William Rodney Herring

A new product offered by SunTrust Bank will help prevent identity theft. An AP article (in Monday's Post) reveals that although

A number of banks offer consumers free help if they are victims of ID theft...SunTrust is believed to be the first major bank to offer free monitoring to try to prevent ID theft.

Now identity theft has all kinds of real consequences, right? And CitiBank has a whole slew of cute commericals about the company's "identity theft solutions." My question is: What kind of thing must your identity be to be the kind of thing that can be stolen? Does it belong to you? Or is it you? Because if it's the latter, then how can it be stolen? And if it's the former--that is, one of your possessions--then what makes it properly yours?

The CitiBank commercials feature bodies discussing purchases that seem outrageously non-identical to the bodies voicing them. Not only that, the voices sound absolutely alien to the bodies. The bodies are clearly meant to represent (the victim's) true identity--in one spot, an elderly woman "identified" as "Ruth F. Identity Theft Victim" voices her recent purchase of "four of them mudflaps with the naked ladies on them": the body is the victim of the theft, the voice the perpetrator. And yet, if the body were the identity, the identity wouldn't have been stolen. The old woman still has the old woman's body. Thus, CitiBank's argument depends upon an essential equivocation. For the old woman's identity to have been anything, it had to have been the old woman (including her body), but for her identity to have been stolen, it had to have been something other than her or her body. And yet, "she" hasn't ceased to be her body subsequent to the theft. Has she even ceased to be her identity? Is this all just a misnomer? Because in some sense, all that's really been stolen is the old woman's purchasing power.

So approaching the question just slightly another way, what is it that is being stolen when your identity is stolen? Your social security number? Well, that's not really a thing, is it? Your credit? Same here: it's not real, and it's only potentially that it is anything at all. So what is entailed in this illusion we call identity--that seems to contain a number of other illusions?

Further, is this obsession with identity (and with identity protection) an evolving phenomenon? Or is it something that's always been part of the human condition? One way of thinking the former is if we consider the proliferation of virtual representations (or are they components?) of identity: credit card numbers (which make the material card beside the point, but which nevertheless can affect one's identity insofar as they change one's credit report); online monikers or aliases behind which one blogs or comments in cyberspace; accounts with online venders (such as Amazon) which contain "vital" statistics, as well as parts of one's personality: likes and dislikes. Have people spread themselves so thin by registering a little bit of their self in so many different places that they've made their very persons vulnerable to theft?

One counterargument to the idea that the phenomenon is even relatively new would be the biblical story of Jacob and Esau. I was reminded of the richness of this story recently when reading Girard's Violence and the Sacred. So I reread the Genesis story this morning (basically chs. 25-28). In the narrative, of course, Isaac, nearing death and blind, calls his son Esau to him to be blessed. While Esau retrieves the venison which Isaac has set as the condition for the blessing, Jacob slaughters two goats, serves his father the meat, and uses the skins to cover his skin because "Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man" (27:11). Jacob pulls off the heist and receives the blessing, which as I've always heard entails the father's inheritance. (I wonder about this because when Esau discovers the theft of his own identity and inheritance, he asks his father, "Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; [Gen. 25.29-34] and, behold, now he hath taken away my blessing" [27:36]. If the blessing were the same thing as the birthright, why would Esau lament the second theft?)

At any rate, this story shows a long record of interrogations into what constitutes identity. Girard also links this to the Odysseus narrative: if Jacob successfully disguises himself as Esau by wearing goatskins, Odysseus and his men escape the Cyclops' cave by hiding in long hair of the Cyclops' sheep's belly, that is, by disguising themselves as sheep. While the Mosaic story is about the anxiety of identity theft, the Homeric one celebrates the fluidity of identity, but nevertheless, both myths believe in identity's irreducibility to selfness.

And yet, if one is not identical to one's identity, then what is one's relation to one's identity? Which returns me to the question of: how do I know my identity is mine? And this involves two questions: how do I know that my identity (and not someone else's) is mine? And how do I know that my identity is mine (and not someone else's)? The latter question is the only one that matters to SunTrust, CitiBank, etc. But if the latter is a question worth asking--and certainly it must be if such financial institutions are going to bring full prosecutorial powers against so-called identity thieves--then the first question must be asked. But does it threaten to throw the entire enterprise of identity protection into jeopardy by throwing the whole need for identity protection into question?

Well, what if we look at it from the other way? Girard's intervention is the argument that a sacrifice must be made to prevent Isaac's curse from falling upon Jacob: "animals thus interpose themselves between father and son. They serve as a sort of insulation, preventing the direct contact that could lead only to violence" (5). He counts "Two sorts of substitution" here: "one brother for another" and "an animal for a man." He doesn't count one sort of animal for another: Esau goes out to hunt for the "savory meat," while Jacob takes two kids from the family's goat herd. Nevertheless, the important point is this: "Once we have focused attention on the sacrificial victim, the object originally signaled out for violence fades from view." In other words, to see how violence was averted in the story, we should notice how Isaac's attention was directed toward the sacrifice, in particular the goatskins, or put another way, because of the sacrifice (the goatskins), toward Jacob as Esau and not as Jacob. If our attention now falls on the element of deception in the story, for Isaac, it fell on his blessed son (even if it was Isaac's speech act itself, apparently incapable of being infelicitous, that conferred upon the son the status of blessed).

But as Girard argues, a certain deception is built into every sacrificial act: "Sacrificial substitution implies a degree of misunderstanding. Its vitality as an institution depends on its ability to conceal the displacement upon which the rite is based." And thus, I would argue that our continued reading of this story is one of misrecognition because the structural displacement remains concealed from us. That is to say, we read this story as one of deception--of identity theft--and as such assume such a thing as proper identity possession. This assumption is our misunderstanding. In other words, the question is not "How did Jacob steal Esau's identity (and therefore his inheritance)?" It is, rather, "Did Jacob steal Esau's identity?" And this question leads us to suss out the connection between identity and inheritance (such is the suggestion of Esau's final question for his father, and the telling fact that it rarely seems to get any attention: "Hast thou but one blessing, my father? bless me, even me also, O my father." [27:38]), which is to set us on the trail of the meaning of identity from the beginning: it was always linked to possession; it was always, in fact, the condition of possession. But this is not (or not only) to say that identity must exist prior to possession because in a certain sense, identity only need exist for the purpose of possessability. In other words, to put it plainly, the point of identity is to establish a node to which capital accumulation could begin to accrue.