ABSTRACT
Derrida’s philosophy, what is today known as “deconstruction,” has often been criticised for what would apparently be an ethical and philosophical relativism and thereby accused of systematically projecting political decision and action into structural impossibilities. In this chapter, we seek to demonstrate, starting from a longstanding philosophical and critical re-reading and retrieval of phenomenology, how and why Derrida’s deconstructive question has always engaged philosophical thinking in an ethical responsibility which, far from settling for a normative ethics of dialogue or a principled universality of recognition, orients the political to incessantly exceed itself in confronting the singularity of historical events and persistently supplement its law in facing the uniqueness of the Other. In this sense, Derrida’s deconstructive question will be seen as wholly inhabited by the political, which, through phenomenology—that is, both with and against the directing method and fundamental idea of phenomenology—covets an engagement toward a futurity always to come and a past never committed to the past in the name of an unconditional and irreducible idea of justice for singularity.
