Instead, chapter 4 develops an alternative strategy, which treats the question “who am I?” as a practical question. On this view, an individual answers this question by making decisions about what properties and actions she considers as expressive of herself (90f.). The resulting sense of identity is subjective in the specifically modern sense in which individuals have a “right of subjectivity”, as Hegel calls it (88): a right to pursue a “will to be oneself” and to take over responsibility for what one is (90). Drawing on Charles Taylor’s work, Descombes interprets the corresponding condition of modern individualism as one of a “great disembedding”, where individuals have learned to treat facts about their origin and social ties as devoid of intrinsic normative force (107). Therefore, modern individuals face the dual task of (a) learning to see themselves as disembedded in the first place (through imaginative exercises of the kind “who would I have been if . . . ?”: 111), and (b) responding to the consequential “identity crisis” by “constructing” an identity of their own (104).

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