Going back to beginnings, I am trying to think again about the reasons for the nagging feeling of “cheesiness” related to this overseas question, why making any kind of work trying to self-represent a particular social group comes with this discomfort. We talked a lot about the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ as the building blocks of identity, and today coming across some texts on Jean Luc Nancy’s “Being Singular Plural”, I realised that it is exactly that kind of identification that makes me uncomfortable from the very beginning. Because just as identification can be a form of creating that ‘we’, it is a manner of ‘with’ that separates and segregates, in its heightened forms, into a identity politics that reveals humanity at its worst. He reminds us of

“the places, groups, or authorities (…Bosnian Serbs, Tutsis, Hutus, Tamil Tigers, Casamnce, ETA Militia, Roma of Slovenia…) that constitute the theatre of bloody conflicts among identities as well as what is at stake in these conflicts. …This is the ‘earth’ we are supposed to ‘inhabit’ today, the earth for which Sarajevo will become the martyr-name, the testimonial name: this is us, we who are supposed to say we as if we know what we are saying and who we are talking about. … This earth is anything but a sharing of humanity… What I am talking about here is compassion, but not compassion as pity that feels sorry for itself and feeds on itself. Com-passion is the contagion, the contact of being with one another in this turmoil.” (pp. xii-xiii)

Nancy asks the question of how ‘we’ can find another sort of meaning beyond a statement of identity: “We do not ‘have’ meaning any more, because we ourselves are meaning – entirely, without reserve, infinitely, with no more meaning other than ‘us’ (p. 1) …Being itself is given to us as meaning, being does not have meaning. ‘Being itself’, the phenomenon of ‘being’ is meaning that is in turn its own circulation – and we are this circulation. (p. 3) …There is no meaning then if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of being.” (p. 2)

Is there a way, thus, that we can find a way of acknowledging being in and of itself, relating to one and another, without identifying? Can we speak about an overseas identity but move beyond it, to relatedness itself?

I am tired of all this talk of identity, as much as i wind myself up in it everyday. Each time someone says, “You don’t understand”, it becomes an accusation of Chinese-ness, of Western-ness, of Foreign-ness, of placement. I want to say, “No, you don’t understand”, but I never do. Instead, can we think about what circulates, what mixes and what blurs? How do these concepts give us relation to our pasts as much as to the person next to us?

[quotes and thoughts reflected from Irit Rogoff’s “We – Collectivities, Mutualities, Participations“]