Missing the Mark on Derrida: A Call to Read Before Criticizing

In a 2022 Chronicle of Higher Education piece titled “What Was Deconstruction?” Timothy Brennan of the University of Minnesota offers what purports to be a sweeping assessment of Jacques Derrida’s intellectual legacy. Yet as with many secondhand accounts of deconstruction, Brennan’s analysis suffers from a glaring shortcoming: he criticizes Derrida’s approach without engaging sufficiently—if at all—with Derrida’s actual texts. If there’s a refrain that runs through Derrida’s long dialogue with his critics, it is the admonition to “do your homework” before passing judgment. Time and again, Derrida called out superficial readings that reduce deconstruction to caricature. This blog post explores how Brennan’s essay falls into that trap and why, in the spirit of Derrida’s own intellectual practice, a more faithful reading of the primary sources would yield either more substantive criticisms—or indeed, a different assessment altogether.

Deconstruction Is Not a Set of (Easy) Doctrines

One of the central misconceptions Brennan perpetuates is the idea that deconstruction can be neatly summed up as “there is no truth” or “everything is textual nonsense.” These caricatures have plagued Derrida’s name for decades. In reality, deconstruction is less a worldview or dogma than it is a disciplined practice of careful, often painstaking reading—an ongoing scrutiny of how texts, philosophies, and concepts are structured by unexamined assumptions, internal tensions, and rhetorical strategies.

Had Brennan spent time with Derrida’s seminal works—Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Dissemination, or even the more concise Speech and Phenomena—he would find that Derrida focuses meticulously on how Western philosophy constructs “presence” as the privileged point of reference for meaning (logocentrism). Deconstruction seeks to show where these structures break down, not to revel in anarchy or declare that meaning is unattainable. The distinction is crucial: Derrida never claims that language is meaningless; instead, he illuminates how meaning is generated and where it inevitably exceeds stable boundaries.

Doing the Homework: Derrida’s Dialogue with Critics

Derrida’s frequent lament was that his critics rarely tackled the detailed arguments in his texts. From John Searle to Camille Paglia, many found in deconstruction a convenient target for claiming that it signaled the “end of reason,” “death of the author,” or “free play without constraint.” Derrida, in response, encouraged them to look more closely at his readings of Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger, Saussure, and others. These line-by-line analyses show that deconstruction is an intensive reading practice, not a brash rejection of meaning or structure. In fact, Derrida’s favorite move was to expose the inevitable slippages in any conceptual framework, thereby stressing how philosophical assumptions must always be subject to critical scrutiny.

Yet Brennan’s piece in the Chronicle settles for a well-worn rhetorical shortcut: describing deconstruction in overly broad strokes—labeling it “relativistic” or “self-contradictory”—and then dismissing it as a passing trend. But to truly dismantle or seriously debate Derrida, one must demonstrate an understanding of such Derridean notions as différance, the metaphysics of presence, and the critique of the “transcendental signified.” Without grappling with these core ideas, any critique remains on the surface level.

The Problem with Reductive Labels

A hallmark of Brennan’s piece is to portray Derrida’s influence as little more than faculty-lounge jargon, ephemeral trends, or overblown claims that alienated the public. This rhetorical strategy typically merges Derrida’s own work with the broader “turn” in literary theory or cultural studies (Brannan's field) that invoked deconstruction in various ways—some faithful to Derrida, others not. Indeed, countless academics adopted (or misappropriated) “deconstruction” as a fashionable banner, often without the meticulous textual focus Derrida demanded.

To lump those appropriations together with Derrida’s specific and carefully nuanced readings is simply to commit a category error. It’s akin to assessing Einstein’s physics solely by how popular culture distorted the idea of “relativity.” Derrida’s writing is challenging, playful, and even at times cryptic, but it remains rigorous in its engagement with the philosophical tradition. Without recognizing that rigor, it’s easy to brand “deconstruction” as a fad. With a more accurate grasp of Derrida’s arguments, we see that the matter is far more layered and methodical.

