Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas by Simon Critchley
Review by: Silvia Benso
Source: The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Mar., 1994), pp. 605-606
Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20129536
Accessed: 01-02-2019 22:16 UTC

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SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 605

monarchical rule which does not take its foundation immediately from
God. Theories supporting papal supremacy seem closer to absolute
monarchical rule than to a mixed constitution with a tempered monarch,
but the very presence of a supreme religious authority tended to under
mine the authority of the kings.
Blythe's second premise is, of course, the more controversial one. If
it should prove to be true, then the standard interpretations of early
modern political thought would have to be reconsidered. Unfortu
nately, this part of the work is not as complete and thorough as it might
be. Blythe does not deny that there are differences between Scholas
ticism and the Italian humanists, but he certainly stresses the continui
ties rather than the discontinuities. One would hope that the author
might in the future expand his remarks on the early republicans of
Northern Italy, especially Machiavelli (pp. 292-5). At present, the view
that early modern political thought inherited some of its most cherished
views from the thirteenth century remains controversial.?Douglas
Kries, Gonzaga University.

Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992. xiv + 256 pp. $19.95?Two waves
mark the appropriation of Derrida in English: an earlier, literary and a
later, philosophical reception. Both readings neglect the relation be
tween deconstruction and ethics, leaving unanswered the question: "why
bother with deconstruction?" (p. 1). Critchley's book, written in an
elegant, concise, clear and yet?despite its scholarly rigor?pleasant
style, admittedly locates itself at the origin of a third way of reception,
"one in which ethical?not to mention political?questions are upper
most" (p. 3).
Critchley makes the novel and audacious claim that "Derridian decon
struction has a horizon of responsibility or ethical significance, provided
that ethics is understood in the Levinasian sense" (p. 236). Having iden
tified the import of Levinas's ethics in its method of reduction, that is,
in its "exploring the ways in which the Said can be unsaid, or reduced,
thereby letting the Saying reside as a residue, or interruption, within the
Said" (p. 8), Critchley boldly extends this notion to the reading of texts
exemplified in Derrida's work. Ethics becomes a matter of textuality,
of what Critchley calls a "cl?turai reading," a double reading in which
the path of repetition (the commentary) "inevitably crosses the path of
something wholly other" (p. 27). The insights, interruptions, or alteri
ties retraced within the text constitute moments of ethical transcen
dence; they are the unconditioned that gives deconstruction its spur, the
ii\junction that produces deconstruction and commands its respectful
reading of the irreducible moments of otherness.
Critchley offers two extensive examples of cl?turai reading. The first
is "Bois," Derrida's final work on and for Levinas, which opens up the
space of the relation between sexual and ethical differences. The sec
ond is "Wholly Otherwise," in which Levinas faces Derrida's work on

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606 IAN BELL AND STAFF

the one hand as a completion of Kant's critique of metaphysics, on the

other as a dislocation of the philosophical Said that opens to an ethical
Saying. The reason why one should bother with deconstruction is thus
found in its generating a reading that opens moments of alterity or tran
scendence from which to disrupt traditional philosophy. In this gen
eration, deconstruction is ethical. The implication is not that ethics can
be derived from deconstruction, but that deconstruction has an ethical
structure.
As "a philosophy of hesitation" (p. 236), however, deconstruction is
unable to move "from undecidability to the decision, from responsibility
to questioning, from deconstruction to critique, from ethics to politics"
(p. 236). In the last chapter, Critchley tries to overcome this impasse
by exercising on deconstruction that same cl?turai reading by which he
has characterized deconstruction in the preceding chapters: the ethical
opening is retraced in the issue of the political and in the praise of de
mocracy as the future of deconstruction.
Although the subtitle places Derrida and Levinas side by side, the book
is primarily dedicated to Derrida, while the reading of Levinas is instru
mental for the possibility of retracing an ethical structure (but is this
sufficient to allow us to speak of ethics?) in deconstruction. Despite
and because of this moment of ingratitude?which includes the trans
lation from acting to reading?Critchley's understanding of ethics avers
to be faithful to Levinas. The conversion of Levinas's ethics to textuality
is part of Critchley's claim that moments of "ingratitude, faultiness, and
violence are the necessary conditions of a fidelity to Levinas' work" (p.
112). But the ingratitude that Levinas himself evokes is the violence
that the Other does to us, not the violence we (that is, Critchley) do to
the Other. Although cleverly construed, the book seems at times frag
mentary, probably because of the independent conception of its parts.
But the fragments may signify the interstices in need of exploration for
an ethical opening of Critchley's own work, and his attempt to retrace
an ethical command within the text, and to avoid reducing deconstruc
tion to mere edification certainly deserves praise and reading.?Silvia
Benso, University Park, Pa.

Dascal, Marcelo, ed. Cultural Relativism and Philosophy: North and Latin
American Perspectives. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991. xii + 316 pp. n.p.?
In the introduction and acknowledgments of this book Marcelo Dascal
informs the reader as to the peculiar history behind the book and to the
vision which inspired it. In particular, the dominance of Western Cul
ture, evidenced by the presence of Coca-Cola, the dream of democratic
freedom, and aspirations to the wonders of the market economy in all
but the most remote parts of the world has created a tension between
North America and Latin America in many, perhaps all, facets of life (p.
1). This tension has developed because the values present in North
America are at odds with the values present, at least historically, in Latin
America. This tension can result in one set of values being declared

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