Not planning on citing Derrida much

I don't much hold with Derrida. The concept surrounding this intentionally opaque chapter is to argue that no letter or word has real meaning, since its meaning must be retrieved from its relationship to other words or letters--basically, its meaning is forever deferred; there is no absolute, irreducible core.

While this stampeded through the philosophical, literary and linguistic worlds, I'm not wild about it. To me it uses linguistic horseplay to arrive at a purely theoretical conclusion, let alone through a single language; French. Différance is like difference, see... and it not only isn't a word according to Derrida, it isn't a concept. Derrida's word doesn't have to be a word like other words.

I do appreciate the contribution, in that we shouldn't necessarily consider any word or concept to be absolute, or divinely inspired, or contain any real "truth" within it (in essence arguing against Plato and his concept of the unattainable, non-palpable "idea"). Language is fascinating, and the idea that all words must somehow be connected to all other words makes language a difficult thing to deconstruct. I do like the idea that a concept which is difficult to name or describe is so because there are no words that are closely linked to it in the chain.

Derrida merely strikes me as someone who cleverly kept his career going via expert manipulation of language, and changed his intent at will; by being deliberately inexplicable, he could claim any explanation at all: "There is no simple answer to such a question."