Inheritance Indifferent to Legitimacy

Abstract

This essay seeks to establish the sense in which Derrida’s stated indifference to questions of legitimate descent can function as an ethical or political principle, as he argues in “Marx and Sons.” We track Derrida’s response to accusations of a lack of fealty in texts such as “Marx and Sons,” “Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments,” and “Limited Inc a b c … ” alongside his problematization of a certain sense of inheritance or heritage. We argue that Derrida reveals the necessity of troubling established legitimate inheritances as an ethical and political first principle. As such, we argue that Derrida’s reading of Marx is not just one faithful reading among others, but an indifference to the paradigm of fealty in inheritance.

Keywords:

• inheritance
• legitimacy
• deconstruction

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This is one of the many ways in which we can say along with Haddad that all inheritances are aporetic. We will return to this point below. See Haddad, passim and esp. 7–22.

2 See Peterson, “On Responsibility and the Non(bio)degradable” and “Decision and Radioactive Principles for the Future” for more detailed elaborations of this preoccupation as it appears in the nuclear waste policy of the United States.

3 Haddad explores this understanding of aporia in the context of Derrida’s investigation of hospitality (7–22).

4 “This confusion of permanence with iterability lies at the heart of his [Derrida’s] argument” (Searle 200).

5 Of note is the fact that Ahmad himself references de Man – and, implicitly, Derrida’s apparently insufficient denunciation of de Man – in his critique of Specters of Marx. When warning of Derrida’s unwitting complicity in creating space for a right-wing intelligentsia, Ahmad writes:

However, a great many of his close colleagues in North America, at Yale in particular, who were so instrumental in obtaining for Derrida his international status and from whom Derrida is not known to have distanced himself, had hardly any use for Marxism; some have been more hostile than others, but a hostility toward Marxism has been a common feature among them. (101)

De Man, of course, having been a Yale colleague of Derrida’s whose fascist and collaborationist sympathies were discovered in the 1980s and which occasioned Derrida’s reflections on de Man.