Mohammad Rajaee

Derrida’s deconstruction is a gesture toward what perpetually withdraws—an originary non-origin that is never simply present. This withdrawal is endless, resisting any direct encounter or dialectical grasp. Within a Hegelian or logocentric framework, such resistance appears as an impasse, since logocentric reason conceptualises only by internalising. When Habermas confronts deconstruction, he translates it into the language of the metaphysics of presence, internalising what is meant to remain elusive. Yet this projection is inconsistent: Habermas assumes that because withdrawal cannot be approached dialectically, it cannot be thought at all. In this sense, and in Derrida's own terms, Habermas’s reading of deconstruction acquires a dimension hégélienne. Derrida, however, offers an oblique offering—a way to think the unthinkable without claiming to tame or master it. This paper does not aim to refute Habermas’s critique of Derrida. Instead, it proposes to read Derrida through Habermas’s misreading, allowing the limits of Habermas’s post-Hegelian framework to illuminate deconstruction’s oblique logic. By placing Derrida’s thought face to face with the demand for mediation and presence, I argue that what appears as inconsistency in Habermas becomes a point of entry into Derrida’s oblique offering. Through this encounter, we can understand the vigilance Derrida extends—a thinking at the edge of philosophy’s closure, where thought proceeds without the assurance of presence.

This paper revisits the concept of the “leap” in Derrida’s philosophy as a paleonymic gesture that both inherits and intervenes in the metaphysical tradition. Whereas logocentric thinking conceives the leap as a movement toward an originary ground or a pure realm of presence, Derrida extends it as an infinite, prosthetic motion that never reaches its destination. Drawing on Derrida’s deconstructions, the paper examines how Derrida extends the metaphysical leap—an attempt to transcend contamination—into a deconstructive movement that embraces impurity and relationality. By analysing Derrida’s engagement with Descartes, Heidegger, Blanchot, and Nancy, this study argues that deconstruction itself can be understood as a “leap without ground,” one that endlessly re-leaps within the interplay of inside and outside, presence and absence.