Arnon Grunberg

As

Witness

And here's more about identity - Kwame Anthony Appiah in NYT:

'“As a white man,” Joe begins, prefacing an insight, revelation, objection or confirmation he’s eager to share — but let’s stop him right there. Aside from the fact that he’s white, and a man, what’s his point? What does it signify when people use this now ubiquitous formula (“As a such-and-such, I …”) to affix an identity to an observation?

Typically, it’s an assertion of authority: As a member of this or that social group, I have experiences that lend my remarks special weight. The experiences, being representative of that group, might even qualify me to represent that group. Occasionally, the formula is an avowal of humility. It can be both at once. (“As a working-class woman, I’m struggling to understand Virginia Woolf’s blithe assumptions of privilege.”) The incantation seems indispensable. But it can also be — to use another much-loved formula — problematic.

The “as a” concept is an inherent feature of identities. For a group label like “white men” to qualify as a social identity, there must be times when the people to whom it applies act as members of that group, and are treated as members of that group. We make lives as men and women, as blacks and whites, as teachers and musicians. Yet the very word “identity” points toward the trouble: It comes from the Latin idem, meaning “the same.” Because members of a given identity group have experiences that depend on a host of other social factors, they’re not the same.'

(...)

'Not if we take the point about intersectionality. If Joe had grown up in Northern Ireland as a gay white Catholic man, his experiences might be rather different from those of his gay white Protestant male friends there — let alone those of his childhood pen pal, a straight, Cincinnati-raised reform Jew. While identity affects your experiences, there’s no guarantee that what you’ve learned from them is going to be the same as what other people of the same identity have learned.

We’ve been here before. In the academy during the identity-conscious 1980s, many humanists thought that we’d reached peak “as a.” Some worried that the locution had devolved into mere prepositional posturing. The literary theorist Barbara Johnson wrote, “If I tried to ‘speak as a lesbian,’ wouldn’t I be processing my understanding of myself through media-induced images of what a lesbian is or through my own idealizations of what a lesbian should be?” In the effort to be “real,” she saw something fake. Another prominent theorist, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, thought that the “as a” move was “a distancing from oneself,” whereby the speaker became a self-appointed representative of an abstraction, some generalized perspective, and suppressed the actual multiplicity of her identities. “One is not just one thing,” she observed.'

(...)

'So we might do well to ease up on “as a” — on the urge to underwrite our observations with our identities. “For me,” Professor Spivak once tartly remarked, “the question ‘Who should speak’ is less crucial than ‘Who will listen?’”'

Read the article here.

Indeed, the "as a" almost always presumes authority, but it's always problematic. Even if you say "as a veteran" or "as a survivor of the Holocaust".
You can say "I'm a veteran" or "I survived the Holocaust" or "I'm an orphan" -- but you should not convince yourself that all other veterans, survivors, orphans share your experiences.

Identity is of of of the more problematic constructions we are dealign with, but the moment this construction is used as an excuse to convince others of your own authority, it almost always becomes ugly.
And no, this is not to say that I confuse victims and perpetrators. The philosopher Avishai Margalit writes in "The Ethics of Memory" about the "moral witness." The moment one turns this position -- to use a more or less neutral term -- into an identity the moral witness taints himself. A witness, by nature, is somebody who speaks because he witnessed certain things, and a moral witness speaks not only because he saw certain things, but certain things were done to him. The moment a witness starts speaking on behalf of other witnesses, the witness becomes a Messiah, a politician or somebody looking for authority.

A last note: I trust my dentist to have certain skills and knowledge (expertise) but I'd leave right away if he would tell me: "As a dentist I'm entitled to examine your teeth, and you my dear friend, are not entitled to examine my teeth."

Individualism is often understood as a lack of solidarity, but I would say that the acknowledgment, the acceptance of your own loneliness enables you to feel a certain amount of solidarity with other equally lonely beings.

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