Social Identities and Social Justice

The revolutionary upheaval currently sweeping across Western democracies on parade under the banner term "wokeism" calls for rethinking the foundations of ethics and politics. The social justice movement challenges us fundamentally to reconceive our being with one another in society and to reassess our profoundest traditions. There is something unmistakably right in the demand for justice for all regardless of class, race, gender, or whatever other characteristic. However, "social justice" is being brandished as a weapon today against certain categories judged by partial perspectives and prejudice to be the guilty parties in history and society. Certain identities are scapegoated to allow those wielding woke ideology to posture as avenging angels charged with the mission of canceling an unjust past and culture. Like every historical religion, wokeism has its grip on a transcendent truth shining with sacred splendor and beauty—the imperative of freedom and justice for all without exclusions—but it takes this truth over in ways that make it serve as a means of consolidating power for those who make themselves its priests and executors. In Social Identities and Social Justice, William Franke indicates a way to exit from the current impasse poisoning 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. By 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 was recently Francesco de Dombrowski Visiting Professor at Harvard University's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. He has been professor of philosophy at University of Macao, Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology at University of Salzburg, and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow in Berlin. In 2021, he became Professor Honoris Causa of the Agora Hermeneutica. His books have been published by the university presses of Cambridge, Chicago, Stanford, Northwestern, Notre Dame, SUNY and others. 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 ranging from identity politics to cognitive science and media studies in On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020). His most recent book, 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, and Italian on four continents.