Introducing Derrida is not bad, as such things go. But to talk of deconstruction as a “method” or “technique” would be misleading: if there were such a thing as a deconstructive method, a technical manual explaining what it was and how to apply it would be the very thing.

Imagine a book explaining the philosophical method of another philosopher, Daniel Dennett. Such a book would probably contain several examples of Dennett’s “thought experiments”, his discussion of other philosophers’ “intuition pumps”, a brief guide to his treatment of epistemological issues, what he says about qualia, an account of “the intentional stance” and so on. It might talk about evolutionary biology, about memes, about “exaptation” and the challenge evolution presents to “mind first” views of the cosmos. It might very well talk about sculpture and aesthetics, as these provide some of the terms in which Dennett discusses his own writing.

Dennett is an engaging, accessible writer, who takes fairly clear if necessarily provisional stances and defends them with wit and vigour. He usually makes the other philosophers he has arguments with sound witty and vigorous as well (this is philosophical good manners). Always a good read - I recommend particularly Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

Nevertheless, the best way to get to know what Dennett is all about is to go and read Dennett; not because he’s abstruse and arcane and difficult and - oh my gosh I just can’t explain it, it’s all so deep - but because he doesn’t write whole books where a few short paragraphs would do. He writes whole books that barely “do”, because the discussions they participate in are vastly detailed, surprisingly nuanced and endlessly convoluted, and necessarily overflow any synopsis either he or any of the other participants might try to give of them.

I say this because I don’t want to have to sound apologetic when I say that Derrida, also, defies synopsis and needs to be read. along with a good many other writers, if one wants to become acquainted with the very rich and complicated philosophical arguments his work participates in. The point is that this isn’t just special pleading on behalf of an unusually and unnecessarily abstruse Frenchman: it’s the plea that has to be entered for just about any philosopher worth reading. Why would anybody want to read the books of someone whose arguments can be summed up in a few paragraphs?

Now, if I were to plot my own itinerary through Derrida’s work, I’d probably start with Signature Event Context (in Limited Inc) - simply because that’s where I started reading - and go on from there to The Post Card. Both of these texts are concerned with the vicissitudes of translation and transmission, the things that can happen to meaning en route between sorting offices, languages, philosophers and even users of “ordinary language” in conventional pragmatic situations.

We tend to see meaning as risking loss and distortion whenever it strays too far from hearth and home, from the reassuring intimacy of one voice speaking and one pair of ears listening. But without setting out on the road that leads from one time and place to another time and place, nothing meaningful can ever be articulated. The risks are part of the game of meaning, part of the conditions under which meaning comes about.

Philosophy, in seeking clarity and transparency of meaning, has repeatedly been captivated by an ideal of semantic intimacy - the directness and plenitude of hearing-oneself-speak, perhaps only in one’s own mind, perhaps without having to say anything (and so commit one’s meaning to the vagaries of language). But Derrida shows that meaningful communication can only begin to get underway if this closed circle is breached: for communication to communicate, it must be exposed to the risk of failure (which is also, then, the risk of success).

This is a fundamentally anti-solipsistic, anti-nihilistic argument: it exposes as hopelessly inadequate the supposed self-sufficiency of an isolated consciousness recreating the world in perfect simulation within some interior “Cartesian theatre” (Dennett’s term, as it happens). The very means by which such a simulation might be enacted - its dramaturgy, its props and gestures - are already part of a worldly traffic in meaning that begins before I do, and carries on after I leave off.

Is Derrida all about meaning and its vicissitudes? No, not at all: later writings (and, arguably, the earlier ones too) deal with sacrifice, hospitality, friendship, mourning, haunting, justice, duty, religion, memory, painting, sexual difference, history, nationality, the gift, democracy, resistance, testimony, ritual and much else besides. So many texts, so little time. But the theme of openness, to risk and to the “other”, is paradoxically enough a constant. Derrida never accumulates a set of primitives out of which you are supposed to construct a complete worldview. Rather, he shows how even the supposedly primitive has roots, how it has been grafted together, how much is owing to accident, opportunism and blind chance; and he shows how the ghost of a chance remains, even in the most apparently solid and non-negotiable categories and habits of thought.