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Can this really be Derrida? You can almost see that question forming in audiences' minds while listening to him speak passionately about morality and faith. Even having followed Derrida's turn during the last decade to themes like negative theology, justice, gift-giving, hospitality, faith, and forgiveness, I admit it seems a bit odd to read him explicating Matthew 6 in The Gift of Death and saying that justice and love are not deconstructable.

But John Caputo thinks we should have seen this development coming. On his read, Derrida's recent thought is more a shift in emphasis than a reversal. True, even back in the sixties, Derrida's thinking had an underlying "Levinasian tone" (as Caputo puts it). Yet now that influence from Emmanuel Levinas has become so prominent that Derrida often sounds like Levinas. Of course, Caputo admits that Derrida's notion of differance previously had a more Nietzschean than Levinasian ring. And I'd add that not only was Derrida interpreted in a more Nietzschean (i.e., playful and skeptical) fashion but that his thinking actually was more Nietzschean.

Still, I think Caputo is largely right in claiming that Derrida's early texts can be read as compatible with his current thinking (a view that Derrida shares). Some may disagree on this point, but Caputo cannot simply be dismissed, since there are few interpreters of Derrida as knowledgeable. I can't think of a better introduction to Derrida in terms of accuracy and accessibility than Deconstruction in a Nutshell (which also prepares one for the much more challenging Prayers and Tears). Caputo's style may be too "playful" for some tastes; but his writing is certainly never boring and has a clarity which many commentators on Derrida sadly lack.

In any case, whereas many have either embraced or denounced deconstruction as a tool of wanton destruction, Derrida has recently come to insist that it is (and always has been) all about promoting justice. But how can that claim be reconciled with the early Derrida and the writings of the so-called deconstructionists? To answer that question, we need to re turn to Derrida's beginnings.

Few recent notions have caused such a storm and been open to such widely varying definitions as "deconstruction." Probably the typical view is summed up by a recent chapel speaker at my institution who claimed that "deconstruction is the theory that says you can make texts mean anything you want." But perhaps that chapel speaker himself was guilty of a sort of deconstruction: that of making deconstruction itself mean anything you want it to mean.

As a method of reading and interpreting, deconstruction seems simple enough. Its roots are in Edmund Husserl's notion of Abbau—the "unbuilding" of a complex structure into its component parts. Such unbuilding is not unlike what philosophers call "analysis." Where the two differ is most clear in their focus. While both focus on what a text (or idea or statement or theory) says, deconstruction puts particular emphasis on what is not said (i.e., what is assumed but not explicitly stated).

It's not hard to see that such a method has at least the potential for generating interpretations that are peripheral or even completely contrary to what the text or theory says. Understandably, critics like John Searle and Amy Gutmann view deconstruction as providing license for irresponsible scholarship. Obviously, it's too much to blame deconstruction for the ruination of academe and culture in general, but deconstruction's critics are clearly right that its effect has been negative in many ways. More difficult to assess, though, is how much Derrida and the method of deconstruction itself are to blame.

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