Stella Gaon

Saint Mary's University (Canada), Political Science, Faculty Member

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Phone: +1.902.420.5843
Address: Saint Mary's University
Department of Political Science
923 Robie Street
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Canada B3H 3C3

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Philip Højme

Independent Researcher

Albena Azmanova

University of Kent

Eli Portella Perreras

Florida Gulf Coast University

Fotini Vaki

Ionian University

Domenic Hutchins

University of Virginia

Rocío Zambrana

University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras

Guido Starosta

Universidad Nacional de Quilmes

Blake Emerson

Yale University

Hannes Kuch

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Delia Popa

Villanova University

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Books by Stella Gaon

Sample Chapter from The Lucid Vigil.pdf

The Lucid Vigil: Deconstruction, Desire and the Politics of Critique, 2019

Front matter and "Introduction." For more information, go to https://www.routledge.com/The-Lucid... more

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The Lucid Vigil: Deconstruction, Desire and the Politics of Critique

The Lucid Vigil, 2019

This book provides the first fully philosophical account of the critical nature of deconstruction... more This book provides the first fully philosophical account of the critical nature of deconstruction, and it does so by turning in an original way to psychoanalysis. Drawing on close readings of Sigmund Freud and Jean Laplanche, it argues that Derridean deconstruction is driven by a normative investment in reason’s psychological force. Indeed, deconstruction is more faithful to the principle of reason than the various forms of critical theory prevalent today. For, if one pursues the classical demand for rational grounds vigilantly, one finds that claims to ethical or political legitimacy cannot be rationally justified, because they are undone by logical undecidability. The argument is borne out in the cases of Kantian deontology, Deweyan pragmatism, progressive pedagogy, Habermasian moral theory, Levinasian ethics, and others. What emerges is the ground-breaking demonstration that deconstruction is impelled by a quasi-ethical critical drive, and that to read deconstructively is to radicalize the emancipatory practice of reason as self-critique.

This important volume will be of great value to critical theorists as well as to Derrida scholars and researchers in social and political thought.
(New York: Routledge, paperback 2020)
Discount code: https://lb.ca/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/additem.bbx?/Z105023/I9780367661786

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Democracy in Crisis: Violence, Alterity, Community

"This volume explores the political implications of violence and alterity (radical difference) fo... more "This volume explores the political implications of violence and alterity (radical difference) for the practice of democracy, and reformulates the possibility of community that democracy is said to entail. Most significantly, contributors intervene in traditional democratic theory by boldly contesting the widely-held assumption that increased inclusion, tolerance and cultural recognition are democracy’s sufficient conditions. Rather than simply inquiring how best to expand the ‘demos’, they investigate how claims to self-determination, identity and sovereignty are a problem for democracy and how, paradoxically, alterity may be its greatest strength.

Drawing largely on the Left, continental tradition, contributions include an appeal to the tension between fear and love in the face of anti-Semitism in Poland, injunctions to rethink the identity-difference binary and the ideal of ‘mutual recognition’ that dominate liberal-democratic thought, critiques of the canonical ‘we’ that constitutes the democratic community, and a call for an ethics and a politics of ‘dissensus’ in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression. The authors mobilize some of the most powerful critical insights emerging across the social sciences and humanities – from anthropology, sociology, critical legal studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis and critical race theory and post-colonial studies – to reconsider the meaning and the possibility of ‘democracy’ in the face of its contemporary crisis.

The book will be of direct interest to students and scholars interested in cutting-edge, critical reflection on the empirical phenomenon of increased violence in the West provoked by radical difference, and on theories of radical political change."

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Papers by Stella Gaon

The Emancipatory Force of Critique: A Radical Proposal

Philosophy, Politics and Critique, 2024

This essay interrogates the relationship between "philosophy," "politics," and "critique." I argu... more This essay interrogates the relationship between "philosophy," "politics," and "critique." I argue that critique is emancipatory insofar as it involves a philosophical investigation of the logical conditions of possibility (and impossibility) of the political determinations and categorizations (whether ontological, epistemological, or ethical) that structure social life. Thus, the three terms are inextricably entwined.

