ABSTRACT
Deconstruction is neither a methodological reform that should reassure the organization in place nor a flourish of irresponsible and irresponsible making destruction, whose most certain effect would be to leave everything as it is and to consolidate the most immobile forces within the university. Precisely because it is never concerned only with signified content, deconstruction should not be separable from this politico-institutional problematic and should seek a new investigation of responsibility, an investigation which questions the codes inherited from ethics and politics. Political conservatives prefer this rhetorical terrain because, as they see things, it restricts the grounds of argument to the past—a past that they, of course, see as coinciding with an essentially conservative politics. For the relatively autonomous self, deconstruction is morally lacking; some sort of moral supplement is thus absolutely necessary to sustain and defend deconstruction. In American law, deconstruction must thus displace and subvert this relatively autonomous self and its rhetorical supports.
