Introduction: Theory, Im-possibility, Limits

There are two key themes offered by the work of Jacques Derrida which offer resources for thinking how we might avoid reproducing a mode of analysis in which the potential of post-foundational approaches to ethics are limited by its positioning as a ground for politics: first, an explicit focus on the limits of, and in, theory; second, the development of the concepts of the im-possible, aporia and hiatus. These are the starting points for the analysis offered in this chapter.

In the first instance, Derrida's engagement with the limitations of theory and theorising offers a way to move outside of the question concerning what ethics can do for politics, for thinking about ethics as non-theoretical and non-foundational and for exploring the implications of this reorientation for politics and the political. Deconstruction explicitly ‘resists theory’, offers a focus on ‘what threatens, exceeds, or destabilizes the stanza of a coherent theory’ and seeks to ‘exceed the theoretical’. That is, rather than rejecting theory, deconstruction offers a way of engaging with its limits.

The second theme is a more specific articulation and development of this question of limits. One of the ways in which the limits of theory are traced in Derrida's work is through the concept of the im-possible: ‘the edge that forms the union and the separation of the possible and the impossible, the dash between them – the im-possible as possible or the possible as im-possible’.