ABSTRACT
Now, in this final chapter, I am to provide you with some sort of ‘afterword’. As the Routledge Critical Thinkers editor explains in his Preface: ‘Each book [in this series] concludes with a survey of the thinker’s impact, outlining how their ideas have been taken up and developed by others’ (p. ix). It is a Routledge Critical Thinkers convention for this conclusion to come under the form of the heading ‘After …’: ‘After Derrida’. After Derrida? I began with a sort of preface entitled ‘Why Derrida?’, and I tried to answer that question, in other words to treat it in the most serious fashion, while also explaining why it seemed to me comical and ridiculous. Derrida’s work is of interest precisely to the extent that it questions and transforms the ways in which we might think about the structure and presuppositions of a series of books called Routledge Critical Thinkers. His thinking is fundamentally incompatible with the project of a text (such as this one was supposed to have been) that sums up the author’s work, beginning with a neatly packaged explanation of why this work might be worth reading and ending with a likewise neatly packaged survey of what it was all about and what impact it has had on other thinkers.
