Echoes…Before the Other

Abstract

In his essay “Jacques Derrida: Wholly Otherwise”,1 Lévinas asks “[does] Derrida’s work constitute a line of demarcation running through the development of Western thought in a manner analogous to Kantianism, which separated dogmatic from critical philosophy?” A line of demarcation running through Western thought could also be written as Western thought. In this essay I will ask what might such a form of demarcation mean for reading Derrida in relation to Heidegger and Lévinas? If this line of demarcation also separates a dogmatic from a critical philosophy, might the dogmatism be one that holds fast to an authoritative yet naïve belief in the ideal of a separation between aesthetics and critical thinking?