Below I have quoted an excerpt from Professor Gary Gutting’s book Thinking the Impossible. His very useful analysis has opened the way for me to achieve a greater understanding of Derrida’s work; which  seemed repetitive and pointless, a highly rationalized intellectual meandering. But the insights that Professor Gutting offers here makes me hopeful about coming to a new level of understanding. To  re-read Derrida with a new sense that the seemingly endless questioning has a methodological validity that had previously escaped my grasp. I had read French Philosophy of The Sixties by Ferry and Renaut, Introduction to Phenominology by Dermot Moran and Profits of Extremity by Allan Megill, all offering valuable insights and historical/philosophical analysis. Professor Gutting offers another view of the History of Philosophy, that enhances my understanding, as each one of these other books has.

‘It is not that Derrida is shy of direct criticism of other philosophers. He was quite forthright in his attack on Foucault’s treatment of Descartes in The History of Madness, and we shall see that he had no reluctance in confronting what he saw as Sartre’s philosophical failings. But Derrida distinguishes between two types of thinkers. On the one hand, there are those for whom “a certain kind of rigorous analysis could render their texts accessible and exhaustible”. These include “the great French thinkers”, who have, he says, his “profound respect”, but whom he would obviously have no hesitation in criticizing based on a thorough understanding of their views. On the other hand, there are thinkers (Greeks and Germans, it seems) of whom he says that, when he reads them, “ I feel that I am confronting an abyss, a bottomless pit in which I could lose myself”. He explicitly mentions Plato and Heidegger, but would surely have in mind Hegel (and Nietzsche). Regarding such thinkers, there is for Derrida never a question of decisive refutations; there is only an interminable process of probing deeper and deeper, suggesting new questions and new responses. To any easy dismissal (or any ultimate dismissal at all) of philosophers such as Hegel or Heidegger, his response is always, “But it’s more complicated than that”. With them, we never escape from the abyss.

However, the very act of finding interminable complications in a thinker is not only a way of elaborating and appreciating the richness of that thought. It is also a way of challenging its “mastery”’