Abstract

It is at least plausibly arguable that Derrida's will have been the most important philosophical contribution (in French, at least) of the last 30 years, in spite of the impassioned argument his work has provoked and still arouses (concretized most recently in the argument over Cambridge University's proposal to award him an honorary degree, but also in a series of other “affairs” and polemics). It is entirely proper that an account of his work should appear in a volume such as this, and yet the philosophically most striking thing about Derrida's work is probably that it is not philosophy in any straightforward sense, but its permanent traversal, excess, or outflanking. Derrida has not so much re‐defined philosophy (the traditional task of philosophy) as rendered it permanently in‐definite. This difficult situation has been the cause of many misunderstandings of Derrida, by both philosophers and non‐philosophers, and demands a delicacy of reading which is all but unmanageable, but which goes some way towards explaining the attraction Derrida's work has held for students of literature. It is unhelpful to view Derrida as belonging to any particular philosophical lineage, because his work upsets all the concepts that allow us to posit philosophical lineages (he is thus arguably as “close” to Plato or Kant as to Heidegger or Nietzsche), and it is also difficult to discern any obvious lines of development or change in his thinking, which seems to have remained remarkably consistent – though constantly surprising and unpredictable – since the 1960s. But in spite of its undeniable difficulty, Derrida's work is in fact quite susceptible of reasoned exposition up to a point, beyond which something “undecidable” begins to happen, as we shall see.