Contemporary Pragmatism Editions Rodopi Vol. 6, No. 1 (June 2009), 87–129 © 2009 A Pragmatist Critique of Derridian Politics Tina Sikka I draw on Security Council Resolution 1674 to demonstrate that the political assumptions Jacques Derrida holds in his politically-oriented texts are inconsistent with the assumptions of his linguistic texts, and that Jürgen Habermas’s political theory is consistent with the political implications of his approach to language. Habermasian pragmatism offers a critical theory of society and discourse of modernity that touches on the same themes of politics and meaning as Derrida and other deconstructionists, but is more coherent, consistent, and explanatorily persuasive. In recent years there has been a rise in the amount of critical scholarship dedicated to unpacking the relationship between the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas. Although these two thinkers were born only a few years apart, their experiences of the world and the specific historical forces that shaped their intellectual upbringing could not be more different. Habermas was born and grew up in Germany and was 15 years old when WW II ended. Much of his work, it has been said, is a response to the devastation wrought by Nazism and the attendant need for Germany to found a new constitutional order. Derrida was a Sephardic Jew born in Algeria and educated in France. It has been argued that the trajectory of his work is shaped by the sense of being doubly displaced and, consequently, feeling estranged from both Algerian and French society. This lack of grounding is reflected in his philosophy which is shaped by an ongoing suspicion of “discourses of identity,” (Thomassen, 2006, 1). Perhaps as a partial result of these differences, the theoretical assumptions that underpin Habermas and Derrida’s manifold books and articles on the nature of language, meaning, subjectivity, and truth are equally contradictory. Despite these seemingly insurmountable differences I, as well as other contributors to this area of research such as Lasse Thomassen, Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, Simon Critchley, and Martin Morris, have come to believe that there are points of convergence and divergence between Habermas and Derrida worth unpacking – particularly in relation to their strikingly analogous