Beyond Deconstruction?

Summary

There are many people who think that deconstruction has run its course, has had its day, and that it is now time to return to the important business of philosophy, or perhaps to serious ethical, social and political questions. Derrida's work, it is said, leads nowhere but a sterile philosophy of difference that in its de-politicized, de-historicized abstractness is a form of conservatism little better than the kinds of identity thinking to which it seems to be so radically opposed. In short, we must go ‘beyond’ deconstruction.

But ‘beyond deconstruction’, is a bit like ‘Hegel aufgehoben’. Deconstruction was born from and sustains itself in a meditation on the limits of philosophy. Derrida has made a speciality of diagnosing metaphysical residues in the thought of those who sought passionately to eliminate them, and pronounced this inevitable even for his own (and our own) thought. Deconstruction represents the most sophisticated attempt to deal with the question successively posed by Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger—that of the end of metaphysics. I shall argue is that there is no royal road through or round Derrida or deconstruction, and that a serious confrontation with it makes the value of going ‘beyond’ it problematic.

Ten years ago the situation was different. Heraclitus put it well when he said that dogs bark at what they do not recognize. Now the dogs have stopped barking, sniffed cautiously, and turned tail.