**1. Introduction**

Two approaches have recently emerged in the psychoanalysis of "identity politics": on one hand, a series of indictments have been leveraged against identity politics through the avenues of Freudian [1] and Lacano-Marxist analyses [2], and, on the other hand, a series of segmented, fractured forays have facilitated the analysis of identity categories through psychoanalytic constructs [3, 4]. The former undermines the validity of identity politics as a sociopolitical enterprise for comprehending oppression, and the latter renders the phrase "X is a social construct" intelligible in piecemeal psychoanalytic fashion, addressing each identity category (e.g., race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, nationality, and so on) without necessarily considering the intersection of these categories. Neither pathway for theorizing identity politics encounters the Real: the ungraspable, elusive, and traumatic center resisted by identity-based discourse but around which it fundamentally revolves. Through a Derridean-inspired deconstruction, I have developed an "aporia of identity" within which two forces ineluctably conflict with one another for determining the content of marginalized identities, namely intersubjectivity and intersectionality. The Real

of identity politics resides here: the irresolvable, unsymbolizable clash between the push-and-pull of identification and disidentification with the symbolic register.

"Identity politics" refers to the progressive Leftist discursive formation that foregrounds the political experience of peripheral subject positions. It forges a binarized system for responding to the fundamental question of identity-based movements: "What does it mean to be X (e.g., black, a woman, disabled/differently-abled, and so on)?" The first type of response submits the individual's identity to an agreed-upon signifier for collective organization against oppressive apparatuses; that is, individuals identify as "being-black" and "being-a-woman" through intersubjective engagement with political groups. These groups, however, inexorably cultivate a particular image, ideal, or paradigm of being-black and being-a-woman, such that individuals who might not "fit the description" cannot completely or sufficiently identify with the group's implicit representation of being-X. In the case of "being-a-woman," the politically-crafted image of womanness often assumes the positionality of white feminists, which, in the mid-to-late twentieth century, implied the positionality of being confined to (re)productive labor within their own homes. Women of color, conversely, labored outside their domiciles for decades, if not centuries, before white feminists demanded the capacity to leave the home for professional reasons [5]. The demands of white feminists in political organizations, thus, neglected the marginalized location of black women, introducing another type of response to the meaning of being-a-woman: intersectionality.

Intersectionality, as the second type of response, emerges at the crossing of the individual's various marginalized identities, taking into account someone's situatedness at the intersection of being-black, being-a-woman, being-impoverished, and so on [6]. In order to understand the meaning of being-X, we must also understand the meaning of being-A, being-B, being-C, etc. The aforementioned example of white feminists monopolizing the signification of "woman" demonstrates the necessity of interrogating such a signifier from a multitude of standpoints, including race and class. Even within the available categories of identification, individuals vary along further experiential axes: phenotypic expressions of color, gendered expressions of masculinity/femininity, and economic expressions of affluence/pennilessness to name a few. Discovering the intersection from which an individual's political experience can be (re)constructed, traced, and investigated, therefore, does not guarantee the capacity to adequately signify the individual's political experience in the social order. The meaning of being-X within the intersectional refusal of signification reveals the antinomic pole, movement, and determination of identity in the context of political engagement. The first type of response (i.e., submission to the signifier) firmly positions the individual as a political subject with respect to an established symbolic identification, and the second type of response (i.e., resistance to the signifier) loosely positions the individual as a political subject with respect to established symbolic identifications. To be clear, the intersectional inclination to constantly revise signification does not completely dissociate the individual from subjectification; rather, the intersectional push away from identity always corresponds to an intersubjective pull toward identification with additional signifiers.

The Derridean [7, 8] formulation of the "aporia of identity" appears as follows: the conditions for the possibility of being-X are simultaneously the conditions for the impossibility of being-X. The conditions for (im)possibility nominalize the action of identifying with political signifiers, which illuminate the individual's political experience in the social order while also obscuring it. Invoking signifiers to describe one's marginalized position, if the aim of identity politics has been accurately formulated,
