Ethics in Deconstruction is vital reading for anyone interested in Derrida and the ethical implications of deconstruction broadly defined. It offers a comprehensive set of essays on the ethics of deconstruction and deconstruction as an ethical enterprise. Derrida is the main focus, but essays also look at Sextus Empiricus, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Arendt, Lévinas, Lyotard, Deleuze, and others. This volume broadly defines ethics to include law, justice, politics, religion, and practical reason. The essays explore topics including biopolitics, hospitality, speech and language, consciousness and affection, animality, democracy, sovereignty, nationality and nationalism, Enlightenment, poetics, responsibility, economics, decision theory, promises, the institution of ethics, alterity, and otherness. An editor’s introduction provides a unifying oversight of the multiplicity of topics, and an editor’s afterthought takes the discussion forward with regard to the status of moral law. This volume's contents are distinctive in their wide-ranging coverage of deconstruction, including its boundaries and its others. The reader’s assumptions about deconstruction, ethics, and their contexts will be challenged and renewed. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned with the philosophy of Derrida and the ethical possibilities of deconstruction in many forms across themes and disciplines. It was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
Table of Contents:
Foreword Introduction 1. Fidelity to Life ~ Hospitable Biopolitics 2. Jacques Derrida’s Bio-thanato-politics 3. The Exception Derrida – The “Secret Elect” of the Animals: The Onto-anthropo-theological Vein in Question 4. Deconstruction’s Animal Promise: From Textual Pragmatics to a Categorical Imperative 5. Derrida’s “Very Idea of Democracy” 6. Hyper-Sovereignty and Community: Derrida’s Reading of Heidegger in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II 7. Language by Birth and Nationality by Death: Rethinking Nationalism with Heidegger and Derrida 8. Derrida and Parle-ment (Parliament) 9. Inheritance Indifferent to Legitimacy: A Kind of Ethical and Political First Principle 10. Today's Enlightenment: Jacques Derrida on Europe in the Global Age 11. “What is Proper to a Culture”: Identification and Ethics in Jacques Derrida & Amartya Sen 12. The Notion of Responsibility and the Poetic Revolution in Derrida’s Thought 13. Philosophical Responsibility: Derrida’s Historical and Ethical Task 14. Derrida’s Counter-Institution and Its Ethics of Promise and Responsibility 15. How to Make Impossible Decisions: Jacques Derrida and Ruth Chang on the Ethics of Rational Choice 16. Derrida and the Time of Decision 17. Auto-affection and Ethics: A Derridean Response to Levinas 18. Fugitive Philosophy: Derrida and Lyotard at the Limits of the Law 19. Logics of Alterity in Derrida’s and Deleuze’s Philosophies of Justice 20. An Ethics Worthy of the Name: Of God and Ghosts in Derridean Ethics 21. Quoting the Other. Toward a “Minor” Ethic of Reading 22. Immanent Ethics and Deconstruction 23. Deconstructions as Ethics Without Result: On Derridean Resultlessness, Urgency and Attunement in Contrast to Arendt, Sextus and Kierkegaard After Thought – Derrida Escaping the Deserts of Moral Law: Poetics, Sacrifice, Judaism, and the Limits of Decisionism
About the Author :
Barry Stocker teaches philosophy at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey. He has degrees from the University of Warwick and the University of Sussex, UK. His publications include the monographs Derrida on Deconstruction, Kierkegaard on Politics, and Philosophy of the Novel. Other interests include Montaigne, Vico, Nietzsche, and Foucault.
