For those who fervently repeated the line that deconstruction is a brand of apolitical irresponsibility or nihilism, intent on dismantling Western laws and culture and leaving us lost in some apocalyptic landscape of swirling negations and withering absence, in what Roger Scruton characterised as a world ‘without hope or faith or love… in short, the world of the Devil’, the advice would be clear: close the door as quickly as possible and nail a few boards up for good measure. For such critics, the bluntness of Derrida's remark in Politics of Friendship– ‘no democracy without deconstruction, no deconstruction without democracy’ (PF, 105) – should have reached out from the deceptively comforting parentheses in which it appeared and struck with a sobering force. While it is difficult to make sense of such characterisations of Derrida's work, one only has to recall the ‘de Man affair’, the ‘Cambridge affair’ and the kind of reactions after Derrida's death to recall the intensity of responses deconstruction provoked. But as Derrida once remarked, ‘When the door is slammed too quickly, at least one knows there is a door’ (PS, 74).

But there have been more measured responses. While unsympathetic to deconstruction's ‘ersatz textual politics’, Terry Eagleton matter-of-factly notes that ‘there is no doubt that Derridean deconstruction was a political project from the outset’. And Habermas's choice of the word ‘enlightening’ in the title of a piece written shortly after Derrida's death in 2004, ‘A Final Farewell: Derrida's Enlightening Impact’, signals the kind of shifts that have taken place in response to Derrida's work. ‘Enlightening’ and ‘no doubt… a political project’ is something few would have applied to Derrida's work a few decades ago. But is it the case that, assured of the political concerns of deconstruction, we can now simply slide back into those parentheses? The formulation of that parenthetical claim may still appear somewhat hyperbolic. Does Derridean deconstruction contain an injunction that necessarily points towards democracy?