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Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Critique: A Derridean Perspective

Studia UBB, Philosophia, 2021

Critical phenomenology is gaining currency as a progressive philosophy of emancipation, but there... more Critical phenomenology is gaining currency as a progressive philosophy of emancipation, but there is no consensus on what its “criticality” entails. From a Derridean perspective, critique can be said to involve radical self-interrogation; a philosophy that questions its own conditions of possibility or grounds is one that opens itself to its auto-deconstruction. Deconstruction produces undecidability, however, which means that the philosophy in question can no longer account for its political claims or its normative force. This is the predicament in which critical phenomenology, like any other critical theory, will find itself when it takes its critical injunction to heart.

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Lies in the Time of COVID

Derrida Today, 2020

While demonstrable falsehoods abound in the time of COVID, people’s tendency to believe “frank li... more While demonstrable falsehoods abound in the time of COVID, people’s tendency to believe “frank lies” is not the target of deconstruction. Its target is the “spectral” or performative lie, which opens the distinction between truth and falsehood, and which thereby makes both deliberate deception and truth-telling possible. For example, the performative interpretation of “freedom” as the absence of responsibility, circulating during the pandemic, lends credence to the demonstrably false claims that facemasks are dangerous, and that the pandemic itself is a hoax. A deconstruction of the contestable meaning of “freedom” behind or beneath the frank lies, therefore, constitutes a qualified form of ideology critique, because it exposes the discursive conditions of possibility in which lies as demonstrable falsehoods can be produced.

Keywords: Deconstruction, Hillis Miller, Marx, COVID-19, ideology, responsibility, freedom

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Il la faut (la logique), "Yes, yes": Deconstruction's Critical Force

Derrida Today, 2018

Jacques Derrida regularly appeals to an affirmative gesture that is ‘prior’ to or more ‘originary... more Jacques Derrida regularly appeals to an affirmative gesture that is ‘prior’ to or more ‘originary’ than the form of the question, and this suggests one way to understand deconstruction’s critical force. The ‘Yes, yes’, he says, situates a ‘vigil or beyond of the question’ with respect to an ‘irreducible responsibility’. Some Derrida scholars therefore construe the double affirmation as a source or ground of critique. In this paper, I refute this suggestion. While an originary ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘come’ (viens) does open the fields of (for example) ‘inheritance’, language, or ‘holistic webs’, I argue, it only marks (will have marked) the processes of différance or of trace that make signification possible in general. No thing, as such, is thereby affirmed. This is why the originary affirmation cannot be said to constitute, in itself, the imperative (il la faut) of the logic (la logique) of ethical-political critique. To explain why a certain ethical imperative can be associated with deconstruction, one must determine why one is always already subject to a vigil that opens critique to its own possibility. One must also determine how the affirmative gesture relates to deconstruction’s critical force (forthcoming in Derrida Today).

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Question 94 - Response to Misgeld.pdf

Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 2017

Dieter Misgeld: A Philosopher's Journey from Hermeneutics to Emancipatory Politics, by Hossein Me... more Dieter Misgeld: A Philosopher's Journey from Hermeneutics to Emancipatory Politics, by Hossein Mesbahian and Trevor Norris (2017), is a book-length transcript of a set of wide-ranging and extensive conversations with Professor Emeritus Dieter Misgeld. These interviews were conducted in 2005, on the occasion of his retirement from teaching at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. The " journey " referenced in the title reflects the sharp distinction between philosophy and politics that appears to inform Misgeld's views throughout the text. In response to Misgeld, I propose that, while his understanding of philosophy as apolitical or quietist arguably holds on a narrow definition of the term " philosophy, " this definition forecloses a more radical understanding of philosophy as critique. A deeper and broader conception of philosophy as " theory, " I submit, can and should be drawn from the work of first-generation Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Properly conceived and undertaken, philosophy as critical theory can and does subvert political power, albeit not in ways that one might predict on the basis of the customary separation of theory and practice. I refer to numerous moments of the discussion to make this case so as to convey the breadth and richness of the book.

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More than Life: Human Dignity and the Problem of Rights

Mosaic: A Journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Dec 2015

This essay interrogates the concept of “dignity” underlying rights discourse in order to show tha... more This essay interrogates the concept of “dignity” underlying rights discourse in order to show that the extension of human rights to animals is both oxymoronic and counter-productive. Because dignity signifies the sovereign power to transcend life, human rights theory would be better served by what Derrida calls a “power” of “not-being-able.” (Published in December 2015; password protected; available upon request).

