1001Philosophers

Jacques Derrida vs Jurgen Habermas

Derrida and Habermas were the two most prominent late twentieth-century continental philosophers, and their long-running mutual hostility — Habermas treating deconstruction as performatively self-defeating, Derrida charging Habermas with not having read him carefully — finally gave way to a partial reconciliation in the 2000s over questions of European political identity.

At a glance

Jacques DerridaJurgen Habermas
Dates1930 – 2004b. 1929
NationalityFrenchGerman
EraContemporaryContemporary
Movements Post-Structuralism, Continental Philosophy Critical Theory, Continental Philosophy
Profile Jacques Derrida → Jurgen Habermas →

Where they agree

Both worked in the long aftermath of Heidegger and the Frankfurt School, both held that philosophy must reckon with the linguistic turn, and both took the analysis of the philosophical tradition as inseparable from the practice of philosophy itself. Both treated political and ethical questions as proper objects of philosophical inquiry rather than as supplementary to a more fundamental theoretical core.

Where they disagree

Habermas held that philosophy can identify rational norms — the norms of communicative action — that hold even when they are flouted, and that deconstruction's blurring of the philosophy-literature distinction undermines the basis of rational critique. Derrida held that Habermas's foundationalism rests on suppressing the textual operations through which any norm is articulated, and that deconstruction does not abandon rational critique but practices it more rigorously by attending to what philosophical texts cannot say. Their disagreement is the late twentieth-century version of the dispute over reason's self-grounding.

Representative quotes

Jacques Derrida

  • “There is nothing outside of the text.”

    Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.

  • “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.”

    Of Grammatology (1967). G. Spivak translated this as "There is nothing outside the text," which Derrida opponents have characterized to mean that nothing exists but language. Later scholarship has translated it as "There is no outside-of-text" or "There is nothing free of context," i.e. all experience is mediated by interpretation.

  • “At the end of Being and Nothingness , ... Being in-itself and Being for-itself were of Being ; and this totality of beings, in which they were effected, itself was linked up to itself, relating and appearing to itself, by means of the essential project of human-reality. What was named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this fundamental structure.”

    The Ends of Man," Margins of Philosophy , tr. w/ notes by Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press. Chicago, 1982. (original French published in Paris, 1972, as Marges de la philosophie ). p. 116

Jurgen Habermas

  • “Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a subject implies the claim of individuation.”

    Habermas (1972) "Sprachspiel, intention und Bedeutung. Zu Motiven bei Sellars und Wittgenstein". In R.W. Wiggerhaus (Ed.) Sprachanalyse and Soziologie . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). p. 334 | This is called the paradoxical achievement of intersubjectivity

  • “Habermas (1972) "Sprachspiel, intention und Bedeutung. Zu Motiven bei Sellars und Wittgenstein". In R.W. Wiggerhaus (Ed.) Sprachanalyse and Soziologie . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp). p. 334”

    Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a

  • “This is called the paradoxical achievement of intersubjectivity”

    Subjects who reciprocally recognize each other as such, must consider each other as identical, insofar as they both take up the position of subject; they must at all times subsume themselves and the other under the same category. At the same time, the relation of reciprocity of recognition demands the non-identity of one and the other, both must also maintain their absolute difference, for to be a

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