Fragments in Relation Trajectories of/for an Unbound Europe

This essay explores the possibility that the spatial location of an identity is lived as dislocation. How does the lived experience of dislocation undo a center-periphery model? The essay analyzes Sebatian Lifshitz's WildSide (2004) which produces one figuration of the disconnect between uncertain identities and the ambiguous spaces they tentatively occupy within the globalizing drive of Europe. Thinking marginality as a political figuration requires precisely an acknowledgement of the presence of difference in the margins while refusing a discernible meaning of difference. Reading WildSide as the production of a "politics of indifference" around sexuality, race and gender, I argue that "indifference" is the emphatic assertion of the presence of difference and the principled refusal to instrumentally identify difference. Envisioning a politics of indifference is both a conceptual critique and a political figuration of the contours of community which works through and refigures the space of the center and the periphery.