Touch Without Grip: Theological Reflections on Identity and Beyond it

The presentation discusses a possibility of post-ontological understandings of identity and community based on the Balkan notion of komšiluk. In the first step, I will present Jean-Luc Nancy’s “post-ontological” approach to the problem of being and identity. This will be followed by a critical re-reading of his two central concepts: touch and mêlée. Nancy radically insists on the ontology of being-with in which there is no hierarchical distinction between the order of beings or higher principles that rule their encounters, i.e. the process of being mit-ein-ander through touch is all there is. Consequently, every attempt to speak about some “stabile” elements of identity is seen as a violent attempt to essentialize something that should be a permanent process of mixing (mêlée). In the second step, I will focus on Rudi Visker’s view on identity, and discuss a possibility of a non-reductive difference, which is not understood as an ontological core, but as a mèontological meaningfulness. This ownness, however, is not a realization that one reaches through a confessional introspection, discovering one’s “true” self. Quite the contrary, ownness should be seen not as a discovery of a strong subject, but as a realization of de-centered subjects. In the final part, I will try to make a step in the direction of Balkan contextual theology and ponder upon a relationship between religion and non-totalizing identity. In other words, I will try to develop a theological metaphor that is based on the specific contextual reading of the “experience of encounter” in Balkan countries, as way to think about religion as an “identity-space” which can facilitate a specific meeting-in-difference. That meeting should, at the same time, go beyond simple essentialization of identity (criticized by Nancy) and respect specific “ownness” of actors (underlined by Visker). The symbolic anchor will be the Balkan concept of “komšiluk”. Komšiluk will thus be conceived as a “middle ground”, a “no man’s land”, i.e. as a space that belongs to all but is not owned by anyone, a community which is not based upon pre-existing similarities, but comes into being though a creative tension in which a meeting with the other is coterminous with the discovery of one’s self.