Once upon a time I used to think of myself as a political radical.  Nowadays I think of myself as radically apolitical.  The nearest I ever came to explaining why is probably found here.  The passage comes from a discussion of Zdenek Nejedly, an eminent musicologist who became Minister of Education under the Czechoslovak communist regime in the 1950s, in my book The Coasts of Bohemia:

But such banality plays supremely well in the corridors of power — at least as power is organized in modern states, where rule is configured in terms of representation of the imagined community of the governed. For what is created in this confluence of the generic and the particular is, precisely, a presumption of identity: the immediate identity of an artist and his milieu, of a poem and the "natural tongue" in which it is written; the identity of the times and spaces of individuals' biographies and nations' histories; the identity of a national community and all those — artists, poets, politicians — who are now claimed to be speaking in its name.  A closed circle comes to enclose self and society, endlessly mirroring the one to the other.  

Such simplifications are integral to the very possibility of modern politics.  It is this presumption of identity that constitutes the ubiquitous collective subjects of modernity — "the Nation," "Society," "the Working Class," "Women," choose your poison — whose spectral presence (they are invariably spoken of and for) authorizes the exercise of power.

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The more total the social transformation envisaged, the simpler and more encompassing these representations of identity have to be.  The corollary, of course, is ever-sharper demarcations between Us and Them; horizons become frontiers, frontiers become borders, borders require guards.

IDENTITY = BEING IN DENIAL