Deconstruction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics

Abstract

Undertaking a reexamination of some of Derrida’s writings on mourning, this chapter explores the ways in which an ‘ethics-of-the-other’ position broadly associated with deconstructive or poststructuralist analysis is seen to impede emancipatory possibility in the sphere of politics. Such an ethical standpoint is thereby often depicted as regressive, bound by the repetition of trauma, and given to a sense of redemptive entitlement, notably in regard to the worst horrors of the twentieth century. It broadens the reading of contemporary theoretical disputes to look at ways in which, in the writings of Rancière, such a critique of an ‘ethics-of-the-other’ position as ultimately politically conservative is targeted on the work of Lyotard.