Derrida Ethics Under Erasure

A new way of thinking about ethics from a Derridean perspective, exploring the positive ethical implications of Derrida's work for representation and practice.

Derrida's work is controversial, its interpretation hotly contested. Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure offers a new way of thinking about ethics from a Derridean perspective, linking the most abstract theoretical implications of his writing on deconstruction and on justice and responsibility to representations of the practice of ethical paradoxes in everyday life. The book presents the development of Derrida's thinking on ethics by demonstrating that the ethical was a focus of Derrida's work at every stage of his career. In connecting Derrida's earlier work on language with the ethics implicated in his later work on justice and responsibility, Nicole Anderson traverses literary, linguistic, philosophical and ethical interpretative movements, thus recontextualising Derrida's entire oeuvre for a contemporary readership. She explores the positive ethical implications of Derrida's work for representation and practice and asks the reader to consider how this new ethical reading of Derrida's work might be applied to concrete instances of his or her own ethical experience.

This volume reflects Jacques Derrida's views on the role of education and international organizations in an era of globalization. Derrida develops a notion of the global citizen that is uniquely post-Kantian. He looks especially at the changing role of UNESCO and similar organizations at a time when individual and national identities, knowledge and commerce, and human rights are all brought to world attention in new ways. Following Derrida's writings on these issues, prominent scholars engage in a dialogue with him on his approach to understand the ethics of international institutions and education.

Although this book is a study of the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, it would be mistaken to refer to it as a comparison. The book develops a framework which might aide the reader of Levinas and Derrida in determining the scope and significance of their respective projects as far as a discourse of the sacred is concerned. It does so by emphasizing their status as philosophers whose thought correlates but does not compare. Within this correlation, without obscuring either their differences or similarities, we can see a common framework that consists of the following elements. First, it is clear from what and how Derrida and Levinas have written that the general import of their work lies in the area of ethics. However, in many ways it would be justifiable to say that their work is not about ethics at all. Neither of them proposes a moral theory; neither is interested in discussing the question of values vs. social norms, duty vs. virtue and other issues that might pertain to the area of ethics. To be sure, these issues do come up in their work, yet they are treated in a peculiarly different way. For Derrida and Levinas, ethics is not so much an inquiry into the problems of right and wrong but an inquiry into the problem of the ethical constitutedness of human beings.

In this research, the author analyzes Derrida's understanding of the way society is created out of a collection of individuals, how the individuals preserve their singularity and freedom within a social system and the meaning of ethics, as it comes out in his early writings. In this work, the researcher used a phenomenological method of research and Cassirer's way of analyzing the symbolic forms as a framework to analyze the early writing of Derrida. Although it is not a common approach to combine Derrida's philosophy with that of Cassirer's, the researcher found that Cassirer's ideas help to show Derrida's unique position.

Published in 1997, Jacques Derrida's ’deconstructive method’ or ’deconstructionism’ is renowned as a species of anarchic free play, an antifoundationalism which can only end in a ruinous irrationalism and thereby the denial of all possibility of discrimination or judgement. In this book, Morag Patrick argues that far from having abandoned critique, Derrida's questioning of Western metaphysics responds to an ethical injunction, to a duty to recall the necessary incalculability of moral and political responsibility. In the first part of the study, Patrick examines the philosophical background to and the basic features of deconstruction. Derrida is located in a tradition of thinkers for whom the question of the possibility of philosophy is fundamental. The deconstructive endeavour is then explained as an attempt to secure a question that would further and transform thinking, a question that would no longer be philosophy's question. Patrick maintains that Derrida's strategy to this end is not anarchic, but rather adheres to strict protocols of reading. Subsequently, the ethical and political implications of this manner of reading are pursued. It is shown that if Derrida undermines the certainty with which we may assume moral and political responsibilities, if he establishes the essential excessiveness of responsibility, he does so in order to effect judgement and not to annul it.

The first book to argue for the ethical turn in Derrida's work, this new edition contains three new appendixes and a new preface where Critchley reflects upon the origins, motivation and reception of 'The Ethics of Deconstruction'.

What would political thought look like without the foundation of ethics? Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Madeleine Fagan puts forward a radical and far-reaching refusal of foundational ethics. Instead, she proposes an account of the inseparability of ethics and politics. The 'ethical' should not be understood as a label; it does not mean 'good' or 'right', it is not an evaluation or guide. Rather, both the ethical and the political are descriptions of the context in which we find ourselves. The book highlights the necessity of a practice-based rethinking of the relationship between ethics and politics and so denaturalises a series of commonplaces about poststructuralist ethics.