There is . . . no identity that is definitively fixed, stable, and unified. The constructive act of identification always fails -- there are always supplements, instabilities, fragmentation, slippages, there are always "'unwelcome effects'. . . distortions and excesses that point to its precarious and contingent constitution." (Laclau and Zac 1994, 32). . . . But there is a further turn: this failure of identification also always fails to hold, this failure is not the permanent undoing of identity, but rather the constitutive condition for identity (Rakatansky 1995, 9f)
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001