ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Jacques Derrida's ethical turn and on its nexus to America. It concentrates on the links between terrorism and the Enlightenment and how Derrida's ethics of difference may be reconciled with the Enlightenment project. The chapter assesses whether the ethical implications of global terrorism are best handled under an ethics of identity or an ethics of difference. It looks at an alternative ethics that is better suited to deal with terrorism and that partakes of both identity and difference, namely an ethics of pluralism. Derrida's use of deconstruction to broach the question of the relation between law, justice and violence in the face of irreducible difference did not just happen to take place in the United States. Ethics of identity based on the Kantian model of transcendental idealism tend to frame identity at such a high level of abstraction as to ignore or downplay relevant differences.
