‘Post-Structuralism, The Ethicalrelation And The Law’

I will suggest that the entire project of deconstruction, one of the major strands of post-structuralism under anyone’s definition, is driven by an ethical desire to enact the ethical relation. By the ethical relation I mean to indicate the aspiration to a nonviolent relationship to the Other, and to otherness more generally, that assumes responsibility to guard the Other against the appropriation that would deny her difference and singularity. I am deliberately using a broad brush here in defining the ethical relation, so as to include a number of thinkers who share the aspiration to heed the call to responsibility for the Other, but who would otherwise disagree on the philosophical underpinnings of the ethical relation and on its precise definition. I am, then, defining the ethical relation more broadly than the thinker Emmanuel Levinas, with whom the phrase is usually associated. ¹ I will, however, return again and again to Levinas’ specific formulation of the ethical relation as the ‘beyond’ to ontology, ² because it is Levinas’ own under-standing of the ethical relation that Derrida interrogates. As we will see, one way to approach the ethical desire of deconstruction is by examining Derrida’s engagement with Levinas’ ethical philosophy of alterity,