“What is Proper to a Culture”

Abstract

This article considers sociocultural identity and identification in the work of Jacques Derrida. Though Derrida’s philosophy is often presented as a source of inspiration for identity politics, Derrida’s precise position on identity is far from evident. This discussion will unpack his account of identity through a dialogue with the work of Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics and moral philosopher, known for his capabilities approach. In spite of their philosophical differences, I propose that Sen and Derrida share strikingly similar views about identity. Descriptively, they both understand sociocultural identity as inherently hybrid, anti-essentialist and plural. Sen’s argument for this is based on empirical and historical examples, while Derrida’s focuses on the relationship between cultural identity and the other. Their shared understanding of identity is reflected in a similar normative argument: we should consciously select our identities, so as to protect the plural nature of identities. In the case of Sen, this is accomplished through reason. Derrida takes a broader understanding of this, based on his concept of inheritance. I propose that inheritance needs to be interpreted as involving active and critical deliberation on identity and that this is an ethical dimension of Derrida’s work. I conclude by pointing to the potential for future dialogue between Sen and Derrida, the need to reflect further on the normative aspects of inheritance and the potential for their work to inform identity politics.

Keywords:

• Jacques Derrida
• Amartya Sen
• identity
• identity politics
• plurality
• normativity

1 introduction

In both academia and public discourse, it has long been a commonplace to link “postmodernism” and identity politics (Pluckrose and Lindsay). Often polemical, this move has been enabled by the vagueness of both terms. As a result of this, Jacques Derrida is often invoked as a major thinker of identity politics. This is in spite of the fact that the status and meaning of identity in Derrida’s philosophy is far from clear and, indeed, that Derrida might be more accurately thought of as a thinker of non-identity, rather than identity. This paper will help to clarify Derrida’s conception of identity, arguing that his interpretation of culture and inheritance support the importance of identity in politics. At the same time, these concepts also respond to critiques of essentialism and division that have been launched against identity politics.

To achieve this, I will place Derrida in dialogue with Amartya Sen. Sen is a Noble prize-winning economist and political philosopher, whose work has become increasingly recognized as making an important contribution to social philosophy. A major critic of neoclassical economics, Sen has produced influential accounts of justice, agency, reason and freedom. Given Sen’s intellectual background, it is difficult to position him within a specific philosophical school; for instance, though he engages significantly with John Rawls, his The Idea of Justice departs radically from the social contract understanding of justice. Similarly, while he is a major interpreter of Adam Smith, his Capability Approach to freedom departs from measuring well-being in terms of economic criteria, focusing instead on capacity for meaningful action. This focus on the economic and the engagement with Rawls and Smith might make Sen something of an odd partner with Derrida’s deconstruction. However, there are good reasons to think this can represent a productive dialogue. Firstly, issues of justice, reason and politics come to the fore in Derrida’s later work, opening up thematic intersections with Sen. Secondly, many of Sen’s claims around culture and identity are empirical ones, while Derrida’s approach remains largely theoretical, thus allowing us to probe how these two perspectives can inform one another. And, finally, though there may be stylistic differences, Derrida has presented his philosophy as a “double gesture” (“Principle of Reason” 17). In the reception of Derrida, this double gesture is often focused on going beyond norms of rationality (“more than critical”) (“Future” 26). Yet this can tend to overlook the other part of this gesture, the moment which remains within established conventions of critique. It is in this second part of Derrida’s methodology which we can find some potential for dialogue with Sen.

In this article, I will argue that Sen and Derrida have closely connected descriptive and normative accounts of identification. Beginning with their accounts of culture and identity, the first section considers the descriptive dimension: I demonstrate how both emphasize the inherent plurality and hybridity in any act of identification. In the second section, I propose that both share a similar normative lens: arguing that plural identities require active and careful consideration. I suggest that Derrida’s concept of inheritance can be understood as an account of identification and that it is analogous to Sen’s understanding of deliberative choice. This helps bring out the normative dimension of inheritance in Derrida’s work, the proximity of Sen and Derrida, as well as challenge erroneous accounts of the link between deconstruction and “identity politics.” On both a descriptive and normative level, I argue that both thinkers offer a conception of identity which is inherently hybrid and plural and which obliges us to actively select among our plural identities.

