ABSTRACT
In order to examine what I will call an ‘ethics of discussion’, I would now like to assemble several threads from the argument of the preceding chapters. The ethics of discussion is the ethics that Derrida appeals to in his debates with his critics, for instance in his exchange with John Searle and in the debates surrounding the wartime journalism of Paul de Man.1 At one level, the ‘ethics of discussion’ refers to certain academic norms such as the need to carefully and closely study what one evaluates and criticizes, to hear both sides of an argument, to proceed with an open mind, and so on. These are norms that one can fi nd in the academic world, however imperfect, and they are norms that Derrida affi rms. At another level, the ethics of discussion points beyond the walls of the university. In this more general sense, the ethics of discussion implies a willingness to respond to the other. That is, it implies a willingness to respond to the otherness-the singularity and heterogeneity-of the other and to take responsibility for one’s relationship to the other, a relationship that inevitably infl icts some violence on the otherness of the other as we saw in previous chapters.
