On 10 February 2026, I participated in an event at Spui25 where Alexander Douglas gave a talk about the digital self in relation to his latest book, Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self. In the book, Douglas draws on three distinct sources—the Zhuangzi, the philosophy of Spinoza, and the theory of René Girard—to argue that the human quest for a fixed and definitive identity can be seen as the fall of humanity. Driven by the ‘romantic lie’ that there is a stable self to be found, we are drawn into rivalry, anxiety, and various pathologies. The path away from this identity regime, Douglas suggests, lies in embracing indeterminacy, ambiguity, uncertainty, and difference.
Thinking through processes of becoming is necessary in our current culture of stasis. On the one hand, we are constantly fed identities, commodities, trends, and viral moments; on the other hand, it is increasingly difficult to attain any of them. There is more choice but less room for human agency. Desires are reproduced at an ever-accelerating pace, yet they are never allowed to run their course, keeping us hooked to their constant flow. Mechanisms that spark transformation—processes of breakdowns and build-ups that chart paths toward unknown horizons—are necessary to explore. This environment underscores the urgency of Douglas’ research into escaping the self.
Intrigued by the book and its quest against identity, I invited Douglas for a written interview. In our exchange, we discuss identity, language, mimesis, affect, and transformation.
Mela Miekus: I would first like to ask you where and how this research began for you. Why did you choose to work with (and against) identity? What is your identity?
Alexander Douglas: My identity, like everyone’s, is a cacophony of echoes of all the figures around me, whom I’ve taken as models to imitate, often unconsciously. The three figures I try to think with in Against Identity—Zhuangzi, Spinoza, and Girard—could be seen as models for various features of myself, although I wasn’t thinking about this while writing. These features are all quite incompatible with each other. Girard exemplifies the sort of dignified scholar I aspired to become when I went into academia. Spinoza echoes a certain intemperate rebellious streak, which I usually regret recognising in myself but sometimes invite. Zhuangzi expresses a bit of gentle chaos and a carefreeness that I occasionally manage successfully to summon. Beyond this, the figures are perhaps screens upon which I project my ancestry. Zhuangzi and Spinoza reflect the Luso-Asian heritage I inherited from my mother, while Girard, although I have no French ancestry, cuts the same sort of suave and erudite figure that my father embodied. Of course, it seems silly to suggest that I was engaged in self-discovery in writing a book called Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self, but that isn’t quite what I mean. In the conclusion I propose that we might benefit from converting our search for ourselves into a discovery of the other. I think I went through a bit of that conversion, although there is still a long way to go, and that’s what I was trying to report on in the book. But there is also a story of facing a peculiar kind of loss and grief, which drove much of the thought in this book. I think that through grief I discovered a deeper joy, and I used this book to share some of it.
Mela Miekus: In the first section of the book, you discuss Zhuangzi, the ancient Chinese philosopher to whom we ascribe a compilation of canonical texts within the philosophical tradition of Daoism. Within this section, you pay a lot of attention to language in developing your arguments. I enjoyed how you conceptualise wo versus wu and guide the reader through additional terms such as sang, which beautifully illustrate the different modes of selfing and unselfing. Can you talk me through your process here and the role of language in theorising this section of the book?
Alexander Douglas: The Zhuangzi uses language in a very rich way, and not just to convey what my analytic philosopher colleagues would call “propositional content”. This is made quite explicit, for example in the second chapter where a series of deep questions about language and meaning are asked but not answered:

“But human speech is not just a blowing of air. Speech has something of which it speaks, something it refers to”. Yes, but what it refers to is peculiarly unfixed. So is there really anything it refers to? Or has nothing ever been referred to? You take it to be different from the chirping of baby birds. But is there really any difference between them? Or is there no difference? Is there any dispute, or is there no dispute? Anything demonstrated, or nothing demonstrated? (Brook Ziporyn’s translation)

Clearly it cannot be as simple as looking past the symbols themselves to the meaning—the Zhuangzi leaves it quite mysterious what precisely there is behind the symbols and whether it can really be captured by us. This means that if we want to enter into the spirit of Zhuangzi we have to look carefully at the way it plays with the surface features of language—the part of language that resembles the “chirping of baby birds”—that is, the sounds and the shapes of the symbols. This is extremely difficult with such an ancient text, since we have only partial knowledge of how the original authors would have used the symbols in question and what sounds they might have been associated with. The Pinyin romanisations I use (following convention) spell out the sounds of modern Mandarin, not the language that would have been spoken by the authors of Zhuangzi. I depend entirely on the work of scholars to try to grasp this dimension of Zhuangzi. One thing that can’t be ignored is the number of ways there are to refer to “I” or the self—ji 己, wo 我, wu 吾, zi 自, etc. Meanwhile the characters sometimes placed with these, to indicate an absence or a losing of self—wu 無, sang 喪—have rich philosophical meanings of their own, which mere one-to-one translation can’t convey. It’s not only the words that are different but the way that language is used—for example how one and the same character can be noun, verb, or adjective, or somewhere in between. The whole text appears to be a sort of dance of words. I’m far from understanding this dance, but I wanted to try to get across a little of its sense, even though this meant challenging the reader a bit (and setting myself an extreme challenge when it came to recording the audio version!).