2 descriptive – culture and identity

Before bringing the two thinkers into dialogue, it is worth defining two key terms here, both identity and identity politics. In terms of identity, our discussion will limit itself to sociocultural identity, rather than other dimensions of identity, most notably personal identity (Sen, “Fog”). By personal identity, I refer to debates about the continuity of personhood and identity over time and events.¹ By sociocultural identity, I am referring to categories with which individuals can identify with and which express affiliations or associations with others. This possibly endless list includes categories of race, gender, sexuality, profession and nationality. To label these “sociocultural” does not necessarily imply that there may not be material or biological, but that these are inflected through culture and society more generally. Importantly, as we will see, both thinkers stress the cultural dimension of such identities. With regards to identity politics, this will be understood as political action and ideology centred on the recognition of difference, one which emphasizes the hierarchies and power differentials at stake in identities. Critics of identity politics have emphasized how this approach can lead to the essentialization of identities and, particularly with the rise of the Internet and social media, how this can lead to deindividualization: the reduction of individuals to one overarching category (Parsell). I will propose that both Sen and Derrida offer a way of addressing these criticisms, while still underscoring the importance of identity in politics.

Culture and identification play a prominent role in Derrida’s later work. This is often seen through issues around Europe in, for instance, The Other Heading, or through his own identity as a Sephardic Jew from Algeria in, for example, The Monolingualism of the Other. In these accounts, we come to see how non-identity is a fundamental part of all forms of identification. This somewhat contradictory perspective emerges from a view of culture as a process, and a process which is inherently differential. To enter into this discussion, we could do worse than start with The Other Heading, a text which was originally given at a conference on “European Cultural Identity” in 1990. And here we can turn to one of the claims that Derrida makes early in his discussion: “what is proper to a culture is to not be identical to itself” (Other Heading 19). Labelling this an axiom, Derrida provides a striking definition of culture, as not based on sameness but rather difference. This is not to say that there is no such thing as cultural identity. Derrida goes on to say that the mis-identification that is the nature of culture does not mean that there is no cultural identity, but rather that all cultural identity depends on difference:

Not to not have an identity, but not to be able to identity itself, to be able to say “me” or “we”; to be able to take the form of a subject only in the non-identity to itself or, if you prefer, only in the difference with itself [avec soi]. (19)

All cultural identities, therefore, are based not on some essential trait, but rather their formation as a subject – as an “I” or “We” – is based on difference.

Where does this difference come from? Derrida’s answer to this question is quite simple: it comes from the other. But how we get to that conclusion is far from simple and is true for at least two reasons. He states:

This can be said, inversely or reciprocally, of all identity or all identification: there is no self-relation, no relation to oneself, no identification with oneself, without culture, but a culture of oneself as a culture of the other, a culture of the double genitive and of the difference to oneself. (Derrida, Other Heading 10)

By this double genitive, Derrida refers us to the of in the “culture of the other,” both as the other’s culture, as well as a culture that concerns the other. These two meanings, both operating simultaneously, help explain how culture is at once relational and plural. In the first instance, “the other’s culture” points to the ways in which we are born within structures that we inherit. Our finitude means that we do not create our identities ex nihilo, but rather our available acts of identification emerge intersubjectively and historically: through past history and the behaviour of others and society. In this sense, the culture that we have is the “other’s culture,” it belongs to others and is not our own. Derrida emphasizes this in terms of language in The Monolingualism of the Other, when he states “I have only one language and it is not mine” (25). The second meaning – a culture that concerns the other – involves an understanding of identity as relational: by this, he means that culture is not only created through what it includes, but also what it excludes. My identity involves placing myself in relation, and often opposition, to another – I am X and so not Y. Importantly, this relational dimension means that this Y is also closely involved in the construction of such an identity. In short, “any identity will always be marked by its constitutive outside” (Calarco 53). There thus are two ways in which “the culture of the other” is not identical with itself: our reception of it from others who precede us, and its relation to the other that any given category excludes in its constitution. It is this double genitive which creates the disjunction and difference within every act of identification.

For Derrida, an important consequence of this is that there is never one single origin of culture, rather it emerges from a complex interaction with what a given identity excludes, as well as the way it has been determined in the past. As he puts it: “The grammar of the double genitive also signals that a culture never has a single origin. Monogenealogy would always be a mystification in the history of culture” (Derrida, Monolingualism 10–11). There is no one singular or simple origin of any culture (and therefore any sociocultural identity). The view of identity that emerges here, therefore, is both hybrid and relational: by definition, for Derrida, culture is never a product of one moment or place and is never entirely closed in upon itself.

