The Philosophy of Derrida

For more than forty years Jacques Derrida unsettled and disturbed the presumptions underlying many of our most fundamental philosophical, political, and ethical conventions. In The Philosophy of Derrida, Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh examine Derrida’s large body of work to provide a succinct overview of his core philosophical ideas and a balanced appraisal of their lasting impact. The authors make accessible Derrida’s writings by discussing them in a vernacular that renders them less opaque and nebulous, and by situating Derrida squarely in the tradition of historicist, hermeneutic and linguistic thought, his objectives and those of “deconstruction” are rendered considerably more convincing. From his early work on Husserl, Hegel and de Saussure, to his final writings on justice, hospitality and cosmopolitanism, Derrida is shown to have been grappling with the vexed question of national, cultural and personal identity and asking to what extent the notion of a “pure” identity has any real efficacy. Viewed from this perspective Derrida appears less as a wanton iconoclast, for whom deconstruction equals destruction, but as a sincere and sensitive writer who encouraged us to shed light on our historical constructions so as to reveal that there is much about ourselves that we do not know.