Reading, Invention, Secret: Deconstruction and the “Ethical Turn” of Literary Studies

Abstract

This study examines the so-called “ethical turn” in literary studies through Jacques Derrida’s writings, questioning whether deconstruction itself underwent such a shift. While critics often speak of an ethical or political turn in Derrida’s work from the late 1980s onwards, Derrida himself resisted the language of “turns,” emphasizing continuity rather than rupture. The essay explores how deconstruction’s engagement with notions such as gift, forgiveness, hospitality, and responsibility demonstrates that ethics and politics were always already present in Derrida’s thought. It further considers how deconstruction generates its own ethos, beyond prescriptive rules, as a hyperbolic ethics rooted in the impossible and the unconditional. The connection between this ethos and literature emerges most forcefully in Derrida’s reflections on secrecy: literature is not the concealment of a hidden meaning, but the experience of secrecy itself. Readings of Abraham, Melville’s Bartleby, and other texts illustrate how literary writing stages singularity, alterity, and responsibility beyond classical ethical frameworks.