Globality and Meta-Identity

Identity came to be the primary issue of human knowledge under conditions of the classical, bourgeois in social terms, modernity. It was an essentially contradictory issue since modern identity is pegged to the anonymous rule of capital. The emerging conditions of globality, as the influence of the postmodern thought and the blockbusters like “Matrix” show, call for the new hermeneutics of the Self that dispenses with the metaphysics of self-identity. Personal and even cultural identity is being tied ever more tightly to the immediacy and the generic nature for a new hermeneutics of the Self that dispenses with the metaphysics of self-identity of the corporeal existence related to the communicative nature of the globalized sociality. These changes open new perspectives on the phenomenology of Self. They provide means for establishing links between pre-reflective self-awareness and cultural institutions. The newly discovered experiential depth of identity is in some ways similar to the concept of Self as “original ancestor” or the one who “has not yet come into existence” observed, for example, in ancient Taoism. No doubt, the conditions of globality are bound to change radically the existing notions of Self and identity.

Bio: Professor Vladimir V. Maliavin, born 1950, studied and taught at Moscow University , where he got his PhD in history. We worked also at the Russian Academy of Sciences and later taught and did research work in Japan , USA , France and China . He published more than 20 books on various aspects of China 's and Russia 's cultural history and comparative civilizations. He is currently Director of the Institute of Slavic studies in Tamkang University .