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6.4 Derrida and his circle
Geoffrey Bennington and Avital Ronell belong to a group of translators, many of whom are esteemed thinkers in their own right, with whom Derrida worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prodigious output to be translated in a timely fashion. Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. With Bennington Derrida undertook the challenge published as Derrida, an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the Derridabase) using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the Circumfession ). Virtually all of the aforementioned translators have produced essays and book-length manuscripts on Derrida's work which are recommended often to students searching for secondary literature.
6.5 Derrida and his critics
Outside this circle Derrida's work has often been at least as controversial as within; many analytic philosophers and scientists state their disagreement with his positions. Derrida and his supporters have argued that few of his critics take his work in its proper difficulty as philosophy, rather using it as a proxy or straw-man in the name of allegedly honorable causes, often giving various aliases for " Enlightenment values" ("Those who wish to simplify at all costs and who raise a great hue and cry about obscurity because they do not recognize the unclarity of their good old 'Aufklärung' are in my eyes dangerous dogmatists and tedious obscurantists", 'Limited, Inc', 119). No small number of these seem to have taken their cue from the controversy that arose with John Searle over Derrida's reading of John Austin in "Signature Event Context" (BooksEnthsiast.com). Many sympathetic readers feel that these attempts at criticism are written from ignorance of Derrida's work. In 1992 twenty philosophers including W. V. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus signed a letter to the University of Cambridge to protest its controversial award of an honorary doctorate to Derrida, maintaining that his work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and describing his philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists." Derrida replied with some amusement that the letter embarrasses itself by citing examples ("logical phallusies") which are not to be found in his work except suspended in quotation marks, as references to this letter.
Marcus was at loggerheads with Derrida at least since his visiting professorship at Yale, where she held an endowed chair in the Philosophy faculty. Derrida strenuously protested Marcus's use of Yale stationery and various of her positions in professional associations in a 12 March 1984 letter to the Ministry of Research and Technology, protesting "as a joke" Derrida's unanimous election as the first Director of CIPH and asking the minister to intervene to set aside the election, and raising "more seriously" that were the "appointment" not a "joke" the question of "intellectual fraud" by way of a citation imputed to Foucault by John Searle. Derrida discusses the Cambridge incident at length and with a view to his wider view of the institutional setting of philosophy in the interview "'Honoris causa': This is 'also' extremely funny" (in Points...) but consigns Marcus to footnotes to that interview and the "Afterword" of Limited Inc. The two somehow managed to spend more than two decades working in the same institutions (Marcus joined the Philosophy faculty at Irvine in 1992).
7 Online texts
7.1 Essays, excerpts
