Jon Cogburn cites a very interesting recent article on Derrida from Le Monde by Jean Birnbaum, which concerns Derrida’s philosophical import for today and raises the question of how to inherit his work. I think Birnbaum usefully brings out the positive and negative aspects of that heritage.

Since I first read Derrida in the late 70s I have always thought that his work was epistemological and ontological in scope. This is why I always preferred Feyerabend and Deleuze over Derrida, who seemed to me to embody a half-way house between a correlationist epistemology and ontology and the realist pluralism of Feyerabend and Deleuze. One of the reasons I left Sydney for Paris in 1980 was that a “Derridian” reading of Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault was gaining popularity, a reading that amounted to a new form of textual idealism. His critique of structuralism mobilised various themes of difference, non-foundationalism, semiotic turn…