"Another way to understand what Derrida is getting at and wether there is a way to return to a reductionist critique of the totality rather than a fragmented critic of everything, is to take up Max Horkheimer's book The Eclipse Of Reason. In it, Max describes how enlightenment reason is unjustifiably totalizing. He prefigures post modernity and deconstruction by tracing how reason itself leads to rationality and barbarism. According to Max, premodern reason was objective.
At the risk of oversimplifying, let's say that objective reason is a reason that searches for the truth with a capital T. The aim of objective reason is to discover something outside of ourselves, something either in the world or in the heavens, that once discovered will provide a comprehensive meaning to our lives and direct us on how to live.
Subjective reason on the other hand is thinking in the service of the self. In the modern world, almost all reason is subjective, in so much as it is concerned with utility and with what is good for humans. What's worse than subjective reasons' selfishness is that while starting with the aim of liberating humanity from oppressive totalizing systems of universal meaning, it inevitably ends up breaking with meaning altogether by placing the self-interest of the powerful at the center. What starts as subjective reason based on the inherent value and meaning of every individual human life, becomes a hollow instrumental reason that stamps out human meaning altogether.
Derrida's deconstruction is the form instrumental reason takes when it can no longer justify itself and must thereby
However, we might hold on to a bit of hope as both hopelessness of neoliberal deconstruction and the possibility to a radical continuation of philosophy are quite literally in the air."
