.  The point is simply that these things are constructed.  They have a mechanism behind them.  In fact, the whole idea is to reach a higher level of empiricism where we investigate exactly what these mechanisms are, rather than taking forms of identity and opposition for granted.  This is why neither the pacifistic beautiful soul nor the hard-headed chickenhawk is the political figure Deleuze is looking for in that first quote.  One insists of the inevitable reality of limits and contradictions and war, and the other denies them any substance.  One sees only zero-sum games where the other thinks only "collective insanity" traps us in anything less than non-zero-sum cooperation.  But neither really investigates how things get built, when cooperation materializes and when it does not, where forms congeal and where flow continues uninterrupted.  

Phrased in the language of affirmation and negation, the problem is that the beautiful soul denies the existence of negation, and hence denies the reality of power altogether (in the conventional political sense of control and limit, though perhaps also in Nietzsche or Spinoza's sense of increasing ability to do stuff).  This is better than the "slave of power" we saw at the end of the previous post, who is only concerned with affirming the inevitability of the limitations embodied by some current or future power.  But the real goal is to understand how power is actually constructed, not as inevitable, but precisely as contingent, changing, and historical.  Our goal may ultimately be to defuse these power structures, but we don't accomplish that simply by imagining a safe space supposedly without power relations, or by simply multiplying the letters at the end of our birding acronyms.  These aren't bad ideas.  In fact, they're mostly great ideas.  They're just not complete, and it seems to me that they lead to another danger for the beautiful soul.

Ignoring power altogether also means ignoring your own power.  But since power and identity don't thereby disappear like a mist burning off under the sun, it becomes very easy to slide back into taking some construction of power for granted.  In fact, you may end up taking for granted the very same power of identity that you were critiquing in the first place.  I think this is exactly what sometimes happens to the beautiful soul of identity politics.  I think we've seen now how the construction of a "safe space" can sometimes be a simple demonstration of power, an imposition of new limits rather than a dissolving of old ones.  I'm sure this isn't the deepest intention of those constructing the space.  I'm imagining that the deepest intention is precisely the same as Deleuze's goal for thought: making a world where difference flourishes and allows for even more difference.  But these incidents highlight the danger that arises if we ignore the actual construction of power in a given circumstance.  We become liable to want to take revenge for the limits someone has placed on us and give vent to our, completely understandable, anger by demonstrating our power where we finally can.  This is certainly a "fair" and "just" response in the sense of being reciprocal to (though often not equal in magnitude to) the original treatment.  And it is clearly a way to assert the power of our identity against the way that exact identity was previously used to strip of us power.  You can see though, how we've now fallen into the old dialectical logic where difference turns into a clash of opposite identities.  We've slid from being motivated by a definition of power that is positive and affirmative, to pursuing one that is negative and limiting.  Ultimately, we started out to critique the way a repressive dominant identity unthinkingly conveyed power, and yet ended up asserting that our power comes precisely from our suppressed minority identity.  We still haven't changed the unquestioned underlying logic that identity = power, and that therefore difference ≠ power.  

As I said at the beginning, I don't think this means we have accomplished nothing, much less deepened our dilemma.  I think it means we've found a danger.  I think knowing about the existence of this danger gives us a method to move forward though.  We have to ask whether our actions stem from affirmation or negation, whether they open possibilities or close them.  We have to do this not "in general" as some sort of categorical imperative, but again in every circumstance and according to the different conditions.  This is exactly what Deleuze asks, and is the "selective" aspect of the Eternal Return:

... does the determined affirmation result from an already negative and negating difference, or does the negative result from an already differential affirmation?

P.S.  A lot of that penultimate paragraph is written in the second person plural.  I'm aware that on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, but both of my readers are probably aware that I am rich white heterosexual male; I am the oppressor.  So I apologize if phrases like "our minority identity" seem disingenuous.  I wrote it that way because I am trying to follow the text in understanding affirmation and negation as primarily philosophical questions, albeit, so I'm claiming, with political consequences.  "Dominant" and "minority", "master" and "slave" are not primarily historical terms in this context, but are evocative descriptions of ways of thinking.  In other words, any of us can end up on either side of these patterns at different points in our thinking.