The Cult of Difficulty

Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction, and the Political Economy of Theory

A revised and adversarial bibliography of the twentieth century’s most quoted and least read philosopher

A note on this revision. What follows began as a tidy primer and ends as an indictment — not of Derrida the man, who was serious, formidable, and personally generous, but of the academic order that canonised him and the uses to which his method was put. The original draft contained several errors of date and attribution, a bibliography that omitted the works on which any honest verdict must turn, and a “criticism” section that mistook decorum for analysis. All three are corrected below. The aim is not to bury Derrida under fashionable contempt — that is its own intellectual laziness — but to read him the way he taught everyone else to read: against himself, and against the institution that made him a totem.

I. The Coronation That Became a Dethroning

Every origin story is also a balance sheet, and Derrida’s American origin has a price tag on it. Deconstruction did not arrive in the United States as a manuscript smuggled past customs; it arrived on a Ford Foundation grant.

In October 1966, the newly founded Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins convened a symposium grandly titled The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. It was organised by Rene Girard and Richard Macksey and underwritten by Ford money, and its purpose was to import French structuralism wholesale — to crown Claude Levi-Strauss and his method before an American audience. Levi-Strauss was in the room. A late addition to the programme, a thirty-six-year-old normalien named Jacques Derrida, delivered a paper called Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. Instead of crowning the king, he dethroned him. The lecture argued that every structuralist “system” secretly depends on a privileged centre it cannot itself account for — an origin, a ground, a still point — and that no such centre survives scrutiny.

The Americans present understood that they had witnessed the live birth of something. The word for it — post-structuralism, soon simply Theory — would not be in common use until the next decade. But the economic shape of the thing was already set: a foundation-funded conference, a translated French text, a method exquisitely suited to an expanding postwar university that needed an inexhaustible supply of publishable difficulty. Hold that shape in mind. It explains more about Derrida’s afterlife than any of his concepts do.

II. What Deconstruction Actually Claims

Before the prosecution, an honest statement of the defendant’s position — because the lazy caricature (“nothing means anything”) is both wrong and a gift to Derrida’s defenders, who get to win the easy argument while never having to face the hard one.

Derrida’s quarrel was with what he called logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence: the assumption, running from Plato through Rousseau to Husserl, that meaning is most fully present in living speech, with writing a degraded copy, and that thought rests on stable, self-evident foundations — origin, presence, the thing itself. Against this he set a cluster of moves:

Differance — his coinage (the silent a audible only in writing, which is the joke) naming two things at once: meaning arises through difference between signs, and it is endlessly deferred, never arriving at a final, fully present signified. The essay was delivered to the Societe francaise de philosophie in 1968 and collected in Margins of Philosophy (1972).
The trace — every term carries the ghost of what it excludes; presence is always shadowed by absence.
The critique of the speech/writing hierarchy — Derrida reversed the traditional ranking, arguing that the features philosophy despised in writing (iterability, the absence of the author, the drift of context) are conditions of all signification, speech included.
Deconstruction — not demolition but a manner of close reading that locates the point where a text’s own logic undermines its stated thesis; the binary opposition it depends on (presence/absence, nature/culture, man/woman) is shown to be unstable, the suppressed term doing secret work.

This is genuinely interesting, and at its best — on Rousseau, on Austin, on the philosophical uses of metaphor — it is illuminating. The trouble is not that the ideas are empty. The trouble is what happens when an unfalsifiable reading method meets an academic labour market that rewards endless production. To that we now turn.

III. The Bibliography, Corrected and Enlarged

The original list mixed French first-edition dates with English-translation dates, miscredited several works, and — more seriously — omitted the books on which the moral and political case against deconstruction actually rests (Memoires: for Paul de Man, Force of Law, The Gift of Death, Archive Fever). A bibliography that leaves those out is not neutral; it is a defence brief. Dates below are first French publication, with English translation noted where the gap matters. Additions and corrections are flagged.