This point can be nicely illustrated through Derrida’s work on Europe. As mentioned above, this focus on culture is particularly prominent in Derrida’s account of Europe. Indeed, if Europe receives special attention in Derrida’s work, it is in large part because Europe is understood as the “place which pioneers the rethinking of identity” (Evans 289).² His discussion of Europe’s relation to philosophy can help nicely illustrate this point. In “The Right to Philosophy from the Cosmopolitan Point of View,” Derrida argues that the presentation of philosophy as having an exclusively European origin is a misrepresentation. Instead, philosophy has always been “bastard” and “hybrid”:

Philosophy has never been the unfolding responsible for a unique, originary assignation linked to a unique language or to the place of a sole people. Philosophy does not have one sole memory. Under its Greek name and in its European memory, it has always been bastard, hybrid, grafted, multilinear, and polyglot. (10)

Philosophy then does not have one sole origin or one unified moment to which to return. And in case we think this is something unique to philosophy, Derrida stresses at the end of this paragraph that this can be applied “for the same reasons” to law and to democracy. If Derrida lends special attention to these, it is in large part because they present themselves as having one origin, and a European one at that. These are the cultural entities par excellence of European identity and yet, as Derrida emphasizes, these are not truly or solely European. In this, they reflect the same dynamic of non-identification within identity that Derrida has brought out above. They come to us from the past (the other’s culture) and they are determined, in part, by what they exclude (the culture of the other, i.e., the non-Western). Similarly, in an interview with the Algerian philosopher Mustapha Cherif, published as Islam and the West, Derrida stresses the intermingling of Greek and Arabic thought:

We know very well that Arab thought and Greek thought intimately blended at a given historical moment and that one of the primary duties of our intellectual and philosophical memory is to rediscover that grafting, that reciprocal fertilization of the Greek, the Arab, and the Jew. (38–39)

Again, for Derrida, it is this hybridity which represents culture and any identification that comes with it: the meaning of any sociocultural identity emerges only through a differential process of inheritance and exclusion, disrupting any myth of one singular or unified origin.

This discussion can help us make sense not only of Derrida’s axiom in The Other Heading, but also his conclusion. That he is a European intellectual, “among other things” (Derrida, Other Heading 83). The value of this among other is at once descriptive and normative. Limiting ourselves to the descriptive for the moment. Derrida insists that he is European, but not totally European: “My cultural identity, that in the name of which I speak, is not only European, it is not identical to itself” (82–83). In this discussion, Derrida describes two forms of belonging: belonging “fully a part” (à part entière) and belonging “in every part” (de part en part) (82). These two types of belonging translate poorly into English, but both play on the link between belonging in French (appartenance) and their “part.” However, we can generally describe “fully a part” as fully or unconditionally, or in its own right, whereas “in every part” can be seen as completely or through and through. For Derrida, these two meanings of belonging need to be separated and are “incompatible” (82). Derrida supports a form of belonging that is fully or unconditional, but not one which dominates or exhausts an individual’s identity. As such, he concludes with a description of himself as “European among other things” (83). The value of these “other things” is key, emphasizing that individual’s identities are not limited to one specific characteristic, and foregrounding the hybridity and non-identity at the heart of all forms of cultural identification. No one is ever solely European, but this not-being-solely-European does not make one less European. As mentioned, this operates on both a prescriptive and descriptive level and we will return to this normative point in the second section. Before doing so, it is worth underlining the important overlap with Amartya Sen. Their shared conclusions can help better expand the consequences of Derrida’s work on identity.

Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny is a substantial and sustained critique of the reduction of individuals to one overarching identity. For Sen, the “miniaturization of human being” ignores the diverse range of identities that we occupy depending on particular contexts (Identity and Violence xiii). As Mozaffar Qizilbash has nicely illustrated, this text identifies two pernicious illusions around identity: “the illusion of a singular identity, or of singularity, and the ‘illusion of destiny’” (253). The former refers to a view that we can have only one identity; the latter describes a view where we have certain identities thrust upon us, around which there are no choices to be made. Importantly, for Sen, this “illusion of singularity” is closely connected to violence (Identity and Violence 45), pitting identities against one another and reducing the range of common identities that we might share, turning “self-understanding into a murderous instrument” (176). This is not only a conceptual trick of violent extremists but also, in Sen’s view, shared by many well-meaning groups: both those who appeal to a “clash of civilizations,” as well as social theorists who emphasize the importance of community in determining our norms and practices. Against the splitting of societies into discrete and distinct groups – what he labels “plural monoculturalism” – Sen instead insists on the many overlapping and intersecting affiliations that unite people (156). Sen does not want to do away with identification, but rather acknowledges its importance in our lived-experience. Sen’s list of common identities include race, gender, religion, sexuality, but also more “banal” affiliations, including profession, sporting interest or taste in art.

In later work, Sen continues his critique of the “solitarist illusion” of a singular, determining characteristic of our identity, identifying this both in how we think about justice and cultural conflict (Identity and Violence 178). In his work on global justice, Sen has brought out how interpreting global justice as international justice “assume[s] that the national identity of a person is the only – or at least the dominant – identity” (“Justice and Identity” 9). In focusing on nationality or citizenship as our main identity, “the claims of other affiliations – even that of our shared humanity – can be overlooked or ignored” (9). From this perspective, any account of justice has to resist being limited by an “all-conquering single identity” (10). Similarly, in “Violence and Civil Society,” Sen argues that the “clash of civilizations” thesis takes “a mind-boggling shortcut in trying to understand our sense of identity, with all its diversities and complexities, in terms of just a single sense of belonging” (11). Once this shortcut is taken, it means that “personal differences are then seen as if they must be parasitic on civilizational contrasts” (11). In short, the “clash of civilizations” insists that religious/cultural identity is the primary and determining aspect of our identity, with any personal differences (such as taste, profession, gender) being derivative and only possible within the cultural constraints of our indivisible and disconnected “civilizations.” For Sen, this view of identity is a major target of his later work.

Alongside his challenge to the “solitarist illusion” of identity, there is a second dimension to Sen’s argument: the importance of deliberation in identification (Identity and Violence 178). For Sen, these exclusionary accounts of identity appeal to an “illusion of destiny” and overlook “the role of choice in determining the cogency and relevance of particular identities” (4). In the case where there is some form of contradiction or conflict between different identities, it is up to the individual to decide (not destiny) on what degree of importance to attribute to particular affiliations and relations:

It is not so much that a person has to deny one identity to give priority to another, but rather that a person with plural identities has to decide, in case of a conflict, on the relative importance of the different identities for the particular decision in question. Reasoning and scrutiny can thus play a major role both in the specification of identities and in thinking through the relative strengths of their respective claims. (29)

For Sen, therefore, our identity is highly context dependent and who we identify as, within these contexts, needs to be understood as a choice. At times this choice can be implicit, but it should always – in his view – be rational. We will return to this normative dimension in our final section, but it is worth underlining now its central position in Sen’s approach to identity.

To unpack Sen’s account further, we can first look closely at how he understands culture itself. Here, in contrast to Derrida, Sen does not offer any elaborate theory as to how culture operates or how cultural identity is created. Instead, Sen draws on a wealth of historical and empirical examples to demonstrate the hybridity that he sees as a fundamental part of culture. Importantly, Sen’s examples are drawn from a range of countries, both Western and non-Western. For instance, Sen appeals to the example of curry, pointing out that this is now represented as a classic British dish, but it is, of course, “Indian.” And yet this supposed origin in India is also complex:

India had no chili until the Portuguese brought it to India from America, but it is effectively used in a wide range of Indian food today and seems to be a dominant element in most types of curries. It is, for example, plentifully present in a mouth-burning form in vindaloo, which, as the name indicates, carries the immigrant memory of combining wine with potatoes. Also, tandoori cooking might have been perfected in India, but it originally came to India from West Asia. (Sen, Identity and Violence 156–57)

As the example indicates, culture has more than one origin and is inherently hybrid. Indeed, he understands emphasizing solely one identity as an effort of “trying to moor the cultural anchor on a rapidly moving boat” (113). For him, accounts which focus on a single identity are “make-believe” and have “little use for the actual history of huge historical interactions and constructive movements of ideas and influences across borders of countries and regions in so many fields” (Sen, “Violence and Civil Society” 11). While the example of curry may appear trivial, it presents a view of culture as fundamentally intertwined and overlapping. It is not only, therefore, that we always have plural identities, but that those identities are themselves historically intertwined.

