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.

In both Deceit, Desire, & the Novel: Self and Other in Literature and Violence and the Sacred, René Girard theorizes “‘triangular’ desire.” It’s the title of his first chapter in the former and culminates in “Freud and the Oedipus Complex” in the latter where Girard argues that the Oedipus Complex itself—wherein Freud theorized around what he both saw and didn't quite (want to) see as mimetic or triangular desire—by helping to obscure the fact of mimetic desire, serves to intensify the “double bind” that encapsulates the violent potentiality of mimetic desire. (It is this last point that enables Girard to conclude that we should “cast off that most burdensome of all mythologies: the myth of the Oedipus complex” [192].) The double bind, like Freud’s superego, is a more or less repressed anxiety, but it arises from the recognition that the object that one wants is altogether unpossessible as long as one wants to please the Other one admires and who also wants to possess the object. And this more or less conscious recognition that “The object represents a desire shared by both” means that “such sharing leads not to harmony, as one might suppose, but to bitter conflict” (181).

But first, a bit about triangular desire: In DDN, Girard’s formulation of desire is only posited as a “novelistic” desire or, put another way, a desire that novelists, as they’ve attended more and more to the individual or self (and, by extension, to subjectivity), have exposed. In other words, Girard is careful not to claim – in this book – that desire works this way anywhere but in the novel. However, he does broach the topic of “metaphysical desire” in his chapter called “The Metamorphosis of Desire,” when he claims: