Report of Daniel BERNABÉ, The Identity Trap. The Erasure of the Social Question (2018, Paris, L'Échappée, 2022, 304 pages, Translated from Spanish by Patrick Marcolini). Article published in the journal Cités, No. 96, 2023.
The French publisher of Daniel Bernabé's book did very well to take the initiative not only to have it translated but also to modify the initial title (" The Diversity Trampa ", the diversity trap) to make it "the identity trap"; as well as its subtitle (" How neoliberalism frames the identity of the working class ") to make it "the erasure of the social question". Because when it was published in Spanish, in 2018, identitarianism Woke had not yet crossed the Atlantic, at least not enough to be identified as such; and what could then appear, in a fairly classic way, as an anti-liberalism pamphlet in favor of the proletariat constitutes today, five years after its publication, a perfectly current offensive against the invasion of communitarian issues – “gender”, intersectionality, decolonialism, the LGBT question, transactivism – and the way in which they obscure the socio-economic problems that had always occupied the left.
Because this charge, documented and effective, against the new "inclusivist" vogue, which has since become "wokism", is well led from the left - and this is what makes it so interesting in a context where the propagandists of this movement try to persuade themselves, by proclaiming it in all tones, that there would be no anti-wokism except on the right or even the extreme right. A journalist, Bernabé is close to the Podemos party and has even received a prize from the Spanish Communist Party. He also takes care to emphasize that the causes defended by the new identitarian ideology are legitimate, from feminism to anti-racism and the fight against homophobia. But what is not, in his eyes, is the fragmentation of the social world into communities of victimization, shattering any universalist awareness of what connects us and ultimately leading to reducing the political subject to the individual, to his subjectivity, to his "wounded sensitivity": this very thing, he asserts, which is at the foundation of liberal ideology.
From then on, the artificial opposition between a progressive wokeness and a reactionary anti-wokeness entrenched against "political correctness" is disintegrating: the so-called "left" Woke " has made - as the translator Patrick Marcolini pertinently writes in his foreword - "a sort of takeover bid on the movements that were once called progressive", while this "new dominant ideology of our time" thus plays, paradoxically, "the game of neo-liberalism".
Bernabé begins by pointing out some capitalist recuperations: that of feminist struggles (including "the spectacular transformation of Frida Kahlo into an object of identity consumption"); that of post-modernism, whether in architecture or in the philosophical theories of deconstruction, emphasizing that "postmodernism has only brought confusion, when it has not directly harmed the aspirations of the left"; that of the hippie lifestyle, leading to "the individual-king"; and finally that of diversity, which he describes as a "market" making us regress to a pre-modern era.
This is where the "identity trap" of what we now know as "wokism" lies, and which has made us move "from questions of economic redistribution to questions of symbolic representation", in accordance with the "paradigm of recognition" dear to Nancy Fraser, a factor of indifference towards material inequalities and even contempt for the poor. Hence the blurring of the right/left opposition and the decline of a left that has distanced itself from popular aspirations by paying itself in words: "The left should remember that it is not by changing words that we will transform the world, but by transforming the world that we will change words" - and he stigmatizes in passing the fashion of inclusive writing. In summary: "Deconstructing identities to the point of their atomization is giving neoliberal amphetamines to postmodernism. It is because we have to fill the space left vacant by the dissolution of class, national or religious affiliations that we are all increasingly diverse – without seeing that this diversity is consubstantially linked to inequality.
He also points out the way in which the extreme right makes its honey from the competition of identities, is surprised that "the concept of degenerate art comes back to us today carried by a young woman with progressive and feminist opinions", brilliantly castigates the communitarianism of the quota policy ("The diversity market never sleeps: it constantly needs new quotas of specificity, in the same way that the Mayan priests regularly demanded their share of victims") and the "monsters" engendered by the identity trap: "It is disconcerting to see, in several European countries, many activists and people who define themselves as progressives defending the wearing of the veil, in other words presenting the cultural imperialism of the Wahhabi dictatorships as the advanced point of the new feminism. The identity trap, like the sleep of reason, ends up engendering monsters. Through it, postmodern theories come, without even realizing it, to commune with obscurantists – the Islamists – while exciting the resentment of other obscurantists – the fascists.
Certainly the argument is not free from some naivety due, probably, to the legacy of an untimely militancy. Thus the New Philosophers cannot be reduced to a "support" of "the bourgeoisie" in the face of the hegemony of left-wing ideas (Bernabé has probably read too much Perry Anderson). The Marxist catechism is really too dated ("The identity trap is ultimately only an expression of the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism, that is to say, in the last analysis, of the bourgeoisie", or again "The market has every interest in putting diversity under control to facilitate the flow of its products"). As for the Islamo-leftist catechism, it makes teeth grind ("...the responsibility of NATO in the destabilization of the countries of the Middle East, which leads millions of people to leave their countries of origin"). And the misinterpretation of secularism is obvious when Bernabé mentions "the case of France, where freedom of worship regularly clashes with the secular principles of the Republic...".
But these few drosses do not undermine the overall relevance of the work, which drives a salutary wedge into the automatic assimilation of wokeness to progressivism that its thurifers are trying to sell us. This is why Bernabé's speech is primarily addressed to the left, not to castigate it but, on the contrary, to put it back on track, as Mark Lila, Jonathan Haidt and, more recently, Susan Neiman have also done in the United States. Let us therefore give him the last word: "The left cannot beat neoliberalism on its own ground, by following its rules, that is to say by integrating the newspeak of diversity, techno-utopian fantasies and market analyses. This is where we have been since the mid-1990s, and all this has only served to empty the parties, the unions and the political programs."
