I have just purchased Thinking the Impossible from Oxford University Press. I’m going to start reading it after I finish the three books I am currently reading. Christopher Bray in his witty and intelligent review make me want to put aside all those other books and immediately take up with my new intellectual infatuation, but I leave too many of my past infatuations, for new more exciting intellectual engagements: it is a very bad habit. Probably indicative of intellectual shallowness. The talk of Derrida reminds me of an essay of Richard Rorty’s in the Consequences of Pragmatism called Philosophy as a Kind of Writing:An Essay on Derrida, it is a long defense of Derrida, as a new kind of thinker/writer. But after having read Philosophy and Social Hope, one of his latter collections of essays, and for me Rorty became a writer of elegant, witty, playful literary essays about philosophy without denigrating the power of his thought, in any way: making him assessable like his great intellectual and literary precursor William James.My point being, that we might interpret the essay on Derrida as in fact a literary aspiration, even a self-description.