Year (French)	Work	Why it matters
1962	Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction	Translation plus a book-length introduction; the seedbed of the later critique of presence.
1967	Speech and Phenomena (La voix et le phenomene)	The decisive assault on Husserl: the “living present” of consciousness is shown to depend on the sign. Often the sharpest, most analytic Derrida.
1967	Of Grammatology	The foundational text; the Rousseau reading and “there is no outside-text.”
1967	Writing and Difference	Essays on Foucault, Levinas, Freud, Artaud — and Structure, Sign, and Play, delivered at Johns Hopkins in October 1966, not 1967.
1972	Dissemination	Plato’s Pharmacy; the pharmakon as undecidable (remedy/poison).
1972	Margins of Philosophy	Contains Differance (the 1968 lecture) and Signature Event Context, the essay that started the Searle quarrel.
1972	Positions	Interviews; the most accessible doorway.
1974	Glas	Two columns — Hegel and Genet — read across the gutter. The point at which “difficulty” becomes typographic spectacle.
1978	Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (added)	Nietzsche, woman, and the famous unattributed fragment “I have forgotten my umbrella” — a parable of undecidability.
1978	The Truth in Painting	Aesthetics, the frame (parergon), the Van Gogh–Heidegger–Schapiro dispute over a pair of shoes. The original draft’s “1987” was the English translation date.
1980	The Post Card	Freud, Lacan, Socrates and Plato, the postal system as a metaphor for communication that may never arrive.
1986	Memoires: for Paul de Man (added)	Lectures honouring his late friend — published before the scandal broke, which is precisely why it became evidence in it.
1972–88	Limited Inc	The Searle exchange. Signature Event Context (1971), Searle’s reply (1977), Derrida’s caustic Limited Inc a b c… (1977); collected in English in 1988. The original draft’s flat “1988” hides a decade-long fight about whether Derrida was arguing or evading.
1989–90	Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority (added)	Delivered 1989; the central late text on deconstruction and justice — “deconstruction is justice,” he claimed. Indispensable to any fair political reckoning.
1992	Acts of Literature	Literary essays (Joyce, Kafka, Shakespeare). The original draft’s 1991 is wrong; the Attridge-edited collection is 1992.
1992	The Gift of Death (added)	Kierkegaard, Abraham, the aporia of responsibility; the pivot of the so-called “ethical/religious turn.”
1993	Specters of Marx	Marxism “after” communism; “hauntology.” His most-cited political book — and Exhibit A for the charge that he embraced Marx only once Marxism was safely defeated.
1993	Aporias (corrected)	English translation Stanford 1993 (lecture 1992); the original draft’s “1996” is incorrect. Death, borders, the limit.
1994	Politics of Friendship	”O my friends, there is no friend” — democracy, fraternity, the canon of friendship from Aristotle to Schmitt.
1995	Archive Fever (added)	Freud, the archive, the death drive; wildly influential across history and media studies.
1996	Monolingualism of the Other (added)	Language, colony, identity; Derrida the Algerian Jew on never owning the only language he had.
1997	Of Hospitality	The ethics and aporia of welcoming the stranger.
1997	Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas	Mourning and ethics.
2003	Rogues (Voyous)	Democracy, sovereignty, the “rogue state” after September 11 (English 2005).
2006 (posth.)	The Animal That Therefore I Am	The human/animal border; the cat that watches him.
2008– (posth.)	The Beast and the Sovereign (seminars)	The late teaching, now the growth industry of Derrida studies — which is itself part of the story.

IV. The Case for the Prosecution

A. The Scientific Question — and an honest concession that sharpens it

The most cited weapon against postmodern theory is the Sokal Affair. In 1996 the physicist Alan Sokal placed a parody — a string of fashionable nonsense dressed as quantum gravity — in the cultural-studies journal Social Text, then revealed the hoax. With Jean Bricmont he expanded the case in Fashionable Nonsense (1997).

Here is where intellectual honesty earns its keep, because the sloppy polemicist now says “Sokal demolished Derrida,” and the sloppy polemicist is wrong. Sokal and Bricmont pointedly declined to include a chapter on Derrida. Their stated reason: the single Derrida passage in the hoax was a one-off, and there is no systematic abuse of physics or mathematics in his work. Their real targets were Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Deleuze, Latour, Baudrillard, Virilio — the borrowers of equations they did not understand. Derrida, whatever else he was, was not that.

So the precise charge is narrower and more damning. There is exactly one notorious moment when Derrida reached for physics: at Johns Hopkins in 1966, pressed by Jean Hyppolite on what he meant by the “centre,” he improvised that the Einsteinian constant is not a constant or a centre but “the concept of the game.” It is a sentence that means nothing in physics and was never meant to — it was a flourish. The real problem is not that Derrida abused science. It is that the method itself is built to be immune to the kind of test science lives by. A reading that can always locate a hidden contradiction in any text, and can never be shown to have located the wrong one, is not false. It is unfalsifiable — and unfalsifiability is exactly the property that lets a discipline generate infinite output while settling nothing. That, not a stray remark about Einstein, is the scientific indictment.

