Standing Problems 263major problem is that in attacking logocentrism so dynamically and in declaiming
his method as unsettlingallthe self-confidence of Western normative thinking, the
question arises as to where to go next and how would one know where to go next?
Clearly Derrida became increasingly disturbed during the 1980s and 1990s by issues
such as human rights, justice, racism, hospitality, friendship, immigration, asylum-
seeking, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and forgiveness, amongst other issues. The
central question is, given what he has already done with deconstruction, how does he
account for this new mood of responsibility? Further, how would he justify it, would
he even want to justify it? Some have seen Derrida’s struggles here as tied up with his
rediscovery of the ethical writing of his old teacher Emmanuel Levinas.^40
If everything is a conventional linguistic sign (and nothing else), surely all existing
normative or ideologically orientated theories succumb to the same logic. Mira-
culously, in some way, Derrida believes that there is an idea of justice, in fact he
even equates deconstruction with justice, since deconstructing the rationale of justice
enables thepresenceof justice to arise in some way (see Beardsworth 1996: 132–3).
Similarly, Derrida suggests in his bookOn Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness(2002)
that in thinking about refugees, we should try to recover something he calls ‘an original
concept of hospitality, of the duty of hospitality’, which he considers as constituting a
‘new cosmopolitics’. This, in turn, involves ‘dreaming of another concept, of another
set of rights’ that transcend international law. This new ethic of hospitality is not
one ethic amongst others, rather ‘ethics is hospitality’. Ethics is ‘co-extensive with
the experience of hospitality’. Apparently, ‘being at home with oneself (...the other
within oneself) supposes a reception or inclusion’. The debate about cosmopolitanism
and how to deal with the rights of refugees ‘is a question of knowing how to transform
and improve the law, and of knowing if this improvement is possible within a his-
torical space that takes placebetweenthe Law of an unconditional hospitality...and
the conditional laws of a right to hospitality, without whichTheunconditional Law
of hospitality would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire’
(Derrida 2002: 5, 8, 17, 22–3). Cosmopolitan hospitality calls forth, it appears, a ‘just’
response.
The cosmopolitan essay is followed by another equally baffling essay on themes of
forgiveness. The overriding thought arises here that if a new ‘young’ Derrida (mark 2)
encountered the above writings, he would surely set about gleefully deconstructing all
their hidden presences, normativism, and teleology. The ‘ends of man’ have crept back
here within Derrida’s anfractuous prose. These later works seem to be the work of frus-
trated melancholy. He obviously does ‘feel’ concerned about refugees, racism, and the
like, he also has valid thoughts about a Europe that could be more tolerant and open to
difference, but in a sense he is at the same time hoisted by his own youthful petard. His
last gasp here is to think of ethics and justice as actually embodied in deconstruction.
If deconstruction functions successfully on the humanistic rationalism of the West,
then it will create a space for something else—but what? Derrida intimates that it will
be something really just and ethical, but there is absolutelynoreason why that should
be the case, unless Derrida wants to incorporate some benign rationalist teleology.
The outcome could just as well turn into rampant racism or xenophobia.