Contexts and polemics of Derrida

Abstract

In this work, a very general presentation is risked, attentive or sensitive to the internal diversity of Derrida's thought. Characteristic of his writing and his extensive, more or less regular teaching is a congruent but highly complex thematic diversity. To which must be added its very peculiar «tone». Nothing will be understood of Derrida's philosophical language if one does not know how to accuse in his writing, here and there, a whole game of ironies, parodies, ellipses, a game that does not take away, of course, the greatest philosophical seriousness from his thought. As for the rest, it is not wrong to remember that the birth of philosophy is linked to that beautiful fertile trope of the appearance of theoretical sterility that is Socratic irony.

The circumstance of the recent disappearance of the French philosopher, of Algerian Jewish origin, as he liked to emphasize, is also an additional reason to try here to give rise to this debate on the value and meaning of the contribution of the work of Jacques Derrida to the contemporary philosophical space that has been conditioned by a whole series of interpretative mistakes, and finally, by a kind of allergy to the type of philosophical writing that Derrida has practiced for almost half a century.