inheritance

“Let us consider first of all, the radical and necessary heterogeneity of an inheritance, the difference without opposition that has to mark it, a ‘disparate’ and a quasi-juxtaposition without dialectic (the very plural of what we will later call Marx’s spirits). 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. And inhabit in a contradictory fashion around a secret. If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by a cause - natural or genetic. One always inherits from a secret - which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’ The critical choice called for by any reaffirmation of the inheritance is also, like memory itself, the condition of finitude. The infinite does not inherit, it does not inherit (from) itself. The injunction itself (it always says ‘choose and decide among what you inherit’) can only be one by dividing itself, tearing itself apart, differing/deferring itself, by speaking at the same time several times – and in several voices”
( Derrida, Specters of Marx, 1994, p. 18.)