This special issue of Angelaki on “Derrida: Ethics in Deconstruction” appears twenty years after the sad occasion of the death of Jacques Derrida in Paris on 12 October 2004, after an extraordinary life as an academic philosopher and a thinker. He was a philosopher in a very broad sense, whose work was important across the humanities and social sciences, and also in the creative arts. Derrida was of course much more than a specialist in moral philosophy, and ethics here is taken in the broadest sense of things to do with life, ways of living and awareness of the capacities of the self, as well as the more formal aspects of morality, law, and politics. Other ways could have been found to frame a twenty-year tribute to Derrida’s extraordinary legacy. The choice here is partly to emphasise the falsity of a widespread though very misguided criticism: that is the claim that Derrida denied ethical responsibility and individual agency, or moral thought of any kind, as he was lost in verbal gymnastics and an anti-humanistic denial of intentionality. It is then particularly appropriate that this collection focuses on the constant ethical responsibility present in Derrida’s writings. The responsibility itself has a number of aspects, which include his own commitment to ethically charged causes, his reflections on ethical themes, his engagement with works of ethical significance, but most of all the constant sense in his writing of openness to the Other. The openness appears in the inner voice that is never independent of the external world, the externality that influences all our thoughts and choices, the relation of all meaning to communication, the real-world impact of words, the ethical significance of all discourse, and the ways in which all living brings us in relation to others of many kinds.
The collection is divided into five sections organised around broad themes: Life; Sovereignty; the Social; Responsibility and Decisions; Derrida and French Philosophy; Defining Deconstruction. The contents of the issue are outlined below with reference to this framework.
life and sovereignty
This section contains arguments about biopolitics as power over life, death, and animality. The papers investigate the ties between life and death, the power of life as well as power over life, the connection of deconstruction with life, and the nature of animality, particularly human animals in relation to other animals. The papers also discuss the inclusive autoimmunity of democracy, Derrida’s thoughts on nationalism and philosophy, and his ethico-politico reaction to Heidegger on the sovereignty of being over entities as revealed in world-making, which is also a question of what might distinguish humans from other animals.
the social world
Papers in this section cover Derrida’s conceptions of Europe, his approach to identity, the possibilities of democratic speech across borders, and the nature of cosmopolitanism. These discussions include a comparison of Derrida with the economist and social philosopher Amartya Sen, as well as thematic concerns with: Enlightenment, hospitality, cities, frankness and truth in speech, globalism, the thought of Marx in relation to Derrida’s approach to intellectual inheritance.
decisions and responsibility
In this section, contributors reflect on the singularity of the subject and of individual decisions together with the connected sense of responsibility in Derrida’s ethics. A comparison is made with Husserl and also with Ruth Chang, a prominent normative theorist in the fields of practical reason and jurisprudence. Topics include counter-institutions, anxiety, historicity, poetics, individual sovereignty, and the temporo-spatiality of experience, promises, and faithful infidelity. These papers combine in a multi-perspectival account of the moment of decision and the nature of responsibility to others.
derrida and french philosophy
This section gathers three papers on comparisons between Derrida and his French contemporaries. They respectively focus on Lévinas, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The contributors bring these philosophers together around issues of justice, law, auto-affection, alterity, and non-classical forms of reasoning.
defining deconstruction
Ethics is deeply embedded in deconstruction and the connection is the premise of the issue as a whole. These papers are distinct in their focus on the interaction. Topics covered include theism and atheism, anxiety and attunement, dialectic, irony, and conversation, with reference to Arendt, Kierkegaard, Agamben, Sextus Empiricus, and Searle.
The issue concludes with a text by the editor, which does not try to sum up or react systematically to the preceding papers, but is the product of immersion in these papers and reflection on them.
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