In opposition to the polemics claiming that the work of Jacques Derrida is a species of nihilistic textual free play that suspends all questions of value and is therefore immoral and politically pernicious, this book argues that Derridian deconstruction can and indeed should be understood as an ethical demand, provided that ethics is understood in the particular and radical sense given to it in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas' work, whose full philosophical importance is only now beginning to be recognized, is introduced in this book. Levinas has exerted a powerful and continuous influence on the development of Derrida's thinking, and by following the textual dialogue between Levinas and Derrida, one can see how the question of ethics can be compellingly raised within deconstruction. This book reinterprets some of the central motifs of Derrida's work (the closure of metaphysics, difference, the general text) in the light of Levinas' ethical problematic and shows how the very textual practice of deconstructive reading has overriding ethical implications. The book concludes by moving from ethics to politics and assessing whether Derrida's work offers a persuasive account of the passage from ethical responsibility to political questioning and critique. The book also contains discussions of Heidegger, Husserl, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy.
