ABSTRACT

Some things have changed quite profoundly in the forty years since Jacques Derrida presented the essay ‘The Ends of Man’ in New York in October 1968 at the conference ‘Philosophy and Anthropology’. Sadly, other things have remained tragically constant. In the former sense, I am referring to what Derrida terms in that essay ‘the reign of the all-powerful motif of . . . the ‘so-called human sciences’’,2 which today has been replaced (or mutated into) the even more tyrannous reign of cultural studies. In the later sense, I mean the re-run of American imperialist hubris that is currently being played out in Iraq as a monstrous, deferred twin to the Vietnam War.