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I have argued elsewhere that there is a philosophical alliance between Niklas Luhmann's systems theory and what I have renamed deconstruction-the philosophy of the limit. 1 This alliance turns not only on shared philosophical roots in French phenomenology but on the replacement of grounding principles with grounding paradoxes. Luhmann explicitly argues that systems theory can have no higher level grounding of itself beyond the analysis of the operations of the systems themselves. 2 The paradox is that one only knows a system as a system from within it and by distinguishing it from other systems, but there is no system of all systems in which we could ground the analysis of systems theory. Derrida's philosophy of the limit, as I have interpreted it, is in alliance with this position in two senses: first, the philosophy of the limit is an articulation of the philosophical limit of any attempt to ground reality in an appeal to a system of all systems or, on the contrary, in a transcendental subjectivity. The limit of philosophy is, in Luhmann's sense, a limit to the traditional philosophical project of grounding sociological analysis in either a normative description of a sphere of nature with a corresponding teleological conception of history or some other conception of the ultimate system which encompasses all systems and therefore serves as the basis of the analysis of how one system is either integrated with or distinguished from another.
Both the philosophy of the limit and systems theory also analyze social and intellectual phenomena within a concept of meaning-effects that does not coincide with the concept of meaning as individual intentionality. But even if we accept these as legitimate and shared philosophical presuppositions between the philosophy of the limit and systems theory, we shall need to ask the question: What are the conditions, even if we understand these as systems, that make a system "appear" as a system rather than just as the nature of reality? Luhmann's consistent answer to that question is to turn us back to the observer: "In the case of autopoietic (that is, self-reproducing) systems, this would mean that an observer has to focus on the self-determined and self-determining distinctions a system uses to frame its own observations." 3 For Luhmann, what is...