ABSTRACT
Commentaries on Jacques Derrida tend to divide very sharply when it comes to assessing the relationship between deconstruction and what Jurgen Habermas calls the 'unfinished project' of post-Kantian critical thought. For Habermas, it is more a matter of placing deconstruction in the wider present-day cultural context of philosophies that have given up too soon on the 'unfinished project' of modernity, and which continue to rehearse issues that belonged to an earlier, subject-centred discourse of epistemology and ethics. So it is – on this account – that Derrida betrays the unfinished project of modernity and opens the way to a postmodern notion of endless interpretative 'freeplay' where there is no longer any place for such typecast Enlightenment values as truth, reason, and critique. There is no denying that Derrida maintains a complex, ambivalent, at times mistrustful attitude toward the philosophic discourse of modernity.