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"As if" there were a "Jew": The (non)existence of deconstructive responsibility

Derrida Today, May 2014

"The argument of this paper hinges on Derrida’s relation to Judaism as a religious heritage and/o... more "The argument of this paper hinges on Derrida’s relation to Judaism as a religious heritage and/or as an essential experience. If he can be said to ‘appropriate his Jewish roots’ at all, as Colby Dickinson (2011) has recently proposed, this is not because Derrida concurs that all belief in an ultimate reality (‘as such’) must now be understood in merely conditional terms (‘as if’). Rather, it is because Derrida deconstructs the difference between the Jew and the non-Jew, along with the differences between the ‘as if’ and the ‘as such’ and the performative and the constative, in his very demonstration of the impossibility of ‘being-jewish’. Dickinson thus misunderstands the way in which Derrida appropriates Kant’s regulative ‘as if’, and thus misrepresents what is at stake in Derrida’s ‘faith’ in ‘Jewishness’. What is at stake is what Derrida calls deconstructive responsibility, and it takes the form of a radical fidelity to the principle of reason (to an ‘unconditional theoreticism’). This responsibility, paradoxically, demands and impels the interrogation of critical thinking itself, with its principles, its essences and its identities. Accordingly, Derrida interrupts both the ‘as such’ and the ‘as if’ with the ‘if’ of a dangerous ‘perhaps’."

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Why Must I? A Freudian Response to the Question of Ethical-Political Responsibility

Mosaic: A journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Dec 2011

In order to explain deconstruction’s “surplus of responsibility,” this essay reformulates Freud’s... more In order to explain deconstruction’s “surplus of responsibility,” this essay reformulates Freud’s account of psychic integrity in terms of a subject that is constitutively split and yet compelled, categorically, to cohere. Freudian psychoanalysis thereby provides a quasi-legitimate account of the responsibility to render reason that deconstruction relentlessly pursues.

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Alterity as democracy-to-come

Violence, Alterity, Community, 2010

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When was 9/11? Philosophy and the terror of futurity

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Aug 1, 2008

This essay offers a close reading of Derrida’s response to the events of September 11, 2001, in t... more This essay offers a close reading of Derrida’s response to the events of September 11, 2001, in the interview he conducted immediately afterwards with Giovanna Borradori in the text Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003). I argue that this text is significantly different from previous philosophical responses to horrific political events (such as those by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt) insofar as it invites us to contest radically the assumption that philosophy’s role is to envision and to realize the ‘good’. Instead, Derrida’s response provokes us to acknowledge that philosophy’s role was only ever to criticize itself, that this is the absolute limit of what philosophy can or should do, and that this work is both genuinely risky and crucially important, because in undertaking a critique of itself philosophy intervenes for democracy, without rules or guarantees, in the very determinations that are the material of political life.

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Communities in Question: Sociality and Solidarity in Nancy and Blanchot

Journal for Cultural Research, Jan 1, 2005

In his early essays “Violence and Metaphysics” and “The Ends of Man,” Jacques Derrida evoked a “c... more In his early essays “Violence and Metaphysics” and “The Ends of Man,” Jacques Derrida evoked a “community of the question” when he called for a fundamental questioning of the being of the “we” in the West. This demand was later formulated by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe as the philosophical interrogation of the political (le politique), in distinction from the question of politics (la politique). The essay begins by arguing that what is at stake in this distinction is the very possibility of politics that is otherwise foreclosed. It then explores Nancy’s interrogation of le politique in The Inoperative Community, and compares his response to Maurice Blanchot’s response in The Unavowable Community. It is argued that both deconstructions of “community” depict a certain sociality that corresponds to Derrida’s call – a ‘communality’ beyond or radically other than the traditional model of community as formed by sovereign individuals and as forming the sovereign state. Where they differ is that Blanchot founds the ethical relation of the “unavowable” community on the radical interruption of ontology signaled by death, whereas Nancy casts ontology itself in an ethical register, and thereby allows a certain solidarity to emerge as well.

