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Although the residues of official segregation are widespread, affirmative action continues to meet resistance in both official and everyday life, even in such recent Supreme Court decisions as Grutter v Bollinger (539 U.S. 306). This is due in part to a governing ontology that draws the line between individual and collective. But there are other possibilities for conceiving the social, and I offer one here in a theory of affirmative action that is developed through close examination of sharing and promising as elemental qualities of equitable communal life. The nature and value of these actions are demonstrated in narrative formulations of fairness as exemplified in triage and the situation at the end of slavery; of the difference between equality and equity and how justice depends on their conjunction; and finally of theorizing how these may come together in the permutable, opaque, yet resilient interdependence of person and community that represents most deeply the Greek idea of two in one, that is, of one two, not two ones. In these respects the paper is successful insofar as it discloses the kinds of reasoning that underlie both resistance and commitment to affirmative action.

Certain familiar theoretic claims of both popular and academic postmodernism are examined for their implications as to the necessary and desirable limits of social life. Taken to the end, these claims promote errancy as a means of freeing conduct from the constraints of foundation. But this kind of freedom, one which treats all limitation as pernicious, generates social action that is mechanical, scattered, and without substance—it is a pyrrhic emancipation which trades content for self-sufficiency and thus constitutes an empty life of unhappy social dispersion. And yet an opportunity does remain to address the way a limit can also be inspiring if we think through how interpretation, a limit which is itself limited, invites nevertheless what Derrida glossed as “joyous affirmation.” Interpretation, though imperfect, offers powers that are genuine and enjoyable because these powers supply life with content and thus with the vitalizing collective and individual possibility of conduct which is affirmative (and disaffirmative). Perhaps it could even be said that interpretation emancipates us from the emptiness of pure freedom.