The paper examines one possible argument against restricting the display of religious icons in Romanian public schools. Opponents of this decision claim that cult objects affirm something essential about our cultural identity and therefore that using legal instruments to protect this identity is justified. Using a differential analysis of two models of identity recognition, Charles Taylor’s and Axel Honneth’s, this paper argues that the legal protection of cultural identity is compatible with value pluralism but only if its defense is justified (...) in the terms provided by Honneth’s theory of identity recognition. However, the argument in favor of displaying icons in Romanian public schools, unlike the argument against wearing the Islamic veil in French public schools, cannot be justified in these terms. (shrink)

Contemporary democratic political culture prioritizes the right over the good. The right is imagined as a non-controversial, universally acceptable and non-negotiable good. The liberal politics of the right assumes the substance ontology of the disengaged, rational, autonomous subject. The alternative ontology of the engaged, embodied, cultural and historical self, which inspires the liberal politics of identity, however, conceives recognition of identity as a substantive, complete, determinate and non-negotiable right. This paper argues that the non-substance ontology of the self can, in (...) fact, stimulate a politics of the non-substantial good, which is incomplete, indeterminate and imperfect. Such a conception of the good can powerfully evoke the moral sense undergirding the good, albeit negatively, when it is put into circulation in the common discursive space of politics. In polities of radical diversity like India, the negative politics of the good is especially pertinent. (shrink)