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Praise of Identities

 

Of the universal and the particular

Who are we? Who do we want to become? Two questions lie at the heart of a reflection on identities. The aim is twofold: to acknowledge the legitimacy of the fears aroused by the manipulations and malicious uses of this concept, and, without phobia or fetishism of the universal, to maintain that relativism is compatible with universalism without leading to skepticism.

The argument is based on an axiomatics with three components. A definition of identity as relational identity. A postulate: the universal is not a state of nature, it is constructed and has a history. A thesis: the reality of identities stems from elective affinities between the way of inhabiting the world and certain cultural forms.

The first part of the work deals with the experience and significance of local cultures. In the second part – a reflection on health and illness in the light of different philosophies – the author focuses on the status of the patient, a concrete individual, and on the concept of “individual normativity” (Canguilhem). In the face of the challenges of technoscience, Abdoulaye Elimane Kane suggests, in the third part, that we should seek, in democratic deliberation and in the invention of a Grand Narrative, forms of resilience that enable human beings to remain “the measure of all things.”