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Judging justice: The strange responsibility of deconstruction

Philosophy & social criticism, Jan 1, 2004

This paper demonstrates that when the concept of ethical-political responsibility is taken in its... more This paper demonstrates that when the concept of ethical-political responsibility is taken in its modern sense as a decision or outcome based on the protocols of reason, responsibility is neither simply possible nor simply impossible. Paradoxically, it appeals to a demand that it cannot fulfil; responsibility is thus (im)possible. Moreover, insofar as a deconstructive demonstration of this aporia is itself a response to reason’s own demand, deconstruction cannot be characterized as simply responsible or irresponsible. Rather, deconstruction inscribes itself as the interior limit of the order of ethics, of responsibility, as such. Deconstruction is thus characterized best as an (ir)responsible interrogation of the very principle of reason to which political philosophers such as Habermas appeal when they invoke responsibility. To this extent deconstruction enacts the strange responsibility of interrogating critically precisely what is deemed ‘just.’

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'Politicizing Deconstruction': On not treating _Specters of Marx_

Rethinking Marxism, Jan 1, 1999

The argument of this paper is that the indeterminacy of Derridean 'justice' is precisely what len... more The argument of this paper is that the indeterminacy of Derridean 'justice' is precisely what lends deconstruction its peculiar moral force. Those who understand deconstruction as no more than an indeterminate indecisionism are therefore missing a crucial feature of the Derridean project. These readers, I propose, falsely collapse the conditions and the consequences of ethical-political decision. From this point of view, Derrida's Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International may be understood as neither more nor less directly political than those of Derrida's works which do not directly address Marxism. My conclusion is that the deconstructive practice of exposing différance at the heart of any presence is integral to Derrida's on-going project of political contestation and, further, is directly germane to the theorization of Marxist politics.

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Pluralizing Universal 'Man': The Legacy of Transcendentalism and Teleology in Habermas's Discourse Ethics

The Review of politics, Jan 1, 1998

The central claim of this article is that Habermas's programme of discourse ethics fails to 'detr... more The central claim of this article is that Habermas's programme of discourse ethics fails to 'detranscendentalize' the Enlightenment subject. On the contrary, tacit assumptions concerning a transcendental conception of reason and a subject that is teleologically predisposed toward its rightful end are the logical pillars of Habermas's two most crucial claims. First, unless Habermas presupposes an abstract and decidedly unencumbered moral discussant, he cannot maintain his claim concerning the rationality - and hence the unconditionality - of the moral principle he describes. Secondly, unless Habermas begs the question of the proper end of individual and collective development, he fails to support the claim that discourse ethics speaks to the emphatic dimension of moral reason. Thus Habermas's formulation of discourse ethics does not overcome Enlightenment metaphysics; rather, its force depends upon the pluralization of universal 'Man'.

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Education qua Enlightenment: On the Rationality of the Principle of Reason

Philosophy of Education Archive, Jan 1, 2003

While numerous theorists of education acknowledge that infallible “truths” in the sphere of moral... more While numerous theorists of education acknowledge that infallible “truths” in the sphere of morality are not there to be had, they also maintain that without a determinate standard of moral critique that is epistemologically sound, it is impossible to take a legitimate, ethical-political stance. In this paper, I argue that this impasse cannot be resolved along such lines as Harvey Seigel or, alternatively, Nicholas Burbules, propose. These proposals both overlook that Kant’s link between reason (the critical capacity to search for grounds) and legitimate goods (ethical-political norms that are grounded) cannot be logically upheld. This suggests that reason's emancipatory promise was never strictly rational to begin with. Consequently, it would seem, mysticism, ideology or force are just what the idea of education as enlightenment needs.

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The Undecidable Grounds of Scientific Expertise: Science Education and the Limits of Intellectual Independence

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Jan 1, 2001

This article addresses the question of the nature of the critical assessment nonscientists can ma... more This article addresses the question of the nature of the critical assessment nonscientists can make - and that they should, as a science education goal, be taught to make - with regard to scientific claims when they either do not have the necessary evidence, or they are simply unable to appraise it for themselves. We argue that if scientific knowledge is seen as based partly on evidence that is prudentially, socially and politically constituted rather than as exclusively rational or empirical in nature, and if it is understood as a communal rather than as an individual product, then evidence can be criticized or interrogated on the basis of the conditions of its production, even when it cannot be appraised substantively. Such evidential undecidability is in this sense a critical lever for the assessment of scientific claims; however, it is neither a content-transcendent nor a strictly immanent dimension of scientific knowledge. The undecidability at the foundation of evidential proof is an a priori condition of possibility for the production of scientific knowledge and, as such, is a constitutive feature of scientific claims, although it does not appear within them. For this reason, an emphasis on the undecidable dimensions of “evidence” should be featured as a component of the science education curriculum. Such an emphasis would provide not only a fuller scientific understanding of what evidential proof actually entails, but also a crucial resource for the critical appraisal of scientific claims by nonscientists.

