Edinburgh University Press, 2009.  

Phenomenology or Deconstruction? contains new readings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricœur, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Jacques Derrida’s engagement with phenomenological themes generates a new understanding of “being” and “presence” that exposes significant blindspots in traditional readings of both phenomenology and deconstruction. In reproducing neither a stock phenomenological reaction to deconstruction nor the routine deconstructive reading of phenomenology, Christopher Watkin provides a fresh assessment of the future of phenomenology along with a new reading of the deconstructive legacy. Through careful studies of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and Nancy, Watkin shows how a phenomenological tradition much wider and richer than Husserl or Heidegger takes into account Derrida’s critique of ontology while maintaining a commitment to the ontological. This new reading fundamentally recasts the relation between deconstruction and phenomenology and marks the first sustained discussion of the possibilities and problems for future “deconstructive phenomenology.”

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Lucid and rigorous in equal measure, Watkin’s Phenomenology and Deconstruction is both a timely intervention and a critical introduction to a vital current in contemporary European thought. It is also an essential reconfiguration of the intellectual landscape as concerns phenomenology, giving us back the bodies we need, but stranger and richer. — Prof. Patrick ffrench, Department of French, King’s College, London