The Play of the World: The End, the Great Outdoors, the Outside, Alterity and the Real

Abstract

Both in his earliest debates with thinkers such as Foucault and Levinas, and in later critiques of political immediacy, Derrida invoked the inescapable burden of a necessary but impossible universalism. By raising the stakes so high it would seem that deconstruction generates hyperbolic conceptions of ethics and justice, but also precludes any form of day to day political positivity. In this essay I pursue the seemingly less ‘ethical’ conception of play in Derrida's work to argue for a multiple universalism.