What insurrection promises is civil war, as in the indefinite suspension of the social. If there are no rules in war, then there are no identities left to affirm in civil war. There is nothing to praise in the unjustness of war, except that it lays bare the starkness of how social categories promise peace but only deliver war. Behind every claim to an identity is a history of suffering, colonialism, violence, and exploitation that renders meaningless the statements of ‘proudly’ claiming ‘our’ identity. We should not pride ourselves on the victories of our enemies, but rather pride ourselves in finally coming to terms with the freedom to have been done with any identity whatsoever. This line of thought, taken up by Dylan Rodriguez and his work on Filipino American identity, leads to only one conclusion: “there really cannot exist a Filipino or ‘Filipino-American’ subject, or collective identity...” The challenge of civil war is to retain all of this statement’s polemical force and extended it to all identities. In the present society, there cannot really exist any identity category, except in recognizing how it only produces the opposite of the desired, stable, identity it promises; every identity merely tells the story of war–wars past and wars to come–and the asymmetrical power formations that have brought bodies to their present collective moment.
Hostis, “Introduction to the Politics of Cruelty” from Hostis 1, pg. 12
