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The idea that there was some kind of turn, after the 1980s, towards issues of ethical and political responsibility is now well established as a version of the history of deconstruction. Sometimes this is thought to be attributable to Derrida's own increasingly social, ethical and political responsibility after the Heidegger affair in 1987 and the de Man affair in 1988: many have spoken of the "ethical turn" in Derrida's work, and by extension, an ethical turn in criticism and theory more generally. It has been my argument in this book that Derrida's most consistent interests throughout his career were based in questions about time, and that the primacy of questions about time is what was least well understood by proponents of deconstruction in literary studies in the United States in those first decades. My argument is therefore part of a discernible process of revision that has been underway more recently, and which seeks to emphasize the arguments about time that are at the centre of Derrida's thinking, whether about structure or ethics, from the beginning. Martin Hägglund, for example, has intervened to question a range of readings of Derrida which sought, in the 1990s, to yoke him to Levinas, or to take Derrida's own statements of absolute agreement with Levinas's work as evidence of some ethical turn.¹ Hägglund's work is one of the places where temporality and presence are reinstated as the questions that are, particularly in Derrida's late writing, more basic than, or perhaps merely inextricable from, questions of ethics.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137307033_9

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