Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora

Abstract

There is a sense in which the current interest in questions of identity and in particular interstitial identities, though timely, has been blown out of proportion, or rather has become somewhat pleonastic since identity is by definition always necessarily interstitial. This paradox originates in the very etymology of the term ‘identity’ which, as Paul Ricoeur pointed out, refers to both the constitutive kaleidoscopic character of identity (the fact that something is ‘one’ as opposed to multiple) and to its transience and mutability (Ricoeur, 1990, 12–13). The very capacities in which one is defined on various levels, or within various circles such as family structure, local life, the workplace, and the nation, make one necessarily multiple and not fully congruent with only one identity definition. As for the notion of sameness, it is challenged by the contextual transience of situations and categories. From which it results that identity cannot be anything but interstitial, in the sense of not being fully aligned with abstract definitions with which it is bound to clash.