Quotes About Identity

True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and though them, all the rest.

It is the unconscious which chooses what aspect of us will be admitted to official existence.

Man is hidden, well hidden, & this time we must make no mistake about it: this does not mean that he is there beneath a mask, ready to appear ... the situation is more serious: there are no faces underneath the masks, historical man has never been human, & yet no man is alone.

There are several ways for a body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.

The idea of tradition is this double movement: being other in order to be the same, forgetting in order to conserve, producing in order to receive, looking ahead in order to receive the entire force of the past.

If we want to both inhabit our body and know it, we must be simultaneously ourselves and another.

The negative principle is less identity-with-self than non-difference-with-self. This absence becomes a factor only by negation of its own negation. It is less a unity of the multiple in the living than an adhesion between the elements of the multiple. In a sense, there is only the multiple, and this totality that surges from it is not a totality in potential, but the establishment of a certain dimension.

Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become.

But where are these reference events and these landmarks themselves? They refer us to others, and the answer satisfies us only because we do not attend to it, because we think we are 'at home.' The question would arise again and indeed would be inexhaustible, almost insane, if we wished to situate our levels, measure our standards in their turn, if we were to ask: but where is the world itself? And why am I myself? Am I really alone to be me? Have I not somewhere a double, a twin?

There is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-coincidence, there is inside and outside turning about one another.

Nothingness is like the point of the stroboscopic spiral, which is who knows where, which is 'nobody.

What do I bring to the problem of the same and the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference.

Thus, a nocturnal reality of the soul, of the incorporeal--which is not nothing--but which needs to 'adorn' itself with the visible--which is like the opposite of the visible--The visible opens onto an invisible that is its relief or its structure and where identity is rather non-difference.

The study of the appearance of animals takes on interest when we understand this appearance as a language. We must grasp the mystery of life in the way that animals show themselves to each other...There is a specular relation between animals: each is the mirror of the other...What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality...The identity of that which sees and that which it sees appears to be an ingredient of animality.

There are several ways for the body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.

Each one can be, according to the moment, I or You or They....Insofar as we live in language, we are not only I; we haunt all grammatical persons, as we are at their intersection, at their crossroads, at their tuft.

A pre-self, a latent ego that remains in ignorance of itself, because it has not yet encountered in others a limit to the self.

Existence turning back upon itself but without succeeding in carrying itself away.

The person himself must be understood as institution, not as consciousness of...

What is at issue is to recognize the operation in us which is us and which is not ours.

Circularity--a dangerous word. Circularity of Heraclitus, yes: to go in one direction is truly to go in the other. A thick identity there, which truly contains difference.

My possession of my own time is always deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive...in short, I am never at one with myself.

In all identification, elements of sadomasochism are present.

Our open and personal existence rests upon an initial foundation of acquired and congealed existence.