TenouaTalk27 May 2026
Who decides who I am? Identity revisited
49 min
Who decides who I am: my birth, my desire, the story I tell? A study session on identity, against the twin assignations of the moment, neither pure inherited belonging nor pure subjective feeling. Delphine Horvilleur rereads the three biblical names of the Jewish people (the Hebrew who crosses, Israel who wrestles, the Jew of exile) as a braid of identities in motion. In French.
“I am what I have always been, what I will always be: that is my identity. It is magnificent, it is interesting, it is seductive, and it is false.”
“None of us is only our birth; none of us is only our desire. […] We are what we make of our birth: at once what we say of ourselves and what we live through.”
“Hebrew identity, in the Bible, is given to a man who is not one with his origin and not one with his destination. A man in motion, who crosses, changes name, changes shore, and takes on his responsibility. Migration, otherness, relation, the pursuit of justice: all of it is contained in that Hebrew identity.”
“These three names weave together like a braid that tells the complexity of this undefinable identity.”