B. The de Man Affair — Deconstruction Meets History

The original draft does not mention Paul de Man. No serious account can avoid him.

De Man was Derrida’s closest American ally, the engine of the “Yale School,” the man who made deconstruction the house style of elite literary departments. In 1987, four years after his death, a Belgian graduate student discovered that the young de Man had written some 170 articles for Le Soir, a Brussels newspaper under Nazi control — including, in March 1941, an essay arguing that European literature would be unharmed, even improved, by the removal of its Jews. He had concealed this for thirty-five years in America. It made the front page of the New York Times.

What followed is the most revealing episode in the whole history of Theory, because it forced an unfalsifiable method to confront a brute, dated, unambiguous fact. Derrida responded with a long, anguished, and notorious essay, Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell (Critical Inquiry, Spring 1988). Defending his friend, he made a move that appalled even sympathisers: to read de Man’s wartime writing as straightforwardly antisemitic, he suggested, was to repeat “the exterminating gesture.” The critic Jeffrey Mehlman remarked that there were grounds for seeing the whole of deconstruction as a “vast amnesty project” for collaboration. That is too neat. But the affair exposed the soft underbelly of the method: a reading practice that treats every text as a field of undecidable tensions has no way to say, plainly, this was a fascist newspaper and that was an antisemitic article. When the stakes were highest, the most powerful interpretive machine in the humanities produced not clarity but a fog dense enough to shelter a friend. A method that cannot condemn the obvious is not subtle. It is broken at the joint where thought meets the world.

C. The Political Economy of Theory — the part nobody funds you to write

Now the economic background the tidy primer left out, and the reason both the radical left and the reactionary right end up agreeing about Derrida.

Theory arrived (Ford Foundation, 1966) at the precise moment the American university was industrialising. Enrolments were exploding; the doctorate was becoming a mass product; tenure and promotion ran on the metric of publication. An expanding credential factory needs a raw material that never runs out, and deconstruction supplied it perfectly: a method that can be applied to any text, yields a publishable “reading” every time, and can never be definitively wrong. It was, in the economist’s sense, the ideal input — infinitely divisible, endlessly recombinable, immune to depletion. You can deconstruct Hamlet, a soup-can label, a Supreme Court opinion, or a rival’s deconstruction, forever. Pierre Bourdieu would call the product cultural capital: difficulty as a positional good, obscurity as a barrier to entry that raises the value of those who can perform it. The harder the prose, the higher the prestige of the few licensed to translate it — and Glas and The Post Card made difficulty itself the spectacle.

Then comes the deeper, sadder irony, and it belongs to the left. Theory’s golden age — roughly 1975 to 1995 — maps almost exactly onto the triumph of neoliberalism: Thatcher, Reagan, deregulation, the gutting of unions, the financialisation of everything, the long defeat of the organised working class. And what was the academic left doing while who-eats-and-who-starves was being decided? It was performing cultural politics — the politics of the signifier, of “subversion,” of “transgression” at the level of the text. Terry Eagleton, no conservative, put the verdict bluntly in After Theory (2003): cultural theory had abandoned its mission; it fiddled while the world burned. The cultural turn, he argued, replaced political politics with a gestural radicalism that was not merely ineffective against capital but remarkably congenial to it — a left that ceded the terrain of material power to the right and consoled itself by destabilising binaries in seminar rooms. Difference-talk, it turned out, sold beautifully to a corporate culture that adored “disruption” and feared only a strike.

This is the synthesis the academy works hard not to see. The reactionary critique (Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, Allan Bloom) says Theory destroyed standards, clarity, and the canon. The revolutionary critique (Eagleton, and the older Marxists who watched class analysis get replaced by textuality) says Theory demobilised the left and served capital by redirecting dissent into harmless wordplay. They start from opposite ends and meet in the middle, at the same body. And underneath both runs the material scandal nobody in the profession likes named: while a small caste of theory-stars flew between continents commanding speaking fees and adoring graduate seminars, the actual teaching of the humanities was handed to a reserve army of adjuncts — contingent, underpaid, benefitless, often on food stamps. Deconstruction taught a generation to find the oppression hidden in King Lear while the oppression sitting in the next office, grading 200 papers for a few thousand dollars a course, went unread. There is no outside-text, the master said. There was, in fact, an outside. It had a payroll.

