One of the questions about Derrida that’s often asked is, was he, in fact, a philosopher? Some of his critics don’t think he was. There are a few reasons for this: first of all, because he is wilfully difficult. He doesn’t explain things in the way that philosophers are supposed to. He thought that any sort of language was a decision and therefore clarity of the sort that philosophers tend to deal in was also a decision. By making a decision to be clear, you were making a decision about what philosophy was trying to discover.
He had a much wider remit in this. If necessary, he would use religious texts in his philosophy; he would use autobiography; he would use poetry; he would talk obliquely; he would use some of the tactics of novel writing in order to get his ideas across. This made a lot of philosophers very angry, and the hostility towards Derrida during his lifetime was quite intense. In fact, some people have compared it to the way Socrates was treated. And there are similarities between Derrida and Socrates – this constant questioning of truth, this way that corrupted youth. In fact, there was a letter written to The Times when he was offered a doctorate at Cambridge, saying that he was no philosopher. He was given the doctorate, but there still remained suspicion around his work, and that suspicion goes on today.
What is crucial about this is, I think, to go back to Derrida himself and to look at the work he did with philosophy, his earlier work on Husserl, and you will see someone who, far from denigrating philosophy, loved philosophy, who read it as closely as it’s possible to read it. Yes, he said the truth was in dispute, but one of the beauties of truth being in dispute was it continued to generate philosophy. He loved that – and Derrida is one of the great philosophers because he loved philosophy.