Wrecked out of our wounds: Identity politics and the metaphysics of presence

Identity politics is primeval -- rooted in the pre-Oedipal*. It always evokes a "metaphysics of presence" (term from Derrida); the "good breast versus the bad breast" (terms from Melanie Klein).

Those who say that they are postmodern, and yet invoke identity politics at every turn are engaging in primeval sorcery, because they believe that they see more at hand than is actually capable of presenting itself to them.

A "metaphysics of presence" is fundamentally an erroneous or "magical" way of seeing. It is erroneous because it oversimplifies what is actually there to be seen and understood. It is "magical" because this mode of seeing is creative and inventive, actively constructing what it claims to perceive, rather than passively observing it.

The "metaphysics of presence" is unavoidably postmodern, since the postmodernist must make initial reference to presences that "appear" to him or her, before deconstructing these appearances through clashing them against other "appearances". The postmodernist, then, is involved in masking as well as unmasking, and plays the role of a kind of magician.

Ultimately, what is lost -- psychologically and ontologically -- though the mutual clashing and splintering of opposed identities is not the firmness of reality as such(as with a postmodernist interpretation of the world), but the firmness of the boundaries of identity. It is these that shatter and fragment, leaving only the core of a vulnerable human essence (Note: not as an "absence" but fundamentally as a "presence" of core humanity, stripped of its identity postulates. This is the nakedness of the human soul that we encounter at the end of Black Sunlight.)

In Marechera's writing,  the pure essence of human experience is on display, with the other signifiers of presence (such as race and gender) shattered and gone.

We are thus "wrecked out of our wounds", according to Marechera.  In this particular case, which is far from being postmodern, what wrecks us is also what redeems us. We rediscover our true humanity as a metaphysical human core only after experiencing and overwhelming imposition of the metaphysics of presence through a visceral encounter with opposing and contradictory identities. It is this encounter that wrecks us "out of our wounds".

The postmodernist, who retreats periodically to his or her island of skepticism, cannot lay claim to the same sort of shamanistic experience of reading.

NOTE: *Jungians see this early childhood level of consciousness as being simply different from the rational, adult norm.  It's a realm of transformation and mystical consciousness.  We all have components of that  in us; the ability to see ourselves as part of life's  great "oneness".