As with Derrida, Sen is also critical of the idea of democracy or culture as emerging from a singular European origin. Here, Sen also identifies a need to address a Eurocentric heritage, and particularly the impact of the presumed singularity of Western ideas on public policy. As Sen stresses, “The belief in the allegedly ‘Western’ nature of democracy is often linked to the early practice of voting and elections in Greece” but this is “confusing and confounded” for three reasons (Identity and Violence 52). Firstly, the orientation of the Greeks was not westward towards the “Goths and Visigoths,” but rather they showed “greater interest” in “talking to the ancient Iranians, or Indians, or Egyptians (rather than in chatting up the ancient Ostrogoths)” (52). Secondly, and relatedly, there is little evidence that there was “immediate impact” in what we now understand as Western Europe, unlike the impact in some of “the contemporary cities in Asia” (52). And, finally, Greece did not have a monopoly on public deliberation, with Sen appealing to the Buddhist councils in India or the importance of reasoning in the “The Seventeen-Article Constitution,” created by the Japanese prince Shotoku (53). Sen goes on to list further examples, but his aim is to challenge a European exceptionalism and like Derrida sees democracy as a key part of debates around identity and culture. It is key both because it demonstrates that culture is inherently hybrid, but also because it challenges the presentation of non-Western cultural identities as disconnected from these traditions. Again, Sen’s approach here is more historical than conceptual, but notably reaches a similar position to Derrida on the multiple origins and plural nature of identity.

In short, both Sen and Derrida share similar descriptive conclusions around cultural identity and share similar historical narratives around the emergence of specific identities (including “European”).³ For both, identity is inherently plural and hybrid, efforts to reduce this always being a “mystification” (Derrida, Other Heading 11). Both understand identity as central to human experience, something which merits direct intellectual attention. With both their descriptive accounts outlined, we can now turn to the normative aspects of their work, which once again share an important intersection: the need to retain the plural nature of identity through active choice and consideration.

3 normative – choice and inheritance

For Amartya Sen, reason and choice occupy a central position in the negotiation of plural identities: it is deliberation and rationality which can resolve the problems of the “solitary illusion” and the “illusion of destiny.” The use of reason, in Sen’s account, is a direct consequence of our plural identities: we need to select between them and we do this through rational deliberation. Violence is tied to this denial of choice:

Perhaps the worst impairment comes from the neglect – the denial – of the role of reasoning and choice, which follows from the recognition of our plural identities. The illusion of unique identity is much more divisive than the universality of plural and diverse classifications that characterize the world in which we actually live. The descriptive weakness of choiceless singularity has the effect of momentously impoverishing the power and reach of our social and political reasoning. (Sen, Identity and Violence 17)

For Sen, it is simply the case that we have plural identities and accounts which deny this are neglecting a basic fact about reality. Indeed, it is for this reason that, elsewhere, Sen insists on a strong distinction between personal identity and social identity, whereby changes can take place in my social identity without changing my selfhood:

Once the priority of a social affiliation (chosen or unchosen) is accepted as an integral part of one’s “overall identity,” something substantial is lost. This includes the ability to recognize easily that one has to decide on one’s social affiliations, which does not compromise one’s personal identity. (Sen, “Fog” 288)

Theories that equate social identity with personal identity overlook the individual’s capacity to select from and reason about which social identities and affiliations to prioritize. Equally, theories that deny this plurality enable more division and violence and so are normatively inferior as well. So, for instance, Sen claims: “The role of reasoned choice needs emphasis in resisting the ascription of singular identities and the recruitment of foot soldiers in the bloody campaign to terrorize targeted victims” (Identity and Violence 8). Elizabeth Anderson has proposed that for Sen the “solitary illusion” does not necessarily lead to violence, and that Sen’s objection is really that “it imposes arbitrary obstacles to expanding the scope of cooperation through practical identification” (254). However, regardless of the direct causal relation, it is clear that Sen understands the negatives of identity through violence and terrorism, emphasizing the high stakes of his discussion.

