Tal é a identidade daquilo a que chamamos, em qualquer sentido possível, um sujeito ou o sujeito — que é, sempre e em última análise, o sujeito filosófico. Esta identidade não é a simples posição abstrata de uma coisa como sendo imediatamente o que é e apenas o que é; antes, actualiza-se como uma apreensão de si mesma pela unidade que eu sou em mim mesmo: um Ego, um núcleo irredutível de auto-constituição. Quem diz “sujeito” pressupõe este Ego auto-constituído, por mais atenuado ou remoto que seja. Mesmo o sujeito psicanalítico não deixa de pressupor o sujeito filosófico, pelo menos no que diz respeito à prescrição prática (que não pode evitar uma aposta na teoria) pela qual a análise se separa da hipnose (e da sedução, como Freud fez ver a Ferenczi). Como o eu kantiano, e independentemente de qualquer cisão do seu ego, o analisando, sendo um falante consciente, deve poder acompanhar todas as suas representações. O mesmo vale para o analista.
“Identity, as self-consciousness, is what distinguishes man from nature, particularly from the brutes, which never reach the point of comprehending themselves as Ί,’ that is, pure self-contained unity.” (Hegel)
Such is the identity of what we call, in any possible sense, a subject or the subject—which is, always and in the last analysis, the philosophical subject. This identity is not the simple abstract position of a thing as immediately what it is and only what it is; rather, it actualizes itself as a grasping of itself by the unity that I am in myself: an Ego, an irreducible kernel of self-constitution. Whoever says “subject” presupposes this self-constituted Ego, however attenuated or remote it may be. Even the psychoanalytical subject still presupposes the philosophical subject—at least in terms of the practical prescription (which cannot avoid a stake in theory) whereby analysis splits off from hypnosis (and from seduction, as Freud made clear to Ferenczi). Like the Kantian I, and regardless of any splitting of his ego, the analysand, being a conscious speaker, must be able to accompany all his representations. The same goes for the analyst.]
The subject’s identity is related to difference in three ways. It is opposed to difference in general, insofar as difference creates the disparity or exteriority of being-outside-the-self, or insofar as it posits that otherness with respect to which the identical pulls itself together from itself and upon itself. But identity, while pulling itself together, assumes and resorbs within itself the differences that constitute it: both its difference from the other, whom it posits as such, and its difference from itself, simultaneously implied and abolished in the movement of “grasping itself.” In this way, finally, identity makes difference·, it presents itself as preeminently different from all other identity and from all nonidentity; relating itself to itself, it relegates the other to a self (or to an absence of self) that is different. Being the very movement proper to self-consciousness, identity—or the Self that identifies itself—therefore makes difference itself, difference proper·, and this property designates or denotes itself as “man.”
Where does this difference of self-consciousness come from? How does man attain what the animals, according to Hegel, do not? Mans “humanity” cannot explain this, as long as that humanity has not been determined as, precisely, self-consciousness and identity. “Man” attains what the animals do not only because identity, in him, has preceded and established humanity in its very difference: ‘”Identity, as self-consciousness, is what distinguishes man.
Before difference, then, before all difference posited as such (which cannot be difference except through the identical), there is identity itself, difference proper, which will constitute the difference of “man” as much as of every “individual.” (But why is there more than one individual? And why doesn’t Identity constitute the difference of a single individual and a single man by contrast with Nature and the Animal? It is precisely this question that overtaxes the system of identity. That system offers no tidy way to account for the difference of the collectivity or for that between the sexes. Thus, as we continue here, this will be our only real topic.)
On that score, identity itself, the identity that alone can differentiate the identical from what is without identity, is indifferent identity. Only an identity without difference can constitute and determine an identity as difference proper, different from difference. The first identity is indifferent in two senses. It is identically valid for all individual identities, among which, on these grounds, it does not differentiate (thus individuals are indifferent differences), and it includes within itself the indifference to self and to itself: indeed, only a self already one and the same can later relate itself to itself. One cannot posit A = A unless A is identical to itself in the first place. No matter how this indifferent identity (whose history runs from Fichte to Hegel) originarily divides itself (sich urteilen, which is also to say “judges itself”), it divides itself. By itself, the indifferent abolishes its own negation and engenders the different as the reversal of this negation in affirmation of the identity between different identities. The true plural is excluded on principle. The path of self-consciousness can easily lead through desire and recognition of the other, but it is traced beforehand as the circular process of the Self of this consciousness.
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