Book 82 - Amin Maalouf "On Identity"

[jazzy_dave]

Amin Maalouf "On Identity" (The Harvill Press)




I did not think I took enough time before to explore the notion of identity and how simple and complex it can be. But that changed after reading this book. Amin Maalouf succeeds in this remarkable attempt to study and in some ways simplify the notion of identity while underlining that there is no major identity, but, on the contrary, it is our multiple affiliations that define our identity. It also demonstrates how certain identity problems cause major problems ranging, sometimes, to ethnic massacres.

Starting from a trivial question that has often been asked, Amin Maalouf wonders about the notion of identity, the passions it arouses, its deadly drifts. Why is it so difficult to freely assume one's various affiliations? Why at the end of this century must self-assertion so often be accompanied by the negation of others? Will our societies be indefinitely subject to tension, to the outbursts of violence, for the sole reason that the people who live side by side do not all have the same religion, the same skin colour, the same culture of origin? Is there a law of nature or a law of history that condemns men to kill each other in the name of their identity?

t is because he refuses this fatality that he has chosen an answer and a way forward in multiculturalism a book of wisdom and lucidity, of anxiety but also of hope.