ABSTRACT
However, even if one accepts that it will be necessary to address the massive questions of the overwhelmingly inertial power of the political logos by a lateral strategy of deconstructing the margins of the political heritage-as Rousseau puts it in Book 3, Chapter 4, of The Social Contract, ‘if you had the world at the end of a long enough lever, you could move it with a fi nger; but to support the world on your shoulders you would need to be Hercules’
date as a possible fulcrum for displacing the work of the logos. This chapter
addresses this embarrassment. After an account of the logic of hospitality it will attempt to answer this diffi culty of deconstruction reading politics, namely, the relation between the classic texts of what is quickly assembling itself, against all expectation, as ‘the deconstructive tradition’ and the later texts of ‘Derrida-Lite’. In this way I will propose Paul de Man’s reading of The Social Contract in Allegories of Philosophy as an exemplary performance of the work of hospitality. I will do so in order to ‘drill down’ into the archive of deconstruction to show the complex fi gural and philosophical manoeuvres out of which ‘hospitality’ emerges as a radical shorthand for the entire business of deconstruction.
