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Writing about J. Derrida is a tricky business. Not only has the number of his writings grown considerably since he catapulted himself on to the philosophical scene in 1967; they are also, as many critics have observed, exceedingly difficult and often wilfully obscure.1 And as if this wasn't bad enough, the number of exegetical and critical essays and books on Derridean deconstructionism has now reached a proportion that is unmasterable, unless one is prepared to make the study of deconstruction one's primary occupation for a considerable time to come. What I intend to do in this essay is therefore not an assessment of Derrida's work as a whole (a concept which Derrideans would have to be suspicious of anyway), but a critique of just some of his main arguments- insofar as Derridadoes engage in argumentation.
This, of course, is the beginning of the problems any critique of Derrida must face because. as speech act theoreticians such as Searle and philosophers associated with the second generation of the Frankfurt School such as K.-0 . Apel and J. Habermas have shown, argumentation presupposes certain minimal norms of rationality which deconstructionists tend to reject.
Even Richard Rorty, the nee-pragmatist philosopher who has strong sympathies for deconstruction and other poststructuralist forms of a critique of “Western Metaphysics”, is very much aware of the dilemma Derrida is faced with when he wants to 'demonstrate· that the whole of our philosophical tradition somehow got it wrong and, at the same time, tries to convey the idea that rigorous demonstration is exactly one of the things we should realizes is, and always has been, impossible because it presupposes logic and stability of meaning.2
Derrida may not be... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline