Habermas and
Jacques Derrida engaged in somewhat acrimonious disputes beginning in the 1980s and culminating in a mutual refusal to participate in extended debate and a tendency to talk past one another. Following Habermas' publication of "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Derrida" (in
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity), Derrida, citing Habermas as an example, remarked that, "those who have accused me of reducing philosophy to literature or logic to rhetoric ... have visibly and carefully avoided reading me" ("Is There a Philosophical Language?" p. 218, in
Points...). Others prominent in
postmodern thought, notably
Jean-François Lyotard, engaged in more extended polemics against Habermas, whereas
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe found these polemics counterproductive. In hindsight, these contentious exchanges contributed to divisions within
continental philosophy by focusing too heavily on a purported opposition between
modernism and
postmodernism — these terms were occasionally elevated to
totemic if not
cosmological importance in the 1980s, due in no small part to works by Lyotard and Habermas and their often enthusiastic and sometimes uncautious reception in American universities. It may be suggested that schematic terminology like "
poststructuralism", trafficked heavily in the United States but virtually unknown in France, found expression in Habermas' understanding of his French contemporaries, bringing with them the baggage of the "
culture wars" raging within American academic circles at the time. In short: although the differences between Habermas and Derrida (if not deconstruction generally) were profound but not necessarily irreconcilable, they were fueled by polemical responses to mischaracterizations of those differences, which in turn sharply inhibited meaningful discussion.
In the aftermath of
9/11, Derrida and Habermas established a limited political solidarity and put their previous disputes behind them in the interest of "friendly and open-minded interchange," as Habermas put it. After laying out their individual opinions on 9/11 in
Giovanna Borradori's Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Derrida wrote a foreword expressing his unqualified subscription to Habermas's declaration, "February 15, or, What Binds Europeans Together: Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core Europe,” in
Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe (Verso, 2005). Habermas has offered further context for this declaration in an
interview. Quite distinct from this,
Geoffrey Bennington, a close associate of Derrida's, has in a further conciliatory gesture offered an
account of deconstruction intended to provide some mutual intelligibility. Derrida was already extremely ill by the time the two had begun their new exchange, and the two were not able to develop this such that they could substantially revisit previous disagreements or find more profound terms of discussion before Derrida's death. Nevertheless, this late collaboration has encouraged some scholars to revisit the positions, recent and past, of both thinkers, vis-a-vis the other.
Jürgen Habermas stunned his admirers not long ago with the following characterization of
egalitarian universalism:
