Some years ago the intellectual reception of Mr. Jacques Derrida could be divided into two camps: the acolytes,practitioners and apologists of deconstruction and those who, at the mention of his name, exclaimed charlatan, intellectual con man or stronger words of accusation, condemnation. Is Mr. Derrida some nine years after his death still relevant to literary/philosophical debate? Or has he been largely forgotten except as an historical curiosity who inaugurated a now discarded reign of post-modern error?  Those questions await the passage of time: the judgement of history. But even his ideological coterie has seemed to disappear, without much of a trace. Why then read a book published in 1988?

Mr. Neel’s is a teacher of composition,rhetoric and critical theory, whose critical stance toward the work of Derrida is welcome, because he doesn’t feel obliged like some of his  explicators  to simply repeat the critical nostrums of the master, couched in the impenetrable  Derridian patois. (Mr. Neel pays the ultimate intellectual compliment to Mr. Derrida’s writing by engaging with it as serious.) As if the reader was aware of the particular meanings of his  opaque vocabulary. Mr. Neel in chapter six of his book titled A T(R)OPOLOGICAL GROUP defines nine main terms:

Presence, Transendental  Signified, The Trace, Absence, Differance, Supplement, Representation, Foundation, Logocentrism

This has value in that it is not the seemingly circular definitional chatter of the acolyte, but a set of definitions in service to achieving an intellectual clarity, as much as is possible, for Derrida traded in paradox, ambiguity. His approach to a ‘literary/philosophical analysis’ ( I put it in quotation marks to denote a description based in logocentrism ) reveled in the play of meanings, in fact that is the central ruling notion of his approach. One could observe as does Richard Rorty, in chapter six of Contingency, irony, and solidarity, titled From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida,in footnote six,  on ‘early’ Derrida’s use of ‘word magic’ and ‘magic words’ as in ‘late’  Heidegger, as the in order to of their respective philosophical projects.

If you are interested, or even curious as to the thought/writing of Derrida here is the place to start your inquiry. I’ve read The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida by Leslie Hill which was good, but only supplied a brief, yet informative, sketch of  his project. I also read the first forty pages of Starting with Derrida by Sean Gaston, too sophisticated a reading for my understanding, at that point in my reading my inquiry into Derrida. I did have the advantage of having read French Philosophy of the Sixties, An Essay in Anti-humanism by Ferry and Renaut which supplied a critically wide ranging view of French philosophical scene from Existentialism into the sixties, very helpful to a better understanding of that intellectual milieu. Also, French Theory by Francois Cusset  and Thinking the Impossible by Gary Gutting added a dimension to my historical understanding of that milieu and the  reception of French theory  in America.

Mr. Neel makes plain in his last chapter titled Weak Discourse and Strong Discourse that he and Rorty have much in common, in that both express a belief, a faith, in the ultimate value of the continuing conversation, in the democratic state.  Indeed, this expressed faith in the power of argument, in the play of voices, the push and pull of dialectics is it’s cornerstone, without dismissal of Derrida’s thought as trivializing, superfluous or based on a corrupting intellectual mendacity.

American Litterateur