I have just crossed the border. I left Germany, I became German. Self-categorization had not been required previous to the border crossing. My identity was identical with its context. By leaving my home country and -culture I entered a new stage of individuation: I experienced myself as different, just as the young child has to learn that it is not one with the world. Associating or disassociating oneself with the aspects of an identity category as defined by the Other, dealing with rigid concepts of what constitutes this category seems to leave only space for a reactive position. Is it possible however, to apply Foucault's claim here that the "discourse [in which a group is talked about] can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy." [7]; does it make "possible the formation of a 'reverse' discourse: homosexuality [e.g.] began to speak in it's own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified." [8]? It seems to me that within the boundaries of the reverse discourse, the fixity of the dominant discourse can only be answered by a 'reverse' discourse of fixity. To avoid the fixity that lies in the binary of self and Other, Judith Butler offers the following concept of a non-essential concept of identity: "That any consolidation of identity requires some set of differentiations seems clear. ... That the identity sign I use now has its purpose seems right, but there is no way to predict or control the political uses to which that sign will be put in the future. And perhaps this is a kind of openness, regardless of its risks, that ought to be safeguarded for political reasons.... How to use a sign and avow its temporal contingency at once? It is in avowing the sign's strategic provisionality (rather than it's strategic essentialism) that identity can become a site of contest and revision indeed, take on a future set of significations that those of us who use it now may not be able to foresee." [9] Judith Butler describes that in the construction of an identity a certian kind of repetitious 'play' is of importance. "How and where I play at being one [e.g. a lesbian, a woman...] is the way in which that 'being' gets established, instituted, circulated, and confirmed." [10] But "paradoxically, it is precisely the repetition of that play that establishes as well the instability of the very category that it constitutes." [11] Following the logic of the atopic, it is here where a space for a non-essential, 'unfixed' identity can be opened up: in the acknowledgement that identity is constructed from within binarily structured cultures but rejecting the concept of its normative construction it can begin to resist the confinement fo the other term of the binary. "The 'I' is no longer a substancial essence ...but is nontheless a mobile function." [12] Under the assumption of the strategic provisionality of 'identity components' it becomes possible to apply Foucault's reverse discourse in a way that lifts it out of a purely reactive state. I would like to draw attention to the parallel nature of Butler's concept of the non-essential identity and Barthes' concept of the atopic in that they presume the impossibility of arrival and emphasize the strategic importance of the movement. Movement like that of water, for which there is no lasting shape, no absolute state of matter.