At the same time, it is worth stressing that Sen does not provide a necessarily harmonious view of identity and the selection of which identities to privilege becomes particularly important when identities conflict. He makes a distinction between constraining and non-constraining identities, where the latter concerns inherently exclusive identities (i.e., being rich and poor). Yet even in the case of non-constraining identities (i.e., being a man and Chinese), there can be contexts where conflict emerges around which identity to prioritize at a particular moment:

It is not so much that a person has to deny one identity to give priority to another, but rather that a person with plural identities has to decide, in case of conflict, on the relative importance of the different identities for the particular decision in question. Reasoning and scrutiny can thus play a major role both in the specification of identities and in thinking through the relative strengths of their respective claims. (Sen, Identity and Violence 29)

As the above suggests, in all aspects of Sen’s account, reason plays a central role in managing any potential conflict or intersection of identities.

Sen also devotes some time to a counter-argument around identity: identity as discovery. This describes a view where identity is not something that is negotiated or exchanged with, rather it is something “out there,” external to us, and something which we discover about ourselves. In this sense, we are passive with regards to identity, simply stumbling across it, rather than actively and continuously creating it. However, even if this view of identity were to be true, it would not remove the importance of choice and decision within every act of identification: “Even when this person discovers something very important about himself or herself, there are still issues of choice to be faced […] Important choices have to be made even when crucial discoveries occur. Life is not mere destiny” (Sen, Identity and Violence 39). That being said, these choices are not an infinite buffet menu: our backgrounds, societies, prior choices, among other things, all limit what categories our identities can include. I cannot, for instance, decide to identify as a medieval French knight, but I could decide to make being a medieval historian or a live action role-player (LARPer) a key part of my identity. However, the fact that our choices are constrained in no way takes away from Sen’s analysis: he does not propose a view of all-powerful reason, which can help us select from an infinite number of choices, but rather insists that choices are always made within constraints:

More generally, whether we are considering our identities as we ourselves see them or as others see us, we choose within particular constraints. But this is not in the least a surprising fact – it is rather just the way choices are faced in any situation. (31)

Sen’s account of reason and agency is therefore highly situated. Choice and reason operate at all levels of our negotiation of plural identities, even if our choice is never unlimited or infinite. To neglect this is both a descriptive error, as well as a moral failure.

The prominence of reason in Sen’s framework might appear to mark a point of conflict between his account and that of Jacques Derrida’s. However, this assumption would be a mistake. Though Derrida is well known for his critiques of reason, it would not be fair to say that Derrida rejects reason entirely. Indeed, a central point of “The Principle of Reason” is not to dismiss the value of the rational, but rather to rethink it on unconditional terms. There, Derrida insists that there are two forms of response: we can “respond to” (répondre à) the call of reason, which is to explain rationally and follow academic conventions and critical norms; and, we can “answer for” (répondre de) the call of reason, which involves questioning its foundations and going beyond the conventions of critique in the name of reason (“Principle of Reason” 8–9). Though Derrida might dissent from the level of confidence that Sen places on reason, he would not reject it outright. And, indeed, bringing these two into dialogue can help us rethink one of Derrida’s central concepts: inheritance. In what follows, I will argue that inheritance needs to be understood as (partially) a rational and deliberative act. I propose that this will bring out the normative dimension in Derrida’s account of inheritance, which is an imperative to actively and consciously inherit our identities.

First, it is important to outline the meaning of inheritance. In Specters of Marx, for instance, inheritance is presented as a fundamental part of our existence; by virtue of our finite nature, and our “thrownness,” a relationship to the past inherently calls for inheritance:

That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not. (Derrida, Specters 68)

From this perspective, inheritance is partially a descriptive concept and, indeed, we have seen this at work in one interpretation of Derrida’s “culture of the other” in section 2. While traditional conceptions of inheritance may privilege fidelity and understand it as a commitment to faithfully repeating a legacy, Derrida, in full deconstructive style, brings forth the inherent infidelity that inheritance involves. This is so for several reasons. First, as a consequence of our finitude, we inherently will repeat the past in a new context and under new conditions and circumstances, thus distorting and reinventing it in unpredictable and potentially radical ways. Yet more than that Derrida explains that the injunction to inherit is never uniform; in any legacy there are always several, and at times even conflictual, dimensions none of which can be gathered together as one simultaneously:

An inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself. Its presumed unity, if there is one, can consist only in the injunction to reaffirm by choosing. “One must” means one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out several different possibles that inhabit the same injunction. (Specters 18)

In this, our interpretation focuses on that which is most fundamental about this legacy, up to the point that our current interpretation may even explicitly contradict the letter (but importantly not the spirit) of the past we inherit. Filtering and selecting within a legacy therefore is not done willy-nilly, but rather always as a way of reaffirming the most fundamental parts of that inheritance.

