Embracing Ourselves Part One
This is the first in a series of posts under the same general title.
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In general, the question I want to ask is: How do we embrace ourselves in our entirety? Specifically, I want to ask this question: How can we embrace not just those parts of ourselves we are proud of, and would like to be known by, but also—and especially—those parts of ourselves we are not proud of, and would not like to be known by?
The Question in General
I have very intentionally worded the general question in the plural—using “our-” rather than “my-” and “selves” rather than “self” (so “ourselves,” not just “myself”). What I want to focus on is “us,” not just in the distributive sense of each of us as individuals, but also and above all on “us” in the collective sense of the community of individuals to which “we” all belong. I want to ask not how “I” (whoever “I” happen to be—in logicians’ jargon: whatever value is given to that variable) can embrace “myself” in “my” entirety, including all those parts of me I’d rather not own up to. That is certainly a good and important question to ask oneself, of course. But what I want to focus on in this series of posts is, rather, the question how a community of individuals can embrace all those individuals who belong to that community. It is the question of how we, as a community, can embrace all of us, without exception, rather than embracing only some of us and excluding the rest of us.
Thus, I want to ask: “How do we (in the collective sense of us as a single community—any community—consisting of many diverse individuals) embrace ourselves (as just that: one single community) in our entirety (which is to say including each and every one of us all together equally, excluding none?”
That is, in general, the question I am asking.
That question is itself not only my question, in the sense of being a question that just happens to be of interest to me personally, whereas others may have different questions that interest them. It is also, and above all, our question, that is, a question of interest to us all—whether we know it or not. Indeed, it is a question that “interests” us in the deepest sense, because it is only by really asking ourselves that question that we can truly be “ourselves”—truly be the very community that, like it or not, “we” are.
In hopes of being as clear as I can, for all of our sakes, I will keep rephrasing the question a few more times. The question is:
How can any community—whatever that community may be, whether a nation, an ethnic community within a nation, an inter-ethnic community or even an an-ethnic one, of national or international scope, all the way even up to the universal community of all human beings (the great community of “all the living and the dead” that James Joyce invokes at the end of “The Dead,” the great final story in Dubliners)—embrace all of itself? How can a community, any community, as a whole embrace itself in its entirety, which is to say with no exceptions, inclusive of every member of the community? How can any community constitute itself as a community without in the process opposing to itself some of itself? How can any community constitute itself without in the process—surreptitiously, as it were— generating what contemporary French political thinker Jacques Rancière calls “the part that has no part” in that very community? How can community create and sustain itself without excluding some part of itself, which is to say some of the individuals who make it up, from full participation (notice that: “participation,” actively or fully being a part of, being “party to”) in that community (full “communion” with everyone else in it, we might say)?
How can “we” really be all of “us”?
In general, that’s what I’m asking.
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To be continued.