Context Matters: Derrida’s Historical and Philosophical Setting

One key oversight in superficial critiques is ignoring the historical context out of which Derrida’s thought emerged. Postwar France was a hotbed of intellectual ferment; existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, and psychoanalysis were all in the mix, influencing one another in real-time. Derrida’s early projects, especially those addressing Husserl and Heidegger, reflect a distinctly European philosophical lineage that cannot be extracted from this context without distorting it.

Indeed, if there is any “homework” that critics often skip, it’s tracing Derrida’s response to German phenomenology and the structuralist moment in French theory. Without situating deconstruction in that lineage, any “big picture” of Derrida’s significance remains incomplete and open to the usual clichés. Brennan’s essay, unfortunately, does not show any deep engagement with these origins, thereby lapsing into the same reductionism Derrida frequently criticized.

Conclusion: A Plea for Rigorous Reading

Throughout his career, Jacques Derrida implored critics to “do their homework,” not out of intellectual elitism, but because deconstruction is fundamentally about reading: slowing down, digging into the text, and uncovering how its arguments both stand and undo themselves in real-time. Timothy Brennan’s essay sidesteps that method, relying on a handful of broad-brush dismissals and conflating Derrida’s nuanced scholarship with the hype that surrounded “deconstruction” in literary circles.

For anyone who genuinely wishes to grapple with Derrida’s legacy, the lesson is clear: return to the texts—to his detailed analyses of canonical philosophers and to the delicate, often playful work of teasing out assumptions that lurk beneath the surface of any given argument. You might still disagree with him at the end of that journey, but at least you’ll do so on the basis of a deep acquaintance with his writings rather than secondhand caricatures. If Derrida’s greatest contention was that meaning is never fully present and always shifting, then we owe it to ourselves—and to intellectual honesty—to grapple with his words in the same spirit of attentiveness he devoted to the words of others.

Coda: Deconstruction in Practice: Originalism, Logocentrism, and the Politics of Interpretation

For a recent application of Derrida’s approach to reading, see my blog post on originalism, "Originalism, Derrida, and the Urgent Need for an Applied Humanities in Our Courts and Beyond." There, I examine how Derridean deconstruction can expose the internal contradictions of originalist legal interpretation, which claims to derive meaning from a fixed historical moment yet inevitably engages in interpretive acts shaped by contemporary concerns. Just as Derrida demonstrates that no text possesses a single, stable origin untainted by subsequent readings, originalism’s appeal to an unmediated constitutional past collapses under scrutiny.

Rather than offering a neutral method of reading, originalism functions as a form of logocentrism, positioning the Founders' intent as an ultimate presence—an immutable source of meaning that supposedly grounds legal interpretation. However, as Derrida’s work makes clear, any appeal to an "original" meaning is already entangled in processes of deferral, citation, and reinterpretation. The so-called original meaning is always a reconstruction, one that reflects not only historical texts but also the ideological assumptions of the present.

In this way, originalism mirrors the same theoretical paradoxes seen in psychoanalysis’s engagement with castration: a concept is simultaneously recognized as constructed yet treated as an absolute necessity. Just as Freud and Lacan at times acknowledge the phantasmatic nature of castration yet continue to elevate it as a structuring principle of subjectivity, originalism proclaims its fidelity to historical meaning while enacting a profoundly ahistorical reading practice. Both discourses rely on a master signifier—whether castration or the Constitution’s "original intent"—that functions as an unacknowledged fetish, sustaining contradictory claims to both fixity and interpretive necessity. (See my "The Phallus and Its Discontents: Castration, Fetishism, and the Limits of Psychoanalytic Theory.")

By applying Derridean deconstruction to legal hermeneutics, my post argues for an applied humanities—one that engages directly with political and legal institutions rather than remaining confined to academic critique. If deconstruction has often been accused of being politically disengaged, its use in dismantling originalist logic demonstrates its urgent relevance in contemporary legal and ethical debates. Just as deconstruction allows us to interrogate the foundational assumptions of psychoanalysis, it also provides a critical tool for exposing the ideological investments that shape legal interpretation, historical memory, and the broader structures of institutional power.