Kojève once expressed a warning in the form of a critique of identity that is worth reflecting on: “Be what you can never become”. The mistake of those who seek identity is to want to become what they already are. What we simply are is not an identity, it is an ever-ongoing experience that continually slips through our fingers and therefore we can never become. And yet the society in which we live does nothing but attribute an identity to us, which, with varying degrees of conviction, we end up assuming. This identity – as we know perfectly well – is necessarily false, and those who truly want to become what they are risk – as happened to Nietzsche and, albeit to a lesser extent, to almost everyone else – falling into madness. Wise, that is, without identity, is he who is always without ever becoming: but this is precisely what today’s so-called civilised societies consider foreign and reject to the margins, when they do not simply seek to eliminate it.
Source: Quodlibet.it, 24/07/2025
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