Peter Osborne describes identity politics in "Radicalism without Limit? Discourse, Democracy and the Politics of Identity", as a politics wherein "oppressed social identities are transformed directly into oppositional identities through a celebration of difference which inverts the prevailing structure of value but leaves the structure of difference untouched." (from _Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism_)
Adorno has a much more interesting definition (echoing a little i think marx's comments on religion as the opiate of the masses, the cry of the oppressed, etc): identity as "security, as an existential value, [that] turns from something longed for and denied into a presence which is here and now, and is independant of what prevents it from being." and, in terms of a connection between identity and destiny: "The identity of the self and its alienation accompany each other from the very beginning; whence the bad romanticism of the concept of alienation in the first place. A precondition of freedom, identity is at one and the same time also and immediately the principle of determinism." (_Negative Dialectics_)
Angela _________