Friendship and Fission: Personal Identity in Derrida and Parfit

Abstract

Personal identity is most often thought of as singular and indivisible. This is the legacy of the Cartesian, non-reductionist, conception of the subject. In response, both Jacques Derrida and Derek Parfit provide arguments that show the limitations of this understanding of personal identity, doing so while working on opposite sides of a much-discussed divide between continental and analytic philosophy. In the ‘Recoils’ chapter, of Politics of Friendship, Derrida shows how it is possible to consider the subject as multiple and divisible, beyond Cartesian constraints, allowing him to offer an alternative cogito, “I think therefore, I am the other”. Parfit, in parallel, provides thought experiments, including the famous “Fission”, which demonstrate that this alternative cogito is only contradictory when considered from within unnecessary Cartesian constraints. Both Derrida and Parfit provide strong reasons for a conception of personal identity without these limitations and in doing so lessen the perceived gap between continental and analytic philosophy.