ABSTRACT
It is still evening, it is always nightfall along the ‘ramparts’, on the battlements of an old Europe at War. With the other and with itself.
—Derrida (1994: 14)
A book is a little cog in much more complicated textual machinery. —Deleuze (1996: 8)
In a late interview, Derrida suggests that deconstruction is ‘not about destroying anything: only, and out of fi delity, trying to think how it came about, how something not natural is made: a culture, an institution, or a tradition’ (2005: 115). He then adds that such an analysis should be applied to deconstruction itself:
And then you must also do the history of analysis itself and the notion of critique — and even of deconstructions. Because there is also a tradition of deconstruction, from Luther to Heidegger (Luther was already speaking of Destruktion to refer to a sort of critique of institutional theology in the name of the original authenticity of the evangelical message). The ‘deconstruction’ I attempt is not that deconstruction, it’s defi nitely more ‘political’ too, differently political; but it would take too many words to explain this. And some people might judge what I said to be hermetic (Derrida 2005: 115).
