The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony

by Denise Riley

Marlene Dietrich had the last line in Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil : "What does it matter what you say about other people?" The author ponders the What does it matter what you say about yourself? She wonders why the requirement to be a something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own subject. She decides that some hesitations and awkwardness in inhabiting many categories of the person—including those celebrated by what is sometimes termed identity politics—need not evidence either psychological weakness or political lack of nerve. Neither an "identity" nor a "nonidentity" can quite convince. But if this discomfort inhering in self-characterization needs to be fully admitted and registered—as something that is simultaneously linguistic and affective—it can also be cheerfully tolerated. Here language is not treated as a guileful thing that leads its speakers astray. Though the business of being called something, and of being positioned by that calling, is often an unhappy affair, irony can offer effective therapy. Even if uncertain and volatile categorizations do trouble the politics that they also shape, they hardly weaken the empathetic solidarity that is distinct from identification. The verbal irony of self-presentation can be politically helpful. Questioning the received diction of the self cannot be dismissed merely as a luxury of those in secure positions, but instead can move toward a conception of a constructive nonidentity. This extended meditation on the language of the self within contemporary social politics also considers the lyrical "I" and linguistic emotionality, the historical status of irony, and the possibilities of a nonidentitarian solidarity that is unapologetically alert to the affect of language.

Genres: Theory, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Poetry

233 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Denise Riley (born 1948) is an English poet and philosopher who began to be published in the 1970s.

Her poetry is remarkable for its paradoxical interrogation of selfhood within the lyric mode. Her critical writings on motherhood, women in history, "identity", and philosophy of language, are recognised as an important contribution to feminism and contemporary philosophy. She was Professor of Literature with Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and is currently A.D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University. She was formerly Writer in Residence at Tate Gallery London, and has held fellowships at Brown University and at Birkbeck, University of London. Among her poetry publications is Penguin Modern Poets 10, with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair (1996). She lives in London.

Reviews

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was very clever, in some places amusing and in some places frighteningly relatable but overall it built up to a nothing except a calling into question of everything we could ever say about ourselves. Even irony is a false friend and irony is equivocal. I would say always/already equivocal but after reading this book I am scared to use cliches like that although as Riley points out trying to avoid using them also ends you up in a communicative cul de sac (this was the relatable thing).

She's very well read and seems to have some sort of symbiotic relationship with Judith Butler (maybe it is just that they are friends) where I found this book by reading Butler but this is also peppered with references to Butler. But this is peppered with a million references. It's very clever and kind of privileged, you get the impression the author must have had a lot of reading and thinking time to come up with this and I am jealous as hell (but possibly also not focussed enough or clever enough even if I had the time).

Then the solidarity I thought sounded promising but she left it right to the end and said almost nothing about it. I like that you don't have to identify with or be the same for solidarity but there also seems to be a knowing wink here about solidarity as a vain attempt to stave off the irrelevance of self vis a vis ageing and death. Which is admittedly starting to terrify me, so much so that i structured that sentence agrammatically (that wasn't deliberate).

Maybe sometime when I am drunk I will reread this book in case it is better that way. I will enjoy the echo and narcissus drunk anyway: "Fuck you" LOL. This uses a lot of Kierkegaard and I remember needing to be quite drunk to read that back in 2007 or whenever it was. I don't know why I read it, I honestly think it would have something more useful for me about how "care" and "teaching" and "parenting" and everything are made up things but also things we socially probably can't just walk away from. Probably. But this is way more theoretical.

I wonder what books like this are for? They must be fun to write but is this just an extended conversation with other very clever people (like Judith Butler)? But I feel I should also pay better attention because the comment on my article (twice now from different reviewers) is that I am not using theory much I am just making shit up. So I guess I should try to understand stuff like this.

Should you read this? If that's an honest question then probably not. It would probably be useful to some people but those people can probably work it out for themselves and not ask me for advice. The narcissus and echo bit if pretty amusing though. Childish but funny. And I will reread it sometime to get my head around it. She says her version of Echo is agentic.

I think maybe I am just not smart enough to understand this in one reading...

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've got a lot of conflicting feelings about this one: Riley's flair for description and poet's eye for diction makes the reading positively scintillating at times, and wonderfully compelling. On the other hand, the self-same verbal skills engender a growing weight to the book's verbal structure and, at times, begin to take on the sense of pure excessiveness, as if the critical project had fallen away somewhere. Similarly, I love what I believe Riley's doing with identity politics are crises in representation and self-understanding, but at times I feel like she's drawing circles where more straightforward lines and dots would carry her arguments and points across much more coherently. As a poetic exercise, that's all cool; but as pedagogical literature the approach has its limits, as well as its aforesaid strengths. Whatever else, it possessed me to read more of her work, as well as to sit up straight and listen to what she has to say. An effective exercise, to be sure.

[Kcthinker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like this book. Riley is a good writer.

I know, if my vocabulary was stronger to the twentieth power, of smarts, I would have like the book more & feel smarter than what I feel now.

I kept looking up a lot of words. This put a lot of stalling into my reading. I stalled so many times that I am non-stop asking, if I am comprehending what Riley is asking me to understand.

I scored myself a 30%, in my confidence, in my comprehension. I am sure a smarter and a stronger word lover would gain more inspiration than I did. I wish Riley would had a remedial version of this book.

If I had to do my reading experience again with this book, I would have downloaded the book to my reader so I could look up more words.

[Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a few moments in The Words of Selves where Denise Riley expresses her reservations about identifying herself as a writer, of the guilt and 'feelings of fraud' that accompany that self-identification. Let it be known however, that without reservation, Riley is writer. A bloody good one. But perhaps such demurrals are to expected from book all about the hesitancies, paradoxes and necessities of speaking about oneself.

And such self-referential loops are abound in Riley’s book: writing on the affective power of language, Riley’s prose exhibits - performs - this very power as she wrings from language its expressive potential in an almost acrobatic display of intelligence and wit. Under the microscope is not just the act of writing, whose intensely ‘impersonal’ nature Riley aims to demonstrate, but also vicissitudes of lyric poetry, with Riley’s own poetic compositions occasionally adorning the pages of the book.

None of this is to say that Riley is an easy writer. Drawing from a philosophical tradition whose luminaries include Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Judith Butler and, most prominently for the book, Jacques Lecercle, Riley’s easy familiarity with this heritage also presumes a reader's acquaintance with many of the problematics drawn from this backdrop. Fortunately, Riley is confident enough in her own ability to let her own wonderful turns of phrase govern her prose, allowing discussions to unfold on her terms, rather than letting the weight of citation and reference to drag down the rhythm of the book.

Tying together Riley’s multifaceted reflections on self-description is her advocacy and defence of irony as a means to defuse and soothe over the sometimes unbearable pressure and weight of 'being-an-x'. She writes indeed of the ‘political necessity of irony’ as that which, by rendering the all-too-farmilar strange again, allows for a political practice more responsive and better equipped to deal with the necessary ambiguities of identity. But this is just a teaser of what is the upshot of a cavalcade of insight after spectacularly written insight into the nature of language, subjectivity and politics. No reservations here.