Jacques Derrida, French philosopher and originator of deconstruction, passed away this Friday. Obituaries at the Guardian and the New York Times; blog posts by Michael Bérubé and Jack Balkin and Brian Leiter; comments at Crooked Timber; a nice encyclopedia article. A quick perusal is enough to give an impression of how controversial Derrida was! Derrida is one of those intellectual figures who is arguably more important as a symbol than for his actual work. In Derrida’s case, in the minds of many people he has come to represent a perspective that is deeply anti-intellectual, or at least anti-Enlightenment and anti-rationality. This is a completely misguided impression, but a persistent one nonetheless. Derrida enjoyed the project of undermining conventional Western metaphysics, emphasizing gaps and contradictions in the writings of major players of the philosophical tradition. More significantly (for the critics), he also enjoyed playful and elliptical language, especially in his own writings, although he could be quite straightforward in speech.