The other major representative of philosophical post-structuralism is Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who burst onto the philosophical scene in 1967 with three important publications: Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology. Unlike Foucault, who was chiefly concerned with the relationship between the humanistic disciplines and power, Derrida concentrated on the history of philosophy. Finding inspiration in Heidegger’s program of a “destruction of the history of ontology,” Derrida engaged in what he called a deconstruction of Western metaphysics.

Derrida criticized the Western “metaphysics of presence” for its systematic tendency to emphasize or favour (“privilege”) concepts such as unity, identity, and totality over otherness, difference, and marginality. Especially pernicious was the tendency to conceive of linguistic truth as the “presence” of that which is spoken of through its representation in words. To the contrary, the ungrounded nature of meaning—the fact that meanings are not given by any natural connection with things in the world but only by their systematic relations with each other—ensures that the spoken-of is never fully “present” but instead endlessly mediated through an infinite chain of meanings. The Western conception of truth as presence, therefore, is impossible. Derrida’s concepts of différance—a neologism meaning both a difference (in space) and a deferring (in time)—and “dissemination” characterize the infinite character of meaning and the futility of attempts on the part of metaphysics to reach a point of finality or closure.

One of the principal goals of deconstruction was to unravel the conceptual dualities, or “binary oppositions,” that had been endemic in Western metaphysics, according to Derrida, since the time of the ancient Greeks. Among them were mind versus body (or matter), nature versus culture, intelligible versus sensible, internal versus external, present versus absent, literal versus metaphorical (or figurative), and speech versus writing. In each of these oppositions, one member of the pair is assumed to be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or derivative. To deconstruct an opposition is to show how this assumption of primacy is contradicted or undermined by various aspects of the meaning of the text in which the opposition appears—and particularly by aspects of meaning that depend on figurative or performative uses of language. Thus it is commonly assumed that the opposition between “nature” and “culture” is absolute. But in reality it is a distinction that possesses meaning only within culture itself.

Derrida cautioned that a mere reversal of the relation of primacy within the opposition would solve little, since it was the opposition itself that was problematic—the inversion of a metaphysical opposition is still a metaphysical opposition. Moreover, he insisted, the result of deconstruction is not an end to metaphysics, since there is no alternative set of nonmetaphysical concepts with which it could be replaced. As Derrida remarks in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), “The passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy…but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way.”

In “Signature, Event, Context” (1971), Derrida recommended a program of “displacing” (rather than reversing) the binary oppositions of metaphysics and then reconstituting or “reinscribing” them. Yet the details of this process of reinscription were never clarified. Like Foucault’s critique of pouvoir-savoir, deconstruction, in the end, left its practitioners empty-handed and directionless: once metaphysics’s pernicious influence had been condemned, it was by no means clear along what lines philosophy should proceed—or even why it should continue at all, since the metaphysical tendencies of language are ultimately inescapable. (It was perhaps in this sense that the American pragmatist Richard Rorty [1931–2007] recommended that the philosophical search for first principles or “truth” should simply be abandoned; instead, philosophy should take the artifices of literature as its model in order to make the general “conversation of mankind” more stimulating and interesting.)

Lévinas

The philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas (1905–95) filled an important void in post-structuralist ethics. Followers of Derrida and Heidegger increasingly relied on Lévinas’s idea that the traditional, rationalist methods of moral adjudication—Kant’s categorical imperative, for example—fail to do justice to the nature of the individual case in its irreducible particularity.

Lévinas studied under both Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg during the late 1920s, and his philosophy accordingly occupies a position midway between those of his teachers. Lévinas was impressed by Heidegger’s effort to transcend Husserl’s arid rationalism by according primacy to Dasein’s being-in-the-world rather than to the standpoint of a disembodied transcendental subjectivity. Thus he regarded Being and Time as an existentially rich extension of philosophy’s thematic boundaries beyond the conventions of post-Cartesian epistemology, in which the abstract, subject-object opposition predominates. By the same token, however, Lévinas was profoundly troubled by Heidegger’s affinities with Nazism, from which he concluded that the Freiburg philosopher’s break with Western metaphysics had been insufficiently radical.

In his major work, Totality and Infinity (1961), Lévinas presented a powerful critique of Heidegger for having granted priority to ontology over “ethics,” by which he meant one’s ethical relationship to “the Other.” By beginning with the Seinsfrage, or the question of being, Heidegger’s philosophy merely reenacted the fundamental error of Western metaphysics in general: the attempt to grasp conceptually the meaning of things rather than to respect their “alterity,” or otherness.

For Lévinas the search for totality—as manifest, for example, in the principle of sufficient reason (for everything that is the case, there is a sufficient reason why it should be so and not otherwise)—represents a significant shortcoming of Western thought. At issue is a philosophical will-to-domination that proves destructive of plurality, otherness, and being qua “mystery.” As Lévinas observes in his essay “Ethics as First Philosophy” (1984):

Modernity [is] distinguished by the attempt to develop from the identification and appropriation of being by knowledge toward the identification of being and knowledge.… The Wisdom of first philosophy is reduced to self-consciousness. Identical and non-identical are identified, [and] the labor of thought wins out over the otherness of things and men.

A concern to highlight and preserve the “otherness of things and men” is the dominant motivation of Lévinas’s philosophizing.

In place of the self-serving reduction of alterity to sameness, Lévinas stresses the primacy of ethics. Specifically, it is the “face of the Other” that offers the basis for an alternative version of first philosophy oriented toward “infinity”—endless openness—rather than totality, which Lévinas associates with the “metaphysical closure.” The biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” Lévinas insists, provides philosophy with an ethical grounding that transcends theoretical reason.

It is ironic, then, that a continental philosophical tradition that began as an impassioned defense of reason in the face of epistemological skepticism should conclude—as do the French Nietzscheans—by equating reason with domination, insisting that the hegemony of reason be rejected or overthrown.