I was struck more forcibly than I expected when I came across the headline in the New York Times: “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74“. The adjective bestowed on the deceased suggests a certain contempt that Derrida was held in by sections of the Anglophone academy. I remember seeing Derrida lecture to a packed auditorium in UCD perhaps six years ago. I have little recollection of his subject, but I remember finding his argument contemporaneously comprehensible and reasonable but then its substance floated entirely free from my mind the moment I began walking back through the campus’s concrete arcades. I did, however, admire Derrida’s refusal ever to do anything as mundane as providing a definition of Deconstruction. Nothing is more lethal to a intellectual movement than its easy comprehensibility. One of the few nuggets of Derrida’s thinking that stayed with me is the term “Diff�rance.” The unorthodox spelling suggested, I think, that any definitive meaning of a text was constantly being differed. There was no God, so don’t expect any ultimate truths. To me, this slice of academic jargon is like a verbal madeleine cake, conjuring up my years of university in the early 1990s when I was supposed to be grappling earnestly with such concepts–years during which, somewhat in the spirit of Derrida, I postponed such arduous tasks. From the interviews on Derrida’s thinking taken by The Guardian, however, it seems that such facile understanding is far from atypical.