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Difference, differend, différance: post-structural investigations of social identity

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Sample Chapter from The Lucid Vigil.pdf

The Lucid Vigil: Deconstruction, Desire and the Politics of Critique, 2019

Front matter and "Introduction." For more information, go to https://www.routledge.com/The-Lucid... more

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The Lucid Vigil: Deconstruction, Desire and the Politics of Critique

The Lucid Vigil, 2019

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Democracy in Crisis: Violence, Alterity, Community

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The Emancipatory Force of Critique: A Radical Proposal

Philosophy, Politics and Critique, 2024

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Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Critique: A Derridean Perspective

Studia UBB, Philosophia, 2021

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Lies in the Time of COVID

Derrida Today, 2020

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Il la faut (la logique), "Yes, yes": Deconstruction's Critical Force

Derrida Today, 2018

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Question 94 - Response to Misgeld.pdf

Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 2017

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More than Life: Human Dignity and the Problem of Rights

Mosaic: A Journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Dec 2015

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"As if" there were a "Jew": The (non)existence of deconstructive responsibility

Derrida Today, May 2014

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Why Must I? A Freudian Response to the Question of Ethical-Political Responsibility

Mosaic: A journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, Dec 2011

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Alterity as democracy-to-come

Violence, Alterity, Community, 2010

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When was 9/11? Philosophy and the terror of futurity

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Aug 1, 2008

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Communities in Question: Sociality and Solidarity in Nancy and Blanchot

Journal for Cultural Research, Jan 1, 2005

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Judging justice: The strange responsibility of deconstruction

Philosophy & social criticism, Jan 1, 2004

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'Politicizing Deconstruction': On not treating _Specters of Marx_

Rethinking Marxism, Jan 1, 1999

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Pluralizing Universal 'Man': The Legacy of Transcendentalism and Teleology in Habermas's Discourse Ethics

The Review of politics, Jan 1, 1998

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Education qua Enlightenment: On the Rationality of the Principle of Reason

Philosophy of Education Archive, Jan 1, 2003

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The Undecidable Grounds of Scientific Expertise: Science Education and the Limits of Intellectual Independence

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Jan 1, 2001

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Difference, differend, différance: post-structural investigations of social identity

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Thinking the Ethical Relation: The Implications of Deconstruction for Feminist Political Theory

problematiquejournal.com, 1995

My purpose in this discussion is to show how I understand the "politics" of deconstruction, parti... more My purpose in this discussion is to show how I understand the "politics" of deconstruction, particularly with regard to Thomas McCarthy's objection that Derrida's "metapolitical, philosophical reflection" cannot "itself produce relevant political insights," and therefore does not "obviate the need for entering into empirical, normative, and critical debates at the level of politics." (1991, 114-15). I begin with the claim that an adequate notion of ethical-political "responsibility" entails the following presuppositions: that moral claims and decisions always necessitate a moment or an ethical ground that philosophy itself is essentially unable to address, that this moment is fundamentally bound up with subjectivity and that, consequently, an element of uncertainty is essential and foundational to the ethical sphere itself. I argue that such an understanding of "responsibility" is not at all congruent with the theories of Richard Rorty or Jurgen Habermas. In other words, I suggest, it would be misguided to reduce my own view of radical contingency to the ways in which contingency is taken up by either Habermas or Rorty. In the last section of the paper, I propose that the view I outline at the start does connect directly - if somewhat abstractly - with Derrida's project. Specifically, I propose that it is on precisely the level of "responsibility" that the deconstructive work of Derrida is an important contribution to radical social theories such as feminism. I conclude with the suggestion that deconstruction is a "critical theory" - but that, unlike that of the Frankfurt school, it is one which works at the metapolitical level of the ethics of ethics.

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