Flutterby™! : Derrida

I've scoffed at Jacques Derrida before, and after our visit to The Guggenheim on this recent New York trip my opinions of post-modernism are lower than they've ever been (and that's saying something), so when Arts & Letters Daily pointed to a National Review look at the new documentary Derrida I had to check it out. I was not disappointed:

Indeed, the critical point to be borne in mind with regards to Derrida — the man who is the subject of the movie — is that he is not now, nor has he ever been, a philosopher in any recognizable sense of the word, nor even a trafficker in significant ideas; he is rather a intellectual con artist, a polysyllabic grifter who has duped roughly half the humanities professors in the United States — a species whose gullibility ranks them somewhere between nine-year-old boys listening to spooky campfire stories and blissful puppies chasing after nonexistent sticks — into believing that postmodernism has an underlying theoretical rationale. History will remember Derrida, and it surely will, not for what he himself has said but for what his revered status says about us.