It is a curious fact – one noted by Perry Anderson in his book Considerations on Western Marxism – that the level and quality of theoretical work on the left often seems to vary inversely with the fortunes of left-wing politics at large. Then again, one could argue (and Anderson does) that this should not be any great cause for surprise, since a recourse to theory is typically the response of any marginalised fraction of dissident intellectuals, excluded from the mainstream of political life and left little choice but to cultivate a range of more of less hopeful alternative visions. Still one might think it a curious turn of events when this response takes the form of a deep investment in issues of aesthetics, philosophy of art, and literary theory as the chief areas of concern among a sizeable number of committed left-wing cultural activists. For it is, to say the least, far from self-evident that specialised work in these areas could eventually feed back to exert any influence on the way people live, think, feel, vote, and comport themselves in the public sphere of politically responsible action and choice. The suspicion must be – or so it would seem from a commonsense-realist standpoint – that these theorists are just whistling in the dark, discovering all manner of pseudo-radical rhetorics and postures by which to disguise their own deep sense of political failure and defeat. [from "Introduction: Criticism, History and the Politics of Theory"]

In this chapter I propose to contest some of the arguments that Habermas brings against Derrida in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. It seems to me that he has misread Derrida's work, and done so moreoveer in a way that fits all to readily with commonplace ideas about deconstruction as a species of latter-day Nietzschean irrationalism, one that rejects the whole legacy of post-Kantian enlightened thought. In short, Habermas goes along with the widely-held view that deconstrution is a matter of collapsing all genre-distinctions, especially those between philosophy and literature, reason and rhetoric, language in its constative and performative aspects. This is all the more unfortunate since Habermas's book (which I shall henceforth refer to as PDM) is by far the most important contribution to date in the ongoing quarrel between French post-structuralism and that tradition of Ideologiekritik which Habermas has carried on from Adorno and earlier members of the Frankfurt School. So I will be criticising PDM from a standpoint which might appear squarely opposed to Habermas's critical project. That this is not at all my intention – that in fact I concur with most of what Habermas has to say – will, I hope, become clear in the course of this chapter. [from chapter 1, "Deconstruction, Postmodernism and Philosophy: Habermas on Derrida"]