recent debate with Richard Rorty, that the latter, by not fully recognizing its indebtedness to Levinas, misunderstands the political import of the work of Jacques Derrida. I maintain, pace Critchley, that trying to push the Derrida\u2013Levinas connection too far will not only further compound Rorty\u2019s view of Derrida as a thinker devoid of political ef\ufb01cacy, but that it will moreover serve to obscure the signi\ufb01cant differences which exist between Levinas and Derrida \u2013 differences which cannot be overlooked in any serious discussion of the two thinkers in question. In the second half, I try to convince Critchley that what separates Derrida from Levinas is precisely what hooks him up with Rorty at a political level. Both, I argue, are committed to a civic religion of social hope. In so doing, I try to convince Rorty that his caricature of Derrida as a private writer without political consequence, ought now to be seriously reconsidered.

Simon Critchley1 has for many years been a pivotal defender of the view that deconstruction is not, as many of its most vehement detractors argue, a brand of wanton libertinism intent on razing our most hallowed institutions to dust, but is rather a form of critical engagement with a strong ethical and political impetus. Critchley\u2019s The Ethics of Decon-

this reading, is a thinker whose work seeks to privilege difference or otherness at the expense of homogeneity, or to deconstruct the prevail- ing crusts of convention in the name of those buried beneath their weight. Critchley\u2019s foremost motivation in this book was to put paid to the rather obtuse view that deconstruction promoted a form of linguistic idealism in which the subject was swallowed up by an omnivorous chain of sig- ni\ufb01ers, thus signaling the demise of truth, value and meaning. In this, I believe, he has succeeded. While there will always be those who dismiss Derrida as an irresponsible charlatan who has done more than any other to destroy the fabric of the academy, it is, thanks to Critchley and those like him, becoming more and more dif\ufb01cult to sell such a line.

That acknowledged, I have come of late to the belief that, if pushed too far, the strategy of hitching Derrida\u2019s wagons onto Levinas\u2019s tow- truck serves only to lessen the impact and ef\ufb01cacy of Critchley\u2019s argument. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the latter\u2019s recent debate with Richard Rorty. This series of exchanges has under- scored most forcibly, in my opinion, the weaknesses of attempting to argue for more than the inspirational value of Levinas\u2019s insights for Derrida\u2019s work. In an effort to persuade Rorty that Derrida\u2019s writings are more than mere private ironic indulgences, albeit of the most creative and imaginative kind, Critchley argues that if one reads Derrida from a Levinasian perspective one will see quite clearly that not only does Derrida\u2019s work have credible political utility, but it resembles in a surprising way many of Rorty\u2019s own ethical and political intuitions. I agree with Critchley that Derrida and Rorty share many common politi- cal and ethical assumptions, and that Rorty\u2019s early portrait of Derrida as a political eunuch is simply erroneous. I disagree, however, with his contention that the reason why Derrida comes close to Rorty at a politi- cal level is because many of the former\u2019s insights in this regard are predi- cated upon Levinas\u2019s insights, and that these insights are, in turn, shared in the main by Rorty. In advancing this thesis, Critchley not only under- estimates the force of Derrida\u2019s very speci\ufb01c take on what is required at an ethical and political level, an approach which departs in a most sig- ni\ufb01cant way from that forged by Levinas, but he also, I want to argue, misrepresents Levinas himself.

I have always been of the view that if one attempts to convince Rorty of the merits of Derrida\u2019s political credentials by way of an invo- cation of Levinas, one is getting off on the wrong foot. For a pragma- tist, Levinas\u2019s Judaically charged ethics is at best idealistic. This is so because pragmatists in the mode of Rorty believe that ethics ought to take the form of concrete responses to pressing dilemmas. In suggesting that \u2018the word of God speaks through the glory of the face and calls for an ethical conversion or reversal of our nature\u2019, Levinas, on a pragma- tist reading, is simply indulging in hyperbolic rhetoric. Ethics demands

practical projects which aim at relieving unjusti\ufb01able misery and suffer- ing, and this is achieved through a manipulation of sentiment in which we come to see strange people as fellow-sufferers. Rorty is quite speci\ufb01c with regard to the means by which sentiment can be manipulated to such an end. I shall return in more detail to the actual nature of these means shortly. For the moment, however, it is suf\ufb01cient to say that at no point in his authorship does Levinas recommend any concrete pro- posals of the type Rorty would favor. For him, the face-to-face encounter is ethical in and of itself. It does not require, that is, anything more than a mere observance of everyday etiquette.2So to argue that Derrida\u2019s work has ethical and political ef\ufb01cacy on the basis of its Levinasian strains alone, is to run the risk of having it dismissed as little more than a quaint attempt to realize sublimity.

In what follows, I want to tease out the distinctions between Levinas and Derrida, so as to advance a more plausible case for seeing the latter\u2019s work as having real and genuine ethical and political substance. In so doing, I want to show that, if looked at from this non-Levinasian per- spective, many of the sentiments therein chime harmoniously with Rorty\u2019s own liberal and democratic ideals, albeit for different reasons than those proffered by Critchley.

In his \u2018Metaphysics in the Dark: a Response to Richard Rorty and Ernesto Laclau\u2019, Simon Critchley argues that \u2018the undeconstructable condition of possibility for deconstruction isju st ice, which I seek to interpret in Levinasian terms as a relation to the other, a response to suffering or an attempt to limit cruelty and humiliation\u2019.3It is true that one of Derrida\u2019s so-called \u2018undeconstructables\u2019 is justice, and that he uses this word in a Levinasian vein to mean \u2018the relation to the other\u2019. There are, however, subtle, yet highly signi\ufb01cant, differences between what Derrida means by justice and what Levinas has in mind. Moreover, it is incorrect to argue that justice, for Levinas, amounts to a response to suffering \u2018or an attempt to limit cruelty or humiliation\u2019. Critchley is here employing Rorty\u2019s de\ufb01nition of a good liberal \u2013 as someone for whom the in\ufb02iction of cruelty is the worst thing we can do. At no point throughout his work, however, does Levinas offer concrete suggestions as to how suffering, cruelty and humiliation might be avoided. His is an \u2018ethics\u2019 which, in many ways, is punctuated by the classical gestures of the metaphysical tradition from which he is trying so desperately to escape. That is, Levinas\u2019s talk of ethics as \ufb01rst philosophy, as having no ontological or deontological foundation, seems totally at odds with his assertion that it is through the face of the other that God communes