Ethics at the limit of reason: Ricoeur and the challenge of deconstruction

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 72, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-22

  Bourgeois, Patrick L ^a  

^a LOYOLA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0006403105     PISSN: 10513558     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/acpq19987211     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. This challenge for ethics is specifically summed up in the title of one of the main texts that is a product of the ongoing deconstructive tradition, John Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetices of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University, 1993). Henceforth the reference to this work will be within the text as AE. Jack Caputo is the best English writer in this style of thinking today, and is emerging as one of its leading voices in this country. In equal measure, but not so evident from its title,
2. Simon Critchley's The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida & Levinas(Oxford UK: Blackwell, 1992) challenges any too-typical ethics today as within a closure.
3. It is not possible in the limits of this paper to explore this point fully, but enough will be indicated in the footnotes to make clear this inadequacy of deconstruction. For a full treatment of these points, see: Patrick L. Bourgeois, "Trace, Semiotics, and the Living Present: Derrida or RicoGur," Southwest Philosophy Review, 9 no. 2 (August, 1993), 43-63.
4. Patrick L. Bourgeois, "Semiotics and the Deconstruction of Presence: A Ricoeurian Alternative" American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. LXVI, no. 3 (1993), 361-79.
5. "The Instant and the Living Present: Ricoeur and Derrida," Philosophy Today, 37, no. 1 (Winter 1993).
6. Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of Limit(New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 1. Cornell's interest in renaming deconstruction "a philosophy of limit is not the same as ours, for she is primarily interested in deconstruction, thus renamed, in its relation to law: "Indeed, the significance of understanding justice as the limit to any system of positive law is the first reason I am renaming deconstruction as the philosophy of the limit," (2).
7. Cornell, The Philosophy of Limit, 70.
8. I am here simply agreeing with Critchley in affirming that "limit" has essentially the same conceptual force as the term "closure" does in Derrida's earlier work, so that the problem is essentially the same as in the use of the term "closure." Likewise, it might be worth mentioning that Robert Bernasconi does not mention any change in Derrida's view in 1967 when he preferred the term "closure" (cloture) to end. He further does not see this as a move away from Heidegger on this point. See: Robert Bernasconi, "Levinas and Derrida: The Question of the Closure of Metaphysics," in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 183.
9. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 87.
10. Paul Ricoeur, "Reply to Patrick L. Bourgeois," in The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago and LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1995), 567.
11. Robert Bernasconi, "Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics," in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1987), 135.
12. Jacque Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978).
13. "As Derrida explains: 'There is no beyond-the-undecidable, but this beyond nevertheless remains to be thought from this 'somewhat more reliable point of' reference"; and one can only be involved there in a promise, giving one's word on the subject, even if one denies it by signing ironically.'" Cornell, The Philosophy of Limit, 85, quoting Derrida, "Acts," 137.
14. Cornell has gone beyond this point, establishing that such a philosophy of limit, as ethics, in the context of a feminist contribution, can be seen to offer a '"new/ 'different' ethical configuration." The Philosophy of the Limit, 170.
15. John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutic: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987), 235. Henceforth references to this work will be within the text as RH.
16. Caputö's footnote 29 is quite revealing regarding the ultimate intent of this work: "In my view, Levinas describes the dynamics of faith as well as anybody. Indeed, I think that what Levinas provides is above all a metaphysics of the religious, of faith, which organizes faith around the trace of the Infinite Other. I myself take the present work to be, among other things, a background for a possible account of faith, and I take the notion of differance as a propaedeutic to a theory of faith"; see chapter 2, note 21. Fn. 21, chapter 2: There is, I think, an important (quasi) philosophy of religious in deconstruction; for a little start on it, see Charles E. Winquist and John D. Caputo, "Derrida and the Study of Religion," Religious Studies Review, 16 (January 1990): 19-25.
17. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself As Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 170.