THERNESS AND DECONSTRUCTION IN JACQUES DERRIDA

Year 2016, Volume: 1 Issue: 2, 4 - 10, 01.12.2016

Innocenzo Sergıo Genovesı

Abstract

Otherness, together with difference, plays a crucial role in Derrida's thinking. Although many critics have interpreted deconstruction as a negative philosophical movement aiming to dismantle old metaphysical dogma and to give alternative readings of philosophical and literary texts, I show that the reflection about the relationship with otherness and the impossibility of getting a complete understanding and availability of it leads deconstructive thinking to fundamental positive results. Indeed, our aiming toward the absolute Other corresponds for Derrida to a basic human aptitude to openness, which he calls messianism. Accordingly, deconstruction is not to be seen as the mere destruction of a tradition, but rather as the strive for the opening to the Other who is yet to come. This paper will focus on Derrida's works that refer to the Jewish conception of Otherness. After having defined the notions of otherness and difference that he develops in such writings, I will attempt to establish to what extent the Jewish conception of messianism influenced Derrida's ideas. Does the Other, that is the Messiah, in the end arrive, or should we rather think about “Him” as never coming, like Judaism does? Translated in philosophical terms: is the coming of the Other something we can expect as a result of deconstructive praxis or is it an unreachable and regulative idea? I will argue that Derrida's position is nearer to the latter. In the end of the paper I will raise the question whether the other's unreachability is a necessary condition for deconstruction to realize its aim at openness. Derrida's work shows that in order to understand our reality we should consider difference as a quasi- fundamental notion. However, I will suggest that difference does not have to be absolutely unbridgeable to make us receptive toward Otherness and that the Other may in the end come

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