Inheritance, therefore, closely intersects with the issues of identity that we have outlined above. Indeed, all the more so because cultural identity is not uniform or united, issues of selection and choice come to the fore. Though inheritance is an ontological condition for us, it can also be an act, one where we make choices and take responsibility for deciding what a particular identity might mean to us. This is a point that Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab makes also, when discussing Derrida’s writings on Europe, she states: “A constructionist view of the cultural self implies human agency and selectivity and hence choice, freedom and responsibility” (70). Any reception of a cultural identity, that is, any type of identification with it, therefore, involves acts of filtering and selection.

We can see that interpretation and selection are a central part of Derrida’s understanding of inheritance. But this interpretation could still remain on a descriptive level, implicit in the act of reception. To move to a more normative dimension, it is worth emphasizing how Derrida understands this as an active and critical selection. For instance, he glosses inheritance as a “critical and transformative filter” (Derrida, Specters 102). Or, in a late interview with Elisabeth Roudinesco, Derrida states that this “demands reinterpretation, critique, displacement, that is, an active intervention, so that a transformation worthy of the name might take place” (4). To be responsible to the past – or rather the plural and irreducible pasts – is to respond. This is a point which has been brought out by several commentators. Rosalyn Diprose focuses on this point, emphasizing that responsible inheritance “must be assumed actively, by active interpretation” (443). Similarly, Geoffrey Bennington describes part of Derrida’s view of political responsibility as “the active, critical memory of an inheritance or tradition” (22). Indeed, it is only in this remembering (though we may also be tempted to say dismembering) of the past that we can save the past from a sclerotic decline, on this view responding to the past involves “redeploying its legacy otherwise and in doing so saving it (however temporarily) from the death of doctrine” (Earlie 320). Importantly, such a response and a redeployment is not something that I can shirk – I cannot avoid it – nor is it something that I will ever be fully satisfied with. As Earlie points out, inheriting a legacy is a reprieve for that past, but it does not definitively save it. Instead, inheritance is a process of continual response, continuously seeking to do justice to that legacy. In this sense, identity for Derrida is also never settled: it is not that I simply need one active interpretation or one final push to get over the problem of “who am I?” and “who do I identity with?” Instead, these questions continuously pose themselves, regardless of the answer we give them.⁴ For Derrida, there is a clear imperative to address these interminable questions, to do so consciously and actively, in as rational and as deliberative a manner as possible.

As with Sen, we can understand this conception of inheritance as emerging from the descriptive account of sociocultural identities that we saw in section 2. If “the other’s culture” described our finitude and our necessary inheritance of culture from others, particularly those who predate us, then this account of inheritance as an active engagement follows directly. Similarly, the understanding of culture as never fully identical with itself, creates a situation where this lack or excess of identification needs to be interpreted and engaged with. In this, then, we can see that Derrida and Sen not only share a descriptive understanding of identity, but also converge on the normative implications of this description. From this intersection, I propose that we can draw three significant conclusions.

The first concerns the potential for dialogue between Sen and Derrida. Though Sen is not easily placed within a particular school of thought, we can see some of the potential for fruitful dialogue between Derrida and other philosophical traditions. Derrida’s work helps better support Sen’s descriptive account of identity and culture, offering a framework to explain how these plural and hybrid identities emerge. Similarly, Sen’s account of reason and choice can help bring out the normative dimension of Derrida’s concept of inheritance and its relation to identity. In this respect, this dialogue can be mutually beneficial in supporting and refining their respective positions. Such an approach could be extended to Sen’s accounts of justice, freedom and agency and, indeed, points towards the untapped potential for increased engagement with Derrida by those outside continental philosophy.