Mela Miekus: Throughout the book, you explore the concept of ‘identitylessness’ through the perspectives of three different philosophers: Zhuangzi, Spinoza, and Girard. While we learn much about how they view identitylessness, I would be curious to hear your own understanding of what our ‘communion in a shared identitylessness’ could look like.
Alexander Douglas: It’s hard to imagine what it would really look like, but we can put away one fear that holds us back. People are often afraid that if we relax our constant activity of self-definition and categorisation then things will melt into a kind of undifferentiated sludge—that we’ll “make a sop of all this solid globe”, as Ulysses warns in Troilus and Cressida. In fact, the purity that people worry about protecting is a myth to begin with. When people become more integrated and open to each other’s influence—more willing to be transformed through their encounters with each other—they don’t lose their unique characteristics at all. The less we all strive to develop our own distinct character and protect it from dilution by foreign influences, the more individually characterful and idiosyncratic we become. We can see this in common experience. The people I’ve found to be most charmingly and recognisably themselves are not those who curate, protect, and insulate their personality. Rather, it’s the people who are most open to changing and learning from others. This is for the same reason that the most cosmopolitan and multicultural places are often the most unmistakably distinctive. So, when trying to visualise what I called “communion in a shared identitylessness”, I think we should expect the unexpected: such a communion might bring out our individuality and all the differences that make us interesting, in a way that individualism could never have done. Uniqueness might be one of those things that vanish when you pursue them directly but emerge in full splendour when you allow yourself to be distracted by something else. So while I can’t say what communion in shared identitylessness would be like, I’d like to suggest that it won’t be homogenous or uniform or bland, which seems to be what those who don’t like this idea fear in it. I would also add that if, as the thinkers I examined suggest, identity gets in the way of love—erecting distinctions as barriers among us and obscuring us behind definite concepts that leave out a great deal—then a condition of shared identitylessness could also be one of pure love.
Mela Miekus: Throughout the book, you show that identity is never born of a true self but of an unconscious mimesis of the models around us. You note that imitation itself is not necessarily the problem, but rather the fact that it happens unconsciously. What about a conscious mimesis? Do you think we are capable of creating space (or a shield) between the identity we imitate in public and the personal “self” that does not have to be led by it?
Alexander Douglas: Yes, I think that it’s better to imitate consciously than unconsciously. One important theme in the book, which I find in all three central figures, is that there is no option of simply withdrawing from mimesis. Imitation—mimesis—is just how our identity forms. Heroic ideas of authenticity and self-determination are just dust we throw up to hide from our fundamentally mimetic, unoriginal nature. Mimesis naturally leads us towards self-deception: the figure we imitate appears to us as a model, not an imitator. Wanting to be like that figure, we are tempted to tell ourselves a story in which we are the original: the genuine article whom others wish to imitate. Realising that everyone is thoroughly mimetic, even our models, can help us to overcome the impulse to tell ourselves these wishful stories. Nevertheless, even if we imitate consciously, fixed models trap us into fixed ways of being and seeing the world. What the book suggests is that we should escape, not from imitation as such, but from the imitation of fixed models—that we should learn to imitate and be influenced in a more fluid, flexible, even fickle way. We should be open to as many mimetic models as possible and always ready to discover new ones—to listen to voices we never thought to listen to before. Nor, as I said, do we need to worry that we’ll lose our unique and distinctive character in doing so. Again, being unique and distinctive is somehow much deeper and richer than being definite or definable by some fixed concept. This is something I learned from watching my father going through the stages of Alzheimer’s disease, learning at every stage that none of the things I took to define him actually defined him and accepting in the end that love reaches deeper than identity. We remain ourselves by transforming; our essence is wandering. This is a truth revealed not by thought but by love, and philosophy, as Raimon Panikkar said, is much more the wisdom of love than the love of wisdom.
Mela Miekus: The third section of the book is committed to the philosophies of twentieth-century French theorist René Girard. Within it, there is a subsection on “Limits of Political Liberation”, and I’m curious about how you navigate Girard’s opinions here. What about the need for political liberation stemming from a direct threat to one’s life or one’s community’s life? Is this a point that surpasses identity?
