The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas

Simon Critchley’s first book, 'The Ethics of Deconstruction', was originally published to great acclaim in 1992. It was the first book to argue for the ethical turn in Derrida's work and to show as powerfully as possible how deconstruction has persuasive ethical consequences that are vital to our thinking through of questions of politics and democracy. 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'.

Table of Contents:
Abbreviations; Preface to Third Edition; Prefatory Note and Acknowledgements; 1. The Ethics of Deconstruction: The Argument; 2. The Problem of Closure in Derrida; 3. Clotural Readings 1: 'Bois' - Derrida's Final Word on Levinas; 4. Clotural Readings II: Wholly Otherwise: Levinas's Reading of Derrida; 5. A Question of Politics: The Future of Deconstruction; Appendix 1: The Ethics of Deconstruction: An Attempt at Self-Criticism; Appendix 2: Habermas and Derrida Get Married; Appendix 3: Emmanuel Levinas; Appendix 4: Derrida. The Reader; Appendix 5: Leaving the Climate of Heidegger’s Thinking; Appendix 6: Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them; Index.

About the Author :
Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He also teaches at Tilburg University and the European Graduate School. His many books include Very Little…Almost Nothing, Infinitely Demanding, The Book of Dead Philosophers, The Faith of the Faithless, and, most recently with Tom McCarthy, The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society. A new work on Hamlet called Stay, Illusion! Was published in 2013 by Pantheon Books, co-authored with Jamieson Webster. He is series moderator of ‘The Stone’, a philosophy column in The New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.

Review :
I celebrate this third edition of the classic book on ethics and deconstruction that Critchley published over twenty years ago and which has been widely reread and reviewed both in the English-speaking world and well beyond it. This book was pathbreaking, for it started a whole line of reflection on the possible ethical implications of Derrida's work, that Derrida himself encouraged in his later writings. Critchley's book remains as crucial for the interpretation of deconstruction as it was in its original version and I arnestly encourage a careful reading of its main theses. On its first appearance The Ethics of Deconstruction not only helped to shape the English reception of both Levinas and Derrida, but it also contributed to a reorienting of continental philosophy toward ethical issues. The book was timely when it first appeared and has not lost any of its initial relevance today. In fact with the additional material added to this edition it is now all the more valuable.