The second point concerns debates around normativity in Derrida’s work. The normative status of Derrida’s work has long been a matter of discussion and it is not necessary to rehearse these debates here. However, our account of inheritance challenges the prominent view that Derrida’s work lacks a normative dimension. As we have seen, he supports quite explicitly an active and critical act of inheritance. Indeed, inheritance is not a secondary dimension of his philosophy, but is taken to be one of his central concepts (particularly in his later work). Though Derrida might not, or at least not in our discussion above, provide a specific content to guide our choice in inheriting. It is clear that he – like Sen – believes that we should make this choice in an active and conscious way. He does not tell us what to select, but there is a distinct and evident imperative to select. For Derrida, inheritance should be an active and critical activity, such statements are clearly not only descriptive, but rather also prescriptive and normative.

The final consequence concerns how we understand identity politics. What Sen and Derrida demonstrate is that acknowledging the central position of identity does not require us to commit to exclusionary identities. Instead, coming from quite distinct theoretical starting points, both thinkers present plurality and hybridity as better describing the reality of identity and as providing a better ethical framework for this. Though the above is only a partial account – we have not considered, for instance, the complex relation between power and identity – this points to the potential to think a form of identity politics outside of any essentializing or reductive framework.⁵ In this, I concur with Matthew R. Calarco when he argues that Derrida’s approach “offers a more promising direction for contemporary political theory than does a politics of pure identity or difference” (52). And, similarly, this echoes Ananta Kumar Giri’s discussion of Sen, where he calls for “an ethics and politics of identity formation which is not exclusionary but dialogical” (233). This would be one which still acknowledges the singularity of individuals and the potential for shifting identities in different contexts and seeks to renew “the emancipatory promise of identity politics” (232).

4 conclusion

On both a descriptive and normative level, both Sen and Derrida present a similar view of identity. For them, identity is inherently plural and hybrid and obliges us to actively engage with how we understand ourselves and which identities we assume. Though their style, and the thinkers they privilege, may differ, there is still potential for a productive dialogue between the two. Though Sen offers no explicit framework for explaining hybrid identities, Derrida’s account of culture helps elaborate how these identities emerge. Similarly, Sen’s focus on reason and deliberation brings out the double movement of Derrida’s philosophy: particularly the movement which remains within the traditional conventions of rationality and critique. Building on this, Sen’s emphasis on choice and identity helps bring out the normative dimension of Derrida’s account of inheritance, foregrounding the imperative to actively decide on our specific identities, what and how we inherit. Finally, their work joined together can reframe discussions around identity in politics, both underlining the importance of identity in our lived-experience, while avoiding the very real traps of essentialism and deindividualization. In this respect, for both thinkers, identity has neither destiny nor essence, but remains a continuous and critical act of inheritance.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Marian Hobson for originally directing me towards Amartya Sen and to Andrew Hines for stimulating exchanges. This work was supported by “Differential Ontology and the Politics of Reason,” funded by the Government of the Region of Madrid, as part of line 3 of the multi-year agreement with the Universidad Complutense de Madrid: V PRICIT Excellence Program for University Professors (Fifth Regional Plan for Scientific Investigation and Technological Innovation); and “The Politics of Reason” (PID2020 -117386GA -I00), financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, Government of Spain. Additional work was financed through Una Europa and the DIGITALIZED! Project funded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (SF21D3). I am grateful to King's College London for their support.

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For an account which brings Derrida’s view of personal identity in contact with another major thinker of identity in the Anglo-American tradition, Derek Parfit, see Barton.

2 We might well ask, as Margaret Heller does, if privileging Europe in this way might well carry with it some of the old Eurocentrism that Derrida is keen to do away with, whether “the substance of his argument rather repeats older themes of European exceptionalism” (105).

3 This is a point which could be expanded further by consideration of their use of biography in their writings. Both thinkers explicitly thematize and theorize their own identity as plural and hybrid. On the intellectual value of Derrida’s “self-conscious performance” of his biography, see Hiddleston (302).

4 Importantly, this connection to inheritance is closely connected to Europe. As Isin points out, “For Derrida, being European means taking responsibility for the heritage of thought that reflects upon what Europe is” (112), or similarly as Benjamin and Chang emphasize “Derrida was convinced that, in the age of telematic spectrality, the unaccomplished inheritance of Europe calls for a responsibility before a world that Europe cannot ‘see’ or apprehend” (168).

5 For recent efforts to take a similar approach with other Francophone philosophers, see Rae on Laclau and Ingala on Balibar.