D. The Cambridge Reckoning, 1992

The establishment did, once, say the quiet part aloud. When Cambridge proposed an honorary degree for Derrida in 1992, nineteen philosophers — including W. V. O. Quine, Ruth Barcan Marcus, David Armstrong, and the Fields-medal mathematician Rene Thom — signed a letter to The Times opposing it. Their charge: his work “does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour,” his influence lay almost entirely outside philosophy in film and literature departments, and his prose “defies comprehension” on any page you cared to open. The degree was awarded anyway, 336 to 204 — a humiliatingly narrow margin for what is usually a rubber stamp. Derrida’s camp called the signatories philistines. But the vote count is the tell: even at the height of his fame, in one of the world’s great universities, a third of the dons were prepared to say in public that the emperor’s tailoring was conjectural.

V. The Case for the Defense

A prosecution that won’t hear the defence is just another unfalsifiable reading, and we have had enough of those. So, honestly:

The early work is real philosophy. Speech and Phenomena is a rigorous, close, and arguably decisive engagement with Husserl. Whatever one thinks of Glas, the Derrida of 1967 is doing analytic-grade work on the foundations of phenomenology, and the analytic establishment that mocked him largely never read it.
The targets were sometimes guilty. Western philosophy did lean on unexamined hierarchies; texts do say more and other than their authors intend; “presence” is a metaphysical assumption, not a neutral given. Some of what deconstruction exposed stayed exposed.
The misuse is not the man’s fault. That a method was abused by a thousand careerist imitators is an indictment of the incentive structure, not necessarily of the originator — though Derrida’s relish for difficulty made the abuse easy.
The late ethical-political work is serious. The Gift of Death, Force of Law, Of Hospitality, Politics of Friendship wrestle with responsibility, justice, and the stranger in ways that are not reducible to wordplay. His defenders (Caputo, Critchley, and lately Julian Baggini) argue the “charlatan” verdict is the laziness of people who never finished the book.

The fair verdict is therefore double. Derrida was a genuine and powerful thinker whose best work survives. Theory — the institution, the industry, the cult — was a different thing, and it has a great deal to answer for.

VI. If You Read Only Five Books

The original five were a defence brief (all early, all flattering). A reader who wants the whole case — the philosophy and the reckoning — should read:

Of Grammatology (1967) — the foundation, unavoidable.
Speech and Phenomena (1967) — the rigorous Derrida, to see what was lost when the imitators took over.
Margins of Philosophy (1972) — for Differance and Signature Event Context in one volume.
Specters of Marx (1993) — the politics, and the controversy about its timing.
The Gift of Death (1992) or Force of Law (1990) — the ethical turn, where the defence makes its strongest stand.

And one book about the phenomenon, to supply the outside-text: Terry Eagleton, After Theory (2003) — a man of the left auditing what the left did with its decades.

Scholarly Standing

Major thinker, contested legacy, indispensable to understand and dangerous to revere.

Derrida is canonical and will stay canonical; the early philosophy earns the fourth star and the late ethics defends it. The withheld fifth star is not for the work but for the cult — the industry of unfalsifiable readings, the de Man evasion, and the political economy that turned a reading method into a credential mill while the humanities hollowed out beneath it. Read him closely. Trust the apparatus around him not at all.

Sources & Further Reading

Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play (Johns Hopkins, Oct. 1966); on the conference, Macksey & Donato, The Structuralist Controversy (1970); Cusset, French Theory (2008).
Sokal & Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense / Intellectual Impostures (1997–98) — note their explicit exclusion of Derrida.
On the de Man affair: Derrida, Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell, Critical Inquiry 14 (Spring 1988); Hamacher, Hertz & Keenan, eds., Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism (1989); Louis Menand, “The Politics of Deconstruction,” NYRB (1991).
Barry Smith et al., letter to The Times (London), 9 May 1992; Smith & Sims, “Revisiting the Derrida Affair,” Sophia 38:2 (1999).
Terry Eagleton, After Theory (2003); Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals (1990); Pierre Bourdieu on cultural capital.

Critical Bibliography Series · Sepahsalar.org · 3 June 2026 Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Quote freely, attribute honestly, share alike.