Who is Jacques Derrida and what does he want??
In one sense, we all ‘know’ who Jacques Derrida is. Derrida is the idealist who thinks that the whole world is a text. Derrida is the guy who thinks that philosophy is just another type of literature. Derrida is the fellow who claims that writing comes before speech. So many false assumptions and second hand opinions circulate in relation to Jacques Derrida and the intervention popularly known as deconstruction, that it’s difficult to know where to begin. I can only ask you to perform a sort of ‘bracketing’ of everything you think you know about deconstruction, in order to focus on what Derrida actually says. There are a number of reasons why we should pay attention to Derrida. For if deconstruction is right, then we have yet to think collectively. We have yet to draw the full consequences from our social being. And we have yet to theorise praxis from a position that is not tied to what Derrida calls the metaphysics of subjectivity. Derrida also exposes the political consequences of so
