Deconstruction and the 'Unfinished Project of Modernity'

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by Christopher Norris

Routledge

Due/Published December 2000, 256 pages, paper

ISBN 0415929563

Deconstruction has been widely and detrimentally misunderstood. In this provocative new book, Christopher Norris challenges the prevalent idea that deconstruction is merely a more specialized offshoot of postmodernism. Through a close engagement with some key thinkers-among them Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Habermas, Lyotard and Levinas--Norris argues that deconstruction is part of the unfinished project of modernity--a project whose interests and values deconstruction upholds by continuing to question them in a spirit of enlightened self-critical inquiry. Assessing the impact of postmodernist thought across a range of disciplines, the book presents a lucid analysis and guide to the problems and prospects of critical theory.

Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1. Deconstruction versus Postmodernism: epistemology, ethics, aesthetics
Chapter 2. Postmodern Ethics and the Trouble with Relativism
Chapter 3. Deconstruction and the 'Unfinished Project of Modernity'
Chapter 4. Deconstruction, Postmodernism and Philosophy of Science
Chapter 5. 'The idea of University': some interdisciplinary soundings
Chapter 6. Ethics, Autonomy and Self-Invention: debating Foucault
Chapter 7. 'The Night in which All Cows Are Black': Paul de Man, 'mere reading' and indifference to philosophy
Chapter 8. Conflict, Compromise or Complementarity: ideas of science in modern literary theory
Chapter 9. Sexed Equations and Vexed Physicists: the 'two cultures' revisited

Notes
Bibliography
Index