Identity, Resistances and Difference

The productive paradoxes of empowerment emerge by thinking the political resistance of the subject and the subject's resistance to its own compromised self-constitution. The "I" that affirms its specific identity establishes its difference from the other at the same time that it must acknowledge its indebtedness to the other in its self-constitution. A processual understanding of the subject's resistance to power is inextricable from its self-transformation in the force-field of social positionings which the subject disavows even as it posits its difference. The affirmation of difference runs the risk of disavowing the power of the other's positings, which position the self ethically within a community and epistemologically as an object of knowledge. Political movement and psychic self-separation coincide with the competing pressures of social stabilization and self-assertion. A critical engagement with psychoanalytic gender theory and examples from the history of decolonial resistance in the next section will show the coincidence of political and psychic resistance as the productive ground for rethinking the relation between identity and difference.