Abstract

This dissertation situates the political and technological preoccupation with uniquely identifying people as a problem of the representation or "appearance" of the person in several modern political thinkers. Although the technologies of "personal identification" are largely the product of an empiricism that, in and of itself, has no formal political justification, the political meaning of identifying people is often explained as a consequence of modern state projects to make people "legible" , or simply the expression of the police power, which can be balanced with the right to privacy. ;While not disputing the importance of these frameworks, the dissertation argues that the question of identifying people resides in a more difficult ambiguity in modern political thought, originating with special acuity in Hobbes's vision of the political order of a "Dominion of Persons." It argues that the space of representation opened by Hobbes contains a tension between the radicalness of the private and the exposure that general representation enables. The proposition that everyone can represent their 'person' as a work of art and is entitled to a world of the private where their identity can be as they wish runs into conflict with other strains that require a strong binding between the person and the sovereign voice of address. ;Arendt's vision of the political cherishes the appearance or "disclosure" of one's unique identity in public as the foundation of political life as such, but the priority of light over darkness runs into crisis in a twentieth century politics marked by monuments to Unknown Soldiers and Displaced Persons camps. Following Arendt, the dissertation revisits the sovereign prerogative to compel "proof" of the person's identity in recent communitarian arguments and then in Althusser, Kafka, Derrida, Blackstone and Agamben. ;The dissertation concludes with the argument that the right to privacy should be affirmed, but also that the demand for personal identification can be challenged democratically in the spirit of Hobbes's original call for a voluntarist, self-representing person by affirming the capacity, within political modernity, to create oneself as a work of art