Abstract

This is a reading of several early texts by Jacques Derrida, with particular attention to his discussions of responsibility. The notion, "responsibility," in early deconstruction is rarely thematized in the secondary literature, even as that literature discusses the "ethical" aspects of Derrida's thought. My reading provides a new vantage point from which to address the role of ethics in deconstruction. ;I propose that the extensive discussions of philosophical responsibility in Derrida's earliest works provide another dimension to the notion of "writing," arguably the best known concept emerging from this period. My reading takes Derrida's technical term, "writing," to be akin to the notion of writing we find in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard. For the latter, the terms "writing" and "thought" develop in an overtly political context, in which the limits of communication and theory give meaning to the ethical and the political. My reading of Lyotard illuminates an additional aspect of his thought, namely its relevance to theories of incommensurability in Anglo-American philosophy of science. I show that Lyotard's discussion of writing/thought fulfills the criteria for what Paul Feyerabend considers good science, which entails an equally important idea of good politics. With the help of this constructed exchange between Feyerabend and Lyotard, I conclude with a reading of Derrida's discussion of science, writing, and thought, in Of Grammatology. ;Thus, my approach to Derrida's early work yields several relatively novel insights. It reevaluates the relationship between ethics and Derrida's notion of writing . It shows the relevance of Derrida's and Lyotard's thought to philosophy of science, especially that part of philosophy of science which attempts to outline the ethics of certain epistemologies. Finally, this reading raises questions about the relationship between the works of Derrida and Lyotard, a relationship which contemporary scholarship has just recently begun to explore. In addition to the figures above, the dissertation offers readings of Edmund Husserl and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as extensive engagements with some of Derrida's best known commentators, most notably Rodolphe Gasche, Geoffrey Bennington, John Caputo, and Christopher Norris