Critchley on Derrida
Courtesy of enowning, a nice article by Simon Critchley on Derrida. This passage in particular was interesting:
At the heart of the many of the polemics against Derrida was the frankly weird idea that deconstruction was a form of nihilistic textual free play that threatened to undermine rationality, morality and all that was absolutely fabulous about life in Western liberal democracy. In my view, on the contrary, what was motivating Derrida's practice of reading and thinking was an ethical demand. My claim was that this ethical demand was something that could be traced to the influence of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and his idea of ethics being based on a relation of infinite responsibility to the other person. Against the know-nothing polemics, deconstruction is an engaged and deeply ethical practice of reading of great social and political relevance.What Critchley leaves unsaid, of course, is how these readings are ethically relevant, an important question about what it means today to do philosophy. Must our infinite responsibility (is this incurred or accusatory or taken freely?) to the other continually challenge our thought in such a way that every ethical decision is at once a failure?
2 Comments:
I wonder if he is speaking about ethical relevance in the sense of "useful for our ends" or ethical relevance in the sense that ethics grounds logic and hermeneutics. The former, if true, was largely a dismal failure on Derrida's side. He tried to be relevant but had a hard time being so. (IMO) However if we mean the latter, then what Derrida is doing isn't so far removed from Peirce. Peirce, you may recall was closest to Derrida's notion of Decontruction, according to On Grammatology. And Peirce famously grounded logic on ethics, not metaphysics.
I'm partial to philsophers asking good questions, especially someone as well read as Derrida. Most of the stuff of his I've read, he's dug into what he's commenting much further than I have. The questions are supposed to make you think; are your assumptions valid? I am more suspicious of those that have all the answers.
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