Social Identities and Social Justice

The revolutionary upheaval currently sweeping across Western democracies on parade under the banner term “woke” calls for rethinking the foundations of ethics and politics. The social justice movement challenges us to fundamentally reconceive our being with one another in society and to re-embrace our profoundest traditions. Focus on identities, however, has become divisive and vexatious. In Social Identities and Social Justice, William Franke indicates a way to exit from the current impasse empoisoning politics in Western democracies by thinking the concept of identity through to its grounds in the non-identity (or undelimited human potential) that all share and that unites rather than divides us. The traditions of negative theology (admission of ignorance of God) and apophasis (self-critical unsaying of one's own certainties) are leveraged for outlining a truly relational approach to public discourse. We must open our concepts of mutually exclusive identities towards their infinite truth rooted in our unlimited interconnectedness. Doing so, we open our ideas beyond their finite content and open ourselves to building a world together.

William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities and professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt University. He has been professor of philosophy at University of Macao; Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology at University of Salzburg; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fellow in Berlin; and Francesco de Dombrowski Visiting Professor at Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. In 2021 he became Professor Honoris Causa of the Agora Hermeneutica. His apophatic philosophy is conceived and expounded in On What Cannot Be Said (2007) and A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014). It is extended into a comparative philosophy of culture in Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders (2018) and applied to address current controversies in education and society in On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020). His most recent Pandemics and Apocalypse in World Literature: The Hope for Planetary Salvation (2025) plies his apophatic philosophy to illuminate issues of urgent public purport. He lectures and leads seminars on his ideas in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish on five continents.