Alexander Douglas: Yes, definitely. Girard is responding to a particular species of fantasy to which intellectuals are particularly susceptible: the fantasy that liberating us from certain structures, institutions, and prohibitions will remove our deepest sources of frustration and anxiety. Girard warns us that there is no such saving utopia—that the problem lies in what we are, not what we have built. None of that is to say that there is no point in trying to escape from directly harmful oppression. For example, when I discussed Girard’s observation that abolishing private property would not bring about an end to human competitiveness and envy, I noted that it might nevertheless (for all I know) rescue a great many people from material deprivation, and that would be reason enough to pursue it. I wasn’t trying to make a point about private property as such but rather to note that even if liberation from our deepest troubles is impossible, liberation from certain oppressions certainly is possible. We might not be able to escape the frustrations of mimesis, but many people could escape being brutalised, controlled, and exploited to the extent that they currently are. That is very much, as you put it, a point that surpasses identity, except that I think identity-thinking can often get in the way of liberation. For one thing, of course, certain notions of identity are often part of the motivation or at least the justification for brutalisation, control, and exploitation. Moreover, once people define themselves in terms of these notions, moving to a situation in which they make less sense becomes unthinkable: people feel that allowing this would mean ceasing to be what they are. So things don’t change, even when they are horrible. And finally, it is surprisingly easy for a well-meaning project like overthrowing a system of oppression to become a new way for people to identify themselves, and for preserving this identity to become their priority rather than the original motivation. People can even get into the position of avoiding any actual solution to a problem because they have defined themselves in terms of a struggle against that problem. So the situation is difficult but not hopeless: our commitment to our identities makes it hard for us to really help each other, but if we weaken that commitment then many possibilities for social reform open up, even if Girard is right that the image of total liberation is a mirage.
Mela Miekus: Let’s talk about affect as a driver of the self. Your work emphasises the problem with imitation, external models, and the idea of an empty self; empty in the sense that it lacks a stable, inherent core. But for the self to appear “empty”, we would first have to imagine it as autonomous and sovereign; as something with borders that needs to be filled.
Judith Butler, in Precarious Life, argues that the self is always relational and fundamentally precarious, constituted through ties to others that can be undone. An “I” cannot lose a “you” and return unchanged, because that “you” was part of the “I”, Butler explains. Have you considered this precarious, affective dimension of the self, particularly the body, its boundaries, and experiences (like mourning) that disrupt the myth of sovereignty? How does this relational and affective vulnerability fit into the model of the self from Against Identity?
Alexander Douglas: You’re right that the standard Western notion of emptiness requires fixed boundaries, but this is not true of the notion of emptiness or wu 無 in Zhuangzi. Wu 無 seems instead to be a kind of teeming chaos of partial beings—Ellen Marie Chen refers to a “fertile nothingness”. I’m told that there is a similar way of thinking about the “quantum vacuum” in physics, and in some Indian thought (e.g. the “net of Indra”) you have the idea that things are empty precisely because they are so interdependent and interdefined. That is the sense of emptiness I meant in discussing the idea that we are essentially empty: what mimetic models allow us to do is select from the chaos of overlapping and contradictory possible selves that constitutes our essential “fertile” emptiness. Indeed, as I mentioned, my own experience of mourning was part of the thinking that went into Against Identity. What I learned about grief was that it is mixed up with terror: when you lose somebody you’ve always known, you are struck by the terror of also losing yourself, because you can form no notion of yourself independent of that fixed point of reference. I think Butler’s point is absolutely fundamental. It is the other who makes me myself, but not in the trivial sense that I need a contrast to bring out my character, nor in the philosophical sense that what I am doesn’t truly exist until it is recognised by somebody else. It is much deeper than that: the part of the other that I don’t know and don’t control—the part that is entirely beyond me is somehow also part of me. Everything that I am and do is a partial function of something entirely hidden from me and alien to me. Indefiniteness, embodied in the wild crowd of selves beyond my comprehension, is an ingredient in my definiteness. When I fully embrace this, I become open to the other, and a harmony between indefiniteness and definiteness is achieved. If, on the other hand, I try in my pursuit of definiteness to escape from indefiniteness then I will experience disharmony, and I will have to hide the other away behind an idea I form of the other—an idea that is controlled by me and designed for maximum consistency with my self-definition. I will never really see the other. I will not, in fact, really see anyone or anything; all things will become sets and props in the autobiographical play I perform to myself. This is what I meant when I wrote in my conclusion: “I believe that we have barely begun to live in the world together”. I hope to write another book elaborating on this rather cryptic statement.
 
Alexander Douglas was born in Canberra, Australia where he studied music and philosophy. He now teaches the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics at the University of St Andrews. In addition to Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self (Penguin, 2025), he is the author of The Philosophy of Hope: Beatitude in Spinoza (Routledge, 2023) and The Philosophy of Debt (Routledge, 2016). He has grown increasingly interested in combining ideas from Western and East Asian philosophy. He loves music, literature, history, and engineering. He lives with his wife in Edinburgh.
Mela Miekus is an Amsterdam-based writer and researcher with a background in art theory and curating. Her research practice centers around contemporary art and internet cultures with a focus on mediated figure design, the politics of aesthetics, and online girlhood. She is currently a researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures.