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  “I would say that’s part of the discussion of free discussion, of the modern task of a modern Enlightenment: it is necessary not to rely on slogans. When you hear ‘deconstruction of the subject,’ this is a slogan, usually. It is used by people who want to avoid what they consider to be the threat coming from deconstruction.” — Jacques Derrida, Talking Liberties 1. The Word That Warns Against Words What happens when the name of a practice of questioning becomes a slogan? The question arises in a 1992 conversation at Oxford between Jacques Derrida and Alan Montefiore, held as part of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures on human rights. Montefiore suggests that perhaps “reconstruction” would be a better term when speaking about the subject. Derrida does not respond by defending deconstruction as the correct name for a doctrine. Instead, he shifts the discussion to the danger of slogans: “It is necessary not to rely on slogans.” He then makes the point directly: when we hear “...

I. What Do We Mean by “Subject”? Questioning the subject became one of the central concerns of twentieth-century philosophy. But there seems to be an obvious problem with this move when we turn to human rights. Modern ideas of freedom, responsibility, and human rights seem to require someone who possesses them. Rights belong to people; people act, choose, suffer, speak, and take responsibility for what they do. Behind these actions, we tend to imagine a stable individual: the human being as the subject of experience, activity, responsibility, and freedom. So what happens if philosophy begins to question the subject itself? The question can sound almost absurd. If there is no stable subject, who is left to have rights? If there is no fixed human essence, on what basis can we speak of universal human rights at all? This is essentially the problem put to Jacques Derrida in an interview devoted to the “deconstruction of the subject.” The interviewer asks whether the subject whose...