The Question posted by Richard Seymour

Derrida. What's the big deal? It's just common sense.

I kid, of course. I am as befuddled as you are when I try to read that deliberately abstruse text. It's like trying to walk through mashed potato. And yet, there is a sense in which what Derrida is saying is perfect common sense, or at least common enough that anyone can understand it if they are receptive enough. Just a quick example.

On the philosophical question. In 'Violence and Metaphysics: an essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas' (you can find this in Writing and Difference), Derrida goes to the heart of what I think is his approach. He notes that the question is always enclosed, always-already determined by the answer. To ask a question, as any fule know, is already to know part of the answer. Hence: deconstruction. The anthropologists, the philosophers, the metaphysicians of presence - they already know the answer when they begin, and construct their observations accordingly. Derrida, in Of Grammatology and in Structure, Sign and Play in the History of the Human Sciences, carefully pulls apart Levi-Strauss' writings to show how he structures his narratives to create the myth of innocent speech interrupted and distorted by writing. The question has been scripted by the answer.

In part, what is to be preserved is the original question, the "initiative" question, the "eh?" that prompts all our other questioning. It isn't that there can be a question before or outside of text, (bear in mind that, for Derrida, there is nothing prior about speech - text is all in the mind, so to speak), but there is a moment in which the question is "not yet determined enough for the hypocrisy of an answer to have already initiated itself beneath the mask of the question".

Derrida, like Said, irrupted into Western philosophy from the repressed margin of the imperial West - in Derrida's case, Algeria. His questions were not aimed at destroying rationality as Johann Hari stupidly claimed (how would this be possible?); they were aimed at destroying the means of intellectual domination by which the West asserted its hegemony. The whole lineage from ancient Greece to structuralism had to be radically re-thought as if there really was some thinking to do.

In this, he represented a true return to philosophy, in which questions themselves had a lot to answer for. It is no coincidence, that those who are most impatient with Derrida today, and who used his grave as a urinary receptacle, are the most ardent believers in the meliorative capacities of rapacious imperialism.