The very word existentialism, beginning with the prefix ex ('out' or 'out of') aligns it with existence exile, exodus, exit, exteriority; these words 'bear a meaning that is not negative' (Blanchot, 1993: p 127), a meaning that challenges the sedentary predilection of the philosophical tradition for home, identity, and
selfsameness. It questions the centrality of the established polis in favour of a cosmopolitan community; it challenges a paradigm of homesickness that places the refugee and the exile in the 'inferior position of the supplicant' (Viriasova, 2016: p 222).
This "grouping" itself can be problematic: such groupings must be "of such
selfsameness as to make the averaging of the costs of dealing with the group a valid and reasonable indicium of the cost of dealing with any specific group member." (50) Again, with the help of economists, this is hardly an impossible undertaking.
(83) As such, identity is no longer seen in academic circles in the way Erik Erikson earlier proposed: 'The term "identity" expresses such a mutual relation in that it connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself (
selfsameness) and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential characteristics with others.' (84) Yet while postmodern approaches link identity to concepts such as hybridity and multiplicity, individuals tend to experience identity as a unitary entity.
For instance, in "How to Look at Television," Adorno argued that "The repetitiveness, the
selfsameness, and the ubiquity of modem mass culture tend to make for automated reactions and to weaken the forces of individual reaction" (p.
In that case we may speak about temporal
selfsameness, understood as conflation of the narrating and the narrated, which thematically and symbolically correlates with the spatial
selfsameness: the room that the narrator never leaves for the duration of the narrative.
