the this-worldly emphasis that Derrida disdained in Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure, J. L. Austin, and others.
These thinkers’ addiction to presence (as Derrida described it)
was matched by the empirical fact of the face-to-face, the en-
counter with the other person, in Lévinas. The way out of the
cave had to point toward a supervening reality. For Derrida at
the end of his career, this reality was Lévinasian justice. One
can speculate that Lévinas offered an acceptable path to Der-
rida not just because of the prestige associated with ethical
judgment, but because Lévinas rejects psychology in favor of a
more primal confrontation with the suffering person, whose
motives and character do not matter.
There is another aspect of Derrida that demands discus-
sion: his entanglement in what his fellow deconstructionist
Paul de Man named, in a famous book, the “blindness and in-
sight” model. For de Man, every text necessarily misreads it-
self, and therefore each author misunderstands the meaning of
his own writing. Ironically, this pattern of misreading is just as
true of the critic who sets to work uncovering an author’s self-
deceptions. So, de Man remarked, Derrida deliberately mis-
reads Rousseau in order to attain the advantage over him: but
Rousseau’s text, which is richer and more knowing than Der-
rida will admit, has the last word, and exposes the critic as di-
minisher of his subject’s complexities.
In this book I address Derrida’s readings of several fasci-
nating thinkers whose blindnesses become Derrida’s insights.
Derrida’s readings of Rousseau, Plato, Husserl, and Austin
were, as de Man predicted, misreadings. Derrida obscured
their individuality and turned them into examples of a mono-
lithic logocentrism. (By logocentrismDerrida meant the self-
validating pride of a reason that can explain itself, securing on
its own behalf a masterful logos, or account of the world.)
Introduction 7