Much more interesting for me are, I think, essential reasons for why historians (and others) were never going to read Derrida well. I want to raise an appropriate level of tension over the issue as an historical problem, not a problem of present practice… a fine line to walk I think. I’ll post more on this as I work on my paper, but there are clearly exceptions to this tension (eg. Kerwin Lee Klein), but they are clearly exceptions and very interesting in and of themselves.

It’s a good point about whether Derrida is original on history. Once you sort through his style, sometimes his ideas do not seem all so revolutionary. But, against this, there is some interesting work of Marian Hobson’s that argues that his style cannot be divorced from his ideas so easily. So this needs to be considered.

Is Derrida essential reading? Good question. I’d probably actually say no, and what I would argue against is the way in which conventional narratives of the thing called “the linguistic turn” would suggest that he is, and that he could be easily incorporated into such a narrative.

I’ve got more to say on LaCapra, but I’ll stick this in a new post.

Bourdieu talks about ‘the international arms race of ideas’ as a framework for understanding how and why ideas are picked up or not, suggesting that we need to look at more than the conceptual value of ideas to understand their reception. Is Derrida essential reading? If so why, and for what? Is he the only or best way to get at what he gets at? If it’s just a matter of the historicity and instability of identity, Americans can get that from G.H. Mead and symbolic interactionism (not that they do) without wading through Derrida’s (to us) turgid prose.

I’m surprised a bit by your finding in History and Theory; when I was in grad school in the 80s Derrida was a big part of the ‘linguistic turn’ in intellectual history championed by LaCapra et. al. Of course there’s an elective affinity between European high theory like Derrida and intellectual historians of European high theory.

as Phd candidate, do you have some e-book (the free one)
from Derrida, especially from his early writing.

tks.

And just a few pages later in WD, Derrida does say, ‘well actually, it’s necessary to treat structuralism as an historical object…’ It’s always a dialectical, always a ‘trembling’, never an outright rejection.

The opposition to a ’systems of thought’ argument – and the essay on Foucault is brilliant on this, isn’t it? – is precisely where Ricoeur is quite interesting. Ricoeur, as far as I have gathered for the moment, is about conflicting and opposing, but complementary and necessary approaches. Thus ’system’ and ’singularity’ – and it would seem that Derrida does the same thing, but in a hyper-dialectical way. Emphasises the systemic nature (eg. the unity of the history of metaphysics), only to confront it with rupture, singularity, event.

Derrida, to my knowledge, never writes on Ricoeur directly, but cites him approvingly in his Husserlian writings. Which is interesting in itself, because often he spends a fair amount of time distancing himself from the French reading of Husserl.

I’ll put on some material on Ricoeur soon… most of what I have been looking at, at the moment, is his earlier work – particularly the volume History and Truth

The reception of Derrida is a fascinating thing – and things happen not at all for the reasons that are commonly given – something like historiographic folklore. It’s proving, for me at least, a terribly fun area for the intersection between history and philosophy, and approaches to intellectual history.

I haven’t read Ricoeur, though.