What is an identity that there should be a fear of losing it? Something for which your documents, cards and keys are an analogue, so a set of token or anchors in overlapping symbolic and social maps which you take to be more real than you are, since they lend you the membership that you need to have. Identity is in the colours and stamps that decorate the document that stands for you, that registers your standing. Take them away and you lose your reference points, you become impoverished, grey, anonymous, depersonalised, lacking in vital connections. The machinery of your personality will then lose any triggers of activation and you'll run down like an exhausted device. It is a purely social thing, this identity, it's your title to be in the game. All of this seems very superficial, as if all you know of identity is an assumed role; even your authenticity is assumed, it is what you play when you play in the serious games. Loss of identity seems to be an evil the prospect of which is never entirely banished, and while you can have secret doubts about your own identity you don't doubt those of others. You even concur in admiring so-called strong identities. Hard to see in all of this that what you call your identity is entirely your own product, that whatever you are without identity is what it is without mediation and has contracted and emptied itself in order to play these inane games in a world of mirrors and shadows.