"An expanded edition of the standard work in the field. Simon Critchley's The Ethics of Deconstruction, was originally published to great acclaim in 1992. It was his first book and the first to argue for the ethical turn in Derrida's work and to show as powerfully as possible how deconstruction has persuasive ethical consequences that are vital to our thinking through of questions of politics and democracy. Rather than being concerned with deconstruction in terms of the contradictions inherent in any text, an approach typical of the early Derrida and those in literary criticism aiming to extract a critical method for an application to literature, Critchley concerns himself with the philosophical context necessary for an understanding of deconstruction. Far from being some sort of value-free nihilism or textual free-play, Critchley showed the ethical demand that was driving Derrida's work. His claim was that Derrida's understanding of ethics has to be understood in relation to his lifelong engagement with the work of Emmanuel Levinas and the book lays out the fascinating details of their philosophical confrontation. A second expanded edition was published in 1999 by Edinburgh University Press. This third edition contains three new texts, and a new preface where Critchley reflects upon the origins, motivation and reception of The Ethics of Deconstruction"--Back cover.