The Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volume 45, Issue 2, Summer 2007

Patrick O’Connor
Pages 303-334

Derrida’s Worldly Responsibility
The Opening between ‘Faith” and the “Sacred”

This article will theorize how Derrida’s deconstruction signifies a fundamental ontological alterity. We will examine the use of both the tropes of “sacred” and ‘faith” as tropes to express this possibility. We will articulate how deconstruction, as a development of phenomenology, provides a theoretical nexus where the alterity of things and persons may be thought. We will arrive at the paradoxical formulation of “ontological alterity” as a key moment in deconstructive thinking. Essentially we will argue that deconstruction offers the resources to think the relation between other person and things in the world as motivated by a firm radicalization of Heideggerean worldliness and Levinasian alterity.