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Identity is what is naturally given and is therefore considered a possession, yet it is also which possesses the individual. If on the one hand, identity is constituted by a personal experience and an individual history, it is also inevitably a product of the otherness of cultural, social, and linguistic determinants. As the individual reconstructs and reflects upon an imaginary identity, he/she cultivates an illusion of conscious control that only serves to occlude the aleatory and contingent nature of this imaginary essence.
- Karl Racevskis
The Final Foucault (21)
The essence of humankind and what it means to be human have been questioned for some time and continue to be issues of discussion for philosophers, writers, sociologists, scientists and most other scholars. In the Garden of Eden, Eve bit the apple in a sort of social rebellion, or as Michel Foucault would say in a "struggle against a constraint of individuality" (330). Astronomers search the cosmos for answers to how "we" fit in to this universe. Biologists name and identify species, which helps humans better understand the world they live in. Philosophers such as, Nietzsche, Foucault, Plato, and countless others have pondered who are "we" and how did we become who we are. One of the fundamental problems with humankind's search for identity is the impulse to discover a "fixed essence that exists independently of the range of discourses made available to individuals" (Giroux 14).
But as more recent scholarship has demonstrated, our identity is not a stable core; it grows and builds depending on our communities, social interactions, and power relationships. Further, there are different levels of identity. There is the identity of humankind. There is the national identity and the role it plays in the construction of the individual identity. Below the national identity and the many different facets that go into shaping it are the different communities that contribute to the formation of who an individual is: the cultural apparatus, the social, and the school apparatus. This article works under the premise that humans are social creatures, and that identity construction is circularly structured. The identity of humankind shapes the identity of the individual and everything in between and viceversa. This article outlines this structure, from the identity of humankind down...