Marlene Dietrich had the last line in Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil:
"What does it matter what you say about other people?" The author
ponders the question: What does it matter what you say about yourself?
She wonders why the requirement to be a something-or-other should be
so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own
subject. She decides that some hesitations and awkwardness in inhabiting
many categories of the person--including those celebrated by what is
sometimes termed identity politics--need not evidence either
psychological weakness or political lack of nerve.
Neither an "identity" nor a "nonidentity" can quite convince. But if
this discomfort inhering in self-characterization needs to be fully
admitted and registered--as something that is simultaneously linguistic
and affective--it can also be cheerfully tolerated. Here language is not
treated as a guileful thing that leads its speakers astray. Though the
business of being called something, and of being positioned by that
calling, is often an unhappy affair, irony can offer effective therapy.
Even if uncertain and volatile categorizations do trouble the politics
that they also shape, they hardly weaken the empathetic solidarity that
is distinct from identification. The verbal irony of self-presentation
can be politically helpful. Questioning the received diction of the self
cannot be dismissed merely as a luxury of those in secure positions, but
instead can move toward a conception of a constructive nonidentity.
This extended meditation on the language of the self within contemporary
social politics also considers the lyrical "I" and linguistic
emotionality, the historical status of irony, and the possibilities of a
nonidentitarian solidarity that is unapologetically alert to the affect
of language.
