ABSTRACT
How did Derrida transform the way in which people like me do philosophy? Let me begin negatively with a couple of caveats and confessions. I was never a structuralist and always found Saussure’s linguistics a deeply improbable approach to language, meaning and the relation of language and meaning to the world. Therefore, Derrida’s early arguments in this area, particularly the critique of the priority of speech over writing in the hugely influential Of Grammatology, always left me rather cold. Talk of ‘poststructuralism’ left me even colder; almost as cold as rhetorical throat-clearing about ‘post-modernism’. So, in assessing Derrida’s influence, I would want to set aside a series of notions famously associated with him – like différance, trace and archi-writing, what Rodolphe Gasché used to call the ‘infrastructures’ – in order to get a clearer view of what I think Derrida was about in his work and what we can learn from that work.
